Anima Poetae Part 13

[Sidenote: THE SQUARE, THE CIRCLE, THE PYRAMID]

To be and to act, two in Intellect (that mother of orderly mult.i.tude, and half-sister of Wisdom and Madness) but one in essence = to rest, and to move = [sq] and a [cir]! and out of the infinite combinations of these, from the more and the less, now of one now of the other, all pleasing figures and the sources of all pleasure arise. But the pyramid, that base of stedfastness that rises, yet never deserts itself nor can, approaches to the [cir]. Sunday. Midnight. Malta. December 16th, 1804.

[Sidenote: THE PYRAMID IN ART]

I can make out no other affinity [in the pyramid] to the circle but by taking its evanescence as the central point, and so, having thus gained a melting of the radii in the circ.u.mference [by proceeding to] _look_ it into the object. Extravagance! Why? Does not everyone do this in looking at any conspicuous three stars together? does not every one see by the inner vision, a triangle? However, this is in art; but the prototype in nature is, indeed, loveliness. In Nature there are no straight lines, or [such straight lines as there are] have the soul of curves, from activity and positive rapid energy. Or, whether the line seem curve or straight, yet _here_, in nature, is motion--motion in its most significant form. It is motion in that form which has been chosen to express motion in general, hieroglyphical from pre-eminence, [and by this very pre-eminence, in the particular instance, made significant of motion in its totality]. Hence, though it chance that a line in nature should be perfectly straight, there is no need here of any curve whose effect is that of embleming motion and counteracting actual solidity by that emblem. For here the line [in contra-distinction to the line in art] is actual motion, and therefore a balancing _Figurite_ of rest and solidity. But I will study the wood-fire this evening in the Palace.

[Sidenote: Wednesday Night, 11 o'clock, December 19]

I see now that the eye refuses to decide whether it be surface or convexity, for the exquisite oneness of the flame makes even its angles so different from the angles of tangible substances. Its exceeding oneness added to its very subsistence in motion is the very _soul_ of the loveliest curve--it does not need its body as it were. Its sharpest point is, however, rounded, and besides it is cased within its own penumbra.

[Sidenote: FOR THE "SOOTHER IN ABSENCE" Friday Morning, Dec. 21, 8 o'clock]

How beautiful a circ.u.mstance, the improvement of the flower, from the root up to that crown of its life and labours, that bridal-chamber of its beauty and its two-fold love, the nuptial and the parental--the womb, the cradle, and the nursery of the garden!

_Quisque sui faber_--a pretty simile this would make to a young lady producing beauty by moral feeling.

Nature may be personified as the [Greek: polymechanos ergane], an ever industrious Penelope, for ever unravelling what she has woven, for ever weaving what she has unravelled.

[Sidenote: THE MEDITERRANEAN]

Oh, said I, as I looked at the blue, yellow, green and purple-green sea, with all its hollows and swells, and cut-gla.s.s surfaces--oh, what an _ocean_ of lovely forms! And I was vexed, teased that the sentence sounded like a play of words! _That_ it was not--the mind within me was struggling to express the marvellous distinctness and unconfounded personality of each of the million millions of forms, and yet the individual unity in which they subsisted.

A brisk gale and the foam that peopled the _alive_ sea, most interestingly combined with the number of white sea-gulls, that, repeatedly, it seemed as if the foam-spit had taken life and wing and had flown up--the white precisely-same-colour birds rose up so close by the ever-perishing white-water wavehead, that the eye was unable to detect the illusion which the mind delighted to indulge in. O that sky, that soft, blue, mighty arch resting on the mountain or solid sea-like plain--what an awful omneity in unity! I know no other perfect union of the sublime with the beautiful, so that they should be felt, that is, at the same minute, though by different faculties, and yet, each faculty be predisposed, by itself, to receive the specific modifications from the other. To the eye it is an inverted goblet, the inside of a sapphire basin, perfect beauty in shape and colour. To the mind, it is immensity; but even the eye feels as if it were [able] to look through with [a] dim sense of the non-resistance--it is not exactly the feeling given to the organ by solid and limited things, [but] the eye feels that the limitation is in its own power, not in the object. But [hereafter] to pursue this in the manner of the old Hamburg poet [Klopstock].

[Sidenote: I WILL LIFT UP MINE EYES TO THE HILLS]

One travels along with the lines of a mountain. Years ago I wanted to make Wordsworth sensible of this. How fine is Keswick vale! Would I repose, my soul lies and is quiet upon the broad level vale. Would it act? it darts up into the mountain-top like a kite, and like a chamois-goat runs along the ridge--or like a boy that makes a sport on the road of running along a wall or narrow fence!

