country but England, that there is to this day no complete
collection or edition of the works of Coleridge--one of the
most poetical of our poets, one of the most important of our
critics, and one of the most influential, if one of the
least methodical and conclusive, of our philosophers. Indeed
we never knew what good prose he could write till the
fragments called _Anima Poetae_ were published, two-thirds
of a century after his death. But that no collected edition
of his letters appeared till very shortly before this is
explicable without any difficulty. Coleridge's temperament
was not heroic, and his correspondence as well as his
conduct justified, in regard to much more than his nonage,
the ingenious phrase of an American lady-essayist that he
must have been "a very _beatable_ child." To a certain
extent, however, the correspondence does also justify our
adoption (see _Introduction_) of the charitable theory that
enlargement of understanding brings about extension of
pardon. And putting this aside, the letters sometimes give
us an idea of what his admittedly marvellous conversation
(or rather monologue) must have been like. They are not very
easy to select from, for their author's singular tendency to
_divagation_ affects them. But they sometimes display that
humour which he undoubtedly possessed, though his best-known
published writings seldom admit of it: and the divagation
itself has its advantages. In the following Coleridge
appears in curiously different lights. After joking at his
own Pantheism he becomes amazingly practical, for it _was_,
as Scott points out somewhere, a fault of Southey's to
cling to the system of "half-profits," a fault which often
made his enormous labours altogether unprofitable. "I-rise
to I-set" = "getting-up to bed-time" seems to have been a
favourite quip of his. "Stuart," the Editor of the _Morning
Post_ for which Coleridge was then writing. "The
Anthology"--an _Annual_ one edited by Southey. As for the
_Anti-Jacobin_ libel it was, admirable as was the wit that
accompanied it, utterly indefensible; for it accused
Coleridge of having _at this time_ "left his poor children
fatherless and his wife destitute" (the extraordinary thing
is that he actually did this later!) Of course he never
executed the Life of Lessing.[115] "The Wedgwoods" had given
him an annuity. The assault on "Mr. Go_b_win" is one of poor
Hartley Coleridge's most delightful feats. Had he been a
little older, he might have pointed out to the author of
_Political Justice_ that lecturing his mother for his,
Hartley's, fault was quite unjustifiable: and indeed that
objecting to it at all was improper. The right way
(according to that great work itself) would have been to
discuss with Hartley whether the advantage in physical
exercise and animal spirits derived by him from wielding the
nine-pin, outweighed the pain experienced by Go_b_win, and
so was justifiable on the total scheme of things. ("Moshes,"
as indeed is obvious, was Hartley's pet-name).
29. TO ROBERT SOUTHEY
Tuesday night, 12 o'clock
(December 24) 1799.
My dear Southey,
My Spinosism (if Spinosism it be, and i' faith 'tis very like it)
disposed me to consider this big city as that part of the supreme One
which the prophet Moses was allowed to see--I should be more disposed
to pull off my shoes, beholding Him in a _Bush_, than while I am forcing
my reason to believe that even in theatres _He_ is, yea! even in the
Opera House. Your "Thalaba" will beyond all doubt bring you two hundred
pounds, if you will sell it at once; but _do_ not print at a venture,
under the notion of selling the edition. I assure you that Longman
regretted the bargain he made with Cottle concerning the second edition
of the "Joan of Arc," and is indisposed to similar negotiations; but
most and very eager to have the property of your works at almost any
price. If you have not heard it from Cottle, why, you may hear it from
me, that is, the arrangement of Cottle's affairs in London. The whole
and total copyright of your "Joan," and the first volume of your poems
(exclusive of what Longman had before given), was taken by him at three
hundred and seventy pounds. You are a strong swimmer, and have borne up
poor Joey with all his leaden weights about him, his own and other
people's! Nothing has answered to him but your works. By me he has lost
somewhat--by Fox, Amos, and himself _very much_. I can sell your
"Thalaba" quite as well in your absence as in your presence. I am
employed from I-rise to I-set (that is, from nine in the morning to
twelve at night), a pure scribbler. My mornings to booksellers'
compilations, after dinner to Stuart, who pays _all_ my expenses here,
let them be what they will; the earnings of the morning go to make up an
hundred and fifty pounds for my year's expenditure; for, supposing _all
clear_, my year's (1800) allowance is anticipated. But this I can do by
the first of April (at which time I leave London). For Stuart I write
often his leading paragraphs on Secession, Peace, Essay on the new
French Constitution, Advice to Friends of Freedom, Critiques on Sir W.
