The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Volume I Part 27

(P. 141.) To think that this was all my own, that I was king and lord of all this country indefeasibly, &c.

By the by, what is the law of England respecting this? Suppose I had discovered, or been wrecked on an uninhabited island, would it be mine or the king's?

(P. 223.) I considered--that as I could not foresee what the ends of divine wisdom might be in all this, so I was not to dispute his sovereignty, who, as I was his creature, had an undoubted right, by creation, to govern and dispose of me absolutely as he thought fit, &c.

I could never understand this reasoning, grounded on a complete misapprehension of St. Paul's image of the potter, Rom. ix., or rather I do fully understand the absurdity of it. The susceptibility of pain and pleasure, of good and evil, const.i.tutes a right in every creature endowed therewith in relation to every rational and moral being,--a'

fortiori', therefore, to the Supreme Reason, to the absolutely good Being. Remember Davenant's verses;--

Doth it our reason's mutinies appease To say, the potter may his own clay mould To every use, or in what shape he please, At first not counsell'd, nor at last controll'd?

Power's hand can neither easy be, nor strict To lifeless clay, which ease nor torment knows, And where it cannot favour or afflict, It neither justice or injustice shows.

But souls have life, and life eternal too: Therefore, if doom'd before they can offend, It seems to show what heavenly power can do, But does not in that deed that power commend.

(Death of Astragon. st. 88, &c. P. 232-3.)

And this I must observe with grief too, that the discomposure of my mind had too great impressions also upon the religious parts of my thoughts,--praying to G.o.d being properly an act of the mind, not of the body.

As justly conceived as it is beautifully expressed. And a mighty motive for habitual prayer; for this cannot but greatly facilitate the performance of rational prayer even in moments of urgent distress.

(P. 244.) That this would justify the conduct of the Spaniards in all their barbarities practised in America.

De Foe was a true philanthropist, who had risen above the antipathies of nationality; but he was evidently partial to the Spanish character, which, however, it is not, I fear, possible to acquit of cruelty.

Witness the Netherlands, the Inquisition, the late Guerilla warfare, &c.

(P. 249.) That I shall not discuss, and perhaps cannot account for; but certainly they are a proof of the converse of spirits, &c.

This reminds me of a conversation I once over heard. "How a statement so injurious to Mr. A. and so contrary to the truth, should have been made to you by Mr. B. I do not pretend to account for;--only I know of my own knowledge that B. is an inveterate liar, and has long borne malice against Mr. A.; and I can prove that he has repeatedly declared that in some way or other he would do Mr. A. a mischief."

(P. 254.) The place I was in was a most delightful cavity or grotto of its kind, as could be expected, though perfectly dark; the floor was dry and level, and had a sort of small loose gravel on it, &c.

How accurate an observer of nature De Foe was! The reader will at once recognize Professor Buckland's caves and the diluvial gravel.

(P. 308.) I entered into a long discourse with him about the devil, the original of him, his rebellion against G.o.d, his enmity to man, the reason of it, his setting himself up in the dark parts of the world to be worshipped instead of G.o.d, &c.

I presume that Milton's 'Paradise Lost' must have been bound up with one of Crusoe's Bibles; otherwise I should be puzzled to know where he found all this history of the Old Gentleman. Not a word of it in the Bible itself, I am quite sure. But to be serious. De Foe did not reflect that all these difficulties are attached to a mere fiction, or, at the best, an allegory, supported by a few popular phrases and figures of speech used incidentally or dramatically by the Evangelists,--and that the existence of a personal, intelligent, evil being, the counterpart and antagonist of G.o.d, is in direct contradiction to the most express declarations of Holy Writ. '"Shall there be evil in a city, and the Lord hath not done it?"' Amos, iii. 6. '"I make peace and create evil."' Isa.

xlv. 7. This is the deep mystery of the abyss of G.o.d.

(Vol. ii. p. 3.) I have often heard persons of good judgment say, ... that there is no such thing as a spirit appearing, a ghost walking, and the like, &c.

