Anima Poetae Part 32

[Sidenote: THE MEED OF PRAISE]

There is a species of applause scarcely less genial to a poet, whether bard, musician, or artist, than the vernal warmth to the feathered songsters during their nest-building or incubation--a sympathy, an expressed hope, that is the open air in which the poet breathes, and without which the sense of power sinks back on itself like a sigh heaved up from the tightened chest of a sick man. Alas! alas! alas!

[Sidenote: THE GREAT UNKNOWN]

Anonymity is now an artifice to acquire celebrity, as a black veil is worn to make a pair of bright eyes more conspicuous.

[Sidenote: BOOK-LEARNING FOR LEGISLATORS]

For the same reasons that we cannot now act by impulses, but must think, so now must every legislator be a man of sound book-learning, because he cannot, if he would, think or act from the simple dictates of unimproved but undepraved common sense. Newspapers, reviews, and the conversation of men who derive their opinions from newspapers and reviews will secure for him artificial opinions, if he does not secure them for himself from purer and more authentic sources. There is now no such being as a country gentleman. Like their relation, the Dodo, the race is extinct, or if by accident one has escaped, it belongs to the Museum, not to active life, or the purposes of active life.

[Sidenote: THEISM AND ATHEISM]

The more I read and reflect on the arguments of the truly philosophical theists and atheists, the more I feel convinced that the ultimate difference is a moral rather than an intellectual one, that the result is an x y z, an acknowledged insufficiency of the known to account for itself, and, therefore, a something unknown--that to which, while the atheist leaves it a blank in the understanding, the theist dedicates his n.o.blest feelings of love and awe, and with which, by a moral syllogism, he connects and unites his conscience and actions. For the words goodness and wisdom are clearly only reflexes of the effect, just as when we call the unknown cause of cold and heat by the name of its effects, and _know_ nothing further. For if we mean that a Being like man, with human goodness and intellect, only magnified, is the cause, that is, that the First Cause is an immense man (as according to Swedenborg and Zinzendorf), then come the insoluble difficulties of the incongruity of qualities whose very essence implies finiteness, with a Being _ex hypothesi_ infinite.

[Sidenote: THE MIND'S EYE]

An excellent instance of the abstraction [from objects of the sense]

that results from the attention converging to any one object, is furnished by the oily rags, broken saucers, greasy phials, dabs, crusts, and smears of paints in the laboratory of a Raphael, or a Claude Lorraine, or a Van Huysum, or any other great master of the beautiful and becoming. In like manner, the mud and clay in the modelling hand of a Chantrey--what are they to him whose total soul is awake, in his eye as a subject, and before his eye as some ideal of beauty _objectively_?

The various objects of the senses are as little the objects of _his_ senses, as the ink with which the "Lear" was written, existed in the consciousness of a Shakspere.

[Sidenote: A LAND OF BLISS]

The humming-moth with its glimmer-mist of rapid unceasing motion before the humble-bee within the flowering bells and cups--and the eagle _level_ with the clouds, himself a cloudy speck, surveys the vale from mount to mount. From the cataract flung on the vale, the broadest fleeces of the snowy foam light on the bank flowers or the water-lilies in the stiller pool below.

[Sidenote: TIME AND ETERNITY]

The defect of Archbishop Leighton's reasoning is the taking eternity for a sort of time, a _baro major_, a baron of beef or quarter of lamb, out of which and off which time is cut, as a brisket or shoulder--while, even in common discourse, without any design of sounding the depth of the truth or of weighing the words expressing it in the hair-balance of metaphysics, it would be more convenient to consider eternity the _simul et totum_ as the _ant.i.theton_ of time.

[Sidenote: THE LITERARY STERILITY OF ISLAMISM]

The extraordinary florency of letters under the Spanish Caliphate in connection with the character and capabilities of Mohammedanism has never yet been treated as its importance requires. Halim II, founder of the University of Cordova, and of numerous colleges and libraries throughout Spain, is said to have possessed a library of six hundred thousand MSS., the catalogue filling forty-four volumes. Nor were his successors behind him in zeal and munificence. That the prime article of Islamism, the uni-personality of G.o.d, is one cause of the downfall, say rather of the merely meteoric existence of their literary age, I am persuaded, but the exclusive scene (in Spain) suggests many interesting views. With a learned cla.s.s Mohammedanism could not but pa.s.s into Deism, and Deism never did, never can, establish itself as a religion. It is the doctrine of the tri-unity that connects Christianity with philosophy, gives a positive religion a specific interest to the philosopher, and that of redemption to the moralist and psychologist.

