Biographia Literaria
conclusion legitimate--the result must be, either that contraries can
both be true, (which is absurd,) or that the faculty and forms of
reasoning employed are inapplicable to the subject--i.e. that there is
a metabasis eis allo genos. Thus, the attributes of Space and time
applied to Spirit are heterogeneous--and the proof of this is, that by
admitting them explicite or implicite contraries may be demonstrated
true--i.e. that the same, taken in the same sense, is true and not
true.--That the world had a beginning in Time and a bound in Space; and
That the world had not a beginning and has no limit;--That a self
originating act is, and is not possible, are instances.]
[Footnote 38: To those, who design to acquire the language of a country
in the country itself, it may be useful, if I mention the incalculable
advantage which I derived from learning all the words, that could
possibly be so learned, with the objects before me, and without the
intermediation of the English terms. It was a regular part of my
morning studies for the first six weeks of my residence at Ratzeburg,
to accompany the good and kind old pastor, with whom I lived, from the
cellar to the roof, through gardens, farmyard, etc. and to call every,
the minutest, thing by its German name. Advertisements, farces, jest
books, and the conversation of children while I was at play with them,
contributed their share to a more home-like acquaintance with the
language than I could have acquired from works of polite literature
alone, or even from polite society. There is a passage of hearty sound
sense in Luther’s German Letter on interpretation, to the translation
of which I shall prefix, for the sake of those who read the German, yet
are not likely to have dipped often in the massive folios of this
heroic reformer, the simple, sinewy, idiomatic words of the original.
“Denn man muss nicht die Buchstaben in der Lateinischen Sprache fragen
wie man soll Deutsch reden: sondern man muss die Mutter in Hause, die
Kinder auf den Gassen, den gemeinen Mann auf dem Markte, darum fragen:
und denselbigen auf das Maul sehen wie sie reden, und darnach
dolmetschen. So verstehen sie es denn, und merken dass man Deutsch mit
ihnen redet.”
TRANSLATION:
For one must not ask the letters in the Latin tongue, how one ought to
speak German; but one must ask the mother in the house, the children in
the lanes and alleys, the common man in the market, concerning this;
yea, and look at the moves of their mouths while they are talking, and
thereafter interpret. They understand you then, and mark that one talks
German with them.]
[Footnote 39: This paraphrase, written about the time of Charlemagne,
is by no means deficient in occasional passages of considerable poetic
merit. There is a flow, and a tender enthusiasm in the following lines
(at the conclusion of Chapter XI.) which, even in the translation will
not, I flatter myself, fail to interest the reader. Ottfried is
describing the circumstances immediately following the birth of our
Lord.
She gave with joy her virgin breast;
She hid it not, she bared the breast,
Which suckled that divinest babe!
Blessed, blessed were the breasts
Which the Saviour infant kiss’d;
And blessed, blessed was the mother
Who wrapp’d his limbs in swaddling clothes,
Singing placed him on her lap,
Hung o’er him with her looks of love,
And sooth’d him with a lulling motion.
Blessed; for she shelter’d him
From the damp and chilling air;
Blessed, blessed! for she lay
With such a babe in one blest bed,
Close as babes and mothers lie!
Blessed, blessed evermore,
With her virgin lips she kiss’d,
With her arms, and to her breast
She embraced the babe divine,
Her babe divine the virgin mother!
There lives not on this ring of earth
A mortal, that can sing her praise.
Mighty mother, virgin pure,
In the darkness and the night
For us she bore the heavenly Lord!
Most interesting is it to consider the effect, when the feelings are
wrought above the natural pitch by the belief of something mysterious,
while all the images are purely natural. Then it is, that religion and
poetry strike deepest.]
