Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Vol. 2 (of 2)

And since I have conversed with those who first returned from France, I have weekly expected the event. Napoleon’s object at present is to embarrass the Allies, and to cool the enthusiasm of their subjects. The latter he unfortunately will be too successful in. In London, my Lady, it is scarcely possible to distinguish the opinions of the people from the ravings and railings of the mob; but in country towns we must be blind not to see the real state of the popular mind. I do not know whether your Ladyship read my letters to Judge Fletcher. I can assure you it is no exaggerated picture of the predominance of Jacobinism. In this small town of Calne five hundred volunteers were raised in the last war. I am persuaded that five could not be raised now. A considerable landowner, and a man of great observation, said to me last week, “A famine, sir, could scarce have produced more evil than the Corn Bill[133] has done under the present circumstances.” I speak nothing of the Bill itself, except that, after the closest attention and the most sedulous inquiry after facts from landowners, farmers, stewards, millers, and bakers, I am convinced that both opponents and advocates were in extremes, and that an evil produced by many causes was by many remedies to have been cured, not by the universal elixir of one sweeping law.

My poems will be put to press by the middle of June. A number adequate to one volume are already in the hands of my friends at Bristol, under conditions that they are to be published at all events, even though I should not add another volume, which I never had so little reason to doubt. Within the last two days I have composed three poems, containing 500 lines in the whole.

Mr. and Mrs. Morgan present their respective compliments to your Ladyship and Sir George.

I remain, my Lady, your Ladyship’s obliged humble servant,

S. T. Coleridge.

CCVI. TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.

Calne, May 30, 1815.

My honoured Friend,—On my return from Devizes, whither I had gone to procure some vaccine matter (the small-pox having appeared in Calne, and Mrs. Morgan’s sister believing herself never to have had it), I found your letter: and I will answer it immediately, though to answer it as I could wish to do would require more recollection and arrangement of thought than is always to be commanded on the instant. But I dare not trust my own habit of procrastination, and, do what I would, it would be impossible in a single letter to give more than general convictions. But, even after a tenth or twentieth letter, I should still be disquieted as knowing how poor a substitute must letters be for a vivâ voce examination of a work with its author, line by line. It is most uncomfortable from many, many causes, to express anything but sympathy, and gratulation to an absent friend, to whom for the more substantial third of a life we have been habituated to look up: especially where a love, though increased by many and different influences, yet begun and throve and knit its joints in the perception of his superiority. It is not in written words, but by the hundred modifications that looks make and tone, and denial of the full sense of the very words used, that one can reconcile the struggle between sincerity and diffidence, between the persuasion that I am in the right, and that as deep though not so vivid conviction, that it may be the positiveness of ignorance rather than the certainty of insight. Then come the human frailties, the dread of giving pain, or exciting suspicions of alteration and dyspathy, in short, the almost inevitable insincerities between imperfect beings, however sincerely attached to each other. It is hard (and I am Protestant enough to doubt whether it is right) to confess the whole truth (even of one’s self, human nature scarce endures it, even to one’s self), but to me it is still harder to do this of and to a revered friend.

But to your letter. First, I had never determined to print the lines addressed to you. I lent them to Lady Beaumont on her promise that they should be copied, and returned; and not knowing of any copy in my own possession, I sent for them, because I was making a MS. collection of all my poems—publishable and unpublishable—and still more perhaps for the handwriting of the only perfect copy, that entrusted to her ladyship. Most assuredly, I never once thought of printing them without having consulted you, and since I lit on the first rude draught, and corrected it as well as I could, I wanted no additional reason for its not being published in my lifetime than its personality respecting myself. After the opinions I had given publicly, in the preference of “Lycidas” (moral no less than poetical) to Cowley’s Monody, I could not have printed it consistently. It is for the biographer, not the poet, to give the accidents of individual life. Whatever is not representative, generic, may be indeed most poetically expressed, but is not poetry. Otherwise, I confess, your prudential reasons would not have weighed with me, except as far as my name might haply injure your reputation, for there is nothing in the lines, as far as your powers are concerned, which I have not as fully expressed elsewhere; and I hold it a miserable cowardice to withhold a deliberate opinion only because the man is alive.

Secondly, for “The Excursion,” I feared that had I been silent concerning “The Excursion,” Lady Beaumont would have drawn some strange inference; and yet I had scarcely sent off the letter before I repented that I had not run that risk rather than have approach to dispraise communicated to you by a third person. But what did my criticism amount to, reduced to its full and naked sense? This, that comparatively with the former poem, “The Excursion,” as far as it was new to me, had disappointed my expectations; that the excellencies were so many and of so high a class that it was impossible to attribute the inferiority, if any such really existed, to any flagging of the writer’s own genius—and that I conjectured that it might have been occasioned by the influence of self-established convictions having given to certain thoughts and expressions a depth and force which they had not for readers in general. In order, therefore, to explain the disappointment, I must recall to your mind what my expectations were: and, as these again were founded on the supposition that (in whatever order it might be published) the poem on the growth of your own mind was as the ground plot and the roots, out of which “The Recluse” was to have sprung up as the tree, as far as [there was] the same sap in both, I expected them, doubtless, to have formed one complete whole; but in matter, form, and product to be different, each not only a distinct but a different work. In the first I had found “themes by thee first sung aright,”

Indeed, through the whole of that Poem, με Αὔρα τις εἰσ έπνευσε μουσικωτάτη. This I considered as “The Excursion;”[134] and the second, as “The Recluse” I had (from what I had at different times gathered from your conversation on the Place [Grasmere]) anticipated as commencing with you set down and settled in an abiding home, and that with the description of that home you were to begin a philosophical poem, the result and fruits of a spirit so framed and so disciplined as had been told in the former.