Anderson's Nose, Odes to Georgiana D. of D. (horribly misprinted),
Christmas Carols, etc., etc.--anything not bad in the paper, that is not
yours, is mine. So if any verses there strike you as worthy the
"Anthology," "do me the honour, sir!" However, in the course of a week I
_do mean_ to conduct a series of essays in that paper which may be of
public utility. So much for myself, except that I long to be out of
London; and that my Xstmas Carol is a quaint performance, and, in as
strict a sense as is _possible_, an Impromptu, and, had I done all I had
planned, that "Ode to the Duchess" would have been a better thing than
it is--it being somewhat dullish, etc. I have bought the "Beauties of
the Anti-jacobin," and attorneys and counsellors advise me to prosecute,
and offer to undertake it, so as that I shall have neither trouble or
expense. They say it is a clear case, etc. I will speak to Johnson about
the "Fears in Solitude." If he gives them up they are yours. That dull
ode has been printed often enough, and may now be allowed to "sink with
deep swoop, and to the bottom _go_," to quote an admired author; but the
two others will do with a little trimming.
My dear Southey! I have said nothing concerning that which most
oppresses me. Immediately on my leaving London I fall to the "Life of
Lessing"; till that is done, till I have given the Wedgwoods some proof
that I am _endeavouring_ to do well for my fellow-creatures, I cannot
stir. That being done, I would accompany you, and see no impossibility
of forming a pleasant little colony for a few years in Italy or the
South of France. Peace will come soon. God love you, my dear Southey!
_I_ would write to Stuart, and give up his paper immediately. You should
do nothing that did not absolutely _please_ you. Be idle, be very idle!
The habits of your mind are such that you will necessarily do much; but
be as idle as you can.
Our love to dear Edith. If you see Mary, tell her that we have received
our trunk. Hartley is quite well, and my talkativeness is his, without
diminution on my side. 'Tis strange but certainly many things go in the
blood, beside gout and scrophula. Yesterday I dined at Longman's and met
Pratt, and that honest piece of prolix dullity and nullity, young
Towers, who desired to be remembered to you. To-morrow Sara and I dine
at Mister Gobwin's, as Hartley calls him, who gave the philosopher such
a rap on the shins with a ninepin that Gobwin in huge pain _lectured_
Sara on his boisterousness. I was not at home. _Est modus in rebus._
Moshes is somewhat too rough and noisy, but the cadaverous silence of
Gobwin's children is to me quite catacombish, and, thinking of Mary
Wollstonecraft, I was oppressed by it the day Davy and I dined there.
God love you and
S. T. COLERIDGE.
FOOTNOTES:
[115] I cannot remember whether anybody has ever made a list of the
books that Coleridge did not write. It would be the catalogue of a most
interesting library in Utopia.
ROBERT SOUTHEY (1774-1843)
One of the strangest things met by the present writer in the
course of preparing this book was a remark of the late Mr.
Scoones--an old acquaintance and a man who has deserved most
excellently on the subject--in reference to Southey's
letters, that they show the author as "dry and
unsympathetic." "They contain too much information to be
good as letters." Well: there certainly is information in
the specimen that follows: whether it is "dry" or not
readers must decide. The fact is that Southey, despite
occasional touches of self-righteousness and of
over-bookishness, was full of humour, extraordinarily
affectionate, and extremely natural. There is moreover a
great deal of interest in this skit on poor Mrs. Coleridge:
for "lingos" of the kind, though in her case they may have
helped to disgust her husband with his "pensive Sara," were
in her time and afterwards by no means uncommon,
especially--physiologists must say why--with the female sex.
