Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) Part 30

At all events, come down, Cottle, as soon as you can, but before midsummer, and we will procure a horse easy as thy own soul, and we will go on a roam to Lynton and Lynmouth, which, if thou comest in May, will be in all their pride of woods and waterfalls, not to speak of its august cliffs, and the green ocean, and the vast valley of stones, all which live disdainful of the seasons, or accept new honours only from the winter's snow. At all events come down, and cease not to believe me much and affectionately your friend.

TO JOSIAH WADE

_A public example_

Bristol, 26 _June_, 1814.

DEAR SIR,

For I am unworthy to call any good man friend--much less you, whose hospitality and love I have abused; accept, however, my entreaties for your forgiveness, and for your prayers.

Conceive a poor miserable wretch, who for many years has been attempting to beat off pain, by a constant recurrence to the vice that reproduces it. Conceive a spirit in h.e.l.l, employed in tracing out for others the road to that heaven, from which his crimes exclude him! In short, conceive whatever is most wretched, helpless, and hopeless, and you will form as tolerable a notion of my state, as it is possible for a good man to have.

I used to think the text in St. James that 'he who offendeth in one point, offends in all,' very harsh; but I now feel the awful, the tremendous truth of it. In the one crime of OPIUM, what crime have I not made myself guilty of! Ingrat.i.tude to my Maker! and to my benefactors--injustice! _and unnatural cruelty to my poor children!

_--self-contempt for my repeated promise-breach, nay, too often, actual falsehood!

After my death, I earnestly entreat that a full and unqualified narration of my wretchedness, and of its guilty cause, may be made public, that, at least, some little good may be effected by the direful example!

May G.o.d Almighty bless you, and have mercy on your still affectionate, and, in his heart, grateful

S.T.C.

TO THOMAS ALLSOP

_Himself and his detractors_

2 _Dec._ 1818.

MY DEAR SIR,

I cannot express how kind I felt your letter. Would to Heaven I had had many with feelings like yours, 'accustomed to express themselves warmly and (as far as the word is applicable to you), even enthusiastically'. But alas! during the prime manhood of my intellect I had nothing but cold water thrown on my efforts. I speak not now of my systematic and most unprovoked maligners. On _them_ I have retorted only by pity and by prayer. These may have, and doubtless have, joined with the frivolity of 'the reading public' in checking and almost in preventing the sale of my works; and so far have done injury to my _purse_. _Me_ they have not injured. But I have loved with enthusiastic self-oblivion those who have been so well pleased that I should, year after year, flow with a hundred nameless rills into _their_ main stream, that they could find nothing but cold praise and effective discouragement of every attempt of mine to roll onward in a distinct current of my own; who _admitted_ that the _Ancient Mariner_, the _Christabel_, the _Remorse_, and some pages of the _Friend_ were not without merit, but were abundantly anxious to acquit their judgements of any blindness to the very numerous defects. Yet they _knew_ that to _praise_, as mere praise, I was characteristically, almost const.i.tutionally, indifferent. In sympathy alone I found at once nourishment and stimulus; and for sympathy _alone_ did my heart crave. They knew, too, how long and faithfully I have acted on the maxim, never to admit the _faults_ of a work of genius to those who denied or were incapable of feeling and understanding the _beauties_; not from wilful partiality, but as well knowing that in _saying_ truth I should, to such critics, convey falsehood. If, in one instance, in my literary life I have appeared to deviate from this rule, first, it was not till the fame of the writer (which I had been for fourteen years successfully toiling like a second Ali to build up) had been established; and secondly and chiefly, with the purpose and, I may safely add, with the _effect_ of rescuing the necessary task from Malignant Defamers, and in order to set forth the excellences and the trifling proportion which the defects bore to the excellences. But this, my dear sir, is a mistake to which affectionate natures are too liable, though I do not remember to have ever seen it noticed--the mistaking those who are desirous and well pleased to be loved _by_ you, for those who love you. Add, as a more general cause, the fact that I neither am nor ever have been of any party. What wonder, then, if I am left to decide which has been my worst enemy, the broad, pre-determined abuse of the _Edinburgh Review_, &c., or the cold and brief compliments, with the warm _regrets_, of the _Quarterly_? After all, however, I have now but one sorrow relative to the ill success of my literary toils (and toils they have been, _though not undelightful toils_), and this arises wholly from the almost insurmountable difficulties which the anxieties of to-day oppose to my completion of the great work, the form and materials of which it has been the employment of the best and most genial hours of the last twenty years to mature and collect.

