Biographia Epistolaris Part 30

LETTER 104. To JOSIAH WADE

March 6, 1801.

My very dear friend,

I have even now received your letter. My habits of thinking and feeling, have not hitherto inclined me to personify commerce in any such shape, so as to tempt me to turn pagan, and offer vows to the G.o.ddess of our isle. But when I read that sentence in your letter, "The time will come I trust, when I shall be able to pitch my tent in your neighbourhood," I was most potently commanded [1] to a breach of the second commandment, and on my knees, to entreat the said G.o.ddess to touch your bank notes and guineas with her magical multiplying wand. I could offer such a prayer for you, with a better conscience than for most men, because I know that you have never lost that healthy common sense, which regards money only as the means of independence, and that you would sooner than most men cry out, enough! enough! To see one's children secured against want, is doubtless a delightful thing; but to wish to see them begin the world as rich men, is unwise to ourselves, for it permits no close of our labours, and is pernicious to them; for it leaves no motive to their exertions, none of those sympathies with the industrious and the poor, which form at once the true relish and proper antidote of wealth.

* * * Is not March rather a perilous month for the voyage from Yarmouth to Hamburg? Danger there is very little, in the packets, but I know what inconvenience rough weather brings with it; not from my own feelings, for I am never sea-sick, but always in exceeding high spirits on board ship, but from what I see in others. But you are an old sailor.

At Hamburg I have not a shadow of acquaintance. My letters of introduction produced for me, with one exception, viz., Klopstock, the brother of the poet, no real service, but merely distant and ostentatious civility. And Klopstock will by this time have forgotten my name, which indeed he never properly knew, for I could speak only English and Latin, and he only French and German. At Ratzeburg, 35 English miles N.E. from Hamburg, on the road to Lubec, I resided four months; and I should hope, was not unbeloved by more than one family, but this is out of your route. At Gottingen I stayed near five months, but here I knew only students, who will have left the place by this time, and the high learned professors, only one of whom could speak English; and they are so wholly engaged in their academical occupations, that they would be of no service to you. Other acquaintance in Germany I have none, and connexion I never had any. For though I was much entreated by some of the Literati to correspond with them, yet my natural laziness, with the little value I attach to literary men, as literary men, and with my aversion from those letters which are to be made up of studied sense, and unfelt compliments, combined to prevent me from availing myself of the offer. Herein, and in similar instances, with English authors of repute, I have ill consulted the growth of my reputation and fame. But I have cheerful and confident hopes of myself.

If I can hereafter do good to my fellow-creatures as a poet, and as a metaphysician, they will know it; and any other fame than this, I consider as a serious evil, that would only take me from out the number and sympathy of ordinary men, to make a c.o.xcomb of me.

As to the inns or hotels at Hamburg, I should recommend you to some German inn. Wordsworth and I were at the "Der Wilde Man," and dirty as it was, I could not find any inn in Germany very much cleaner, except at Lubec. But if you go to an English inn, for heaven's sake, avoid the "Shakspeare," at Altona, and the "King of England," at Hamburg. They are houses of plunder rather than entertainment. "The Duke of York" hotel, kept by Seaman, has a better reputation, and thither I would advise you to repair; and I advise you to pay your bill every morning at breakfast time: it is the only way to escape imposition. What the Hamburg merchants may be I know not, but the tradesmen are knaves. Scoundrels, with yellow-white phizzes, that bring disgrace on the complexion of a bad tallow candle. Now as to carriage, I know scarcely what to advise; only make up your mind to the very worst vehicles, with the very worst horses, drawn by the very worst postillions, over the very worst roads, and halting two hours at each time they change horses, at the very worst inns; and you have a fair, unexaggerated picture of travelling in North Germany. The cheapest way is the best; go by the common post wagons, or stage coaches. What are called extraordinaries, or post-chaises, are little wicker carts, uncovered, with moveable benches or forms in them, execrable in every respect. And if you buy a vehicle at Hamburg, you can get none decent under thirty or forty guineas, and very probably it will break to pieces on the infernal roads. The ca.n.a.l boats are delightful, but the porters everywhere in the United Provinces, are an impudent, abominable, and dishonest race. You must carry as little luggage as you well can with you, in the ca.n.a.l boats, and when you land, get recommended to an inn beforehand, and bargain with the porters first of all, and never lose sight of them, or you may never see your portmanteau or baggage again.

My Sarah desires her love to you and yours. G.o.d bless your dear little ones! Make haste and get rich, dear friend! and bring up the little creatures to be playfellows and school-fellows with my little ones!

