QUARREL WITH WORDSWORTH, SECOND
COURSE OF LECTURES ON
SHAKESPEARE
[During the remainder of 1810, after the cessation of _The Friend_,
Coleridge did nothing of importance except write letters to his
acquaintances about new projects which grew up in the impetuosity of his
conversation or in answering some enquiry to a correspondent. At the
close of the year Coleridge had determined to go to London once more;
and an unfortunate occurrence took place on his arrival in London. Basil
Montagu with his wife and child were travelling from Scotland to London,
and called upon the Wordsworths at Allan Bank, where Coleridge resided
with brief intervals of absence from September 1808 to April 1810.
Montagu invited Coleridge to travel to the metropolis with him in his
chaise and stay some time at his residence. Wordsworth warned Montagu of
Coleridge's opium habit, and said something to the effect that "he had
no hope" of Coleridge, and perhaps that he had been a "nuisance" in the
Wordsworth family. On his arrival in London, Montagu informed Coleridge
that Wordsworth had commissioned him to say that Wordsworth had no hope
of him, and that certain habits of his had made him a nuisance in the
Allan Bank household (Dykes Campbell's _Life_, 179). Coleridge, of
course, left the Montagus on hearing this communication, and repaired to
7, Portland Place, Hammersmith, then the abode of his old friend John
Morgan, and his wife Mary Brent, and her sister Charlotte Brent, with
whom the father of the ladies also lived (_Letters_, 598).
Coleridge was deeply stung that Wordsworth should have said such a thing
to Montagu. Professor Knight in his _Life of Wordsworth_ gives a pretty
full narrative of the event, and believes that Wordsworth, though he
said he had no hope of Coleridge, did not utter the more offensive
assertion about Coleridge being a nuisance in his family. Henry Crabb
Robinson effected a formal reconciliation between the two poets, in
which both figure to some disadvantage. Wordsworth's proposal to
confront Coleridge, his best and closest friend, with Montagu, a
comparative stranger to both of them, for cross-examination, and thus
sift out the actual expression used by the latter to the former, seems
like very hard dealing; and Coleridge's vehemence of protestation to
believe whatever Wordsworth asserted to be the true version, in
contradistinction to anything that Montagu might say, savours of
unreality. Wordsworth's taking offence at Coleridge not going to
Grasmere on the death of his child at a juncture when it was impossible
for him to leave London while _Remorse_ was being put on the stage, does
not redound to the credit of the Bard of Rydal; and Coleridge's failure
to call on his old friend while in the Lake District for the last time
is equally against the poet of Stowey. The estrangement died down rather
than was reconciled; but the irritation against Wordsworth remained long
in Coleridge's heart, and it is more than probable that after the
excitement of the reconciliation made by Crabb Robinson was over,
Coleridge believed Montagu's rather than Wordsworth's version of what
had occurred. This is endorsed by the fact that Montagu was again taken
into favour, and he and his wife were regular guests at the Highgate
Thursdays in after times.[26]
During 1811, while in London, Coleridge again met Godwin, to whom he
softened in his opinion. The following two letters indicate that he did
not occupy the same attitude to the author of _Political Justice_ as he
did when he wrote _The Watchman_.
LETTER 147. TO GODWIN
Tuesday, March 26, 1811.
Dear Godwin,
Mr. Grattan did me the honour of calling on me, and leaving his card, on
Sunday afternoon, unfortunately a few minutes after I had gone out--and
I am so unwell, that I fear I shall not be able to return the call
to-day, as I had intended, though it is a grief even for a brace of days
to appear insensible of so much kindness and condescension. But what
need has Grattan of pride?
Ha d'uopo solo
Mendicar dall' orgoglio onore e stima,
Chi senza lui di vilipendio é degno.
CHIABRERA.
I half caught from Lamb that you had written to Wordsworth, with a wish
that he should versify some tale or other, and that Wordsworth had
declined it. I told dear Miss Lamb that I had formed a complete plan of
a poem, with little plates for children, the _first_ thought, but that
alone, taken from Gessner's _First Mariner_; and this thought, I have
reason to believe, was not an invention of Gessner's. It is this--that
in early times, in some island or part of the Continent, the ocean had
rushed in, overflowing a vast plain of twenty or thirty miles, and
thereby _insulating_ one small promontory or cape of high land, on which
was a cottage, containing a man and his wife, and an infant daughter.