[Footnote 40: Lord Grenville has lately re-asserted (in the House of
Lords) the imminent danger of a revolution in the earlier part of the
war against France. I doubt not, that his Lordship is sincere; and it
must be flattering to his feelings to believe it. But where are the
evidences of the danger, to which a future historian can appeal? Or
must he rest on an assertion? Let me be permitted to extract a passage
on the subject from The Friend. “I have said that to withstand the
arguments of the lawless, the anti-Jacobins proposed to suspend the
law, and by the interposition of a particular statute to eclipse the
blessed light of the universal sun, that spies and informers might
tyrannize and escape in the ominous darkness. Oh! if these mistaken
men, intoxicated with alarm and bewildered by that panic of property,
which they themselves were the chief agents in exciting, had ever lived
in a country where there really existed a general disposition to change
and rebellion! Had they ever travelled through Sicily; or through
France at the first coming on of the revolution; or even alas! through
too many of the provinces of a sister island; they could not but have
shrunk from their own declarations concerning the state of feeling and
opinion at that time predominant throughout Great Britain. There was a
time--(Heaven grant that that time may have passed by!)--when by
crossing a narrow strait, they might have learned the true symptoms of
approaching danger, and have secured themselves from mistaking the
meetings and idle rant of such sedition, as shrank appalled from the
sight of a constable, for the dire murmuring and strange consternation
which precedes the storm or earthquake of national discord. Not only in
coffee-houses and public theatres, but even at the tables of the
wealthy, they would have heard the advocates of existing Government
defend their cause in the language and with the tone of men, who are
conscious that they are in a minority. But in England, when the alarm
was at its highest, there was not a city, no, not a town or village, in
which a man suspected of holding democratic principles could move
abroad without receiving some unpleasant proof of the hatred in which
his supposed opinions were held by the great majority of the people;
and the only instances of popular excess and indignation were on the
side of the government and the established church. But why need I
appeal to these invidious facts? Turn over the pages of history and
seek for a single instance of a revolution having been effected without
the concurrence of either the nobles, or the ecclesiastics, or the
monied classes, in any country, in which the influences of property had
ever been predominant, and where the interests of the proprietors were
interlinked! Examine the revolution of the Belgic provinces under
Philip II; the civil wars of France in the preceding generation; the
history of the American revolution, or the yet more recent events in
Sweden and in Spain; and it will be scarcely possible not to perceive
that in England from 1791 to the peace of Amiens there were neither
tendencies to confederacy nor actual confederacies, against which the
existing laws had not provided both sufficient safeguards and an ample
punishment. But alas! the panic of property had been struck in the
first instance for party purposes; and when it became general, its
propagators caught it themselves and ended in believing their own lie;
even as our bulls to Borrowdale sometimes run mad with the echo of
their own bellowing. The consequences were most injurious. Our
attention was concentrated on a monster, which could not survive the
convulsions, in which it had been brought forth,--even the enlightened
Burke himself too often talking and reasoning, as if a perpetual and
organized anarchy had been a possible thing! Thus while we were warring
against French doctrines, we took little heed whether the means by
which we attempted to overthrow them, were not likely to aid and
augment the far more formidable evil of French ambition. Like children
we ran away from the yelping of a cur, and took shelter at the heels of
a vicious war horse.” (Vol. II. Essay i. p. 21, 4th edit.)]
[Footnote 41: I seldom think of the murder of this illustrious Prince
without recollecting the lines of Valerius Flaccus:
------super ipsius ingens
Instat fama viri, virtusque haud laeta tyranno;
Ergo anteire metus, juvenemque exstinguere pergit.
Argonaut, I. 29.]
[Footnote 42: --
Theara de kai ton chaena kai taen dorkada,
Kai ton lagoon, kai to ton tauron genos.
Manuel Phile, De Animal. Proprietat. sect. I. i. 12.]
[Footnote 43: Paradise Regained. Book IV. I. 261.]
[Footnote 44: Vita e Costumi di Dante.]
[Footnote 45: TRANSLATION: “With the greatest possible solicitude avoid
authorship. Too early or immoderately employed, it makes the head waste
and the heart empty; even were there no other worse consequences. A
person, who reads only to print, to all probability reads amiss; and
he, who sends away through the pen and the press every thought, the
moment it occurs to him, will in a short time have sent all away, and
will become a mere journeyman of the printing-office, a compositor.”
To which I may add from myself, that what medical physiologists affirm
of certain secretions applies equally to our thoughts; they too must be
taken up again into the circulation, and be again and again re-secreted
to order to ensure a healthful vigour, both to the mind and to its
intellectual offspring.]
[Footnote 46: This distinction between transcendental and transcendent
is observed by our elder divines and philosophers, whenever they
express themselves scholastically. Dr. Johnson indeed has confounded
the two words; but his own authorities do not bear him out. Of this
celebrated dictionary I will venture to remark once for all, that I
should suspect the man of a morose disposition who should speak of it
without respect and gratitude as a most instructive and entertaining
book, and hitherto, unfortunately, an indispensable book; but I
confess, that I should be surprised at hearing from a philosophic and
thorough scholar any but very qualified praises of it, as a dictionary.
I am not now alluding to the number of genuine words omitted; for this
is (and perhaps to a greater extent) true, as Mr. Wakefield has
noticed, of our best Greek Lexicons, and this too after the successive
labours of so many giants in learning. I refer at present both to
omissions and commissions of a more important nature. What these are,
me saltem judice, will be stated at full in The Friend, re-published
and completed.
I had never heard of the correspondence between Wakefield and Fox till
I saw the account of it this morning (16th September 1815) in the
Monthly Review. I was not a little gratified at finding, that Mr.
Wakefield had proposed to himself nearly the same plan for a Greek and
English Dictionary, which I had formed, and began to execute, now ten
years ago. But far, far more grieved am I, that he did not live to
complete it. I cannot but think it a subject of most serious regret,
that the same heavy expenditure, which is now employing in the
republication of STEPHANUS augmented, had not been applied to a new
Lexicon on a more philosophical plan, with the English, German, and
French synonymes as well as the Latin. In almost every instance the
precise individual meaning might be given in an English or German word;