Predestination, in the plenitude, in which it is equivalent to fatalism, was the necessary alternative and _succedaneum_ of Redemption, and the Incarnation the only preservative against pantheism on one side, and anthropomorphism on the other. The Persian (Europeans in Asia) form of Mohammedanism is very striking in this point of view.

[Sidenote: THE SPIRIT OF A PEOPLE]

It is not by individual character that an individual can derive just conclusions respecting a community or an age. Conclusions so drawn are the excuse of selfish, narrow and pusillanimous statesmen, who, by dwelling on the kindred baseness or folly of the persons with whom they come in immediate contact, lose all faith in human nature, ignorant that even in these a spark is latent which would light up and consume the worthless overlay in a national moment. The spirit of a race is the character of a people, the sleep or the awakening of which depends on a few minds, pre-ordained for this purpose, and sometimes by the mere removal of the dead weight of a degenerate Court or n.o.bility pressing on the spring. So I doubt not would it be with the Turks, were the Porte and its seraglio conquered by Russia. But the spirit of a race ought never to be supposed extinct, but on the other hand no more or other ought to be expected than the race contains in itself. The true cause of the irrecoverable fall of Rome is to be found in the fact, that Rome was a city, a handful of men that multiplied its subjects incomparably faster than its citizens, so that the latter were soon dilute and lost in the former. On a similar principle colonists in modern times degenerate by _excision_ from their race (the ancient colonies were _buds_). This, I think, applies to the Neapolitans and most of the Italian States. A nest of republics keep each other alive; but a patchwork of princ.i.p.alities has the effect of excision by insulation, or rather by compressure. How long did the life of Germany doze under these ligatures! Yet did we not _despair wrongfully_ of the people? The spirit of the race survived, of which literature was a part. Hence I dare not despair of Greece, because it has been barbarised and enslaved, but not split up into puny independent governments under Princes of their own race. The Neapolitans have always been a conquered people, and degenerates in the original sense of the word, _de genere_--they have lost their race, though what it was is uncertain. Lastly, the individual in all things is the prerogative of the divine knowledge. What it is, our eyes can see only by what it has in common, and this can only be seen in communities where neither excision, nor ligature, nor commixture exists. Despotism and superst.i.tion will not extinguish the character of a race, as Russia testifies. But again, take care to understand that character, and expect no other fruit than the root contains in its nature.

[Sidenote: THE FLIGHT OF MOHAMMED]

Had I proceeded, in concert with R. Southey, with the "Flight and Return of Mohammed," [1799] I had intended to introduce a disputation between Mahomet, as the representative of unipersonal Theism with the Judaico-Christian machinery of angels, genii, and prophets, an idolater with his G.o.ds, heroes, and spirits of the departed mighty, and a fetish-worshipper who adored the invisible alone, and held no religion common to all men or any number of men other than as they chanced at the same moment to be acted on by the same influence--even as when a hundred ant-hills are in motion under the same burst of sunshine. And, still, chiefly for the sake of the last scheme, I should like to do something of the kind. My enlightened fetish-divine would have been an Okenist, a zoo-magnetist and (a priest of) the night-side of Nature.

[For the fragment ent.i.tled "Mahomet," see _P. W._, 1893, p. 139, and editor's _Note_, p. 615.]

[Sidenote: PRUDENCE _VERSUS_ FRIENDSHIP]

Among the countless arguments against the Paleyans state, this too--Can a wise moral legislator have made _prudence_ the true principle-ground, and guide of moral conduct, where in almost all cases in which there is contemplation to act wrong the first appearances of prudence are in favour of immorality, and, in order to ground the contrary on a principle of prudence, it is necessary to refine, to calculate, to look far onward into an uncertain future? Is this a guide, or primary guide, that for ever requires a guide against itself? Is it not a strange system which sets prudence against prudence? Compare this with the Law of Conscience--Is it not its specific character to be immediate, positive, unalterable? In short, _a priori_, state the requisites of a moral guide, and apply them first to prudence, and then to the law of pure reason or conscience, and ask if we need fear the result if the Judge is pure from all bribes and prejudices.