This is the _one_ thought; all that Gessner has made out of it--(and I
once translated into blank verse about half of the poem, but gave it up
under the influence of a double disgust, moral and poetical)--I have
rejected; and, strictly speaking, the tale in all its parts, that one
idea excepted, would be original. The tale will contain the cause, the
occasions, the process, with all its failures and ultimate success, of
the construction of the first boat, and of the undertaking of the first
naval expedition. Now, supposing you liked the idea (I address you and
Mrs. G., and as _commerciants_, not you as the philosopher who gave us
the first system in England that ever dared reveal at full that most
important of all important truths, that morality might be built on its
own foundation, like a castle built _from_ the rock and _on_ the rock,
with religion for the ornaments and completion of its roof and upper
stories--nor as the critic who, in the life of Chaucer, has given us, if
not principles of _æsthetic_ or taste, yet more and better data for
principles than had hitherto existed in our language)if we pulling like
two friendly tradesmen together, (for you and your wife _must_ be one
flesh, and I trust _are_ one heart) you approve of the plan, the next
question is, Whether it should be written in prose or in verse, and if
the latter, in what metre--stanzas, or eight-syllable iambics with
rhymes (for in rhyme it must be), now in couplets and now in quatrains,
in the manner of Cooper's admirable translation of the _Vert-Vert_ of
Gresset. (N.B. not _the_ Cowper).
Another thought has struck me within the last month, of a school-book in
two octavo volumes, of Lives in the manner of Plutarch--not, indeed, of
comparing and coupling Greek with Roman, Dion with Brutus, and Cato with
Aristides, of placing ancient and modern together: Numa with Alfred,
Cicero with Bacon, Hannibal with Gustavus Adolphus, and Julius Cæsar
with Buonaparte--or what perhaps might be at once more interesting and
more instructive, a series of lives, from Moses to Buonaparte, of all
those great men, who in states or in the mind of man had produced great
revolutions, the effects of which still remain, and are more or less
distant causes of the present state of the world.
I remain, with unfeigned and affectionate esteem,
Yours, dear Godwin,
S. T. COLERIDGE.[27]
LETTER 148. TO GODWIN
Friday morning, March 29, 1811.
Dear Godwin,
My chief motive in undertaking _The First Mariner_ is merely to weave a
few tendrils around your destined walking-stick, which, like those of
the woodbine (that, serpent-like climbing up, and with tight spires
embossing the straight hazel, rewards the lucky schoolboy's search in
the winter copse) may remain on it, when the woodbine, root and branch,
lies trampled in the earth. I shall consider the work as a small plot of
ground given up to you, to be sown at your own hazard with your own seed
(gold-grains would have been but a bad saw, and besides have spoilt the
metaphor). If the increase should more than repay your risk and labour,
why then let me be one of your guests at Hendcot House. Your last letter
impressed and affected me strongly. Ere I had yet read or seen your
works, I, at Southey's recommendation, wrote a sonnet in praise of the
author. When I had read them, religious bigotry, the but
half-understanding your principles, and the _not_ half-understanding my
own, combined to render me a warm and boisterous anti-Godwinist. But my
warfare was open; my unfelt and harmless blows aimed at an abstraction I
had christened with your name; and at that time, if not in the world's
_favor_, you were among the captains and chief men in its admiration. I
became your acquaintance, when more years had brought somewhat more
temper and tolerance; but I distinctly remember that the first turn in
my mind towards you, the first movements of a juster appreciation of
your merits, was occasioned by my disgust at the altered tone of
language of many whom I had long known as your admirers and
disciples--some of them, too, men who had made themselves a sort of
reputation in minor circles as your acquaintances, and therefore your
echoes by authority, who had themselves aided in attaching an unmerited
ridicule to you and your opinions by their own ignorance, which led them
to think the best settled truths, and indeed _every_ thing in your
_Political Justice_, whether assertion, or deduction, or conjecture, to
have been new thoughts--downright creations! and by their own vanity,
which enabled them to forget that everything must be new to him who
knows _nothing_; others again, who though gifted with high talents, had
yet been indebted to you and the discussions occasioned by your work,
for much of their development, who had often and often styled you the
Great Master, written verses in your honour, and, worse than all, had
now brought your opinions--with many good and worthy men--into as
unmerited an odium, as the former class had into contempt, by attempts
equally unfeeling and unwise, to realize them in private life, to the
disturbance of domestic peace. And lastly, a third class; but the name
of ---- spares me the necessity of describing it. In all these there was
such a want of common sensibility, such a want of that gratitude to an
intellectual benefactor, which even an honest reverence for their past
selves should have secured, as did then, still does, and ever will,
disgust me. As for ----, I cannot justify him; but he stands in no one
of the former classes. When he was young he just looked enough into your
books to believe you taught republicanism and stoicism; ergo, that he
was of your opinion and you of his, and that was all. Systems of
philosophy were never his taste or forte. And I verily believe that his
conduct originated wholly and solely in the effects which the trade of
reviewing never fails to produce at certain times on the best
minds,--presumption, petulance, callousness to personal feelings, and a
disposition to treat the reputations of their contemporaries as
playthings placed at their own disposal. Most certainly I cannot approve
of such things; but yet I have learned how difficult it is for a man who
has from earliest childhood preserved himself immaculate from all the
common faults and weaknesses of human nature, and who, never creating
any small disquietudes, has lived in general esteem and honour, to feel
remorse, or to admit that he has done wrong. Believe me, there is a
bluntness of conscience superinduced by a very unusual infrequency, as
well as by a habit of frequency of wrong actions. "Sunt quibus cecidisse
prodesset," says Augustine. To this add that business of review-writing,
carried on for fifteen years together, and which I have never hesitated
to pronounce an immoral employment, unjust to the author of the books
reviewed, injurious in its influences on the public taste and morality,
and still more injurious on its influences on the head and heart of the
reviewer himself. The _prægustatores_ among the luxurious Romans soon
lost their taste; and the verdicts of an old prægustator were sure to
mislead, unless when, like dreams, they were interpreted into
contraries. Our reviewers are the genuine descendants of these
palate-seared taste dictators. I am still confined by indisposition, but
mean to step out to Hazlitt's--almost my next door neighbour--at his
particular request. It is possible that I may find you there.