Whatever in Lucretius is poetry is not philosophical, whatever is philosophical is not poetry; and in the very pride of confident hope I looked forward to “The Recluse” as the first and only true philosophical poem in existence. Of course, I expected the colours, music, imaginative life, and passion of poetry; but the matter and arrangement of philosophy; not doubting from the advantages of the subject that the totality of a system was not only capable of being harmonised with, but even calculated to aid, the unity (beginning, middle, and end) of a poem. Thus, whatever the length of the work might be, still it was a determinate length; of the subjects announced, each would have its own appointed place, and, excluding repetitions, each would relieve and rise in interest above the other. I supposed you first to have meditated the faculties of man in the abstract, in their correspondence with his sphere of action, and, first in the feeling, touch, and taste, then in the eye, and last in the ear,—to have laid a solid and immovable foundation for the edifice by removing the sandy sophisms of Locke, and the mechanic dogmatists, and demonstrating that the senses were living growths and developments of the mind and spirit, in a much juster as well as higher sense, than the mind can be said to be formed by the senses. Next, I understood that you would take the human race in the concrete, have exploded the absurd notion of Pope’s “Essay on Man,” Darwin, and all the countless believers even (strange to say) among Christians of man’s having progressed from an ourang-outang state—so contrary to all history, to all religion, nay, to all possibility—to have affirmed a Fall in some sense, as a fact, the possibility of which cannot be understood from the nature of the will, but the reality of which is attested by experience and conscience. Fallen men contemplated in the different ages of the world, and in the different states—savage, barbarous, civilised, the lonely cot, or borderer’s wigwam, the village, the manufacturing town, seaport, city, universities, and, not disguising the sore evils under which the whole creation groans, to point out, however, a manifest scheme of redemption, of reconciliation from this enmity with Nature—what are the obstacles, the Antichrist that must be and already is—and to conclude by a grand didactic swell on the necessary identity of a true philosophy with true religion, agreeing in the results and differing only as the analytic and synthetic process, as discursive from intuitive, the former chiefly useful as perfecting the latter; in short, the necessity of a general revolution in the modes of developing and disciplining the human mind by the substitution of life and intelligence (considered in its different powers from the plant up to that state in which the difference of degree becomes a new kind (man, self-consciousness), but yet not by essential opposition) for the philosophy of mechanism, which, in everything that is most worthy of the human intellect, strikes Death, and cheats itself by mistaking clear images for distinct conceptions, and which idly demands conceptions where intuitions alone are possible or adequate to the majesty of the Truth. In short, facts elevated into theory—theory into laws—and laws into living and intelligent powers—true idealism necessarily perfecting itself in realism, and realism refining itself into idealism.

Such or something like this was the plan I had supposed that you were engaged on. Your own words will therefore explain my feelings, viz., that your object “was not to convey recondite, or refined truths, but to place commonplace truths in an interesting point of view.” Now this I suppose to have been in your two volumes of poems, as far as was desirable or possible, without an insight into the whole truth. How can common truths be made permanently interesting but by being bottomed on our common nature? It is only by the profoundest insight into numbers and quantity that a sublimity and even religious wonder become attached to the simplest operations of arithmetic, the most evident properties of the circle or triangle. I have only to finish a preface, which I shall have done in two, or, at farthest, three days; and I will then, dismissing all comparison either with the poem on the growth of your own support, or with the imagined plan of “The Recluse,” state fairly my main objections to “The Excursion” as it is. But it would have been alike unjust both to you and to myself, if I had led you to suppose that any disappointment I may have felt arose wholly or chiefly from the passages I do not like, or from the poem considered irrelatively.

Allston lives at 8, Buckingham Place, Fitzroy Square. He has lost his wife, and been most unkindly treated and most unfortunate. I hope you will call on him. Good God! to think of such a grub as Dawe with more than he can do, and such a genius as Allston without a single patron!

God bless you! I am, and never have been other than your most affectionate

S. T. Coleridge.

Mr. and Mrs. Morgan desire to be affectionately remembered to you, and they would be highly gratified if you could make a little tour and spend a short time at Calne. There is an admirable collection of pictures at Corsham. Bowles left Bremhill (two miles from us, where he has a perfect paradise of a place) for town yesterday morning.

CCVII. TO THE REV. W. MONEY.[135]

Calne, Wednesday, 1815.

Dear Sir,—I have seldom made a greater sacrifice and gratification to prudence than in the determination most reluctantly formed, that the state of my health, which requires hourly regimen, joined with the uncertain state of the weather and the perilous consequences of my taking cold in the existing weakness of the viscera, renders it improper for me to hazard a night away from my home. No pleasure, however intellectual (and to all but intellectual pleasures I have long been dead, for surely the staving off of pain is no pleasure), could repay me even for the chance of being again unwell in any house but my own. I have a great, a gigantic effort to make, and I will go through with it or die. Gross have been the calumnies concerning me; but enough remains of truth to enforce the necessity of considering all other things as unimportant compared with the necessity of living them down. This letter is, of course, sacred to yourself, and a pledge of the high respect I entertain for your moral being; for you need not the feelings of friendship to feel as a friend toward every fellow Christian.

To turn to another subject, Mr. Bowles, I understand, is about to publish, at least is composing a reply to some answer to the “Velvet Cushion.”[136] I have seen neither work. But this I will venture to say, that if the respondents in favour of the Church take upon them to justify in the most absolute sense, as if Scripture were the subject of the controversy, every minute part of our admirable Liturgy, and liturgical and sacramental services, they will only furnish new triumph to ungenerous adversaries.

The Church of England has in the Articles solemnly declared that all Churches are fallible—and in another, to assert its absolute immaculateness, sounds to me a mere contradiction. No! I would first overthrow what can be fairly and to all men intelligibly overthrown in the adversaries’ objections (and of this kind the instances are as twenty to one). For the remainder I would talk like a special pleader, and from the defensive pass to the offensive, and then prove from St. Paul (for of the practice of the early Church even in its purest state, before the reign of Constantine, our opponents make no account) that errors in a Church that neither directly or indirectly injure morals or oppugn salvation are exercises for mutual charity, not excuses for schism. In short, is there or is there [not] such a condemnable thing as schism? In the proof of consequences of the affirmative lies, in my humble opinion, the complete confutation of the (so-called) Evangelical Dissenters.