[Sidenote: FORM AND FEELING]

One of the most noticeable and fruitful facts in psychology is the modification of the same feeling by difference of form. The Heaven lifts up my soul, the sight of the ocean seems to widen it. We feel the same force at work, but the difference, whether in mind or body that we should feel in actual travelling horizontally or in direct ascent, _that_ we feel in fancy. For what are our feelings of this kind but a motion imagined, [together] with the feelings that would accompany that motion, [but] less distinguished, more blended, more rapid, more confused, and, thereby, co-adunated? Just as white is the very emblem of one in being the confusion of all.

[Sidenote: VERb.u.m SAPIENTIBUS]

Mem.--Not to hastily abandon and kick away the means after the end is or seems to be accomplished. So have I, in blowing out the paper or match with which I have lit a candle, blown out the candle at the same instant.

[Sidenote: THE CONTINUITY OF SENSATIONS]

How opposite to nature and the fact to talk of the "one moment" of Hume, of our whole being an aggregate of successive single sensations! Who ever felt a single sensation? Is not every one at the same moment conscious that there co-exist a thousand others, a darker shade, or less light, even as when I fix my attention on a white house or a grey bare hill or rather long ridge that runs out of sight each way (how often I want the German _unubersekbar_!) [untranslatable]--the pretended sight-sensation, is it anything more than the light-point in every picture either of nature or of a good painter? and, again, subordinately, in every component part of the picture? And what is a moment? Succession with inters.p.a.ce? Absurdity! It is evidently only the _icht-punct_ in the indivisible undivided duration.

See yonder rainbow strangely preserving its form on broken clouds, with here a bit out, here a bit in, yet still a rainbow--even as you might place bits of coloured ribbon at distances, so as to preserve the form of a bow to the mind. Dec. 25, 1804.

[Sidenote: HIS CONVERSATION, A NIMIETY OF IDEAS, NOT OF WORDS]

There are two sorts of talkative fellows whom it would be injurious to confound, and I, S. T. Coleridge, am the latter. The first sort is of those who use five hundred words more than needs to express an idea--that is not my case. Few men, I will be bold to say, put more meaning into their words than I, or choose them more deliberately and discriminately. The second sort is of those who use five hundred more ideas, images, reasons, &c., than there is any need of to arrive at their object, till the only object arrived at is that the mind's eye of the bystander is dazzled with colours succeeding so rapidly as to leave one vague impression that there has been a great blaze of colours all about something. Now this is my case, and a grievous fault it is. My ill.u.s.trations swallow up my thesis. I feel too intensely the omnipresence of all in each, platonically speaking; or, psychologically, my brain-fibres, or the spiritual light which abides in the brain-marrow, as visible light appears to do in sundry rotten mackerel and other _smashy_ matters, is of too general an affinity with all things, and though it perceives the _difference_ of things, yet is eternally pursuing the likenesses, or, rather, that which is common [between them]. Bring me two things that seem the very same, and then I am quick enough [not only] to show the difference, even to hair-splitting, but to go on from circle to circle till I break against the sh.o.r.e of my hearers' patience, or have my concentricals dashed to nothing by a snore. That is my ordinary mishap. At Malta, however, no one can charge me with one or the other. I have earned the general character of being a quiet well-meaning man, rather dull indeed! and who would have thought that he had been a _poet_! "O, a very wretched poetaster, ma'am! As to the reviews, 'tis well known he half-ruined himself in paying cleverer fellows than himself to write them," &c.

[Sidenote: THE EMBRYONIC SOUL]

How far might one imagine all the theory of a.s.sociation out of a system of growth, by applying to the brain and soul what we know of an embryo?

One tiny particle combines with another its like, and, so, lengthens and thickens, and this is, at once, memory and increasing vividness of impression. One might make a very amusing allegory of an embryo soul up to birth! Try! it is promising! You have not above three hundred volumes to write before you come to it, and as you write, perhaps, a volume once in ten years, you have ample time.

My dear fellow! never be ashamed of scheming--you can't think of living less than 4000 years, and that would nearly suffice for your present schemes. To be sure, if they go on in the same ratio to the performance, then a small difficulty arises; but never mind! look at the bright side always and die in a dream! Oh!

