Biographia Epistolaris Part 27

LETTER 94. TO DAVY

Keswick, Friday Evening, July 25, 1800.

My dear Davy

Work hard, and if success do not dance up like the bubbles in the salt (with the spirit lamp under it), may the Devil and his dam take success!

My dear fellow! from the window before me there is a great "camp" of mountains. Giants seem to have pitched their tents there. Each mountain is a giant's tent, and how the light streams from them. Davy! I "ache"

for you to be with us.

W. Wordsworth is such a lazy fellow, that I bemire myself by making promises for him: the moment I received your letter, I wrote to him. He will, I hope, write immediately to Biggs and Cottle. At all events, those poems must not as yet be delivered up to them, because that beautiful poem, "The Brothers", which I read to you in Paul Street, I neglected to deliver to you, and that must begin the volume. I trust, however, that I have invoked the sleeping bard with a spell so potent, that he will awake and deliver up that sword of Argantyr, which is to rive the enchanter "Gaudyverse" from his crown to his foot.

What did you think of that case I translated for you from the German?

That I was a well-meaning sutor who had ultra-crepidated[1] with more zeal than wisdom!! I give myself credit for that word "ultra- crepidated," it started up in my brain like a creation. I write to Tobin by this post. G.o.dwin is gone Irelandward, on a visit to Curran, says the "Morning Post"; to Grattan, writes C. Lamb.

We drank tea the night before I left Grasmere, on the island in that lovely lake; our kettle swung over the fire, hanging from the branch of a fir-tree, and I lay and saw the woods, and mountains, and lake all trembling, and as it were idealized through the suble smoke, which rose up from the clear, red embers of the fir-apples which we had collected: afterwards we made a glorious bonfire on the margin, by some elder bushes, whose twigs heaved and sobbed in the uprus.h.i.+ng column of smoke, and the image of the bonfire, and of us that danced round it, ruddy, laughing faces in the twilight; the image of this in a lake, smooth as that sea, to whose waves the Son of G.o.d had said, "Peace!" May G.o.d, and all his sons, love you as I do.

S. T. COLERIDGE.

Sara desires her kind remembrances. Hartley is a spirit that dances on an aspen leaf; the air that yonder sallowfaced and yawning tourist is breathing, is to my babe a perpetual nitrous oxide. Never was more joyous creature born. Pain with him is so wholly transubstantiated by the joys that had rolled on before, and rushed on after, that oftentimes five minutes after his mother has whipt him, he has gone up and asked her to whip him again.[2]

[Footnote 1: "Ne sutor ultra crepidam."]

[Footnote 2: Letter CX follows No. 94.]

Coleridge was now as enamoured of the Lake District as he had been of Stowey. On 22nd September he wrote to G.o.dwin.

LETTER 95. TO G.o.dWIN

Monday, Sept. 22, 1800.

Dear G.o.dwin,

I received your letter, and with it the enclosed note,[1] which shall be punctually re-delivered to you on the first of October.

Your tragedy [2] to be exhibited at Christmas! I have, indeed, merely read through your letter; so it is not strange that my heart continues beating out of time. Indeed, indeed G.o.dwin, such a stream of hope and fear rushed in on me, as I read the sentence, as you would not permit yourself to feel! If there be anything yet undreamt of in our philosophy; if it be, or if it be possible, that thought can impel thought out of the usual limit of a man's own skull and heart; if the cl.u.s.ter of ideas which const.i.tute an ident.i.ty, do ever connect and unite into a greater whole; if feelings could ever propagate themselves without the servile ministrations of undulating air or reflected light; I seem to feel within myself a strength and a power of desire that might dart a modifying, commanding impulse on a whole theatre. What does all this mean? Alas! that sober sense should know no other way to construe all this, than by the tame phrase, I wish you success! That which Lamb informed you is founded on truth. Mr. Sheridan sent, through the medium of Stuart, a request to Wordsworth to present a tragedy to his stage; and to me a declaration, that the failure of my piece was owing to my obstinacy in refusing any alteration. I laughed and Wordsworth smiled; but my tragedy will remain at Keswick, and Wordsworth's is not likely to emigrate from Grasmere. Wordsworth's drama is, in its present state, not fit for the stage, and he is not well enough to submit to the drudgery of making it so. Mine is fit for nothing, except to excite in the minds of good men the hope "that the young man is likely to do better." In the first moments I thought of re-writing it, and sent to Lamb for the copy with this intent. I read an Act, and altered my opinion, and with it my wish.

