Wednesday 4 March 2020

A New Specimen of Coleridge's Table Talk (1826)



Surprising this has passed by unnoticed: Caroline-Frances Cornwallis (1786–1858) was an important 19th-century feminist writer, hardly obscure or unknown. Her Selected Letters (1864) contains one to ‘Mrs Mossop’ from Jan 1826:
To Mrs. Mossop. Nizells, Jan. 1826

. . . . My Séjour at Hampstead was delightful. One of the people I met there was a Mr. Bandinell, of the Foreign Office, who had just been conversing with Major Denham, lately returned from Africa. He reports that amongst the nations of the interior there is much more appearance of civilization than towards the coast; that in one place he found a market attended by 50,000 people, soldiers clad in iron armour, and much that betokened a considerable advance above the savage life. On the coast it would appear that the slave-trade, by encouraging war, that great opposer of peaceful arts, had tended to degrade the people to their present state, as well as the vile policy of Europeans, who generally contrive to disseminate vice and disease amongst the natives wherever they go. Sir George Rose, Coleridge, Terrick Hamilton (the translator of Antar), besides the tribe of Freres, made our dinner-parties delightful; and Mrs. G. F. possesses the rare art of drawing forth the clever people whom she entertains at her table. Coleridge is an odd man, exceedingly fond of talking, and with an eternal flow of language which nothing seems to exhaust. He generally talks well if he does not get too metaphysical, and I had the luck of being placed beside him at dinner, so that I had the most of his talk. One idea of his seemed to me good, and I do not think I have seen it in print, though it has often passed through my mind—that the knowledge of a future state, or rather the consciousness of immortality, partook of the nature of an instinct. “No nation has been found without such a belief,” said he; “children feel the impression almost before you can say that they have been taught, and nature is never deceived in her instincts; birds never err in the building their nests, animals in a wild state always seek their proper food, and man, if he throws away this conviction, is like a domesticated animal that grows wanton and eats dirt by way of change. The only time I ever saw Lord Byron he pointed to a man in a state of brutal intoxication, and asked if I thought that a proof of an immortal nature? ‘Your inquiry, my lord, is,’ I answered; and so it was; it was the natural instinct shrinking with abhorrence from the degradation of the soul.” Such conversation at a dinner party is not common, and I was much pleased with my place. He is an old man—rather heavy in appearance, excepting that his eyes brighten as he speaks, and he is rarely silent; a good deal of action, though his movements have the air of infirmity, his hand is slow and unsteady, and his back is bowed; he is not corpulent, but square built. After dinner, when he came into the drawing-room, he began a regular lecture of about two hours duration, which rather tired his hearers, and as I was out of his circle, I could not hear what it was about. I have learnt a new art—that of modelling in wax, and I have, in this fashion, got a likeness both of Coleridge and his Excellency [Mr. Frere], which are much approved by those who know them, and which I shall hope to show you some day.
This is, in fact, a double-whammy: a new (which is to say, hitherto unnoticed) piece of Coleridgean prose that contains within it a new, if minor, anecdote concerning Lord Byron. One wonders what Coleridge's two-hour lecture concerned, and whatever happened to Cornwallis's wax likeness of the poet ...



2 comments:

  1. Doctor Dove in his element, charming the ladies. Though Southey captures his full set of metaphysical theories, among them this:

    It will not surprise the judicious reader to be told that the Doctor was a professed physiognomist, though Lavater had not in those days made it fashionable to talk of physiognomy as a science. Baptista Porta led him to consider the subject; and the coarse wood-cuts of a bungling Italian elucidated the system as effectually as has since been done by Mr. Holloway’s graver. But Dr. Dove carried it farther than the Swiss enthusiast after, or the Neapolitan physician before him. Conceiving in a deeper sense than Lebrun, que chacun avait sa bete dans la figure, he insisted that the strong animal likenesses which are often so distinctly to be traced in men, and the correspendent propensities wherewith they are frequently accompanied, are evidence of our having pre-existed in an inferior state of being. And he deduced from it a theory, or notion as he modestly called it, which he would have firmly believed to be a part of the patriarchal faith, if he had known how much it resembled the doctrine of the Druids.
    His notion was that the Archeus, or living principle, acquires that perfect wisdom with which it acts, by passing through a long progression in the lower world, before it becomes capable of being united to a rational and immortal soul in the human body. He even persuaded himself that he could discover in particular individuals indications of the line by which their Archeus had travelled through the vegetable and animal kingdoms.
    (Southey, The Doctor &c vol IV pp279-280)

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  2. Doctor Dove in his element, charming the ladies. Though Southey captures his full set of metaphysical theories, among them this:

    It will not surprise the judicious reader to be told that the Doctor was a professed physiognomist, though Lavater had not in those days made it fashionable to talk of physiognomy as a science. Baptista Porta led him to consider the subject; and the coarse wood-cuts of a bungling Italian elucidated the system as effectually as has since been done by Mr. Holloway’s graver. But Dr. Dove carried it farther than the Swiss enthusiast after, or the Neapolitan physician before him. Conceiving in a deeper sense than Lebrun, que chacun avait sa bete dans la figure, he insisted that the strong animal likenesses which are often so distinctly to be traced in men, and the correspendent propensities wherewith they are frequently accompanied, are evidence of our having pre-existed in an inferior state of being. And he deduced from it a theory, or notion as he modestly called it, which he would have firmly believed to be a part of the patriarchal faith, if he had known how much it resembled the doctrine of the Druids.
    His notion was that the Archeus, or living principle, acquires that perfect wisdom with which it acts, by passing through a long progression in the lower world, before it becomes capable of being united to a rational and immortal soul in the human body. He even persuaded himself that he could discover in particular individuals indications of the line by which their Archeus had travelled through the vegetable and animal kingdoms.
    (Southey, The Doctor &c vol IV pp279-280)

    ReplyDelete