I cannot conceive a better definition of Body than "spirit appearing,"

or of a flesh-and-blood man than a rational spirit apparent. But a spirit 'per se' appearing is tantamount to a spirit appearing without its appearances. And as for ghosts, it is enough for a man of common sense to observe, that a ghost and a shadow are concluded in the same definition, that is, visibility without tangibility.

(P. 9.) She was, in a few words the stay of all my affairs, the centre of all my enterprises, &c.

The stay of his affairs, the centre of his interests, the regulator of his schemes and movements, whom it soothed his pride to submit to, and in complying with whose wishes the conscious sensation of his acting will increased the impulse, while it disguised the coercion, of duty!--the clinging dependent, yet the strong supporter--the comforter, the comfort, and the soul's living home! This is De Foe's comprehensive character of the wife, as she should be; and, to the honour of womanhood be it spoken, there are few neighbourhoods in which one name at least might not be found for the portrait.

The exquisite paragraphs in this and the next page, in addition to others scattered, though with a sparing hand, through his novels, afford sufficient proof that De Foe was a first-rate master of periodic style; but with sound judgment, and the fine tact of genius, he has avoided it as adverse to, nay, incompatible with, the every-day matter of fact realness, which forms the charm and the character of all his romances.

The Robinson Crusoe is like the vision of a happy night-mair, such as a denizen of Elysium might be supposed to have from a little excess in his nectar and ambrosia supper. Our imagination is kept in full play, excited to the highest; yet all the while we are touching, or touched by, common flesh and blood.

(P. 67.) The ungrateful creatures began to be as insolent and troublesome as before, &c.

How should it be otherwise? They were idle; and when we will not sow corn, the devil will be sure to sow weeds, night-shade, henbane, and devil's-bit.

(P. 82.) That hardened villain was so far from denying it, that he said it was true, and ---- him they would do it still before they had done with them.

Observe when a man has once abandoned himself to wickedness, he cannot stop, and does not join the devils till he has become a devil himself.

Rebelling against his conscience he becomes the slave of his own furious will.

One excellence of De Foe, amongst many, is his sacrifice of lesser interest to the greater because more universal. Had he (as without any improbability he might have done) given his Robinson Crusoe any of the turn for natural history, which forms so striking and delightful a feature in the equally uneducated Dampier;--had he made him find out qualities and uses in the before (to him) unknown plants of the island, discover, for instance, a subst.i.tute for hops, or describe birds, &c.--many delightful pages and incidents might have enriched the book;--but then Crusoe would have ceased to be the universal representative, the person, for whom every reader could subst.i.tute himself. But now nothing is done, thought, suffered, or desired, but what every man can imagine himself doing, thinking, feeling, or wishing for. Even so very easy a problem as that of finding a subst.i.tute for ink, is with exquisite judgment made to baffle Crusoe's inventive faculties. And in what he does, he arrives at no excellence; he does not make basket work like Will Atkins; the carpentering, tailoring, pottery, &c. are all just what will answer his purposes, and those are confined to needs that all men have, and comforts that all men desire. Crusoe rises only to the point to which all men may be made to feel that they might, and that they ought to, rise in religion,--to resignation, dependence on, and thankful acknowledgement of, the divine mercy and goodness.

In the education of children, love is first to be instilled, and out of love obedience is to be educed. Then impulse and power should be given to the intellect, and the ends of a moral being be exhibited. For this object thus much is effected by works of imagination;--that they carry the mind out of self, and show the possible of the good and the great in the human character. The height, whatever it may be, of the imaginative standard will do no harm; we are commanded to imitate one who is inimitable. We should address ourselves to those faculties in a child's mind, which are first awakened by nature, and consequently first admit of cultivation, that is to say, the memory and the imagination. The comparing power, the judgment, is not at that age active, and ought not to be forcibly excited, as is too frequently and mistakenly done in the modern systems of education, which can only lead to selfish views, debtor and creditor principles of virtue, and an inflated sense of merit. In the imagination of man exist the seeds of all moral and scientific improvement; chemistry was first alchemy, and out of astrology sprang astronomy. In the childhood of those sciences the imagination opened a way, and furnished materials, on which the ratiocinative powers in a maturer state operated with success. The imagination is the distinguishing characteristic of man as a progressive being; and I repeat that it ought to be carefully guided and strengthened as the indispensable means and instrument of continued amelioration and refinement. Men of genius and goodness are generally restless in their minds in the present, and this, because they are by a law of their nature unremittingly regarding themselves in the future, and contemplating the possible of moral and intellectual advance towards perfection. Thus we live by hope and faith; thus we are for the most part able to realize what we will, and thus we accomplish the end of our being. The contemplation of futurity inspires humility of soul in our judgment of the present.

