The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 2. Томас Де Квинси
is disgusting, and the more complete the delusion the more loathsome the effect. Why are such simulations of nature as wax-work figures of men and women so disagreeable? Because, not finding the motion and the life all we expected, we are shocked as by a falsehood, every circumstance of detail, which before induced you to be interested, making the distance from truth more palpable. You set out with a supposed reality, and are disappointed and disgusted with the deception; whilst in respect to a work of genuine imitation you begin with an acknowledged total difference, and then every touch of nature gives you the pleasure of an approximation to truth.'
In this exposition there must be some oversight on the part of Coleridge. He tells us in the beginning that, if there be 'likeness to nature without any check of difference, the result is disgusting.' But the case of the wax-work, which is meant to illustrate this proposition, does not at all conform to the conditions; the result is disgusting certainly, but not from any want of difference to control the sameness, for, on the contrary, the difference is confessedly too revolting; and apparently the distinction between the two cases described is simply this—that in the illegitimate case of the wax-work the likeness comes first and the unlikeness last, whereas in the other case this order is reversed. But that distinction will neither account in fact for the difference of effect; nor, if it did, would it account upon any reason or ground suggested by Coleridge for such a difference. Let us consider this case of wax-work a little more vigilantly, and then perhaps we may find out both why it is that some men unaffectedly are disgusted by wax-work; and secondly, why it is that, if trained on just principles of reflective taste, all men would be so affected.
As a matter not altogether without importance, we may note that even the frailty of the material operates to some extent in disgusting us with wax-work. A higher temperature of the atmosphere, it strikes us too forcibly, would dispose the waxen figures to melt; and in colder seasons the horny fist of a jolly boatswain would 'pun5 them into shivers' like so many ship-biscuits. The grandeur of permanence and durability transfers itself or its expression from the material to the impression of the artifice which moulds it, and crystallizes itself in the effect. We see continually very ingenious imitations of objects cut out in paper filigree; there have been people who showed as much of an artist's eye in this sort of work, and of an artist's hand, as Miss Linwood of the last generation in her exquisite needlework; in both cases a trick, a tour-de-main, was raised into the dignity of a fine art; and yet, because the slightness of the material too emphatically proclaims the essential perishableness of the result, nobody views such modes of art with more even of a momentary interest than the morning wreaths of smoke ascending so beautifully from a cottage chimney, or cares much to preserve them. The traceries of hoar frost upon the windows of inhabited rooms are not only beautiful in the highest degree, but have been shown in several French memoirs to obey laws of transcendental geometry, and also to obey physical laws of startling intricacy. These lovely forms of almighty nature wear the grandeur of mystery, of floral beauty, and of science (immanent science) not always fathomable.6 They are anything but capricious. Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like them; and yet, simply because the sad hand of mortality is upon them, because they are dedicated to death, because on genial days they will have passed into the oblivion of graves before the morning sun has mounted to his meridian, we do not so much as honour them with a transient stare from the breakfast-table. Ah, wretches that we are, the horrid carnalities of tea and toast, or else the horrid bestialities in morning journals of Chartists and Cobdenites at home, of Red Ruffians abroad, draw off our attention from the chonchoids and the cycloids pencilled by the Eternal Geometrician! and these celestial traceries of the dawn, which neither Da Vinci nor Raphaello was able to have followed as a mimic, far less as a rival, we regard as a nuisance claiming the attentions of the window-cleaner; even as the spider's web, that might absorb an angel into reverie, is honoured amongst the things banned by the housemaid. But the reason why the wax-work disgusts is that it seeks to reproduce in literal detail the traits that should be softened under a general diffusive impression; the likeness to nature is presented in what is essentially fleeting and subsidiary, and the 'check of difference' is found also in this very literality, and not in any effort of the etherealizing imagination, as it is in all true works of art; so that the case really stands the exact opposite of that which Coleridge had given in his definition.7
To pass from art to style. How loose and arbitrary Coleridge not infrequently was in face of the laws on that subject which he had himself repeatedly laid down! Could it be believed of a man so quick to feel, so rapid to arrest all phenomena, that in a matter so important as that of style, he should have nothing loftier to record of his own merits, services, reformations, or cautions, than that he has always conscientiously forborne to use the personal genitive whose in speaking of inanimate things? For example, that he did not say, and could not have been tempted or tortured into saying, 'The bridge whose piers could not much longer resist the flood.' Well, as they say in Scotland, some people are thankful for small mercies. We—that is, you, the reader, and ourselves—are persons; the bridge, you see, is but a thing. We pity it, poor thing, and, as far as it is possible to entertain such a sentiment for a bridge, we feel respect for it. Few bridges are thoroughly contemptible; and we make a point, in obedience to an old-world proverb, always to speak well of the bridge that has carried us over in safety, which the worst of bridges never yet has refused to do. But still there are such things as social distinctions; and we conceive that a man and a 'contributor' (an ancient contributor to Blackwood), must in the herald's college be allowed a permanent precedency before all bridges whatsoever, without regard to number of arches, width of span, or any other frivolous pretences. We acknowledge therefore with gratitude Coleridge's loyalty to his own species in not listening to any compromise with mere things, that never were nor will be raised to the peerage of personality, and sternly refusing them the verbal honours which are sacred to us humans. But what is the principle of taste upon which Coleridge justifies this rigorous practice? It is—and we think it a very just principle—that this mechanic mode of giving life to things inanimate ranks 'amongst those worst mimicries of poetic diction by which imbecile writers fancy they elevate their prose.' True; but the same spurious artifices for giving a fantastic elevation to prose reappear in a thousand other forms, from some of which neither Coleridge nor his accomplished daughter is absolutely free. For instance, one of the commonest abuses of pure English amongst our Scottish brethren, unless where they have been educated out of Scotland, is to use aught for anything, ere for before, well-nigh for almost, and scores besides. No home-bred, i.e. Cockney Scotchman, is aware that these are poetic forms, and are as ludicrously stilted in any ear trained by the daily habits of good society to the appreciation of pure English—as if, in Spenserian phrase, he should say, 'What time I came home to breakfast,' instead of 'When I came home.' The 'tis and 'twas, which have been superannuated for a century in England, except in poetic forms, still linger in Scotland and in Ireland, and these forms also at intervals look out from Coleridge's prose. Coleridge is also guilty at odd times (as is Wordsworth) of that most horrible affectation, the hath and doth for has and does. This is really criminal. But amongst all barbarisms known to man, the very worst—and this also, we are sorry to say, flourishes as rankly as weeds in Scotch prose, and is to be found in Coleridge's writings—is the use of the thereof, therein, thereby, thereunto. This monstrous expression of imperfect civilization, which for one hundred and fifty years has been cashiered by cultivated Englishmen as attorneys' English, and is absolutely frightful unless in a lease or conveyance, ought (we do not scruple to say) to be made indictable at common law, not perhaps as a felony, but certainly as a misdemeanour, punishable by fine and imprisonment.
In nothing is the characteristic mode of Coleridge's mind to be seen more strikingly than in his treatment of some branches of dramatic literature, though to that subject he had devoted the closest study. He was almost as distinguished, indeed, for the points he missed as for those he saw. Look at his position as regards some questions concerning the French drama and its critics, more particularly the views of Voltaire, though some explanation may be found in the fact, which I have noticed elsewhere, that Coleridge's acquaintance with the French language was not such as to enable him to read it with the easy
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The passage occurs at p. 354, vol. ii. of the