If I could but have a tolerably numerous audience to my first, or first and second Lectures on the _History of Philosophy_, I should entertain a strong hope of success, because I know that these lectures will be found by far the most interesting and _entertaining_ of any that I have yet delivered, independent of the more permanent interest of rememberable instruction. Few and unimportant would the errors of men be, if they did but know, first, _what they themselves meant_; and, secondly, what the _words_ mean by which they attempt to convey their meaning, and I can conceive no subject so well fitted to exemplify the mode and the importance of these two points as the History of Philosophy, treated as in the scheme of these lectures.

TO THE SAME

_The Great Work described_

_Jan._ 1821.

... I have already the _written_ materials and contents, requiring only to be put together from the loose papers and commonplace or memorandum books, and needing no other change, whether of omission, addition, or correction, than the mere act of arranging, and the opportunity of seeing the whole collectively bring with them of course (1) Characteristics of Shakespeare's dramatic works, with a critical review of each play; together with a relative and comparative critique on the kind and degree of the merits and demerits of the dramatic works of Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Ma.s.singer. The History of the English Drama; the accidental advantages it afforded to Shakespeare, without in the least detracting from the perfect originality or proper creation of the Shakespearian Drama; the contradistinction of the latter from the Greek Drama, and its still remaining _uniqueness_, with the causes of this, from the combined influences of Shakespeare himself, as man, poet, philosopher, and finally, by conjunction of all these, dramatic poet; and of the age, events, manners, and state of the English language. This work, with every art of compression, amounts to three volumes of about five hundred pages each. (2) Philosophical a.n.a.lysis of the Genius and Works of Dante, Spenser, Milton, Cervantes, and Calderon, with similar, but more compressed criticisms on Chaucer, Ariosto, Donne, Rabelais, and others, during the predominance of the Romantic Poetry. In one large volume. These two works will, I flatter myself, form a complete code of the principles of judgement and feeling applied to works of Taste; and not of Poetry only, but of Poesy in all its forms, Painting, Statuary, Music, &c., &c. (3) The History of Philosophy considered as a Tendency of the Human Mind to exhibit the Powers of the Human Reason, to discover by its own Strength the Origin and Laws of Man and the World, from Pythagoras to Locke and Condillac. Two volumes.

(4) Letters on the Old and New Testament, and on the Doctrine and Principles held in common by the Fathers and Founders of the Reformation, addressed to a candidate for Holy Orders, including advice on the Plan and Subjects of Preaching, proper to a Minister of the Established Church.

To the completion of these four works, I have literally nothing more to do than to _transcribe_; but, as I before hinted, from so many sc.r.a.ps and _sibylline_ leaves, including margins of books and blank pages, that, unfortunately, I must be my own scribe, and not done by myself, they will be all but lost; or perhaps (as has been too often the case already) furnish feathers for the caps of others; some for this purpose, and some to plume the arrows of detraction, to be let fly against the luckless bird from whom they had been plucked or moulted.

In addition to these--of my GREAT WORK, to the preparation of which more than twenty years of my life have been devoted, and on which my hopes of extensive and permanent utility, of fame, in the n.o.blest sense of the word, mainly rest--that, by which I might,

As now by thee, by all the good be known, When this weak frame lies moulder'd in the grave, Which self-surviving I might call my own, Which folly cannot mar, nor hate deprave-- The incense of those powers, which, risen in flame, Might make me dear to Him from whom they came.