I think the memory of children cannot, in reason, be too much stored with the objects and facts of natural history. G.o.d opens the images of nature, like the leaves of a book, before the eyes of his creature, Man--and teaches him all that is grand and beautiful in the foaming cataract, the gla.s.sy lake, and the floating mist.

The common modern novel, in which there is no imagination, but a miserable struggle to excite and gratify mere curiosity, ought, in my judgment, to be wholly forbidden to children. Novel-reading of this sort is especially injurious to the growth of the imagination, the judgment, and the morals, especially to the latter, because it excites mere feelings without at the same time ministering an impulse to action.

Women are good novelists, but indifferent poets; and this because they rarely or never thoroughly distinguish between fact and fiction. In the jumble of the two lies the secret of the modern novel, which is the 'medium aliquid' between them, having just so much of fiction as to obscure the fact, and so much of fact as to render the fiction insipid.

The perusal of a fashionable lady's novel is to me very much like looking at the scenery and decorations of a theatre by broad daylight.

The source of the common fondness for novels of this sort rests in that dislike of vacancy and that love of sloth, which are inherent in the human mind; they afford excitement without producing reaction. By reaction I mean an activity of the intellectual faculties, which shows itself in consequent reasoning and observation, and originates action and conduct according to a principle. Thus, the act of thinking presents two sides for contemplation,--that of external causality, in which the train of thought may be considered as the result of outward impressions, of accidental combinations, of fancy, or the a.s.sociations of the memory,--and on the other hand, that of internal causality, or of the energy of the will on the mind itself. Thought, therefore, might thus be regarded as pa.s.sive or active; and the same faculties may in a popular sense be expressed as perception or observation, fancy or imagination, memory or recollection.

[Footnote 1: These notes were written by Mr. C. in Mr. Gillman's copy of Robinson Crusoe, in the summer of 1830. The references in the text are to Major's edition, 1831. Ed.]

LECTURE XII.

DREAMS--APPARITIONS--ALCHEMISTS--PERSONALITY OF THE EVIL BEING--BODILY IDENt.i.tY.

It is a general, but, as it appears to me, a mistaken opinion, that in our ordinary dreams we judge the objects to be real. I say our ordinary dreams;--because as to the night-mair the opinion is to a considerable extent just. But the night-mair is not a mere dream, but takes place when the waking state of the brain is recommencing, and most often during a rapid alternation, a twinkling, as it were, of sleeping and waking;--while either from pressure on, or from some derangement in, the stomach or other digestive organs acting on the external skin (which is still in sympathy with the stomach and bowels,) and benumbing it, the sensations sent up to the brain by double touch (that is, when my own hand touches my side or breast,) are so faint as to be merely equivalent to the sensation given by single touch, as when another person's hand touches me. The mind, therefore, which at all times, with and without our distinct consciousness, seeks for, and a.s.sumes, some outward cause for every impression from without, and which in sleep, by aid of the imaginative faculty, converts its judgments respecting the cause into a personal image as being the cause,--the mind, I say, in this case, deceived by past experience, attributes the painful sensation received to a correspondent agent,--an a.s.sa.s.sin, for instance, stabbing at the side, or a goblin sitting on the breast. Add too that the impressions of the bed, curtains, room, &c. received by the eyes in the half-moments of their opening, blend with, and give vividness and appropriate distance to, the dream image which returns when they close again; and thus we unite the actual perceptions, or their immediate reliques, with the phantoms of the inward sense; and in this manner so confound the half-waking, half-sleeping, reasoning power, that we actually do pa.s.s a positive judgment on the reality of what we see and hear, though often accompanied by doubt and self-questioning, which, as I have myself experienced, will at times become strong enough, even before we awake, to convince us that it is what it is--namely, the night-mair.