I shall be most happy to converse with you on the subject. If Mr. Bowles were not employed on it, I should have had no objection to have reduced my many thoughts to order and have published them; but this might now seem invidious and like rivalry.

Present my best respects to Mrs. Money, and be so good as to make the fitting apologies for me to Mr. T. Methuen,[137] the man wise of heart! But an apology already exists for me in his own mind.

I remain, dear sir, respectfully your obliged

S. T. Coleridge.

Wednesday, Calne.

P. S. I have opened this letter to add, that the greater number, if not the whole, of the arguments used apply only to the ministers, not to the members of the Established Church. Some one of our eminent divines refused even to take the pastoral office, I believe, on account of the Funeral Service and the Absolution of the Sick; but still it remains to justify schism from Church-Membership.

To the Rev. W. Money, Whetham.

CHAPTER XIII
NEW LIFE AND NEW FRIENDS
1816-1821

CHAPTER XIII
NEW LIFE AND NEW FRIENDS
1816-1821

With Coleridge’s name and memory must ever be associated the names of James and Anne Gillman. It was beneath the shelter of their friendly roof that he spent the last eighteen years of his life, and it was to their wise and loving care that the comparative fruitfulness and well-being of those years were due. They thought themselves honoured by his presence, and he repaid their devotion with unbounded love and gratitude. Friendship and loving-kindness followed Coleridge all the days of his life. What did he not owe to Poole, to Southey for his noble protection of his family, to the Morgans for their long-tried faithfulness and devotion to himself? But to the Gillmans he owed the “crown of his cup and garnish of his dish,” a welcome which lasted till the day of his death. Doubtless there were chords in his nature which were struck for the first time by these good people, and in their presence and by their help he was a new man. But, for all that, their patience must have been inexhaustible, their loyalty unimpeachable, their love indestructible. Such friendship is rare and beautiful, and merits a most honourable remembrance.

CCVIII. TO JAMES GILLMAN.

42, Norfolk Street, Strand,
Saturday noon, [April 13, 1816.]

My dear Sir,—The very first half hour I was with you convinced me that I should owe my reception into your family exclusively to motives not less flattering to me than honourable to yourself. I trust we shall ever in matters of intellect be reciprocally serviceable to each other. Men of sense generally come to the same conclusion; but they are likely to contribute to each other’s exchangement of view, in proportion to the distance or even opposition of the points from which they set out. Travel and the strange variety of situations and employments on which chance has thrown me, in the course of my life, might have made me a mere man of observation, if pain and sorrow and self-miscomplacence had not forced my mind in on itself, and so formed habits of meditation. It is now as much my nature to evolve the fact from the law, as that of a practical man to deduce the law from the fact.

With respect to pecuniary remuneration,[138] allow me to say, I must not at least be suffered to make any addition to your family expenses—though I cannot offer anything that would be in any way adequate to my sense of the service; for that, indeed, there could not be a compensation, as it must be returned in kind, by esteem and grateful affection.

And now of myself. My ever wakeful reason, and the keenness of my moral feelings, will secure you from all unpleasant circumstances connected with me, save only one, viz., the evasion of a specific madness. You will never hear anything but truth from me:—prior habits render it out of my power to tell an untruth, but unless carefully observed, I dare not promise that I should not, with regard to this detested poison, be capable of acting one. No sixty hours have yet passed without my having taken laudanum, though for the last week [in] comparatively trifling doses. I have full belief that your anxiety need not be extended beyond the first week, and for the first week I shall not, I must not, be permitted to leave your house, unless with you. Delicately or indelicately, this must be done, and both the servants and the assistant must receive absolute commands from you. The stimulus of conversation suspends the terror that haunts my mind; but when I am alone, the horrors I have suffered from laudanum, the degradation, the blighted utility, almost overwhelm me. If (as I feel for the first time a soothing confidence it will prove) I should leave you restored to my moral and bodily health, it is not myself only that will love and honour you; every friend I have (and thank God! in spite of this wretched vice, I have many and warm ones, who were friends of my youth and have never deserted me) will thank you with reverence. I have taken no notice of your kind apologies. If I could not be comfortable in your house, and with your family, I should deserve to be miserable. If you could make it convenient I should wish to be with you by Monday evening, as it would prevent the necessity of taking fresh lodgings in town.

With respectful compliments to Mrs. Gillman and her sister, I remain, dear sir, your much obliged

S. T. Coleridge.

CCIX. TO DANIEL STUART.

James Gillman’s, Esq., Surgeon, Highgate,
Wednesday, May 8, 1816.

My dear Stuart,—Since you left me I have been reflecting a good deal on the subject of the Catholic Question, and somewhat on the “Courier” in general. With all my weight of faults (and no one is less likely to underrate them than myself) a tendency to be influenced by selfish motives in my friendships, or even in the cultivation of my acquaintances, will not, I am sure, be by you placed among them. When we first knew each other, it was perhaps the most interesting period of both our lives, at the very turn of the flood; and I can never cease to reflect with affectionate delight on the steadiness and independence of your conduct and principles; and how, for so many years, with little assistance from others, and with one main guide, a sympathising tact for the real sense, feeling, and impulses of the respectable part of the English nation, you went on so auspiciously, and likewise so effectively. It is far, very far, from being a hyperbole to affirm, that you did more against the French scheme of Continental domination, than the Duke of Wellington has done; or rather Wellington could neither have been supplied by the Ministers, nor the Ministers supported by the Nation, but for the tone first given, and then constantly kept up, by the plain, unministerial, anti-opposition, anti-jacobin, anti-gallican, anti-Napoleonic spirit of your writings, aided by the colloquial style, and evident good sense, in which as acting on an immense mass of knowledge of existing men and existing circumstances, you are superior to any man I ever met with in my lifetime. Indeed you are the only human being of whom I can say, with severe truth, that I never conversed with you for an hour, without rememberable instruction. And with the same simplicity I dare affirm my belief, that my greater knowledge of man has been useful to you; though from the nature of things, not so useful, as your knowledge of men has been to me. Now with such convictions, my dear Stuart, how is it possible that I can look back on the conduct of the “Courier,” from the period of the Duke of York’s restoration, without some pain? You cannot be seriously offended or affronted with me, if in this deep confidence, and in a letter which, or its contents, can meet no eye but your own, I venture to declare that, though since then much has been done, very much of high utility to the country by and under Mr. Street, yet the “Courier” itself has gradually lost that sanctifying spirit which was the life of its life, and without which even the best and soundest principles lose half their effect on the human mind. I mean, the faith in the faith of the person or paper which brings them forward. They are attributed to the accident of their happening to be for such a side or such a party. In short there is no longer any root in the paper, out of which all the various branches and fruits and even fluttering leaves are seen or believed to grow. But it is the old tree barked round above the root, though the circular decortication is so small, and so neatly filled up and coloured as to be scarcely visible but in its total effects. Excellent fruits still at times hang on the boughs, but they are tied on by threads and hairs.