With kind remembrances to Mrs. Godwin,
Yours, dear Godwin, affectionately,
S. T. COLERIDGE.
From 19th April to 27th September 1811 Coleridge (_Essays on his Own
Times_, 733-938) was busy contributing articles again to _The Courier_
on all subjects of the day, their irony as bright, their imagery as
fresh, their philosophy as sound as anything he had formerly written.
But Coleridge ceased to write for _The Courier_ when he discovered that
it was not an independent paper. An article on the Duke of York written
by Coleridge, after having been set up in type, was suppressed, at the
instigation of the Government. He wrote to Beaumont on 7th December
1811: "I have not been at _The Courier_ office for some months past. I
detest writing politics even on the right side; and when I discovered
that _The Courier_ was not the independent paper I had been led to
believe, and had myself over and over again asserted, I wrote no more
for it.... I will write for the _Permanent_, or not at all." (Coleorton
_Memorials_ ii, 162, 7th December 1811.)
During the winter of 1811-12 Coleridge did something for the _Permanent_
in the shape of a new course of Lectures on Shakespeare. The course
lasted from the beginning of November 1811 to 28th January 1812. The
Lectures are published in T. Ashe's edition (Bohn Library, pp. 33-165).
The finest of the Lectures is No. IX, given on 16th December 1811. The
Lectures were delivered at the London Philosophical Society's Rooms,
Fetter Lane, and were attended, according to Henry Crabb Robinson, by
enthusiastic audiences; and the course closed with _éclat_. On one
occasion Rogers and Byron were present. The following letter to Dr.
Andrew Bell, whom, it will be remembered, he corresponded with while he
was giving his first course, is a characteristic bit of Coleridge's
application of the Law of Association.
LETTER 149. TO DR. ANDREW BELL (Southey's _Life of Bell_, ii, 645)
Mr. Pople's, 67 Chancery Lane
Holborn, 30 November 1811.
My Dear Sir,
The room I lecture in is very comfortable, and of a grave academic
appearance; the company highly respectable, though (unluckily) rather
scanty; but the entrance, which is under a short passage from Fetter
Lane, some thirty doors or more from Fleet Street, is disagreeable even
to foot-comers, and far more so to carriages, from the narrowness and
bendings of the lane. This, and in truth, the very name of _Fetter_
Lane, renowned exclusively for pork and sausages, have told against me;
and I pay an exorbitant price in proportion to the receipts. I should
doubtless feel myself honoured by your attendance on some one night; but
such is your distance, and such is the weather, that I scarce dare
_wish_ it, much less ask or expect it.
I wrote a long letter to you concerning the sophistications of your
system at present in vogue, the inevitable consequences on the whole
mass of moral feelings, even of the dissenters themselves, and the
courage as well as fortitude, required for the effort to do one's duty.
But I asked myself why I should give you pain, and destroyed it. Yet
come what will, the subject shall be treated fully, intrepidly, and by
close deduction from settled first principles, in the first volume of
the recommencing _Friend_, which I hope to bring out early in the
spring, on a quarterly or four-monthly plan, in partnership with a
publisher who is personally my friend, and who will take on himself all
the _business_, and leave me exclusively occupied in the composition.
Even to this day I have not received nearly one-half of the
subscriptions for the former numbers, and am expiating the error by all
sorts of perplexities and embarrassments. A man who has nothing better
than prudence is fit for no world to come; and he who does not possess
it in full activity, is as unfit for the present world. What then shall
we say? Have both prudence and the moral sense, but subordinate the
former to the latter; and so possess the flexibility and address of the
serpent to glide through the brakes and jungles of this life, with the
wings of the dove to carry us upward to a better!
May the Almighty bless and preserve you, my dear Sir! With most
unfeigned love and honour, I remain--and till I lose all sense of my
better being, of the veiled immortal within me, ever must remain, your
obliged and grateful friend,
S. T. COLERIDGE.]
FOOTNOTES:
[26] [See _Letters_, p. 590, and Professor Knight's _Life of
Wordsworth_, ch. XXV, for full account of the misunderstanding.]
[27] [Letter CLXXXI precedes our 147.]