_1810_
O dare I accuse My earthly lot as guilty of my spleen, Or call my destiny n.i.g.g.ard! O no! no!
It is her largeness, and her overflow, Which being incomplete, disquieteth me so!
S. T. C.
[Sidenote: A PIOUS ASPIRATION]
My own faculties, cloudy as they may be, will be a sufficient direction to me in plain daylight, but my friend"s wish shall be the pillar of fire to guide me darkling in my nightly march through the wilderness.
[Sidenote: THOUGHT AND ATTENTION]
Thought and attention are very different things. I never expected the former, (viz., _selbst-thatige Erzeugung dessen, wovon meine Rede war_) from the readers of _The Friend_. I did expect the latter, and was disappointed. Jan. 3, 1810.
This is a most important distinction, and in the new light afforded by it to my mind, I see more plainly why mathematics cannot be a subst.i.tute for logic, much less for metaphysics, that is, transcendental logic, and why, therefore, Cambridge has produced so few men of genius and original power since the time of Newton. Not only it does not call forth the balancing and discriminating power [_that_ I saw long ago] but it requires only _attention,_ not _thought_ or self-production.
[Sidenote: LAW AND GOSPEL]
"The man who squares his conscience by the law" was, formerly, a phrase for a prudent villain, an unprincipled coward. At present the law takes in everything--the things most incongruous with its nature, as the moral motive, and even the feelings of sensibility resulting from accidents of cultivation, novel-reading for instance. If, therefore, _at all_ times, the law would be found to have a much greater influence on the actions of men than men generally suppose, or the agents were themselves conscious of, this influence we must expect to find augmented at the present time in proportion to the encroachments of the law on religion, the moral sense, and the sympathies engendered by artificial rank.
Examine this and begin, for instance, with reviews, and so on through the common legal immoralities of life, in the pursuits and pleasures of the higher half of the middle cla.s.ses of society in Great Britain.
[Sidenote: CATHOLIC REUNION]
"Hence (_i.e._, from servile and thrall-like fear) men came to scan the Scriptures by the letter and in the covenant of our redemption magnified the external signs more than the quickening power of the Spirit."--MILTON"S _Review of Church Government_, vol. i. p. 2.
It were not an unpleasing fancy, nor one wholly unworthy of a serious and charitable Christianity, to derive a shadow of hope for the conversion and purification of the Roman Apostasy from the conduct and character of St. Peter as shadowing out the history of the Latin Church, whose ruling pastor calls himself the successor of that saint. Thus, by proud _humility_, he hazarded the loss of his heavenly portion in objecting to Christ"s taking upon himself a lowly office and character of a servant (hence the pomps and vanities with which Rome has tricked out her bishops, &c.), the eager drawing of the fleshly sword in defence of Christ; the denying of Christ at the cross (in the apostasy); but, finally, his bitter repentance at the third crowing of the c.o.c.k (perhaps Wickliffe and Huss the first, Luther the second, and the third yet to come-or, perhaps Wickliffe and Luther the first, the second may be the present state of humiliation, and the third yet to come). After this her eyes will be opened to the heavenly vision of the universal acceptance of Christ of all good men of all sects, that is, that faith is a moral, not an intellectual act.
[Sidenote: THE IDEAL MARRIAGE]
On some delightful day in early spring some of my countrymen hallow the anniversary of their marriage, and with love and fear go over the reckoning of the past and the unknown future. The wife tells with half-renewed modesty all the sweet feelings that she disguised and cherished in the courting-time; the man looks with a tear full in his eye and blesses the hour when for the first time (and oh! let it be the last) he spake deep and solemn to a beloved being--"Thou art mine and I am thine, and henceforward I shield and shelter [thee] against the world, and thy sorrows shall be my sorrows, and though abandoned by all men, we two will abide together in love and duty."
In the holy eloquent solitude where the very stars that twinkle seem to be a _voice_ that suits the dream, a voice of a dream, a voice soundless and yet for the _ear_ not the _eye_ of the soul, when the winged soul pa.s.ses over vale and mountain, sinks into glens, and then climbs with the cloud, and pa.s.ses from cloud to cloud, and thence from sun to sun--never is she alone. Always one, the dearest, accompanies and even when he melts, diffused in the blue sky, she melts at the same moment into union with the beloved.
[Sidenote: A SUPERFLUOUS ENt.i.tY]
That our religious faiths, by the instincts which lead us to metaphysical investigation, are founded in a practical necessity, not a mere intellectual craving after knowledge, and systematic conjecture, is evinced by the interest which all men take in the questions of future existence, and the being of G.o.d; while even among those who are speculative by profession a few phantasts only have troubled themselves with the questions of pre-existence, or with attempts to demonstrate the _posse_ and _esse_ of a devil. But in the latter case more is involved.
Concerning pre-existence men in general have neither care nor belief; but a devil is taken for granted, and, if we might trust words, with the same faith as a Deity--"He neither believes G.o.d or devil." And yet, while we are delighted in hearing proofs of the one, we never think of asking a simple question concerning the other. This, too, originates in a practical source. The Deity is not a mere solution of difficulties concerning origination, but a truth which spreads light and joy and hope and cert.i.tude through all things--while a devil _is_ a mere solution of an enigma, an a.s.sumption to silence our uneasiness. That end answered (and most easily are such ends answered), we have no further concern with it.
