CCXII. TO ROBERT SOUTHEY.
[May, 1817.]
Dear Southey,—Mr. Ludwig Tieck[142] has continued to express so anxious a wish to see you, as one man of genius sees another, that he will not lose even the slight chance of possibility that you may not have quitted Paris when he arrives there. I have only therefore (should this letter be delivered to you by Mr. Tieck) to tell you—first, that Mr. Tieck is the gentleman who was so kind to me at Rome; secondly, that he is a good man, emphatically, without taint of moral or religious infidelity; thirdly, that as a poet, critic, and moralist, he stands (in reputation) next to Goethe (and I believe that this reputation will be fame); lastly, it will interest you with Bristol, Keswick, and Grasmere associations, that Mr. Tieck has had to run, and has run, as nearly the same career in Germany as yourself and Wordsworth and (by the spray of being known to be intimate with you)
Yours sincerely,
S. T. Coleridge.
P. S. Should this meet you, for God’s sake, do let me know of your arrival in London; it is so very important that I should see you.
R. Southey, Esq.
Honoured by Mr. Ludwig Tieck.
CCXIII. to H. C. Robinson.[143]
June, 1817.
My dear Robinson,—I shall never forgive you if you do not try to make some arrangement to bring Mr. L. Tieck and yourself up to Highgate very soon. The day, the dinner-hour, you may appoint yourself; but what I most wish would be, either that Mr. Tieck would come in the first stage, so as either to walk or to be driven in Mr. Gillman’s gig to Caen Wood, and its delicious groves and alleys (the finest in England, a grand cathedral aisle of giant lime-trees, Pope’s favourite composition walk when with the old Earl, a brother-rogue of yours in the law line), or else to come up to dinner, sleep here, and return (if then return he must) in the afternoon four o’clock stage the day after. I should be most happy to make him and that admirable man, Mr. Frere,[144] acquainted—their pursuits have been so similar—and to convince Mr. Tieck that he is the man among us in whom taste at its maximum has vitalized itself into productive power. [For] genius, you need only show him the incomparable translation annexed to Southey’s “Cid” (which, by the bye, would perhaps give Mr. Tieck the most favourable impression of Southey’s own powers); and I would finish the work off by Mr. Frere’s “Aristophanes.” In such GOODNESS, too, as both my Mr. Frere (the Right Hon. J. H. Frere), and his brother George (the lawyer in Brunswick Square), live, move, and have their being, there is genius.
I have read two pages of “Lalla Rookh,” or whatever it is called. Merciful Heaven! I dare read no more, that I may be able to answer at once to any questions, “I have but just looked at the work.” O Robinson! if I could, or if I dared, act and feel as Moore and his set do, what havoc could I not make amongst their crockery-ware! Why, there are not three lines together without some adulteration of common English, and the ever-recurring blunder of using the possessive case, “compassion’s tears,” etc., for the preposition “of”—a blunder of which I have found no instances earlier than Dryden’s slovenly verses written for the trade. The rule is, that the case ’s is always personal; either it marks a person, or a personification, or the relique of some proverbial personification, as “Who for their belly’s sake,” in “Lycidas.” But for A to weep the tears of B puts me in mind of the exquisite passage in Rabelais where Pantagruel gives the page his cup, and begs him to go down into the courtyard, and curse and swear for him about half an hour or so.
God bless you!
S. T. Coleridge.