Biographia Epistolaris Part 7

LETTER 25

Redcliff Hill, February 22, 1796.

My dear Sir,

It is my duty and business to thank G.o.d for all his dispensations, and to believe them the best possible; but, indeed, I think I should have been more thankful, if He had made me a journeyman shoemaker, instead of an author by trade. I have left my friends; I have left plenty; I have left that ease which would have secured a literary immortality, and have enabled me to give to the public works conceived in moments of inspiration, and polished with leisurely solicitude; and, alas! for what have I left them? For--who deserted me in the hour of distress, and for a scheme of virtue impracticable and romantic! So I am forced to write for bread--write the flights of poetic enthusiasm, when every minute I am hearing a groan from my wife! Groans, and complaints, and sickness!

The present hour I am in a quick-set hedge of embarra.s.sment, and, whichever way I turn, a thorn runs into me. The future is cloud and thick darkness. Poverty, perhaps, and the thin faces of them that want bread looking up to me! Nor is this all. My happiest moments for composition are broken in upon by the reflection that I must make haste.

"I am too late." "I am already months behind." "I have received my pay beforehand."----O wayward and desultory spirit of Genius, ill can'st thou brook a taskmaster! The tenderest touch from the hand of obligation wounds thee like a scourge of scorpions!

I have been composing in the fields this morning, and came home to write down the first rude sheet of my Preface, when I heard that your man had brought a note from you. I have not seen it, but I guess its contents. I am writing as fast as I can. Depend on it, you shall not be out of pocket for me. I feel what I owe you, and, independently of this, I love you as a friend,--indeed so much that I regret, seriously regret, that you have been my copyholder.

If I have written petulantly, forgive me. G.o.d knows I am sore all over.

G.o.d bless you! and believe me that, setting grat.i.tude aside, I love and esteem you, and have your interest at heart full as much as my own.

S. T. COLERIDGE. [1]

On the 1st of March, 1796, "The Watchman" was published; it ended with the tenth number on the 13th of May following. In March Mr. C. removed to a house in Oxford Street in Kingsdown, and thence wrote the following letter to Mr. Poole:

[1: Letter LIV is our 25.]

LETTER 26

30th March, 1796.

My dear Poole,

For the neglect in the transmission of "The Watchman", you must blame George Burnett, who undertook the business. I however will myself see it sent this week with the preceding Numbers. I am greatly obliged to you for your communication--(on the Slave Trade in No. V);--it appears in this Number. I am anxious to receive more from you, and likewise to know what you dislike in "The Watchman", and what you like, but particularly the former. You have not given me your opinion of "The Plot Discovered".

Since you last saw me, I have been well nigh distracted. The repeated and most injurious blunders of my printer out of doors, and Mrs.

Coleridge's danger at home--added to the gloomy prospect of so many mouths to open and shut, like puppets, as I move the string in the eating and drinking way;--but why complain to you? Misery is an article with which every market is so glutted that it can answer no one's purpose to export it.

I have received many abusive letters, post-paid, thanks to the friendly malignants! But I am perfectly callous to disapprobation, except when it tends to lessen profit. Then indeed I am all one tremble of sensibility, marriage having taught me the wonderful uses of that vulgar commodity, yclept Bread. "The Watchman" succeeds so as to yield a "bread-and-cheesish" profit. Mrs. Coleridge is recovering apace, and deeply regrets that she was deprived of the pleasure of seeing you. We are in our new house, where there is a bed at your service whenever you will please to delight us with a visit. Surely in Spring you might force a few days into a sojourning with us.

Dear Poole, you have borne yourself towards me most kindly with respect to my epistolary ingrat.i.tude. But I know that you forbade yourself to feel resentment towards me, because you had previously made my neglect ingrat.i.tude. A generous temper endures a great deal from one whom it has obliged deeply.

My poems are finished. I will send you two copies the moment they are published. In No. III of "The Watchman" there are a few lines ent.i.tled, "The Hour when we shall meet again" ("Dim Hour! that sleep'st on pillowing clouds afar"), which I think you will like. I have received two or three letters from different "Anonymi", requesting me to give more poetry. One of them writes thus:--

"Sir, I detest your principles; your prose I think very so so; but your poetry is so beautiful that I take in your "Watchman" solely on account of it. In justice therefore to me and some others of my stamp, I entreat you to give us more verse, and less democratic scurrility. Your Admirer,--not Esteemer."

Have you read over Dr. Lardner on the Logos? It is I think, scarcely possible to read it, and not be convinced. I find that "The Watchman"

comes more easy to me, so that I shall begin about my Christian Lectures (meaning a publication of the course given in the preceding year). I will immediately order for you, unless you immediately countermand it, Count Rumford's Essays; in No. V of "The Watchman" you will see why.

(That number contained a critique on the Essays.) I have enclosed Dr.

Beddoes's late pamphlets; neither of them as yet published. The Doctor sent them to me.... My dutiful love to your excellent Mother, whom, believe me, I think of frequently and with a pang of affection. G.o.d bless you. I'll try and contrive to scribble a line and half every time the man goes with "The Watchman" to you.

N.B. The Essay on Fasting I am ashamed of--(in No. II of "The Watchman");--but it is one of my misfortunes that I am obliged to publish ex tempore as well as compose. G.o.d bless you.

S. T. COLERIDGE.[1]

[Footnote 1: Letter LV is our 26.]