In ordinary dreams we do not judge the objects to be real;--we simply do not determine that they are unreal. The sensations which they seem to produce, are in truth the causes and occasions of the images; of which there are two obvious proofs: first, that in dreams the strangest and most sudden metamorphoses do not create any sensation of surprise: and the second, that as to the most dreadful images, which during the dream were accompanied with agonies of terror, we merely awake, or turn round on the other side, and off fly both image and agony, which would be impossible if the sensations were produced by the images. This has always appeared to me an absolute demonstration of the true nature of ghosts and apparitions--such I mean of the tribe as were not pure inventions. Fifty years ago, (and to this day in the ruder parts of Great Britain and Ireland, in almost every kitchen and in too many parlours it is nearly the same,) you might meet persons who would a.s.sure you in the most solemn manner, so that you could not doubt their veracity at least, that they had seen an apparition of such and such a person,--in many cases, that the apparition had spoken to them; and they would describe themselves as having been in an agony of terror. They would tell you the story in perfect health. Now take the other cla.s.s of facts, in which real ghosts have appeared;--I mean, where figures have been dressed up for the purpose of pa.s.sing for apparitions:--in every instance I have known or heard of (and I have collected very many) the consequence has been either sudden death, or fits, or idiocy, or mania, or a brain fever. Whence comes the difference? evidently from this,--that in the one case the whole of the nervous system has been by slight internal causes gradually and all together brought into a certain state, the sensation of which is extravagantly exaggerated during sleep, and of which the images are the mere effects and exponents, as the motions of the weatherc.o.c.k are of the wind;--while in the other case, the image rushing through the senses upon a nervous system, wholly unprepared, actually causes the sensation, which is sometimes powerful enough to produce a total check, and almost always a lesion or inflammation. Who has not witnessed the difference in shock when we have leaped down half-a-dozen steps intentionally, and that of having missed a single stair. How comparatively severe the latter is! The fact really is, as to apparitions, that the terror produces the image instead of the contrary; for 'in omnem actum perceptionis influit imaginatio,' as says Wolfe.

O, strange is the self-power of the imagination--when painful sensations have made it their interpreter, or returning gladsomeness or convalescence has made its chilled and evanished figures and landscape bud, blossom, and live in scarlet, green, and snowy white (like the fire-screen inscribed with the nitrate and muriate of cobalt,)--strange is the power to represent the events and circ.u.mstances, even to the anguish or the triumph of the 'quasi'-credent soul, while the necessary conditions, the only possible causes of such contingencies, are known to be in fact quite hopeless;--yea, when the pure mind would recoil from the eve-lengthened shadow of an approaching hope, as from a crime;-and yet the effect shall have place, and substance, and living energy, and, on a blue islet of ether, in a whole sky of blackest cloudage, shine like a firstling of creation!

To return, however to apparitions, and by way of an amusing ill.u.s.tration of the nature and value of even contemporary testimony upon such subjects, I will present you with a pa.s.sage, literally translated by my friend, Mr. Southey, from the well known work of Bernal Dias, one of the companions of Cortes, in the conquest of Mexico:

Here it is that Gomara says, that Francisco de Morla rode forward on a dappled grey horse, before Cortes and the cavalry came up, and that the apostle St. Iago, or St. Peter, was there. I must say that all our works and victories are by the hand of our Lord Jesus Christ, and that in this battle there were for each of us so many Indians, that they could have covered us with handfuls of earth, if it had not been that the great mercy of G.o.d helped us in every thing. And it may be that he of whom Gomara speaks, was the glorious Santiago or San Pedro, and I, as a sinner, was not worthy to see him; but he whom I saw there and knew, was Francisco de Morla on a chestnut horse, who came up with Cortes. And it seems to me that now while I am writing this, the whole war is represented before these sinful eyes, just in the manner as we then went through it. And though I, as an unworthy sinner, might not deserve to see either of these glorious apostles, there were in our company above four hundred soldiers, and Cortes, and many other knights; and it would have been talked of and testified, and they would have made a church, when they peopled the town, which would have been called Santiago de la Vittoria, or San Pedro de la Vittoria, as it is now called, Santa Maria de la Vittoria. And if it was, as Gomara says, bad Christians must we have been, when our Lord G.o.d sent us his holy apostles, not to acknowledge his great mercy, and venerate his church daily. And would to G.o.d, it had been, as the Chronicler says!--but till I read his Chronicle, I never heard such a thing from any of the conquerors who were there.

