Coleridges ‘Notebooks’ 4

Het volgende citaat uit de Notebooks van Samuel Taylor Coleridge staat vooral bekend om de volzin ‘the spiritual platonic, old England’ die tot een gevleugeld woord is uitgegroeid. Coleridge, gelovige met twijfels, verwoordt in deze passage zijn afkeer van het verlichte, rationele, empirische Engeland van de achttiende eeuw, het Engeland van Locke, Hume, Pope, Johnson en Darwin (waarmee overigens niet Charles wordt bedoeld maar diens grootvader Eramsus). En hij drukt zijn hunkering uit naar het Engeland van zijn ideaalbeeld, gekenmerkt door een spiritualiteit die in zijn beleving voorgoed tot de verleden tijd behoorde.

‘Schiller disgusted with Kotzebueisms deserts from Shakespere. What? cannot we condemn a counterfeit, & yet remain admirers of the Original? This is a sufficient Proof, that the first Admiration was not sound, or founded on slund distinct perceptions/it was a sound feeling, but cloathed & manifested to the consciousness by false Ideas. And now the French Stage, is to be re-introtuced/O Germany! Germany! – Why this endless Rage of Novelty! Why, this endless Looking-out of thyself? – But stop! let me not fall into the Pit, I was about to warn others of – let me not confound the discriminating character & genius of a nation with the conflux of its individuals, in Cities & Reviews/Let England be Sir P. Sidney, Shakespere, Spenser, Milton, Bacon, Harrington, Swift, Wordsworth, and never let the names of Darwin, Johnson, Hume, furr it over! – If these too must be England, let them be another England/ – or rather let the first be old England, the spiritual platonic, old England/& the second with Locke at the head of the Philosophers & Pope of the poets, with the long list of Priestleys, Paleys, Hayleys, Darwins, Mr Pitts, Dundasses, &c &c be representative of commercial G. Britain/ these have their merits, but are as alien to me, as the Mandarin Philosophers & Poets of China/even so Leibniz, Lessing, Voss, Kant, shall be Germany to me, let whatever Coxcombs rise up, & shrill it away in the Grasshopper-vale of reviews/and so shall Dante, Ariosto, Giordano Bruno, be my Italy/Cervantes my Spain/and o! that I could find a France for my Love/but ah! spite of Paschal, Madame Guyon and Moliere France is my Babylon, the Mother of Whoredoms in Morality, Philosophy, Taste/the French themselves feel a foreignness in these Writers/How indeed is it possible at once to love Paschal, & Voltaire?’

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’. Volume II. 1804 – 1808. Text. Lemma 2598.

© 2012 Leo van der Sterren