The present writer, near the middle of the nineteenth
century, knew a lady of family, position and property who
was fond of the phrase, "hail-fellow-well-met," but always
turned it into "Fellowship Wilmot"--a pretty close parallel
to "horsemangander" for "horse-godmother". Extension--with
levelling--of education, and such processes as those which
have turned "Sissiter" into "Syrencesster" and "Kirton" into
"Credd-itt-on", have made the phenomenon rarer: but have
also made such a _locus classicus_ of the habit as this all
the more valuable and amusing. It may be added that Lamb, in
one of his letters, has a sly if good-natured glance at this
peculiarity of the elder Sara Coleridge in reference to the
aptitude of the younger in her "_mother_-tongue." Southey
has dealt with the matter in several epistles to his friend
Grosvenor Bedford. The whole would have been rather long but
the following mosaic will, I think, do very well. Dr.
Warter, the editor of the supplementary collection of
Southey's letters from which it comes, was the husband of
Edith May Southey, the heroine of not a little literature,
sometimes[116] in connection, not merely as here with Sara
Coleridge the younger, but with Dora Wordsworth--the three
daughters of the three Lake Poets. She was, as her father
says, a very tall girl, while her aunt, Mrs. Coleridge, was
little (her husband, writing from Hamburg, speaks with
surprise of some German lady as "smaller than you are").
30. TO GROSVENOR C. BEDFORD ESQ:
KESWICK, Sep. 14, 1821
Dear Stumparumper,
Don't rub your eyes at that word, Bedford, as if you were slopy. The
purport of this letter, which is to be as precious as the Punic scenes
in Plautus, is to give you some account (though but an imperfect one) of
the language spoken in this house by ... and invented by her. I have
carefully composed a vocabulary of it by the help of her daughter and
mine, having my ivory tablets always ready when she is red-raggifying in
full confabulumpatus.
31. TO GROSVENOR C. BEDFORD ESQ:
KESWICK, Oct. 7, 1821.
My dear G,
I very much approve your laudable curiosity to know the precise meaning
of that noble word _horsemangandering_. Before I tell you its
application, you must be informed of its history and origin. Be it
therefore known unto you that ... the whole and sole inventor of the
never-to-be-forgotten _lingo grande_ (in which, by the bye, I purpose
ere long to compose a second epistle), thought proper one day to call my
daughter a great _horsemangander_, thinking, I suppose, that that
appellation contained as much unfeminine meaning as could be put into
any decent compound. From this substantive the verb has been formed to
denote an operation performed by the said daughter upon the said aunt,
of which I was an astonished spectator. The horsemangander--that is to
say, Edith May--being tall and strong, came behind the person to be
horsemangandered (to wit, ...), and took her round the waist, under the
arms, then jumped with her all the way from the kitchen into the middle
of the parlour; the motion of the horsemangandered person at every jump
being something like that of a paviour's rammer, and all resistance
impossible.
32. TO GROSVENOR C. BEDFORD ESQ:
KESWICK, Oct. 8, 1821.
* * * * *
P.S. The name of the newly-discovered language (of which I have more to
say hereafter) is the _lingo grande_.
33. TO GROSVENOR C. BEDFORD ESQ:
KESWICK, Dec. 24, 1822
Dear Stumparumper,
So long a time has elapsed since I sent you the commencement of my
remarks upon the peculiar language spoken by ... which I have
denominated the LINGO-GRANDE, that I fear you may suppose that I have
altogether neglected the subject. Yet such a subject, as you must
perceive, requires a great deal of patient observation, as well as of
attentive consideration; and were I to flustercumhurry over it, as if it
were a matter which could be undercumstood in a jiffump (that is to say
in a momper), this would be to do what I have undertaken shabroonily,
and you might shartainly have reason to think me fuffling and
indiscruckt. Upon my vurtz I have not dumdawdled with it, like a
dangleampeter; which being interpreted in the same _lingo_ is an
undecider, or an improvidentur, too idle to explore the hurtch mine
which he has had the fortune to discover. No, I must be a stupossum
indeed to act thus, as well as a slouwdowdekcum, or slowdonothinger; and
these are appellations which she has never bestowed upon me; though,
perhaps, the uncommon richness, and even exuberance of her language has
not been more strikingly displayed in anything than in the variety of
names which it has enabled her to shower upon my devoted person.
* * * * *
And so-o-o,
Dear Miscumter Bedfordiddlededford,
I subcumscribe myself,
Your sincumcere friendiddledend and serdiddledeservant,
ROBCUMBERT SOUTHEY DIDDIEDOUTHEY.