What then are the real dictates of prudence as drawn from every man's experience in late manhood, and so lured from the intoxication of youth, hope, and love? How cold, how dead'ning, what a dire vacuum they would leave in the soul, if the high and supreme sense of duty did not form a root out of which new prospects budded. What, I say, is the clear dictate of prudence in the matter of friendship? a.s.suredly to _like_ only, and never to be so attached as to be stripped naked by the loss. A friend may be a great-coat, a beloved a couch, but never, never our necessary clothing, our only means of quiet heart-repose! And, yet, with this the mind of a generous man would be so miserable, that prudence itself would fight against prudence, and advise him to drink off the draught of Hope, spite of the horrid and bitter dregs of disappointment, with which the draught will a.s.suredly finish.

Though I have said that duty is a consolation, I have not affirmed that the scar of the wound of disappointed love and insulted, betrayed fidelity would be removed in _this_ life. No! it will not--nay, the very duty must for ever keep alive feelings the appropriate objects of which are indeed in another world; but yet our human nature cannot avoid at times the connection of those feelings with their original or their first forms and objects; and so far, therefore, from removing the scar, will often and often make the wound open and bleed afresh. But, still, we know that the feeling is not objectless, that the counterfeit has a correspondent genuine, and this is the comfort.

[Sidenote: A POET ON POETRY]

_Canzone XVIII. fra le Rime di Dante_ is a poem of wild and interesting images, intended as an enigma, and to me an enigma it remains, spite of all my efforts. Yet it deserves transcription and translation. A.D. 1806 [? 1807].

"Tre donne intorno al cuor mi son venute," &c.

[After the four first lines the handwriting is that of my old, dear, and honoured friend, Mr. Wade, of Bristol.--S. T. C.]

_Ramsgate, Sept. 2nd, 1819._--I _begin_ to understand the above poem, after an interval from 1805, during which no year pa.s.sed in which I did not reperuse, I might say construe, pa.r.s.e, and spell it, twelve times at least--such a fascination had it, spite of its obscurity! It affords a good instance, by the bye, of that soul of _universal_ significance in a true poet's composition, in addition to the specific meaning.

[Sidenote: GREAT AND LITTLE MINDS]

Great minds can and do create the taste of the age, and one of the contingent causes which warp the taste of nations and ages is, that men of genius in part yield to it, and in part are acted on by the taste of the age.

Common minds may be compared to the component drops of the stream of life--men of genius to the large and small bubbles. What if they break?

they are still as good as the rest--drops of water.

[Sidenote: SUBJECT AND OBJECT]

In youth our happiness is hope; in age the recollection of the hopes of youth. What else can there be?--for the substantial mind, for the _I_, what else can there be? Pleasure? Fruition? Filter hope and memory from pleasure, and the more entire the fruition the more is it the death of the _I_. A neutral product results that may exist for others, but no longer for itself--a c.o.ke or a slag. To make the object one with us, we must become one with the object--_ergo, an_ object. _Ergo_, the object must be itself a subject--partially a favourite dog, princ.i.p.ally a friend, wholly G.o.d, _the_ Friend. G.o.d is Love--that is, an object that is absolutely subject (G.o.d is a spirit), but a subject that for ever condescends to become the object for those that meet Him subjectively.

[As in the] Eucharist, [He is] verily and truly present to the Faithful, neither [by a] _trans_ nor _con_, but [by] _substantiation_.

[Sidenote: THE THREE ESTATES OF BEING]

We might as well attempt to conceive more than three dimensions of s.p.a.ce, as to imagine more than three kinds of living existence--G.o.d, man, and beast. And even of these the last (division) is obscure, and scarce endures a fixed contemplation without pa.s.sing into an unripe or degenerated humanity.

[Sidenote: A LIFE-LONG ERROR]

My mother told my wife that I was a year younger, and that there was a blunder made either in the baptismal register itself or in the transcript sent for my admission into Christ's Hospital; and Mrs. C., who is older than myself, believes me only 48. Be this as it may, in _life_, if not in years, I am, alas! nearer to 68.