In all this I am well aware that you are no otherwise to blame, than in permitting what, without disturbance to your health and tranquillity, you could not perhaps have prevented, or effectively modified. But the whole plan of Street’s seems to me to have been motiveless from the beginning, or at least affected by the grossest miscalculations in respect even of pecuniary interest. For had the paper maintained and asserted not only its independence but its appearance of it, it is true that Mr. Street might not have had Mr. Croker to dine with him, or received as many nods or shakes of the hand from Lord this, or that, but it is at least equally true, that the Ministry would have been far more effectually served, and that (I speak now from facts) both paper and its conductor would have been held by the adherents of Ministers in far higher respect. And after all, Ministers do not love newspapers in their hearts; not even those that support them. Indeed it seems epidemic among Parliament men in general, to affect to look down upon and to despise newspapers to which they owe ⁹⁹⁹⁄1000 their influence and character—and at least three fifths of their knowledge and phraseology. Enough! Burn this letter and forgive the writer for the purity and affectionateness of his motive.

With regard to the Catholic Question, if I write I must be allowed to express the truth and the whole truth concerning the imprudent avowal of Lord Castlereagh that it was not to be a government question. On this condition I will write immediately a tract on the question which to the best of my knowledge will be about from 120 to 140 octavo pages; but so contrived that Mr. Street may find no difficulty in dividing it into ten or twenty essays, or leading paragraphs. In my scheme I have carefully excluded every approximation to metaphysical reasoning; and set aside every thought which cannot be brought under one or the other of three heads—1. Plain evident sense. 2. Historical documental facts. 3. Existing circumstances, character, etc., of Ireland in relation to Great Britain, and to its own interests, and those of its various classes of proprietors. I shall not deliver it till it is wholly finished, and if you and Mr. Street think that such a work delivered entire will be worth fifty pounds to the paper, I will begin it immediately. Let me either see or hear from you as soon as possible. Cannot Mr. Street send me some one or other of the daily papers, without expense to you, after he has done with them? Kind respects to Mrs. Stuart.

Your affectionate and obliged friend,
S. T. Coleridge.

CCX. TO THE SAME.

Monday, May 13, 1816.

Dear Stuart,—It is among the feeblenesses of our nature, that we are often, to a certain degree, acted on by stories, gravely asserted, of which we yet do most religiously disbelieve every syllable, nay, which perhaps we know to be false. The truth is that images and thoughts possess a power in, and of themselves, independent of that act of the judgment or understanding by which we affirm or deny the existence of a reality correspondent to them. Such is the ordinary state of the mind in dreams. It is not strictly accurate to say that we believe our dreams to be actual while we are dreaming. We neither believe it, nor disbelieve it. With the will the comparing power is suspended, and without the comparing power, any act of judgment, whether affirmation or denial, is impossible. The forms and thoughts act merely by their own inherent power, and the strong feelings at times apparently connected with them are, in point of fact, bodily sensations which are the causes or occasions of the images; not (as when we are awake) the effects of them. Add to this a voluntary lending of the will to this suspension of one of its own operations (that is, that of comparison and consequent decision concerning the reality of any sensuous impression) and you have the true theory of stage illusion, equally distant from the absurd notion of the French critics, who ground their principles on the presumption of an absolute delusion, and of Dr. Johnson who would persuade us that our judgments are as broad awake during the most masterly representation of the deepest scenes of Othello, as a philosopher would be during the exhibition of a magic lanthorn with Punch and Joan and Pull Devil, Pull Baker, etc., on its painted slides. Now as extremes always meet, this dogma of our dramatic critic and soporific irenist would lead, by inevitable consequences, to that very doctrine of the unities maintained by the French Belle Lettrists, which it was the object of his strangely overrated, contradictory, and most illogical preface to Shakespeare to overthrow.

Thus, instead of troubling you with the idle assertions that have been most authoritatively uttered, concerning your being under bond and seal to the present Ministry, which I know to be (monosyllabically speaking) A LIE, and which formed, I guess, part of the impulse which occasioned my last letter, I have given you a theory which, as far as I know, is new, and which I am quite sure is most important as the ground and fundamental principle of all philosophic and of all common-sense criticisms concerning the drama and the theatre.

