Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, March 1885. VariousЧитать онлайн книгу.
is, I knew Mr. Selivanoff, and here I see the same surname and Christian name; the name of the father is also the same, the tchin (rank) likewise! Yet I was told he had died – more than a year ago – but when I saw his name on the card I thought the news must be false, and I came to assure myself. I see that I am mistaken. A thousand pardons, sir, a thousand pardons,” and again he saluted me still more profoundly than before.
I felt as if the ground were opening under my feet, and was thinking how on earth I should get out of the scrape, when my companion came – without knowing it – to the rescue.
“What a capital joke!” he shouted, clapping me on the back, and laughing so that he could hardly speak. “One might suppose that the worthy director takes you for an escaped prisoner with a dead man's passport. Ha, ha, ha, what a capital joke to be sure!”
And holding his big belly with both hands, he balanced himself first on one foot and then the other, laughing the while, until he could hardly stand.
“You are quite right,” I said, also laughing, though with considerable effort. “It is really an excellent joke. But seriously (turning to the station-master), the thing is easily explained. In the part I come from the Selivanoffs are as plentiful as blackberries. The late Ivan Alexandrovitch, your friend, and I were kinsmen, and had a great affection for each other; the name is so common in the province that I could introduce you to a dozen of my namesakes any day.”
The station-master seemed satisfied with this explanation. At any rate, he made no objection to our departure, and shortly afterwards we were once more en route. But my companion, the tchinovnik did not cease laughing for a long time. “To take you for a fugitive convict with a false passport!” he would say “it is really too good,” and whenever he remembered the incident he would laugh as if he never meant to stop. I remembered it, as may be supposed, with very different feelings. The escape was a very narrow one, and showed me how much I was still at the mercy of the slightest mishap. But this proved to be my last adventure and my last peril. In May, 1881, I reached Geneva, and felt that I was at last really free.
As most stories of Russian revolutionary life have necessarily, if they be true, a tragical termination, readers of the foregoing narrative may be pleased to know that M. Mokrievitch is still in a land where he feels really free. Though one of the heroes of Russian liberty he has not yet become one of its martyrs. But the time may come when he, as many other fugitives have done, will return to the volcanic soil of his native country, there to take part in the struggle to death which, though unseen, goes always on, and must continue without truce and without surcease until the sun of Freedom shall dawn in the Empire of the Night. —Contemporary Review.
COLERIDGE AS A SPIRITUAL THINKER
Mr. Traill's recent volume has recalled the poet-philosopher who died just fifty years ago, leaving a strongly marked but indefinite impression upon the mind of his time. The volume has done something to renew and vivify the impression both in respect of Coleridge's poetry and criticism. His work as a critic has never, perhaps, been better or more completely exhibited. It is recognised generously in all its largeness and profundity, as well as delicacy and subtlety; and justice is especially done to his Shakesperian commentary, which in its richness, variety, felicity, combined with depth and acuteness, is absolutely unrivalled. But Mr. Traill cannot be said to have even attempted any estimate of Coleridge as a spiritual thinker. It may be questioned how far he has recognised that there is a spiritual side to all his thought, without which neither his poetry nor his criticism can be fully understood, cleverly as they may be judged.
It is not only out of date, but outside of all intelligent judgment to quote at this time of day Mr. Carlyle's well-known caricature from his Life of Sterling, and put readers off with this as a “famous criticism.” We now know how to value utterances of this kind, and the unhappy spirit of detraction which lay beneath such wild and grotesque humors. Carlyle will always remain an artist in epithets – but few will turn to him for an intelligent or comprehensive estimate of any great name of his own or of recent time.
We propose to look at Coleridge for a little as a religious thinker, and to ask what is the meaning and value of his work in this respect now that we can calmly and fully judge it. If Coleridge was anything, he was not only in his own view, as Mr. Traill admits, but in the view of his generation, a religious philosopher. It is not only the testimony of men like Hare, or Sterling, or Maurice, or even Cardinal Newman, but of John Stuart Mill, that his teaching awakened and freshened all contemporary thought. He was recognised with all his faults as a truly great thinker, who raised the mind of the time and gave it new and wide impulses. This judgment we feel sure will yet verify itself. If English literature ever regains the higher tone of our earlier national life – the tone of Hooker and Milton and Jeremy Taylor – Coleridge will be again acknowledged, in Julius Hare's words, as “a true sovereign of English thought.” He will take rank in the same line of spiritual genius. He has the same elevation of feeling, the same profound grasp of moral and spiritual ideas, the same wide range of vision. He has, in short, the same love of wisdom, the same insight, the same largeness – never despising nature or art, or literature, for the sake of religion, still less ever despising religion for the sake of culture. In reading over Coleridge's prose works again, returning to them after a long past familiarity, I am particularly struck by their massive and large intellectuality, akin to our older Elizabethan literature. There is everywhere the play of great power – of imagination as well as reason – of spiritual perception as well as logical subtlety.
To speak of Coleridge in this manner as a great spiritual power, an eminently healthy writer in the higher regions of thought, may seem absurd to some who think mainly of his life, and of the fatal failure which characterised it. It is the shadow of this failure of manliness in his conduct, as in that of his life-long friend, Charles Lamb, which no doubt prompted the great genius who carried manliness, if little sweetness, from his Annandale home, to paint both the one and the other in such darkened colors. We have not a word to say on behalf of the failings of either. They were deplorable and unworthy; but it is the fact, notwithstanding, that the mind of both retained a serenity and a certain touch of respectfulness which are lacking in their great Scottish contemporary. They were both finer-edged than Carlyle. They inherited a more delicate and polite personal culture; and delicacy can never be far distant from true manliness. Neither of them could have written of the treasures of old religion as Carlyle did in his Life of Sterling. Whether they accepted for themselves those treasures or not, they would have spared the tender faith of others and respected an ancient ideal. And this is the higher attitude. Nothing which has ever deeply interested humanity or profoundly moved it, is treated with contempt by a good and wise man. It may call for and deserve rejection, but never insult. Unhappily this attitude of mind, reserved, as well as critical, reverent as well as bold, has been conspicuously absent in some of the most powerful and best known writers of our era.
There is a striking contrast between the career of Coleridge and that of his friend Wordsworth. Fellows in the opening of their poetic course, they soon diverged widely. With a true instinct, Wordsworth devoted himself, in quietness and seclusion, to the cultivation of his poetic faculty. He left aside the world of politics and of religious thought, strongly moved as he had been by the interests of both. It may be said that Wordsworth continued a religious thinker as well as poet all his life. And to some extent this is true. The “Wanderer” is a preacher and not only a singer. He goes to the heart of religion, and lays again its foundations in the natural instincts of man. But while Wordsworth's poetry was instinct with a new life of religious feeling, and may be said to have given a new radiancy to its central principles,2 it did not initiate any movement in Christian thought. In religious opinion Wordsworth soon fell back upon, if he ever consciously departed from, the old line of Anglican traditions. The vague Pantheism of the Excursion implies rather a lack of distinctive dogma than any fresh insight into religious problems or capacity of co-ordinating them in a new manner. And so soon as definite religious conceptions came to the poet, the Church in her customary theology became a satisfactory refuge. The Ecclesiastical Sonnets mark this definite stage in his spiritual development. Wordsworth did for the religious thought of his time something more and better perhaps than giving it any definite impulse. While leaving it in the old channels,
Admiration, Hope, and Love.