[Sidenote: OF A NEW HYPOTHESIS]

The evil effect of a new hypothesis or even of a new nomenclature is, that many minds which had familiarised themselves to the old one, and were riding on the road of discovery accustomed to their horse, if put on a new animal, lose time in learning how to sit him; while the others, looking too stedfastly at a few facts which the jeweller Hypothesis had set in a perfectly beautiful whole, forget to dig for more, though inhabitants of a Golconda. However, it has its advantages too, and these have been ably pointed out. It excites contradiction, and is thence a stimulus to new experiments to _support_, and to a more severe repet.i.tion of these experiments and of other new ones to _confute_ [arguments pro and con]. And, besides, one must alloy severe truth with a little fancy, in order to mint it into common coin.

[Sidenote: HIS INDEBTEDNESS TO GERMAN PHILOSOPHY]

In the preface of my metaphysical works, I should say--"Once for all, read Kant, Fichte, &c., and then you will trace, or, if you are on the hunt, track me." Why, then, not acknowledge your obligations step by step? Because I could not do so in a mult.i.tude of glaring resemblances without a lie, for they had been mine, formed and full-formed, before I had ever heard of these writers, because to have fixed on the particular instances in which I have really been indebted to these writers would have been hard, if possible, to me who read for truth and self-satisfaction, and not to make a book, and who always rejoiced and was jubilant when I found my own ideas well expressed by others--and, lastly, let me say, because (I am proud, perhaps, but) I seem to know that much of the _matter_ remains my own, and that the _soul_ is mine. I fear not him for a critic who can confound a fellow-thinker with a compiler.

[Sidenote: THE METAPHYSICIAN AT BAY]

Good heavens! that there should be anything at all, and not nothing. Ask the bluntest faculty that pretends to reason, and, if indeed he have felt and reasoned, he must feel that something is to be sought after out of the vulgar track of Change-Alley speculation.

If my researches are shadowy, what, in the name of reason, are you? or do you resign all pretence to reason, and consider yourself--nay, even that in a contradiction--as a pa.s.sive [cir] among Nothings?

[Sidenote: MEANS TO ENDS]

How flat and common-place! O that it were in my heart, nerves, and muscles! O that it were the _prudential_ soul of all I love, of all who deserve to be loved, in every proposed action to ask yourself, To what end is this? and how is this the means? and not the means to something else foreign to or abhorrent from my purpose? _Distinct means to distinct ends!_ With friends and beloved ones follow the heart. Better be deceived twenty times than suspect one-twentieth of once; but with strangers, or enemies, or in a quarrel, whether in the world's squabbles, as Dr. Stoddart's and Dr. Sorel in the Admiralty Court at Malta; or in moral businesses, as mine with Southey or Lloyd (O pardon me, dear and honoured Southey, that I put such a name by the side of yours....)--in all those cases, write your letter, disburthen yourself, and when you have done it--even as when you have pared, sliced, vinegared, oiled, peppered and salted your plate of cuc.u.mber, you are directed to smell it, and then throw it out of the window--so, dear friend, vinegar, pepper and salt your letter--your cuc.u.mber argument, that is, cool reasoning previously sauced with pa.s.sion and sharpness--then read it, eat it, drink it, smell it, with eyes and ears (a small catachresis but never mind), and then throw it into the fire--unless you can put down in three or four sentences (I cannot allow more than one side of a sheet of paper) the _distinct end_ for which you conceive this letter (or whatever it be) to be the _distinct means_! How trivial! Would to G.o.d it were only _habitual_! O what is sadder than that the _crambe bis cocta_ of the understanding should be and remain a foreign dish to the efficient _will_--that the best and loftiest precepts of wisdom should be trivial, and the worst and lowest modes of folly habitual.

[Sidenote: VERBAL CONCEITS]

I have learnt, sometimes not _at all_, and seldom _harshly_, to chide those conceits of words which are a.n.a.logous to sudden fleeting affinities of mind. Even, as in a dance, you touch and join and off again, and rejoin your partner that leads down with you the dance, in spite of these occasional off-starts--for they, too, not merely conform to, but are of and in and help to form the delicious harmony. Shakspere is not a thousandth part so faulty as the [scir][scir][scir]

believe him. "Thus him that over-rul'd I over-sway'd," etc., etc. I noticed this to that bubbling ice-spring of cold-hearted, mad-headed fanaticism, the late Dr. Geddes, in the "_Heri vidi fragilem frangi, hodie mortalem mori_."

[Dr. Alexander Geddes, 1737-1802, was, _inter alia_, author of a revised translation of the Scriptures.]