Student in the Lingo-Grande, Graduate in Butlerology, Professor of the
science of Noncumsensediddledense, of sneezing and of vocal music, P.L.
and LL.D. etc etc.
FOOTNOTES:
[116] See Wordsworth's _Triad_.
CHARLES LAMB (1775-1834)
There are not many people about whom it is more
difficult--or more unnecessary--to write than it is about
Lamb. A few very unfortunate people do not enjoy him, and
probably never could be made to do so. Most of those who
care for literature at all revel in him: and do not in the
least need to be told to do so. And, as was said before,
there is hardly any difference between his published works
and his letters except that the former stand a little--a
very little--more "upon ceremony." As to selecting the
letters one remembers Mr. Matthew Arnold's very agreeable
confession, when he was asked to select his poems, that he
wanted to select them all. This being impossible, one has to
confess that, putting subject, scale etc. aside, any one is
almost as tempting as any other, and that whatever is chosen
reminds one, half-regretfully, of the letters that were
left. When a man can write (to William Wordsworth too), "The
very head and sum of the girlery were two young girls,"
there is nothing left to do but to repeat, with the slight
alteration of "write to" for "ask," Thackeray's ejaculation
to the supposed host at an unusually satisfactory dinner,
"Dear Sir! do _ask_ us again." And on almost every page of
his letters, whether in Talfourd's original issue of them or
in the more recent and fuller editions of his works, the
spirit is the same everywhere: the volume only differs. If
(but you never know exactly when Lamb is speaking seriously)
at the time he had "an aversion from letter writing," then
most certainly Mrs. Malaprop was justified in saying that
there "is nothing like beginning with a little aversion"!
The letter which follows is, though it may have pleased
others besides myself, not one of the stock examples. But
it seems to me to present a rather unusual combination of
Lamb's attractive qualities, not a little of his rare phrase
("divine plain face" especially) and a remarkable expression
of that yearning for _solitude_ which some people seem to
think rather shameful, but which to others is a thing no
more to be accounted for than it is to be got rid of. It
will be observed that the letter, ostensibly to Mrs. W., is
really both to her and to her husband. "W. H." is of course
Hazlitt, and the "lectures" are his famous ones on English
Poets. As for Lamb's criticisms on lectures generally, they
would perhaps be endorsed by some who have given, as well as
by many who have received, this form of instruction. The
"gentleman at Haydon's" was the hero or victim of a story
good, but too long to give here. He said some excessively
foolish things and Lamb, after dinner, behaved to him in a
fashion possibly not quite undeserved but entirely
unsanctioned by the conventions of society.
34. TO MRS. WORDSWORTH
East India House.
February 18, 1818.
My dear Mrs. Wordsworth,
I have repeatedly taken pen in hand to answer your kind letter. My
sister should more properly have done it, but she having failed, I
consider myself answerable for her debts. I am now trying to do it in
the midst of commercial noises, and with a quill which seems more ready
to glide into arithmetical figures and names of gourds, cassia,
cardamoms, aloes, ginger, or tea, than into kindly responses and
friendly recollections. The reason why I cannot write letters at home
is, that I am never alone. Plato's (I write to W. W. now)--Plato's
double animal parted never longed more to be reciprocally re-united in
the system of its first creation than I sometimes do to be but for a
moment single and separate. Except my morning's walk to the office,
which is like treading on sands of gold for that reason, I am never so.