Again and again, sea serve you, wind speed you, all things turn out good to you! G.o.d bless you,

S. T. COLERIDGE. [2]

John Stoddart, a friend of Coleridge, visited him while at Keswick in the month of October, 1800, and saw the Wordsworths at Grasmere (Dorothy Wordsworth's 'Journal', i, 55)--It was then that Stoddart obtained a copy of 'Christabel', and read it shortly afterwards [3] to Sir Walter Scott, then busy with his 'Border Minstrelsy'. The beauty of 'Christabel' touched Sir Walter's romantic imagination, and echoes of the poem are discernible in the 'Lay of the Last Minstrel' and the 'Bridal of Tryermain'.

But Coleridge, in spite of many attempts, could not complete the piece, and had to give up the endeavour. In a letter to G.o.dwin of 25th March 1801, Coleridge thus laments what was practically the end of his career as a poet:

[Footnote 1: "Tempted," E.R., ii, 18.]

[Footnote 2: Letters CXVI-CXVII follow 104.]

[Footnote 3: In 1802.]

LETTER 105. To G.o.dWIN.

Wednesday, March 25, 1801.

Dear G.o.dwin,

I fear your tragedy [1] will find me in a very unfit state of mind to sit in judgment on it. I have been during the last three months undergoing a process of intellectual exsiccation. During my long illness I had compelled into hours of delight many a sleepless painful hour of darkness by chasing down metaphysical game, and since then I have continued the hunt, till I found myself, unaware, at the root of pure mathematics, and up that tall smooth tree, whose few poor branches are all at the very summit, am I climbing by pure adhesive strength of arms and thighs, still slipping down, still renewing my ascent. You would not know me! All sounds of similitude keep at such a distance from each other in my mind, that I have forgotten how to make a rhyme. I look at the mountains (that visible G.o.d Almighty that looks in at all my windows)--I look at the mountains only for the curves of their outlines; the stars, as I behold them, form themselves into triangles; and my hands are scarred with scratches from a cat, whose back I was rubbing in the dark in order to see whether the sparks from it were refrangible by a prism. The Poet is dead in me; my imagination (or rather the Somewhat that had been imaginative) lies like a cold snuff on the circular rim of a bra.s.s candlestick, without even a stink of tallow to remind you that it was once clothed and mitred with flame. That is past by. I was once a volume of gold leaf, rising and riding on every breath of Fancy, but I have beaten myself back into weight and density, and now I sink in quicksilver and remain squat and square on the earth amid the hurricane that makes oaks and straws join in one dance, fifty yards high in the element.

However I will do what I can. Taste and feeling have I none, but what I have, give I unto thee. But I repeat that I am unfit to decide on any but works of severe logic.

I write now to beg that, if you have not sent your tragedy, you may remember to send 'Antonio' with it, which I have not yet seen, and likewise my Campbell's 'Pleasures of Hope', which Wordsworth wishes to see.

Have you seen the second volume of the 'Lyrical Ballads', and the preface prefixed to the first? I should judge of a man's heart and intellect precisely according to the degree and intensity of the admiration with which he read these poems. Perhaps, instead of heart I should have said Taste; but, when I think of 'The Brothers', of 'Ruth', and of 'Michael', I recur to the expression and am enforced to say heart. If I die, and the booksellers will give you anything for ray life, be sure to say, "Wordsworth descended on him like the [Greek: Gnothi seauton] from heaven; by showing to him what true poetry was, he made him know that he himself was no Poet."

In your next letter you will, perhaps, give me some hints respecting your prose plans.

G.o.d bless you, and

S. T. COLERIDGE.

Greta Hall, Keswick.

P.S.--What is a fair price--what might an author of reputation fairly ask from a bookseller, for one edition, of a thousand copies, of a five-shilling book?

[I congratulate you on the settlement of Davy in London. I hope that his enchanting manners will not draw too many idlers about him, to hara.s.s and vex his mornings.]

[Footnote: 1 This tragedy was ent.i.tled Abbas.]

PART II

THE PERMANENT

I will write for "The Permanent", or not at all." (Letter to Sir G.

Beaumont, "Coleorton Memorials", ii, 162.) "Woe is me! that at 46 I am under the necessity of appearing as a lecturer, and obliged to regard every hour given to "The Permanent", whether as poet or philosopher, an hour stolen from others as well as from my own maintenance." (Letter to Mudford, Brandl's "Life of Coleridge", p. 359.)

The conventional view of Coleridge that opium killed the poet in him does not commend itself to the scientific consciousness. Opium has the tendency to stimulate rather than to deaden the poetic imagination, as the history of De Quincey can testify; and one of Coleridge's most imaginative pieces, "Kubla Khan", is said to have been occasioned by an overdose of the drug.

