Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

founded this cult, together with some German thinkers, was Coleridge. Speaking of the German philosophers, their ideas were almost unknown in England. England, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, had almost completely forgotten its Saxon origins. Coleridge studied German, as wouldCarlyle, and reminded the English of their connection to Germany and the Norse nations. This had been forgotten in England, and then came the Napoleonic Wars; the English and the Prussians were brothers in arms at the victory of Waterloo, and the English felt that forgotten ancient fraternity. And the Germans, through Shakespeare, felt it as well.
    Among the manuscript pages Coleridge left, there are many written in German. He also lived in Germany. On the other hand, he never managed to learn French, in spite of the fact that half the vocabulary in English, almost two-thirds of it, is French words. And these are the words that pertain to the intellect, to thought. It has been said that somebody put in Coleridge’s hand a book in French, and in the other, its translation into English. Coleridge read the English translation, then he went back and read the French text and failed to understand it. That is, Coleridge had an affinity with German thought, whereas he felt quite alienated from French thought. And so, Coleridge dedicated part of his life to a perhaps impossible reconciliation between the doctrine of the Anglican church, the Church of England, and the idealistic philosophy ofKant, whom he worshipped. It is strange that Coleridge would have been more interested in Kant than inBerkeley, for he would have found what he was looking for more easily in Berkeley’s idealism.
    And now we come to what Coleridge thought about Shakespeare. Coleridge had studied Spinoza’s philosophy. You will remember that this philosophy is based on pantheism, that is, the idea that there is only one real being in the Universe, and that is God. We are attributes of God, adjectives of God, moments of God, but we don’t really exist. Only God exists. There is a poem byAmado Nervo. 9 In it, he expresses this idea: God
does
Exist. We are what does not exist. And Coleridge would have been completely in agreement with that poem by Amado Nervo. Spinoza’s philosophy, as in the philosophy of Johannes ScotusEriugena, talks about creative nature and nature that is already created:
natura naturans
and
natura naturata
. 10 And it is well known that when Spinoza spoke about God, he used a word that was synonymous with God: “
Deus sive natura
,” or “God or nature,” as if both words meant the same thing. Except that
Deus
is the
natura naturans
, the force, the impetus of nature—the life force, as BernardShaw would say. Coleridge applies this to Shakespeare. He says that Shakespeare was like Spinoza’s God, an infinite substance capable of assuming all shapes. And so, according to Coleridge, Shakespeare based the creation of his vast work on observation. Shakespeare took everything out of himself. 11
    In recent years, we have had the case of the American novelist, Truman Capote, who heard about a horrible murder that took place in a landlocked state in the United States. Two thieves entered the house of a man—the wealthiest man in town. The two thieves entered the house, killed the father, the wife, and one of the daughters. 12 The younger murderer, and thief, wanted to rape the man’s other daughter, but the other told him they could leave no living witness, and that anyway it was immoral to rape a woman, and they had to stick to their original plan (which was to kill all possible witnesses). Then they shot all four, and they were arrested. Truman Capote, who until then had written pages of very careful prose—in the style of VirginiaWoolf, we could say—moved to this town in the middle of nowhere, gained authorization to visit the prisoners on a regular basis, and in order to win their trust, he told them some shameful episodes from his own life. The trial, thanks to the lawyers’ skill, lasted a couple of years. The writer kept visiting the murderers, brought them cigarettes, became friends with them. He was with them when they were executed, then immediately returned to his hotel and spent the whole night crying. Before, he had trained his memory to take notes; he knew that when a person is questioned he tends to answer cleverly, and he didn’t want that, he wanted the truth. And then he published the book,
In Cold Blood
, which has been