I cannot walk home from office but some officious friend offers his
unwelcome courtesies to accompany me. All the morning I am pestered. I
could sit and gravely cast up sums in great books, or compare sum with
sum, and write "paid" against this, and "unpaid" against t'other, and
yet reserve in some corner of my mind "some darling thoughts all my
own,"--faint memory of some passage in a book, or the tone of an absent
friend's voice--a snatch of Miss Burrell's singing, or a gleam of Fanny
Kelly's divine plain face. The two operations might be going on at the
same time without thwarting, as the sun's two motions (earth's I mean),
or as I sometimes turn round till I am giddy, in my back parlour, while
my sister is walking longitudinally in the front; or as the shoulder of
veal twists round with the spit, while the smoke wreathes up the
chimney. But there are a set of amateurs of the Belles Lettres--the gay
science--who come to me as a sort of rendezvous, putting questions of
criticism, of British Institutions, Lalla Rookhs, etc,--what Coleridge
said at the lecture last night--who have the form of reading men, but,
for any possible use reading can be to them, but to talk of, might as
well have been Ante-Cadmeans born, or have lain sucking out the sense of
an Egyptian hieroglyph as long as the pyramids will last, before they
should find it. These pests worrit me at business, and in all its
intervals, perplexing my accounts, poisoning my little salutary
warming-time at the fire, puzzling my paragraphs if I take a newspaper,
cramming in between my own free thoughts and a column of figures which
had come to an amicable compromise but for them. Their noise ended, one
of them, as I said, accompanies me home, lest I should be solitary for a
moment; he at length takes his welcome leave at the door; up I go,
mutton on table, hungry as hunter, hope to forget my cares, and bury
them in the agreeable abstraction of mastication; knock at the door, in
comes Mr. Hazlitt, or Mr. Martin Burney, or Morgan Demigorgon, or my
brother, or somebody, to prevent my eating alone--a process absolutely
necessary to my poor wretched digestion. O the pleasure of eating
alone!--eating my dinner alone! let me think of it. But in they come,
and make it absolutely necessary that I should open a bottle of orange;
for my meat turns into stone when any one dines with me, if I have not
wine. Wine can mollify stones; then _that_ wine turns into acidity,
acerbity, misanthropy, a hatred of my interrupters--(God bless 'em! I
love some of 'em dearly), and with the hatred, a still greater aversion
to their going away. Bad is the dead sea they bring upon me, choking and
deadening, but worse is the deader dry sand they leave me on, if they go
before bed-time. Come never, I would say to those spoilers of my dinner;
but if you come, never go! The fact is, this interruption does not
happen very often; but every time it comes by surprise, that present
bane of my life, orange wine, with all its dreary stifling consequences,
follows. Evening company I should always like had I any mornings, but I
am saturated with human faces (_divine_ forsooth!) and voices all the
golden morning; and five evenings in a week would be as much as I should
covet to be in company; but I assure you that is a wonderful week in
which I can get two, or one to myself. I am never C. L. but always C. L.
and Co. He who thought it not good for man to be alone, preserve me
from the more prodigious monstrosity of being never by myself! I forget
bed-time, but even there these sociable frogs clamber up to annoy me.
Once a week, generally some singular evening that, being alone, I go to
bed at the hour I ought always to be a-bed; just close to my bedroom
window is the club-room of a public-house, where a set of singers, I
take them to be chorus-singers of the two theatres (it must be both of
them), begin their orgies. They are a set of fellows (as I conceive)
who, being limited by their talents to the burthen of the song at the
play-houses, in revenge have got the common popular airs by Bishop, or
some cheap composer, arranged for choruses; that is, to be sung all in
chorus. At least I never can catch any of the text of the plain song,
nothing but the Babylonish choral howl at the tail on't. "That fury
being quenched"--the howl, I mean--a burden succeeds of shouts and
clapping, and knocking of the table. At length overtasked nature drops
under it, and escapes for a few hours into the society of the sweet
silent creatures of dreams, which go away with mocks and mows at
cockcrow. And then I think of the words Christabel's father used (bless
me, I have dipt in the wrong ink!) to say every morning by way of
variety when he awoke:
"Every knell, the Baron saith,
Wakes us up to a world of death"
or something like it. All I mean by this senseless interrupted tale, is,
that by my central situation I am a little over-companied. Not that I
have any animosity against the good creatures that are so anxious to
drive away the harpy solitude from me. I like 'em, and cards, and a
cheerful glass; but I mean merely to give you an idea, between office
confinement and after-office society, how little time I can call my
own. I mean only to draw a picture, not to make an inference. I would
not that I know of have it otherwise. I only wish sometimes I could
exchange some of my faces and voices for the faces and voices which a
late visitation brought most welcome, and carried away, leaving regret,
but more pleasure, even a kind of gratitude, at being so often favoured
with that kind northern visitation. My London faces and noises don't
hear me--I mean no disrespect, or I should explain myself, that instead
of their return 220 times a year, and the return of W. W. etc., seven
times in 104 weeks, some more equal distribution might be found. I have
scarce room to put in Mary's kind love, and my poor name,
C. LAMB.
* * * * *