Your feelings respecting Baptism are, I suppose, much like mine! At times I dwell on Man with such reverence, resolve all his follies into such grand primary laws of intellect, and in such wise so contemplate them as ever-varying incarnations of the Eternal Life--that the Llama's dung-pellet, or the cow-tail which the dying Brahmin clutches convulsively, become sanctified and sublime by the feelings which cl.u.s.ter round them. In that mood I exclaim, my boys shall be christened!

But then another fit of moody philosophy attacks me. I look at my doted-on Hartley--he moves, he lives, he finds impulses from within and from without, he is the darling of the sun and of the breeze. Nature seems to bless him as a thing of her own. He looks at the clouds, the mountains, the living beings of the earth, and vaults and jubilates!

Solemn looks and solemn words have been hitherto connected in his mind with great and magnificent objects only: with lightning, with thunder, with the waterfall blazing in the sunset. Then I say, shall I suffer him to see grave countenances and hear grave accents, while his face is sprinkled? Shall I be grave myself, and tell a lie to him? Or shall I laugh, and teach him to insult the feelings of his fellow men? Besides, are we not all in this present hour, fainting beneath the duty of Hope?

From such thoughts I stand up, and vow a book of severe a.n.a.lysis, in which I shall tell "all" I believe to be truth in the nakedest language in which it can be told.

My wife is now quite comfortable. Surely you might come and spend the very next four weeks, not without advantage to both of us. The very glory of the place is coming on; the local genius is just arraying himself in his higher attributes. But, above all, I press it because my mind has been busied with speculations that are closely connected with those pursuits that have hitherto const.i.tuted your utility and importance: and, ardently as I wish you success on the stage, I yet cannot frame myself to the thought that you should cease to appear as a bold moral thinker. I wish you to write a book on the power of words, and the processes by which human feelings form affinities with them--in short, I wish you to "philosophize" Horne Tooke's system, and to solve the great questions--whether there be reason to hold that an action bearing the semblance of predesigning consciousness may yet be simply organic, and whether a series of such actions are possible--and close on the heels of this question would follow the old, "Is logic the essence of thinking?"--in other words, "Is thinking possible without arbitrary signs? or how far is the word arbitrary a misnomer? are not words, etc., parts and germinations of the plant, and what is the law of their growth?" In something of this order I would endeavour to destroy the old ant.i.thesis of Words and Things, elevating, as it were, Words into Things, and living things too. All the nonsense of vibrations, etc., you would, of course, dismiss.

If what I have here written appear nonsense to you, or common sense in a harlequinade of "outre" expressions, suspend your judgment till we see each other.

Yours sincerely,

S. T. COLERIDGE.

I was in the country when "Wallenstein" was published. Longman sent me down half-a-dozen--the carriage back the book was not worth.

[Footnote 1: A loan often pounds.]

[Footnote 2: "Antonio."]

Coleridge had asked G.o.dwin to stand G.o.dfather to his child, which compliment G.o.dwin declined. Hence the pa.s.sage in the above letter on Baptism.

Davy now occupied a large part of Coleridge's attention. On 9th October he wrote:

LETTER 96. To DAVY

Thursday night, October 9, 1800.

My dear Davy,

I was right glad, glad with a "stagger" of the heart, to see your writing again. Many a moment have I had all my France and England curiosity suspended and lost, looking in the advertis.e.m.e.nt front column of the "Morning Post Gazetteer", for "Mr. Davy's Galvanic habitudes of charcoal. ..." Upon my soul, I believe there is not a letter in those words round which a world of imagery does not circ.u.mvolve; your room, the garden, the cold bath, the moonlight rocks, Barristed, Moore, and simple-looking Frere, and dreams of wonderful things attached to your name--and Skiddaw, and Glaramara, and Eagle Crag, and you, and Wordsworth, and me, on the top of them! I pray you do write to me immediately, and tell me what you mean by the possibility of your a.s.suming a new occupation; [1] have you been successful to the extent of your expectations in your late chemical inquiries?