Of this work, to which all my other writings (unless I except my Poems, and these I can exclude in part only) are introductory and preparative; and the result of which (if the premises be, as I, with the most tranquil a.s.surance, am convinced they are--insubvertible, the deductions legitimate, and the conclusions commensurate, and only commensurate, with both) must finally be a revolution of all that has been called _philosophy_ or metaphysics in England and France, since the era of the commencing predominance of the mechanical system at the restoration of our second Charles, and with this the present fas.h.i.+onable views, not only of religion, morals, and politics but even of the modern physics and physiology. You will not blame the earnestness of my expressions, nor the high importance which I attach to this work: for how, with less n.o.ble objects, and less faith in their attainment, could I stand acquitted of folly, and abuse of time, talents, and learning in a labour of three-fourths of my intellectual life? Of this work, something more than a volume has been dictated by me, so as to exist fit for the press, to my friend and enlightened pupil, Mr. Green; and more than as much again would have been evolved and delivered to paper, but that, for the last six or eight months, I have been compelled to break off our weekly meeting, from the necessity of writing (alas! alas! of attempting to write) for purposes, and on the subjects, of the pa.s.sing day. Of my poetic works I would fain finish the _Christabel_! Alas! for the proud time when I planned, when I had present to my mind, the materials, as well as the scheme, of the Hymns ent.i.tled _Spirit_, _Sun_, _Earth_, _Air_, _Water_, _Fire_ and _Man_; and the Epic Poem on what still appears to me the one only fit subject remaining for an epic poem--Jerusalem besieged and destroyed by t.i.tus.

TO THE SAME

_Reminiscences_

4 March, 1822.

My Dearest Friend,

I have been much more than ordinarily unwell for more than a week past--my sleeps worse than my vigils, my nights than my days;

--The night's dismay Sadden'd and stunned the intervening day;

but last night I had not only a calmer night, without roaming in my dreams through any of Swedenborg's h.e.l.ls _moderes_; but arose this morning lighter and with a sense of _relief_....

I shall make you smile, as I did dear Mary Lamb, when I say that you sometimes mistake my position. As individual to individual, from my childhood, I do not remember feeling myself either superior or inferior to any human being; except by an act of my own will in cases of real or imagined moral or intellectual superiority. In regard to worldly rank, from eight years old to nineteen, I was habituated, nay, naturalised, to look up to men circ.u.mstanced as you are, as my superiors--a large number of our governors, and almost _all_ of those whom we regarded as greater men still, and whom we saw most of, _viz._ our committee governors, were such--and as neither awake nor asleep have I any other feelings than what I had at Christ's Hospital, I distinctly remember that I felt a little flush of pride and consequence--just like what we used to feel at school when the boys came running to us--'Coleridge! here's your friends want you--they are quite _grand_,' or 'It is quite a _lady_'--when I first heard who you were, and laughed at myself for it with that pleasurable sensation that, spite of my sufferings at that school, still accompanies any sudden reawakening of our school-boy feelings and notions. And oh, from sixteen to nineteen what hours of Paradise had Allen and I in escorting the Miss Evanses home on a Sat.u.r.day, who were then at a milliner's whom we used to think, and who I believe really was, such a nice lady;--and we used to carry thither, of a summer morning, the pillage of the flower gardens within six miles of town, with Sonnet or Love Rhyme wrapped round the nose-gay. To be feminine, kind, and genteelly (what I should now call neatly) dressed, these were the only things to which my head, heart, or imagination had any polarity, and what I was then, I still am.

G.o.d bless you and yours.

ROBERT SOUTHEY

1774-1843

TO JOSEPH COTTLE

_Question of copyrights_

Greta Hall, 20 _April_, 1808.

My dear Cottle,...