To put off, however, the Jack-the-Giant-Killer-seven-leagued boots, with which I am apt to run away from the main purpose of what I had to write, I owe it to myself and the truth to observe, that there was as much at least of partiality as of grief and inculpation in my remarks on the spirit of the “Courier;” and that with all its faults, I prefer it greatly to any other paper, even without reference to its being the best and most effective vehicle of what I deem most necessary and urgent truths. Be assured there was no occasion to let me know, that with regard to the proposed disquisition you were interested as a patriot and a protestant, not as a proprietor of the particular paper. Such too, Heaven knows, is my sole object! for as to the money that it may be thought worth according to the number and value of the essays, I regard it merely as enabling me to devote a given portion of time and effort to this subject, rather than to any one of the many others by which I might procure the same remuneration. From this hour I sit down to it tooth and nail, and shall not turn to the left or right till I have finished it. When I have reached the half-way house I will transmit the MSS. to you, that I may, without the necessity of dis- or re-arranging the work, be able to adopt any suggestions of yours, whether they should be additive, alterative, or emendative. One question only I have to consult you concerning—viz., the form which would be the most attractive of notice; simply essays? or letters addressed to Lord Liverpool for instance, on the supposition that he remains firm to the Perceval principle on this blind, blundering, and feverous scheme?

Mr. and Mrs. Gillman will be most happy to see you to share in a family dinner, and spend the evening with us; and if you will come early, I can show you some most delicious walks. You will like Mr. Gillman. He is a man of strong, fervid, and agile intellect, with such a master passion for truth, that his most abstracted verities assume a character of veracity. And his wife, it will be impossible not to respect, if a balance and harmony of powers and qualities, unified and spiritualized by a native feminine fineness of character, render womanhood amiable and respectable. In serious truth I have much reason to be most grateful for the choice and chance which has placed me under their hospitable roof. I have no doubt that Mr. Gillman as friend and as physician will succeed in restoring me to my natural self.

My kind respects to Mrs. Stuart. I long to see the little one.

Your obliged and sincere friend,

S. T. Coleridge.

CCXI. TO JOHN MURRAY.

Highgate, February 27, 1817.

My dear Sir,—I had a visit from Mr. Morgan yester-afternoon, and trouble you with these lines in consequence of his communications. When I stated to you the circumstances respecting the volumes of mine that have been so long printed, and the embarrassment into which the blunder of the printer had entangled me, with the sinking down of my health that made it so perplexing for me to remedy it, I did it under the belief that you were yourself very little disposed to the publication of the “Zapolya”[139] as a separate work—unless it had, in some shape or other, been brought out at the Theatre. Of this I seemed to have less and less chance. What had been declared an indispensable part, and of all the play, the most theatrical as well as dramatic, by Lord Byron, was ridiculed and thrown out of all question by Mr. Douglas Kinnaird, with no other explanation vouchsafed but that Lord Byron knew nothing about the matter—and, besides that, was in the habit of overrating my performances. These were not the words, but these words contain the purport of what he said. Meantime what Mr. D. Kinnaird most warmly approved, Mr. Harris had previously declared would convulse a house with laughter, and damn the piece beyond any possibility of a further hearing. Still I was disposed in my distressed circumstances of means, health, and spirits, to have tried the plan suggested by Mr. D. Kinnaird of turning the “Zapolya” into a melodrama by the omission of the first act. But Mr. K. was, with Lord Byron, dropped from the sub-committee, and I knew no one to whom I could apply. Mr. Dibdin, who had promised to befriend me, was likewise removed from the stage-managership. Mr. Rae did indeed promise to give me a few hours of his time repeatedly, and from my former acquaintance with him, as the Ordonio of the “Remorse,” I had some reason to be wounded by his neglect. Indeed, at Drury Lane, no one knows to whom any effective application is to be made. Mr. Kinnaird had engaged to look over the “Zapolya” with me, and appointed the time. I went accordingly and passed the whole of the fore-dinner day with him—in what? In hearing an opera of his own, and returned as wise as I came. Much is talked of the advantages of a managership of noblemen, but as far as I have seen and experienced, an author has no cause to congratulate himself on the change, either in the taste, courtesy, or reliability of his judges. Desponding concerning this (and finding that every publication with my name would be persecuted by pre-determination by the one guiding party, that I had no support to expect from the other, and that the thicker and closer the cloud of misfortunes gathered round me, the more actively and remorselessly were the poisoned arrows of wanton enmity shot through it), I sincerely believed that it would be neither to your advantage or mine that the “Zapolya” should be published singly. It appeared, at that time, that the annexing to it a collection of all my poems would enable the work to be brought out without delay,—and I therefore applied to you, offering either to repay the money received for it, or to work it out by furnishing you with miscellaneous matter for the “Quarterly,” or by sitting down to the “Rabbinical Tales”[140] as soon as ever the works now in the press were put out of my hand, that is, as far as the copy was concerned. Your answer impressed me with your full assent to the plan. Nay, however mortifying it might in ordinary circumstances have been to an author’s vanity, it was not so to me, that the “Zapolya” was a work of which you had no objection to be rid. But, if I misunderstood you, let me now be better informed, and whatever you wish shall be done. I have never knowingly or intentionally been guilty of a dishonourable transaction, but have in all things that respect my neighbour been more sinned against than sinning. Much less would I hazard the appearance of an equivocal conduct at present when I feel that I am sinking into the grave, with fainter and fainter hopes of achieving that which, God knows my inmost heart! is the sole motive for the wish to live—namely, that of preparing for the press the results of twenty-five years hard study and almost constant meditation. Reputation has no charm for me, except as a preventive of starving. Abuse and ridicule are all which I could expect for myself, if the six volumes were published which would comprise the sum total of my convictions; but, most thoroughly satisfied both of their truth and of the vital importance of these truths, convinced that of all systems that have ever been prescribed, this has the least of mysticism, the very object throughout from the first page to the last being to reconcile the dictates of common sense with the conclusions of scientific reasoning—it would assuredly be like a sudden gleam of sunshine falling on the face of a dying man, if I left the world with a knowledge that the work would have a chance of being read in better times. But of all men in the way of business, my dear sir! I should be most reluctant to give you any just cause of reproaching my integrity; because I know and feel, and have at all times and to all persons who had any literary concerns with me, acknowledged that you have acted with a friendly kindness towards me,—and if Mr. Gifford have taken a prejudice against me or my writings, I never imputed it as blame to you. Let me then know what you wish me to do, and I will do it. I ought to add, that in yielding to the proposal of annexing the “Zapolya” to the volume of poetry, provided I could procure your assent, I expressly stipulated that if, in any shape or modification, it should be represented on the stage, the copyright of it in that form would be reserved for your refusal or acceptance, and, in like manner the “Christabel” when completed, and the “Rabbinical Tales.” The second “Lay Sermon” (a most unfortunate name) will appear, I trust, next week.

