to be evolved from, and illustrated by, the facts.1 After I had gotten my principles, I pretty generally left the facts to take care of themselves. I never could remember any passages in books, or the particulars of events, except in the gross. I can refer to them. To be sure, I must be a different sort of man from Herder, who once was seriously annoyed with himself, because, in recounting the pedigree of some German royal or electoral family, he missed some one of those worthies and could not recall the name. 2 Schmidt was a Romanist; but I have generally found him candid, as indeed almost all the Austrians are. They are what is called good Catholics; but, like our Charles the 1 "The true origin of human events is so little susceptible of that kind of evidence which can compel our belief; so many are the disturbing forces which, in every cycle or ellipse of changes, modify the motion given by the first projection; and every age has, or imagines it has, its own circumstances, which render past experience no longer applicable to the present case; that there will never be wanting answers, and explanations, and specious flatteries of hope, to persuade and perplex its government, that the history of the past is inapplicable to their case. And no wonder, if we read history for the facts, instead of reading it for the sake of the general principles, which are to the facts as the root and sap of a tree to its leaves; and no wonder if history so read should find a dangerous rival in novels; nay, if the latter should be preferred to the former, on the score even of probability. I well remember that, when the examples of former Jacobins, as Julius Cæsar, Cromwell, and the like, were adduced in France and England, at the commencement of the French consulate, it was ridiculed as pedantry and pedants' ignorance, to fear a repetition of usurpation and military despotism at the close of the enlightened eighteenth century! Even so, in the very dawn of the late tempestuous day, when the revolutions of Corcyra, the proscriptions of the reformers Marius, Cæsar, &c., and the direful effects of the levelling tenets in the peasants' war in Germany (differenced from the tenets of the first French constitution only by the mode of wording them, the figures of speech being borrowed in the one instance from theology, and in the other from modern metaphysics), were urged on the convention and its vindicators; the magi of the day, the true citizens of the world, the plusquam perfecti of patriotism, gave us set proofs that similar results were impossible, and that it was an insult to so philosophical an age, to so enlightened a nation, to dare direct the public eye towards them as to lights of warning."-Statesman's Manual, p. 14.-H. N. C. 2 Michael Ignatius Schmidt, the author of the History of the Germans He died in the latter end of the last century.-H. N. C. Second, they never let their religious bigotry interfere with their political well-doing. Kaiser is a most pious son of the church, yet he always keeps his papa in good order. IT. JULY 20, 1832. Puritans and Jacobins.- Coleridge.* T was God's mercy to our age that our Jacobins were infidels and a scandal to all sober Christians. Had they been like the old Puritans, they would have trodden church and king to the dust—at least for a time. For one mercy I owe thanks beyond all utterance,—that, with all my gastric and bowel distempers, my head hath ever been like the head of a mountain in blue air and sunshine. I JULY 21, 1832. Wordsworth.-The Excursion.*—Dialogue in Verse.*—The Prelude.* HAVE often wished that the first two books of "The Excursion" had been published separately,' under the name of "The Deserted Cottage." They would have formed, what indeed they are, one of the most beautiful poems in the language. Can dialogues in verse be defended? I cannot but think that a great philosophical poet ought always to teach the reader himself as from himself. A poem does not admit argumentation, though it does admit development of thought. In prose there may be a difference; though I must confess that, even in Plato and Cicero, I am always vexed that the authors do not say what they have to say at once in their own persons. The introductions and little urbanities, are, to be sure, very delightful in their way; I 1 The exquisite story of Margaret was, in fact, written by Wordsworth, as a separate poem, at Racedown, in Dorset. The poem was named "The Ruined Cottage ;" it was read to Coleridge, on the occasion of his first visit to Wordsworth, in 1797. "The Excursion" was probably not conceived at that time. would not lose them; but I have no admiration for the practice of ventriloquizing through another man's mouth. 