and I hardly know any writer in whom you can find such fine models of serious and dignified conversation. July 3, 1833. STYLE.-CAVALIER SLANG.-JUNIUS.-PROSE AND VERSE.—IMITATION AND COPY. THE collocation of words is so artificial in Shakspeare and Milton that you may as well think of pushing a brick out of a wall with your forefinger, as attempt to remove a word out of any of their finished passages.1 A good lecture upon style might be composed, by taking on the one hand the slang of L'Estrange, and perhaps, even of Roger I slept; but, hark! that war-shout dread, Which rolling through the city spread; And this the cry, 66 'When, Sons of Greece, When shall the lingering leaguer cease; They led me to the sounding shore- Their love-no love! but some dark spell, In vengeance breath'd, by spirit fell. Rise, hoary sea, in awful tide, And whelm that vessel's guilty pride; Nor e'er, in high Mycene's hall, Let Helen boast in peace of mighty Ilion's fall." J. T. C., ED. "The amotion or transposition will alter the thought, or the feeling, or at least the tone. They are as pieces of mosaic work, from which you cannot strike the smallest block without making a hole in the picture."-Quarterly Review, No. CIII. p. 7. North,' which became so fashionable after the Restoration as a mark of loyalty; and on the other, the Johnsonian magniloquence or the balanced metre of Junius; and then showing how each extreme is faulty, upon different grounds. It is quite curious to remark the prevalence of the Cavalier slang style in the divines of Charles the Second's time. Barrow could not of course adopt such a mode of writing throughout, because he could not in it have communicated his elaborate thinkings and lofty rhetoric; but even Barrow not unfrequently lets slip a phrase here and there in the regular Roger North way-much to the delight, no doubt, of the largest part of his audience and contemporary readers. See particularly, for instances of this, his work on the Pope's supremacy. South is full of it. The style of Junius is a sort of metre, the law of which is a balance of thesis and antithesis. When he gets out of this aphorismic metre into a sentence of five or six lines long, nothing can exceed the slovenliness of the English. Horne Tooke and a long sentence seem the only two antagonists that were too much for him. Still the antithesis of Junius is a real antithesis of images or thought, but the antithesis of Johnson is rarely more than verbal. The definition of good Prose is-proper words in their proper places; of good Verse-the most proper words in their proper places. The propriety is in either case relative. The words in prose ought to express the intended meaning, and no more; if they attract attention to themselves, it is, in general, a fault. In the very best styles, as Southey's, you read page after page, understanding the author perfectly, without once taking notice of the medium of communication;—it is as if he had been speaking to you all the But Mr. Coleridge took a great distinction between North and the other writers commonly associated with him. In speaking of the Examen and the Life of Lord North, in the Friend, Mr. C. calls them "two of the most interesting biographical works in our language, both for the weight of the matter, and the incuriosa felicitas of the style. The pages are all alive with the genuine idioms of our mother tongue. A fastidious taste, it is true, will find offence in the occasional vulgarisms, or what we now call slang, which not a few of our writers, shortly after the Restoration of Charles the Second, seem to have affected as a mark of loyalty. These instancès, however, are but a trifling drawback. They are not sought for, as is too often and too plainly done by L'Estrange, Collyer, Tom Brown, and their imitators. North never goes out of his way, either to seek them, or to avoid them; and, in the main, his language gives us the very nerve, pulse, and sinew of a hearty, healthy, conversational English."-Vol. II. p. 307.-ED. while. But in verse you must do more;-there the words, the media, must be beautiful, and ought to attract your notice-yet not so much and so perpetually as to destroy the unity which ought to result from the whole poem. This is the general rule, but, of course, subject to some modifications, according to the different kinds of prose or verse. Some prose may approach towards verse, as oratory, and therefore a more studied exhibition of the media may be proper; and some verse may border more on mere narrative, and there the style should be simpler. But the great thing in poetry is, quocunque modo, to effect a unity of impression upon the whole; and a too great fulness and profusion of point in the parts will prevent this. Who can read with pleasure more than a hundred lines or so of Hudibras at one time? Each couplet or quatrain is so whole in itself, that you can't connect them. There is no fusion,-just as it is in Seneca. Imitation is the mesothesis of Likeness and Difference. The difference is as essential to it as the likeness; for without the difference, it would be Copy or Fac-simile. But, to borrow a term from astronomy, it is a librating mesothesis: for it may verge more to likeness as in Painting, or more to difference, as in Sculpture. July 4, 1833. DR. JOHNSON.-Boswell.-BURKE.-NEWTON.-MILTON, DR. JOHNSON'S fame now rests principally upon Boswell. It is impossible not to be amused with such a book. But his bow-wow manner must have had a good deal to do with the effect produced; -for no one, I suppose, will set Johnson before Burke,—and Burke was a great and universal talker;-yet now we hear nothing of this except by some chance remarks in Boswell.. The fact is, Burke, like all men of genius who love to talk at all, was very discursive and continuous; hence he is not reported; he seldom said the sharp short things that Johnson almost always did, which produce a more decided effect at the moment, and which are so much more easy to carry off. Besides, as to Burke's testimony to Burke, I am persuaded, was not so continuous a talker as Coleridge. Madame de Staël told a nephew of the latter, at Coppet, that Mr. C. was a master of monologue, mais qu'il ne savait pas le dialogue. There was a spice of vindictiveness in this, the exact history of which is not worth explaining. And if dialogue must be cut down in its meaning to small talk, I, for one, will Johnson's powers, you must remember that Burke was a great courtier; and after all, Burke said and wrote more than once that he thought Johnson greater in talking than in writing, and greater in Boswell than in real life.' Newton was a great man, but you must excuse me if I think that it would take many Newtons to make one Milton. July 6, 1833. PAINTING.