Now, what if the odd accident of such a man as Bernal Dias' writing a history had not taken place! Gomara's account, the account of a contemporary, which yet must have been read by scores who were present, would have remained uncontradicted. I remember the story of a man, whom the devil met and talked with, but left at a particular lane;--the man followed him with his eyes, and when the devil got to the turning or bend of the lane, he vanished! The devil was upon this occasion drest in a blue coat, plush waistcoat, leather breeches and boots, and talked and looked just like a common man, except as to a particular lock of hair which he had. "And how do you know then that it was the devil?"--"How do I know," replied the fellow,--"why, if it had not been the devil, being drest as he was, and looking as he did, why should I have been sore stricken with fright, when I first saw him? and why should I be in such a tremble all the while he talked? And, moreover, he had a particular sort of a kind of a lock, and when I groaned and said, upon every question he asked me, Lord have mercy upon me! or, Christ have mercy upon me! it was plain enough that he did not like it, and so he left me!"--The man was quite sober when he related this story; but as it happened to him on his return from market, it is probable that he was then muddled. As for myself, I was actually seen in Newgate in the winter of 1798;--the person who saw me there, said he had asked my name of Mr. A. B. a known acquaintance of mine, who told him that it was young Coleridge, who had married the eldest Miss----. "Will you go to Newgate, Sir?" said my friend; "for I a.s.sure you that Mr. C. is now in Germany." "Very willingly," replied the other, and away they went to Newgate, and sent for A. B. "Coleridge," cried he, "in Newgate! G.o.d forbid!" I said, "young Col ---- who married the eldest Miss ----." The names were something similar. And yet this person had himself really seen me at one of my lectures.

I remember, upon the occasion of my inhaling the nitrous oxide at the Royal Inst.i.tution, about five minutes afterwards, a gentleman came from the other side of the theatre and said to me,--"Was it not ravishingly delightful, Sir?"--"It was highly pleasurable, no doubt."--"Was it not very like sweet music?"--"I cannot say I perceived any a.n.a.logy to it."--"Did you not say it was very like Mrs. Billington singing by your ear?"--"No, Sir, I said that while I was breathing the gas, there was a singing in my ears."

To return, however, to dreams, I not only believe, for the reasons given, but have more than once actually experienced that the most fearful forms, when produced simply by a.s.sociation, instead of causing fear, operate no other effect than the same would do if they had pa.s.sed through my mind as thoughts, while I was composing a faery tale; the whole depending on the wise and gracious law in our nature, that the actual bodily sensations, called forth according to the law of a.s.sociation by thoughts and images of the mind, never greatly transcend the limits of pleasurable feeling in a tolerably healthy frame, unless where an act of the judgment supervenes and interprets them as purporting instant danger to ourselves.

[1] There have been very strange and incredible stories told of and by the alchemists. Perhaps in some of them there may have been a specific form of mania, originating in the constant intension of the mind on an imaginary end, a.s.sociated with an immense variety of means, all of them substances not familiar to men in general, and in forms strange and unlike to those of ordinary nature. Sometimes, it seems as if the alchemists wrote like the Pythagoreans on music, imagining a metaphysical and inaudible music as the basis of the audible. It is clear that by sulphur they meant the solar rays or light, and by mercury the principle of ponderability, so that their theory was the same with that of the Herac.l.i.tic physics, or the modern German 'Naturphilosophie', which deduces all things from light and gravitation, each being bipolar; gravitation=north and south, or attraction and repulsion; light=east and west, or contraction and dilation; and gold being the tetrad, or interpenetration of both, as water was the dyad of light, and iron the dyad of gravitation.