I remain, my dear sir, with respect and regard, your obliged

S. T. Coleridge.

P. S. I have not seen either the “Edinburgh”[141] or the “Quarterly” last Reviews. The article against me in the former was, I am assured, written by Hazlitt. Now what can I think of Mr. Jeffrey, who knows nothing personally of me but my hospitable attentions to him, and from whom I heard nothing but very high seasoned compliments, and who yet can avail himself of such an instrument of his most unprovoked malignity towards me, an inoffensive man in distress and sickness? As soon as I have read the article (and the loan of the book is promised me), I shall make up my mind whether or not to address a letter, publicly to Mr. Jeffrey, or, in the form of an appeal, to the public, concerning his proved predetermined malice.

Mr. Murray, Bookseller, Albemarle Street, Piccadilly.

CCXII. TO ROBERT SOUTHEY.

[May, 1817.]

Dear Southey,—Mr. Ludwig Tieck[142] has continued to express so anxious a wish to see you, as one man of genius sees another, that he will not lose even the slight chance of possibility that you may not have quitted Paris when he arrives there. I have only therefore (should this letter be delivered to you by Mr. Tieck) to tell you—first, that Mr. Tieck is the gentleman who was so kind to me at Rome; secondly, that he is a good man, emphatically, without taint of moral or religious infidelity; thirdly, that as a poet, critic, and moralist, he stands (in reputation) next to Goethe (and I believe that this reputation will be fame); lastly, it will interest you with Bristol, Keswick, and Grasmere associations, that Mr. Tieck has had to run, and has run, as nearly the same career in Germany as yourself and Wordsworth and (by the spray of being known to be intimate with you)

Yours sincerely,
S. T. Coleridge.

P. S. Should this meet you, for God’s sake, do let me know of your arrival in London; it is so very important that I should see you.

R. Southey, Esq.
Honoured by Mr. Ludwig Tieck.

CCXIII. to H. C. Robinson.[143]

June, 1817.

My dear Robinson,—I shall never forgive you if you do not try to make some arrangement to bring Mr. L. Tieck and yourself up to Highgate very soon. The day, the dinner-hour, you may appoint yourself; but what I most wish would be, either that Mr. Tieck would come in the first stage, so as either to walk or to be driven in Mr. Gillman’s gig to Caen Wood, and its delicious groves and alleys (the finest in England, a grand cathedral aisle of giant lime-trees, Pope’s favourite composition walk when with the old Earl, a brother-rogue of yours in the law line), or else to come up to dinner, sleep here, and return (if then return he must) in the afternoon four o’clock stage the day after. I should be most happy to make him and that admirable man, Mr. Frere,[144] acquainted—their pursuits have been so similar—and to convince Mr. Tieck that he is the man among us in whom taste at its maximum has vitalized itself into productive power. [For] genius, you need only show him the incomparable translation annexed to Southey’s “Cid” (which, by the bye, would perhaps give Mr. Tieck the most favourable impression of Southey’s own powers); and I would finish the work off by Mr. Frere’s “Aristophanes.” In such GOODNESS, too, as both my Mr. Frere (the Right Hon. J. H. Frere), and his brother George (the lawyer in Brunswick Square), live, move, and have their being, there is genius.

I have read two pages of “Lalla Rookh,” or whatever it is called. Merciful Heaven! I dare read no more, that I may be able to answer at once to any questions, “I have but just looked at the work.” O Robinson! if I could, or if I dared, act and feel as Moore and his set do, what havoc could I not make amongst their crockery-ware! Why, there are not three lines together without some adulteration of common English, and the ever-recurring blunder of using the possessive case, “compassion’s tears,” etc., for the preposition “of”—a blunder of which I have found no instances earlier than Dryden’s slovenly verses written for the trade. The rule is, that the case ’s is always personal; either it marks a person, or a personification, or the relique of some proverbial personification, as “Who for their belly’s sake,” in “Lycidas.” But for A to weep the tears of B puts me in mind of the exquisite passage in Rabelais where Pantagruel gives the page his cup, and begs him to go down into the courtyard, and curse and swear for him about half an hour or so.

God bless you!

S. T. Coleridge.

CCXIV. TO THOMAS POOLE.

[July 22, 1817.]

My dear Poole,—It was a great comfort to me to meet and part from you as I did at Mr. Purkis’s:[145] for, methinks, every true friendship that does not go with us to heaven, must needs be an obstacle to our own going thither,—to one of the parties, at all events.

I entreat your acceptance of a corrected copy of my “Sibylline Leaves” and “Literary Life;” and so wildly have they been printed, that a corrected copy is of some value to those to whom the works themselves are of any. I would that the misprinting had been the worst of the delusions and ill-usage, to which my credulity exposed me, from the said printer. After repeated promises that he took the printing, etc., merely to serve me as an old schoolfellow, and that he should charge “one sixpence profit,” he charged paper, which I myself ordered for him at the paper-mill, at twenty-five to twenty-six shillings per ream, at thirty-five shillings, and, exclusive of this, his bill was £80 beyond the sum assigned by two eminent London printers as the price at which they would be willing to print the same quantity. And yet even this is among the minima of his Bristol honesty.