In your poem,[2] "impressive" is used for "impressible" or pa.s.sive, is it not? If so, it is not English; life "diffusive" likewise is not English. The last stanza introduces "confusion" into my mind, and despondency--and has besides been so often said by the materialists, etc., that it is not worth repeating. If the poem had ended more originally, in short, but for the last stanza, I will venture to affirm that there were never so many lines which so uninterruptedly combined natural and beautiful words with strict philosophic truths, "i.e.", scientifically philosophic. Of the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh stanzas, I am doubtful which is the most beautiful. Do not imagine that I cling to a fond love of future ident.i.ty, but the thought which you have expressed in the last stanzas might be more grandly, and therefore more consolingly exemplified. I had forgot to say that sameness and ident.i.ty are words too etymologically the same to be placed so close to each other.

As to myself, I am doing little worthy the relation. I write for Stuart in the "Morning Post", and I am compelled by the G.o.d Pecunia, which was one name of the supreme Jupiter, to give a volume of letters from Germany, which will be a decent "lounge" book, and not an atom more. The "Christabel" was running up to 1,300 lines, and was so much admired by Wordsworth, that he thought it indelicate to print two volumes with his name, in which so much of another man's was included; and which was of more consequence, the poem was in direct opposition to the very purpose for which the lyrical ballads were published, viz., an experiment to see how far those pa.s.sions which alone give any value to extraordinary incidents were capable of interesting in and for themselves in the incidents of common life. We mean to publish the "Christabel", therefore, with a long blank-verse poem of Wordsworth's, ent.i.tled "The Pedlar".[3] I a.s.sure you I think very differently of "Christabel". I would rather have written "Ruth", and "Nature's Lady",[4] than a million such poems. But why do I calumniate my own spirit by saying I would rather? G.o.d knows it is as delightful to me that they "are" written. I "know" that at present, and I "hope" that it "will" be so; my mind has "disciplined" itself into a willing exertion of its powers, without any reference to their comparative value.

I cannot speak favourably of W.'s health, but indeed he has not done common justice to Dr. Beddoes's kind prescriptions. I saw his countenance darken, and all his hopes vanish, when he saw the "prescriptions"--his "scepticism" concerning medicines! nay, it is not enough "scepticism"! Yet, now that peas and beans are over, I have hopes that he will in good earnest make a fair and full trial. I rejoice with sincere joy at Beddoes's recovery.

Wordsworth is fearful you have been much teazed by the printers on his account, but you can sympathise with him. The works which I gird myself up to attack as soon as money concerns will permit me, are the "Life of Lessing", and the "Essay on Poetry". The latter is still more at my heart than the former: its t.i.tle would be an essay on the elements of poetry--it would in reality be a "disguised" system of morals and politics.

When you write, and do write soon, tell me how I can get your essay on the nitrous oxide. If you desired Johnson to have one sent to Lackington's, to be placed in Mr. Crosthwaite's monthly parcel for Keswick, I should receive it. Are your galvanic discoveries important?

What do they lead to? All this is "ultra crepidation", but would to heaven I had as much knowledge as I have sympathy! My wife and children are well; the baby was dying some weeks ago, so the good people would have it baptized; his name is Derwent Coleridge, so called from the river, for fronting our house the Greta runs into the Derwent. Had it been a girl, the name should have been Greta. By the by, Greta, or rather Grieta, is exactly the Cocytus of the Greeks; the word, literally rendered in modern English, is, "The loud Lamenter;" to griet, in the Cambrian dialect, signifying to roar aloud for grief or pain, and it does "roar" with a vengeance!

I will say nothing about Spring--a thirsty man tries to think of anything but the stream when he knows it to be ten miles off!

G.o.d bless you! Your most affectionate

S. T. COLERIDGE.[5]

Another letter to G.o.dwin at this time indicates that Coleridge was still expecting to be able to finish "Christabel", which as a completed poem, Coleridge, as we have already seen, calculated would run up to 1,300 lines.

[Footnote 1: No doubt the leaving of the Pneumatic for the Royal Inst.i.tution.]