Two days afterwards Mr. Coleridge wrote to Mr. B. Flower, then the editor of the "Cambridge Intelligencer", with whom he had been acquainted at the University:

LETTER 27

April 1, 1796.

Dear Sir,

I transmitted to you by Mr. B---- a copy of my "Conciones ad Populum", and of an Address against the Bills (meaning "The Plot Discovered"). I have taken the liberty of enclosing ten of each, carriage paid, which you may perhaps have an opportunity of disposing of for me;--if not, give them away. The one is an eighteen-penny affair;--the other ninepence. I have likewise enclosed the Numbers which have been hitherto published of "The Watchman";--some of the Poetry may perhaps be serviceable to you in your paper. That sonnet on the rejection of Mr.

Wilberforce's Bill in your Chronicle the week before last was written by Southey, author of "Joan of Arc", a year and a half ago, and sent to me per letter;-how it appeared with the late signature, let the plagiarist answer.... I have sent a copy of my Poems--(they were not yet published):--will you send them to Lunn and Deighton, and ask of them whether they would choose to have their names on the t.i.tle page as publishers; and would you permit me to have yours? Robinson and, I believe, Cadell, will be the London publishers. Be so kind as to send an immediate answer.

Please to present one of each of my pamphlets to Mr. Hall--(the late Robert Hall, the Baptist). I wish I could reach the perfection of his style. I think his style the best in the English language; if he have a rival, it is Mrs. Barbauld.

You have, of course, seen Bishop Watson's Apology for the Bible. It is a complete confutation of Paine; but that was no difficult matter. The most formidable Infidel is Lessing, the author of "Emilia Galotti";--I ought to have written, "was", for he is dead. His book is not yet translated, and is ent.i.tled, in German, "Fragments of an Anonymous Author". It unites the wit of Voltaire with the subtlety of Hume and the profound erudition of "our" Lardner. I had some thoughts of translating it with an Answer, but gave it up, lest men, whose tempers and hearts incline them to disbelief, should get hold of it; and, though the answers are satisfactory to my own mind, they may not be equally so to the minds of others.

I suppose you have heard that I am married. I was married on the 4th of October.

I rest all my poetical credit on the "Religious Musings". Farewell; with high esteem, yours sincerely,

S. T. COLERIDGE.

Benjamin Flower, the editor of the "Cambridge Intelligencer", printed the first published version of the "Monody on Chatterton" in his Edition of the Rowley Poems, 1794. He was also to have been the publisher of the "Imitations of the Latin Poets", of which Coleridge spoke so often at this time. Our next letter is from "The Watchman" of 1 April, in answer to a correspondent. G.o.dwin, whom Coleridge had hailed in one of his sonnets in the "Morning Chronicle" (10 January, 1795) as one formed to "illume a sunless world" by his "Political Justice" (1793), is here attacked with some virulence. In after years Coleridge held a better opinion of G.o.dwin and wrote some of his finest letters to him.

LETTER 28. TO CAIUS GRACCHUS.

You have attacked me because I ventured to disapprove of Mr. G.o.dwin's Works: I notice your attack because it affords me an opportunity of expressing more fully my sentiments respecting those principles.--I must not however wholly pa.s.s over the former part of your letter. The sentence "implicating them with party and calumniating opinions," is so inaccurately worded, that I must "guess" at your meaning. In my first essay I stated that literary works were generally reviewed by personal friends or private enemies of the Authors. This I "know" to be fact; and does the spirit of meekness forbid us to tell the truth? The pa.s.sage in my Review of Mr. Burke's late pamphlet, you have wilfully misquoted: "with respect to the work in question," is an addition of your own. That work in question I myself considered as mere declamation; and "therefore" deemed it wofully inferior to the former production of the venerable Fanatic.--In what manner I could add to my numerous "ideal"

trophies by quoting a beautiful pa.s.sage from the pages which I was reviewing, I am ignorant. Perhaps the spirit of vanity lurked in the use of the word ""I""--"ere "I" begin the task of blame." It is pleasant to observe with what absurd anxiety this little monosyllable is avoided.

Sometimes "the present writer" appears as its subst.i.tute: sometimes the modest author adopts the style of royalty, swelling and multiplying himself into "We"; and sometimes to escape the egotistic phrases of "in my opinion," or, "as I think," he utters dogmas, and positively a.s.serts--"exempli gratia": ""It is" a work, which, etc." You deem me inconsistent, because, having written in praise of the metaphysician, I afterwards appear to condemn the essay on political justice. Would an eulogist of medical men be inconsistent, if he should write against vendors of (what he deemed) poisons? Without even the formality of a "since" or a "for" or a "because," you make an unqualified a.s.sertion, that this essay will be allowed by all, except the prejudiced, to be a deep, metaphysical work, though abstruse, etc. etc. Caius Gracchus must have been little accustomed to abstruse disquisitions, if he deem Mr.

G.o.dwin's work abstruse:--A chief (and certainly not a small) merit is its perspicuous and "popular" language. My chapter on modern patriotism is that which has irritated you. You condemn me as prejudiced--O this enlightened age! when it can be seriously charged against an essayist, that he is prejudiced in favour of grat.i.tude, conjugal fidelity, filial affection, and the belief of G.o.d and a hereafter!!

Of smart pretty fellows in Bristol are numbers, some Who so modish are grown, that they think plain sense c.u.mbersome; And lest they should seem to be queer or ridiculous, They affect to believe neither G.o.d nor "old Nicholas"![1]