CI. TO ROBERT SOUTHEY.
Stowey, Tuesday evening, October 15, 1799.
It is fashionable among our philosophizers to assert the existence of a surplus of misery in the world, which, in my opinion, is no proof that either systematic thinking or unaffected self-observation is fashionable among them. But Hume wrote, and the French imitated him, and we the French, and the French us; and so philosophisms fly to and fro, in series of imitated imitations—shadows of shadows of shadows of a farthing-candle placed between two looking-glasses. For in truth, my dear Southey! I am harassed with the rheumatism in my head and shoulders, not without arm-and-thigh-twitches—but when the pain intermits it leaves my sensitive frame so sensitive! My enjoyments are so deep, of the fire, of the candle, of the thought I am thinking, of the old folio I am reading, and the silence of the silent house is so most and very delightful, that upon my soul! the rheumatism is no such bad thing as people make for. And yet I have, and do suffer from it, in much pain and sleeplessness and often sick at stomach through indigestion of the food, which I eat from compulsion. Since I received your former letter, I have spent a few days at Upcott;[209] but was too unwell to be comfortable, so I returned yesterday. Poor Tom![210] he has an adventurous calling. I have so wholly forgotten my geography that I don’t know where Ferrol is, whether in France or Spain. Your dear mother must be very anxious indeed. If he return safe, it will have been good. God grant he may!
Massena![211] and what say you of the resurrection and glorification of the Saviour of the East after his trials in the wilderness? (I am afraid that this is a piece of blasphemy; but it was in simple verity such an infusion of animal spirits into me.) Buonaparte! Buonaparte! dear, dear, dear Buonaparte! It would be no bad fun to hear the clerk of the Privy Council read this paragraph before Pitt, etc. “You ill-looking frog-voiced reptile! mind you lay the proper emphasis on the third dear, or I’ll split your clerkship’s skull for you!” Poole ordered a paper. He has found out, he says, why the newspapers had become so indifferent to him. Inventive Genius! He begs his kind remembrances to you. In consequence of the news he burns like Greek Fire, under all the wets and waters of this health-and-harvest destroying weather. He flames while his barley smokes. “See!” he says, “how it grows out again, ruining the prospects of those who had cut it down!” You are harvest-man enough, I suppose, to understand the metaphor. Jackson[212] is, I believe, out of all doubt a bad man. Why is it, if it be, and I fear it is, why is it that the studies of music and painting are so unfavourable to the human heart? Painters have been commonly very clever men, which is not so generally the case with musicians, but both alike are almost uniformly debauchees. It is superfluous to say how much your account of Bampfylde[213] interested me. Predisposition to madness gave him a cast of originality, and he had a species of taste which only genius could give; but his genius does not appear a powerful or ebullient faculty (nearer to Lamb’s than to the Gebir-man [Landor], so I judge from the few specimens I have seen). If you think otherwise, you are right I doubt not. I shall be glad to give Mr. and Mrs. Keenan[214] the right hand of welcome with looks and tones in fit accompaniment. For the wife of a man of genius who sympathises effectively with her husband in his habits and feelings is a rara avis with me; though a vast majority of her own sex and too many of ours will scout her for a rara piscis. If I am well enough, Sara and I go to Bristol in a few days. I hope they will not come in the mean time. It is singularly unpleasant to me that I cannot renew our late acquaintances in Exeter without creating very serious uneasinesses at Ottery, Northmore is so preëminently an offensive character to the aristocrats. He sent Paine’s books as a present to a clergyman of my brother’s acquaintance, a Mr. Markes. This was silly enough....
I will set about “Christabel” with all speed; but I do not think it a fit opening poem. What I think would be a fit opener, and what I would humbly lay before you as the best plan of the next Anthologia, I will communicate shortly in another letter entirely on this subject. Mohammed I will not forsake; but my money-book I must write first. In the last, or at least in a late “Monthly Magazine” was an Essay on a Jesuitic conspiracy and about the Russians. There was so much genius in it that I suspected William Taylor for the author; but the style was so nauseously affected, so absurdly pedantic, that I was half-angry with myself for the suspicion. Have you seen Bishop Prettyman’s book? I hear it is a curiosity. You remember Scott the attorney, who held such a disquisition on my simile of property resembling matter rather than blood? and eke of St. John? and you remember, too, that I shewed him in my face that there was no room for him in my heart? Well, sir! this man has taken a most deadly hatred to me, and how do you think he revenges himself? He imagines that I write for the “Morning Post,” and he goes regularly to the coffee-houses, calls for the paper, and reading it he observes aloud, “What damn’d stuff of poetry is always crammed in this paper! such damn’d silly nonsense! I wonder what coxcomb it is that writes it! I wish the paper was kicked out of the coffee-house.” Now, but for Cruikshank, I could play Scott a precious trick by sending to Stuart, “The Angry Attorney, a True Tale,” and I know more than enough of Scott’s most singular parti-coloured rascalities to make a most humorous and biting satire of it.
I have heard of a young Quaker who went to the Lobby, with a monstrous military cock-hat on his head, with a scarlet coat and up to his mouth in flower’d muslin, swearing too most bloodily—all “that he might not be unlike other people!” A Quaker’s son getting himself christen’d to avoid being remarkable is as improbable a lie as ever self-delusion permitted the heart to impose on the understanding, or the understanding to invent without the consent of the heart. But so it is. Soon after Lloyd’s arrival at Cambridge I understand Christopher Wordsworth wrote his uncle, Mr. Cookson,[215] that Lloyd was going to read Greek with him. Cookson wrote back recommending caution, and whether or no an intimacy with so marked a character might not be prejudicial to his academical interests. (This is his usual mild manner.) Christopher Wordsworth returned for answer that Lloyd was by no means a democrat, and as a proof of it, transcribed the most favourable passages from the “Edmund Oliver,” and here the affair ended. You remember Lloyd’s own account of this story, of course, more accurately than I, and can therefore best judge how far my suspicions of falsehood and exaggeration were well-founded. My dear Southey! the having a bad heart and not having a good one are different things. That Charles Lloyd has a bad heart, I do not even think; but I venture to say, and that openly, that he has not a good one. He is unfit to be any man’s friend, and to all but a very guarded man he is a perilous acquaintance. Your conduct towards him, while it is wise, will, I doubt not, be gentle. Of confidence he is not worthy; but social kindness and communicativeness purely intellectual can do you no harm, and may be the means of benefiting his character essentially. Aut ama me quia sum Dei, aut ut sim Dei, said St. Augustin, and in the laxer sense of the word “Ama” there is wisdom in the expression notwithstanding its wit. Besides, it is the way of peace. From Bristol perhaps I go to London, but I will write you where I am. Yours affectionately,
S. T. Coleridge.
I have great affection for Lamb, but I have likewise a perfect Lloyd-and-Lambophobia! Independent of the irritation attending an epistolary controversy with them, their prose comes so damn’d dear! Lloyd especially writes with a woman’s fluency in a large rambling hand, most dull though profuse of feeling. I received from them in last quarter letters so many, that with the postage I might have bought Birch’s Milton.—Sara will write soon. Our love to Edith and your mother.