Fenner,[146] or rather his religious factotum, the Rev. T. Curtis, ci-devant bookseller, and whose affected retirement from business is a humbug, having got out of me a scheme for an Encyclopædia, which is the admiration of all the Trade, flatter themselves that they can carry it on by themselves. They refused to realise their promise to advance me £300 on the pledge of my works (a proposal of their own) unless I would leave Highgate and live at Camberwell. I took the advice of such friends as I had the opportunity of consulting immediately, and after taking into consideration the engagement into which I had entered, it was their unanimous opinion that their breach of their promise was a very fortunate circumstance, that it could not have been kept without the entire sacrifice of all my powers, and, above all, of my health—in short, that I could not in all human probability survive the first year. Mr. Frere yesterday advised me strenuously to finish the “Christabel,” to keep the third volume of “The Friend” within a certain fathom of metaphysical depth, but within that to make it as elevated as the subjects required, and finally to devote myself industriously to the Works I had planned, alternating a poem with a prose volume, and, unterrified by reviews on the immediate sale, to remain confident that I should in some way or other be enabled to live in comfort, above all, not to write any more in any newspaper. He told me both Mr. Canning and Lord Liverpool had spoken in very high terms of me, and advised me to send a copy of all my works with a letter of some weight and length to the Marquis of Wellesley. He offered me all his interest with regard to Derwent,[147] if he was sent to Cambridge. “It is a point” (these were his words) “on which I should feel myself authorised not merely to ask but to require and importune.”

Hartley has been with me for the last month. He is very much improved; and, if I could see him more systematic in his studies and in the employment of his time, I should have little to complain of in him or to wish for. He is very desirous to visit the place of his infancy, poor fellow! And I am very desirous, if it were practicable, that he should be in the neighbourhood, as it were, of his uncles, so that there might be a probability of one or the other inviting him to spend a few weeks of his vacation at Ottery. His cousins[148] (the sons of my brothers James and George) are very good and affectionate to him; and it is a great comfort to me to see the chasm of the first generation closing and healing up in the second. From the state of your sister-in-law’s health, when I last saw you, and the probable results of it, I cannot tell how your household is situated. Otherwise, I should venture to entreat of you, that you would give poor Hartley an invitation to pass a fortnight or three weeks with you this vacation.[149]

The object of the third volume of my “Friend,” which will be wholly fresh matter, is briefly this,—that morality without religion is as senseless a scheme as religion without morality; that religion not revealed is a contradiction in terms, and an historical nonentity; that religion is not revealed unless the sacred books containing it are interpreted in the obvious and literal sense of the word, and that, thus interpreted, the doctrines of the Bible are in strict harmony with the Liturgy and Articles of our Established Church.

May God Almighty bless you, my dear Friend! and your obliged and affectionately grateful

S. T. Coleridge.

CCXV. TO H. F. CARY.[150]

Little Hampton, October [29], 1817.

I regret, dear sir! that a slave to the worst of tyrants (outward tyrants, at least), the booksellers, I have not been able to read more than two books and passages here and there of the other, of your translation of Dante. You will not suspect me of the worthlessness of exceeding my real opinion, but like a good Christian will make even modesty give way to charity, though I say, that in the severity and learned simplicity of the diction, and in the peculiar character of the Blank Verse, it has transcended what I should have thought possible without the Terza Rima. In itself, the metre is, compared with any English poem of one quarter the length, the most varied and harmonious to my ear of any since Milton, and yet the effect is so Dantesque that to those who should compare it only with other English poems, it would, I doubt not, have the same effect as the Terza Rima has compared with other Italian metres. I would that my literary influence were enough to secure the knowledge of the work for the true lovers of poetry in general.[151] But how came it that you had it published in so too unostentatious a form? For a second or third edition, the form has its conveniences; but for the first, in the present state of English society, quod non arrogas tibi, non habes. If you have any other works, poems, or poemata, by you, printed or MSS., you would gratify me by sending them to me. In the mean time, accept in the spirit in which it is offered, this trifling testimonial of my respect from, dear sir,

Yours truly,
S. T. Coleridge.

CCXVI. TO THE SAME.

Little Hampton, Sussex, November 6, 1817.

My dear Sir,—I thank you for your kind and valued present, and equally for the kind letter that accompanied it. What I expressed concerning your translation, I did not say lightly or without examination: and I know enough of myself to be confident that any feeling of personal partiality would rather lead me to doubts and dissatisfactions respecting a particular work in proportion as it might possibly occasion me to overrate the man. For example, if, indeed, I do estimate too highly what I deem the characteristic excellencies of Wordsworth’s poems, it results from a congeniality of taste without a congeniality in the productive power; but to the faults and defects I have been far more alive than his detractors, even from the first publication of the “Lyrical Ballads,” though for a long course of years my opinions were sacred to his own ear. Since my last, I have read over your translation, and have carefully compared it with my distinctest recollections of every specimen of blank verse I am familiar with that can be called epic, narrative, or descriptive, excluding only the dramatic, declamatory, and lyrical—with Cowper, Armstrong, Southey, Wordsworth, Landor (the author of “Gebir”), and with all of my own that fell within comparisons as above defined, especially the passage from 287 to 292, “Sibylline Leaves,”[152]—and I find no other alteration in my judgement but an additional confidence in it. I still affirm that, to my ear and to my judgement, both your metre and your rhythm have in a far greater degree than I know any instance of, the variety of Milton without any mere Miltonisms, that (wherein I in the passage referred to have chiefly failed) the verse has this variety without any loss of continuity, and that this is the excellence of the work considered as a translation of Dante—that it gives the reader a similar feeling of wandering and wandering, onward and onward. Of the diction, I can only say that it is Dantesque even in that in which the Florentine must be preferred to our English giant—namely, that it is not only pure language, but pure English. The language differs from that of a mother or a well-bred lady who had read little but her Bible, and a few good books, only as far as the thoughts and things to be expressed require learned words from a learned poet! Perhaps I may be thought to appreciate this merit too highly; but you have seen what I have said in defence of this in the “Literary Life.” By the bye, there is no Publisher’s name mentioned in the title-page. Should I place any number of copies for you with Gale and Curtis, or at Murray’s?

Believe me, that it will be both a pleasure and a relief to my mind should you bring with you any MSS. that you can yourself make it so as to read them to me.