2 I cannot help regretting that Wordsworth did not first publish his thirteen' books on the growth of an individual mind-superior, as I used to think, upon the whole, to the "Excursion." You may judge how I felt about them by my own poem upon the occasion." Then the plan laid out, and, I believe, partly suggested by me, was, that Wordsworth should assume the station of a man in mental repose, one whose principles were made up, and so prepared to deliver upon authority a system of philosophy. He was to treat man as man,— -a subject of eye, ear, touch, and taste, in contact with external nature, and informing the senses from the mind, and not compounding a mind out of the senses; then he was to describe the pastoral and other states of society, assuming something of the Juvenalian spirit as he approached the high civilization of cities and towns, and opening a melancholy picture of the present state of degeneracy and vice; thence he was to infer and reveal the proof of, and necessity for, the whole state of man and society being subject to, and illustrative of, a redemptive process in operation, showing how this idea reconciled all the anomalies, and promised future glory and restoration. Something of this sort was, I think, agreed on. It is, in substance, what I have been all my life doing in my system of philosophy. I think Wordsworth possessed more of the genius of a great philosophic poet than any man I ever knew, or, as I believe, has existed in England since Milton; but it seems to me that he ought never to have abandoned the contemplative position, which is peculiarly—perhaps I might say 1 There are fourteen books in "The Prelude." 2 Poetical works, vol. i. p. 206. It is not too much to say of this beautiful poem, and yet it is difficult to say more, that it is at once worthy of the poet, his subject, and his object : "An Orphic song indeed, A song divine of high and passionate thoughts exclusively-fitted for him. His proper title is Spectator ab extra. JULY 23, 1832. French Revolution.—Coleridge.* No man was more enthusiastic than I was for France and the Revolution: it had all my wishes, none of my expectations. Before 1793, I clearly saw and often enough stated in public, the horrid delusion, the vile mockery of the whole affair.1 When some one said in my "Forgive me, Freedom! O forgive those dreams! I hear thy voice, I hear thy loud lament, I hear thy groans upon her blood-stain'd streams! Of all that made her stormy wilds so dear: And with inexpiable spirit To taint the bloodless freedom of the mountaineer- Are these thy boasts, champion of human-kind? O Liberty! with profitless endeavour But thou nor swell'st the victor's train, nor ever 66 The guide of homeless winds, and playmate of the waves!" France," an Ode. Poetical Works, vol. i. p. 130.-H. N. C. brother James's presence' that I was a Jacobin, he very well observed,—"No! Samuel is no Jacobin; he is a hotheaded Moravian!" Indeed, I was in the extreme opposite pole. I JULY 24, 1832. Infant Schools. HAVE no faith in act of parliament reform. All the great the permanently great-things that have been achieved in the world, have been so achieved by individuals, working from the instinct of genius or of goodness. The rage now-a-days is all the other way: the individual is supposed capable of nothing; there must be organization, classification, machinery, &c., as if the capital of national morality could be increased by making a joint stock of it. Hence you see these infant schools so patronised by the bishops and others, who think them a grand invention. Is it found that an infant-school child, who has been bawling all day a column of the multiplicationtable, or a verse from the Bible, grows up a more dutiful son or daughter to its parents? Are domestic charities on the increase amongst families under this system? In a great town, in our present state of society, perhaps such schools may be a justifiable expedient a choice of the lesser evil; but as for driving these establishments into the country villages, and breaking up the cottage home education, I think it one of the most miserable mistakes which the well-intentioned people of the day have yet made; and they have made, and are making, a good many, God knows. JULY 25, 1832. Mr. Coleridge's Philosophy.-Sublimity.-Solomon.-Madness.— C. Lamb.-Sforza's Decision. TH HE pith of my system is to make the senses out of the mind-not the mind out of the senses, as Locke did. 1 A soldier of the old cavalier stamp, to whom the King was the symbol of the majesty, as the Church was of the life, of the nation, and who would most assuredly have taken arms for one or the other against all the Houses of Commons or committees of public safety in the world. -H. N. C. This soldier was the father of H. N. Coleridge. |