The poet in Coleridge was extinguished by a very different thing than opium. Coleridge's poetic faculty was suspended by the loss of hope and also by the growth of his intellect, by the development of his reasoning and philosophic powers, and by the multiplication of the interests which appealed to him, and the many problems which presented themselves for his solution. He was, const.i.tutionally, the most comprehensive mind of a new age, and just because he was its greatest thinker he was perplexed and attracted by the majority of the problems which arose around him, and which he himself helped to raise. Poetry, the poetry of the Romantic Movement, in which he far excelled all his contemporaries, was no longer capable of grappling with the philosophic, theological, political and social questions now on the horizon or which Coleridge felt would soon, by the development of international affinities, be on the horizon of the English mind. Hence Coleridge's thirst for the new lore of the German philosophy, which seemed to him to supply a want in the Intellectualism of his native country.

In spite of this, Coleridge knew that in being deserted by the poetic spirit, he was leaving a high artistic realm for one of lesser glory; and hence his letter to G.o.dwin of 25th March 1801, and, later on, his dirge over himself in "Dejection".

Coleridge, in choosing to follow Wordsworth to the Lake District in preference to remaining at Nether Stowey with Poole, had experienced some contrition, for Poole, after all, was a more profound appreciator of his many-sidedness and the Cervantean vein of his character than Wordsworth, who appreciated Coleridge only from that side of him which resembled himself.

Tom Poole regretted, like others, that Coleridge had no permanent calling, or could not fix upon an undertaking worthy of his powers.

Poole looked upon Coleridge's devotion to journalism while he was engaged upon the "Morning Post" as a "turning aside of his powers from higher ends" ("T. Poole and his Friends", ii, 2), and wished him to give himself up to something more "permanently" useful to society ("T. Poole and his Friends", ii, 3). The correspondence of Coleridge and Poole from 1800 onwards, often turns upon the subject ("T. Poole and his Friends", ii, 66, 68, 122, 177, 187, 205, 226, 247); and Coleridge admitted a "distracting manifoldness" in his objects and attainments ("T. Poole and his Friends", ii, 122). "You," said Coleridge, "are n.o.bly employed--most worthy of you. "You" are made to endear yourself to mankind as an immediate benefactor: I must throw my bread on the waters" ("T. Poole and his Friends", ii, 122).

While engaged in these argumentations with his best friend, Coleridge was striving to think out in his deep philosophic and musing mind many problems of the time; and there arose in his imagination the Idea of the Permanent. He was henceforth no longer the Poet of Romanticism, whose significance he had exhausted, but the philosopher of the Permanent, which presented itself as a splendid possibility in all departments of human knowledge and activity. In his prose works and letters we find a continual reference to what Coleridge now calls "The Permanent"--the permanent principles of Morals, Philosophy, and Religion, and of the permanent principles of criticism as applied to Poetry and the Fine Arts. Everything is now adjusted by Coleridge to this idea. Art, morals, religion, and politics are tried by its standard, to find if they are founded in the permanent principles of human nature.

It is in the light of this Idea, the ideal of Coleridge's later life, that we must judge Coleridge and weigh him. To continue to see in opium the sole or even the princ.i.p.al cause of his failure, is to misjudge him altogether. To compare him with others of different powers who accomplished more in one direction in the matter of literary output, with Sir Walter Scott or Byron, for instance, is misleading. It is the man of profound genius, who in his own time, is feeling on all sides into the Future, who is least likely to give forth "finished productions," as they are called, in which the subjects of which they treat are often exhausted, and please the ear of the Present. Coleridge is such a man of genius; nearly all his works are fragmentary, unfinished, suggestive rather than "complete," just because they verge upon that Transcendentalism which he was the first to make audible to English ears in his day. Ill health, and opium in conjunction with ill health, contributed no doubt to enfeeble his utterance; but to a.s.sert that opium was the cause or the main cause of Coleridge's inability to do what he wanted himself to do, or what his friends and contemporaries expected him to do, is a gross perversion of the facts of the case.

Coleridge's inability arose from his multiplicity of motive, his visionary faculty of seeing in the light of a new principle a host of problems rise up on all sides, all claiming recognition and solution.

"That is the disease of my mind--it is comprehensive in its conceptions, and wastes itself in the contemplations of the many things which it might do." (Letter to Poole, 4th January 1799, "Letters", p. 270). A greater than Coleridge had felt this tendency before him, and created as its embodiment "Hamlet"; and Coleridge has been called the Hamlet of literature.

CHAPTER X