Mrs. Gillman hopes, that, if choice or chance should lead you and yours near Highgate, you will not deprive us of the opportunity of introducing you to my excellent friend Mr. Gillman, and of shewing by our gladness how much we are, my dear sir, yours and Mrs. Cary’s sincere respecters, and I beg you will accept an expression of particular esteem from your old lecturer,

S. T. Coleridge.

P. S. I return the “Prometheus” and the “Persæ” with thanks. I hope the Cambridge Professor will go through the remaining plays of Æschylus. They are delightful editions.

CCXVII. TO J. H. GREEN.[153]

Highgate, Friday morning, November 14, 1817.

Dear Sir,—I arrived at Highgate from Little Hampton yester-night: and the most interesting tidings I heard, were of your return and of your great kindness ... I can only say that I will call in Lincoln’s Inn Fields the first day I am able to come to town—but should your occupation suffer you to take me in any of your rides for exercise or relaxation, need I say with what gladness I should welcome you? Our dinner-hour is four: but alterable without inconvenience to earlier or later. As soon as I have finished my present slave-work I shall write at large to Mr. Tieck. Be pleased to present my respectful regards to Mrs. Green, and believe me, dear sir, with marked esteem,

Your obliged
S. T. Coleridge.

CCXVIII. TO THE SAME.

[December 13, 1817.]

My dear Sir,—I thank you for the transcript. The lecture[154] went off beyond my expectations; and in several parts, where the thoughts were the same, more happily expressed extempore than in the Essay on the Science of Method[155] for the “Encyclopædia Metropolitana.” However, you shall receive the first correct copy of the latter that I can procure. I would that I could present it to you, as it was written; though I am not inclined to quarrel with the judgment and prudence of omission, as far as the public are concerned. Be assured, I shall not fail to avail myself of your kind invitation, and that time passes happily with me under your roof, receiving and returning. Be pleased to make my best respects to Mrs. Green, and I beg her acceptance of the “Hebrew Dirge” with my free translation,[156] of which I will, as soon as it is printed, send her the music, viz. the original melody, and Bishop’s additional music. Of this I am convinced, that a dozen of such “very pretty,” and “so sweet,” and “how smooth,” “well, that is charming” compositions would gain me more admiration with the English public than twice the number of poems twice as good as the “Ancient Mariner,” the “Christabel,” the “Destiny of Nations,” or the “Ode to the Departing Year.”

My own opinion of the German philosophers does not greatly differ from yours; much in several of them is unintelligible to me, and more unsatisfactory. But I make a division. I reject Kant’s stoic principle, as false, unnatural, and even immoral, where in his “Kritik der praktischen Vernunft,”[157] he treats the affections as indifferent (ἀδιάφορα) in ethics, and would persuade us that a man who disliking, and without any feeling of love for virtue, yet acted virtuously, because and only because his duty, is more worthy of our esteem, than the man whose affections were aidant to and congruous with his conscience. For it would imply little less than that things not the objects of the moral will or under its control were yet indispensable to its due practical direction. In other words, it would subvert his own system. Likewise, his remarks on prayer in his “Religion innerhalb der reinen Vernunft,” are crass, nay vulgar and as superficial even in psychology as they are low in taste. But with these exceptions, I reverence Immanuel Kant with my whole heart and soul, and believe him to be the only philosopher, for all men who have the power of thinking. I cannot conceive the liberal pursuit or profession, in which the service derived from a patient study of his works would not be incalculably great, both as cathartic, tonic, and directly nutritious.

Fichte in his moral system is but a caricature of Kant’s, or rather, he is a Zeno, with the cowl, rope, and sackcloth of a Carthusian monk. His metaphysics have gone by; but he hath merit of having prepared the ground for, and laid the first stone of, the dynamic philosophy by the substitution of Act for Thing, Der einführen Actionen statt der Dinge an sich. Of the Natur-philosophen, as far as physical dynamics are concerned and as opposed to the mechanic corpuscular system, I think very highly of some parts of their system, as being sound and scientific—metaphysics of Quality, not less evident to my reason than the metaphysics of Quantity, that is, Geometry, etc.; of the rest and larger part, as tentative, experimental, and highly useful to a chemist, zoologist, and physiologist, as unfettering the mind, exciting its inventive powers. But I must be understood as confining these observations to the works of Schelling and H. Steffens. Of Schelling’s Theology and Theanthroposophy, the telescopic stars and nebulæ are too many for my “grasp of eye.” (N. B. The catachresis is Dryden’s, not mine.) In short, I am half inclined to believe that both he and his friend Francis Baader are but half in earnest, and paint the veil to hide not the face but the want of one.[158] Schelling is too ambitious, too eager to be the Grand Seignior of the allein-selig Philosophie to be altogether a trustworthy philosopher. But he is a man of great genius; and, however unsatisfied with his conclusions, one cannot read him without being either whetted or improved. Of the others, saving Jacobi, who is a rhapsodist, excellent in sentences all in small capitals, I know either nothing, or too little to form a judgement. As my opinions were formed before I was acquainted with the schools of Fichte and Schelling, so do they remain independent of them, though I con- and pro-fess great obligations to them in the development of my thoughts, and yet seem to feel that I should have been more useful had I been left to evolve them myself without knowledge of their coincidence. I do not very much like the Sternbald[159] of our friend; it is too like an imitation of Heinse’s “Ardinghello,”[160] and if the scene in the Painter’s Garden at Rome is less licentious than the correspondent abomination in the former work, it is likewise duller.

I have but merely looked into Jean Paul’s “Vorschule der Aisthetik,”[161] but I found one sentence almost word for word the same as one written by myself in a fragment of an Essay on the Supernatural[162] many years ago, viz. that the presence of a ghost is the terror, not what he does, a principle which Southey, too, overlooks in his “Thalaba” and “Kehama.”

But I must conclude. Believe me, dear sir, with unfeigned regard and esteem, your obliged

S. T. Coleridge.

I expect my eldest son, Hartley Coleridge, to-day from Oxford.