[Sidenote: PSYCHOLOGY IN YOUTH AND MATURITY]
The _great change_--that in youth and early manhood we psychologise and with enthusiasm but all out of ourselves, and so far ourselves only as we descry therein some general law. Our own self is but the diagram, the triangle which represents all triangles. Afterward we pyschologise out of others, and so far as they differ from ourselves. O how hollowly!
[Sidenote: HAIL AND FAREWELL!]
We have been for many years at a great distance from each other, but that may happen with no real breach of friendship. All intervening nature is the _continuum_ of two good and wise men. We are now separated. You have combined a.r.s.enic with your gold, Sir Humphry! You are brittle, and I will rather dine with Duke Humphry than with you.
[Sidenote: A GENUINE "ANECDOTE"]
Sara Coleridge says, on telling me of the universal sneeze produced on the la.s.ses while shaking my carpet, that she wishes my snuff would _grow_, as I sow it so plentifully!
[This points to the summer of 1810, the five months spent at Greta Hall previous to the departure south with Basil Montagu.]
[Sidenote: SPIRITUAL RELIGION]
A thing cannot be one _and_ three at the same time! True! but _time_ does not apply to G.o.d. He is neither one in time nor three in time, for he exists not in time at all--the Eternal!
The truly religious man, when he is not conveying his feelings and beliefs to other men, and does not need the medium of words--O! how little does he find in his religious sense either of form or of number--it is _infinite_! Alas! why do we all seek by instinct for a G.o.d, a supersensual, but because we feel the insufficiency, the unsubstantiality of all _forms_, and formal being for itself. And shall we explain _a_ by _x_ and then _x_ by _a_--give a soul to the body, and then a body to the soul--_ergo_, a body to the body--feel the weakness of the weak, and call in the strengthener, and then make the very weakness the substratum of the strength? This is worse than the poor Indian! Even he does not make the tortoise support the elephant, and yet put the elephant under the tortoise!
But we are too social, we become in a sort idolaters--for the means we are obliged to use to excite notions of truth in the minds of others we by witchcraft of slothful a.s.sociation impose on ourselves for the truths themselves. Our intellectual bank stops payment, and we pa.s.s an act by acclamation that hereafter the paper promises shall be the gold and silver itself--and ridicule a man for a dreamer and reviver of antiquated dreams who believes that gold and silver exist. This may do as well in the market, but O! for the universal, for the man himself the difference is woeful.
[Sidenote: TRUTH]
The immense difference between being glad to find Truth _it_, and to find _it_ TRUTH! O! I am ashamed of those who praise me! For I know that as soon as I tell them my mind on another subject, they will shrink and abhor me. For not because I enforced a truth were they pleased in the first instance, but because I had supported a favourite notion of theirs which they loved for its and their sake, and therefore would be glad to find it true--not that loving Truth they loved this opinion as one of its forms and consequences. The root! the root must be attacked!
[Sidenote: A TIME TO CRY OUT]
Among the evils that attend a conscientious author who writes in a corrupt age, is the necessity he is under of exposing himself even to plausible charges of envy, mortified vanity, and, above all, of self-conceit before those whose bad pa.s.sions would make even the most improbable charges plausible.
What _can_ he do? Tell the truth, and the whole truth plainly, and with the natural affection which it inspires, and keeping off (difficult task!) all _scorn_ (for to suppress resentment is easy), let him trust the bread to the waters in the firm faith that wisdom shall be justified by her children. Vanity! self-conceit! What vanity, what self-conceit?
What say I more than this? Ye who think and feel the same will love and esteem me by the law of sympathy, and _value_ me according to the comparative effect I have made on your intellectual powers, in enabling you better to defend before others, or more clearly to _onlook_ (_anschauen_) in yourselves the truths to which your n.o.blest being bears witness. The rest I leave to the judgment of posterity, utterly unconcerned whether _my name_ be attached to these opinions or (_my_ writings forgotten) another man"s.
But what can I say, when I have declared my abhorrence of the _Edinburgh Review_? In vain should I tell my critics that were I placed on the rack I could not remember ten lines of my own poems, and that on seeing my own name in their abuse, I regard it only as a symbol of Wordsworth and Southey, and that I am well aware that from utter disregard and oblivion of anything and all things which they can know of me by experience, my name is mentioned only because they have heard that I was Wordsworth"s and Southey"s friend.
[Sidenote: HINTS FOR "THE FRIEND"]
The brightest luminaries of earth give names to the dusky spots in the selenography of Helvetius.
The intrepidity of a pure conscience and a simple principle [may be]
compared to a life-boat, and somewhat in the detail, stemming with a little rudder the tumbling ruins of the sea, rebounding from the rocks and shelves in fury.
Duns Scotus affirms that the certainty of faith is the greatest certainty--a dark speech which is explained and proved by the dependence of the theoretic powers on the practical. But Aristotle admits that demonstrated truths are inferior in kind of certainty to the indemonstrable out of which the former are deduced.