--MUSIC.-POETRY. IT is a poor compliment to pay to a painter to tell him that his figure stands out of the canvas, or that you start at the likeness of the portrait. Take almost any daub, cut it out of the canvas, and place the figure looking into or out of a window, and any one may take it for life. Or take one of Mrs. Salmon's wax queens or generals, and you will very sensibly feel the difference between a copy, as they are, and an imitation, of the human form, as a good portrait ought to be. Look at that flower vase of Van Huysum, and at these wax or stone peaches and apricots! The last are likest to their original, but what pleasure do they give? None, except to children.2 Some music is above me; most music is beneath me. I like Beethoven and Mozart-or else some of the aërial compositions of admit that Coleridge, amongst his numberless qualifications, possessed it not. But I am sure that he could, when it suited him, converse as well as any one else, and with women he frequently did converse in a very winning and popular style, confining them, however, as well as he could, to the detail of facts or of their spontaneous emotions. In general, it was certainly otherwise. "You must not be surprised," he said to me, "at my talking so long to you -I pass so much of my time in pain and solitude, yet everlastingly thinking, that, when you or any other persons call upon me, I can hardly help easing my mind by pouring forth some of the accumulated mass of reflection and feeling, upon an apparently interested recipient." But the principle reason, no doubt, was the habit of his intellect, which was under a law of discoursing upon all subjects with reference to ideas or ultimate ends. You might interrupt him when you pleased, and he was patient of every sort of conversation except mere personality, which he absolutely hated.-ED. I This was said, I believe, to the late Sir James Mackintosh.-ED. 2 This passage, and those following, will evidence, what the readers even or this little work must have seen, that Mr. Coleridge had an eye, almost exclusively, for the ideal or universal in painting and music. He knew nothing of the details of handling in the one, or of rules of composition in the other. the elder Italians, as Palestrina' and Carissimi.Purcell. And I love The best sort of music is what it should be—sacred; the next best, the military, has fallen to the lot of the Devil. Good music never tires me, nor sends me to sleep. I feel physically refreshed and strengthened by it, as Milton says he did. I could write as good verses now as ever I did, if I were perfectly free from vexations, and were in the ad libitum hearing of fine music, which has a sensible effect in harmonizing my thoughts, and in animating and, as it were, lubricating my inventive faculty. The reason of my not finishing Christabel is not that I don't know how to do it for I have, as I always had, the whole plan entire from beginning to end in my mind;2 but I fear I could not carry on with Yet he was, to the best of my knowledge, an unerring judge of the merits of any serious effort in the fine arts, and detected the leading thought or feeling of the artist, with a decision which used sometimes to astonish me. Every picture which I have looked at in company with him, seems now, to my mind, translated into English. He would sometimes say, after looking for a minute at a picture, generally a modern one," There's no use in stopping at this; for I see the painter had no idea. It is mere mechanical drawing. Come on; here the artist meant something for the mind." It was just the same with his knowledge of music. His appetite for what he thought good was literally inexhaustible. He told me he could listen to fine music for twelve hours together, and go away refreshed. But he required in music either thought or feeling; mere addresses to the sensual ear he could not away with; hence his utter distaste for Rossini, and his reverence for Beethoven and Mozart.-ED. I Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina was born about 1529, and died in 1594, I believe he may be considered the founder or reformer of the Italian church music. His masses, motets, and hymns are tolerably well known amongst lovers of the old composers; but Mr. Coleridge used to speak with delight of some of Palestrina's madrigals which he heard at Rome. Giacomo Carissimi composed about the years 1640-1650. His style has been charged with effeminacy; but Mr. C. thought it very graceful and chaste. Henry Purcell needs no addition in England.-ED. 2 I should not have thought it necessary, but for the opinion expressed in Frazer's Magazine for October, 1834, p. 394, to remark here, that the verses published in the European Mazazine, No. LXVII., and dated April, 1815, purporting to be a conclusion of Christabel, are not by Mr. Coleridge. With deference to the critic, I must take the liberty to say that they have not a particle of the spirit of the genuine poem; and that the metre and rhythm are copied by one whose eye was better than his ear. Besides, Coleridge's Bracy was not Merlin, neither was his Geraldine the Lady of the Lake. In fact, the genuine poem was well known, by recitation and transcription, nearly twenty years before its publication; and the writer of the conclusion had, of course, seen it. I believe I could name the Avellaneda of Christabel-but he is now gone, and it would reflect no credit upon his memory.-Ed. |