CLXXI. TO FRANCIS JEFFREY.
Grasmere, December 14, 1808.
Dear Sir,—The only thing in which I have been able to detect any degree of hypochrondriasis in my feelings is the reading and answering of letters, and in this instance I have been at times so wofully under its domination as to have left every letter received lie unopened for weeks together, all the while thoroughly ashamed of the weakness and yet without power to get rid of it. This, however, has not been the case of late, and I was never yet so careless as knowingly to suffer a letter relating to money to remain unanswered by the next post in my power. I, therefore, on reading your very kind letter of 8 Dec. conclude that one letter from you during my movements from Grasmere, now to Keswick, now to Bratha and Elleray, and now to Kendal, has been mislayed.
As I considered your insertion of the review of Mr. Clarkson’s as an act of personal kindness and attention to the request of one a stranger to you except by name, the thought of any pecuniary remuneration never once occurred to me; and had it been written at your request I should have thought twenty guineas a somewhat extravagant price whether I considered the quantity or quality of the communication. As to the alterations, your character and interest, as the known Editor of the Review, are pledged for a general consistency of principle in the different articles with each other, and you had every possible right to alter or omit ad libitum, unless a special condition had been insisted on of aut totum aut nihil. As the writer, therefore, I neither thought nor cared about the alterations; as a general reader, I differed with you as [to] the scale of merit relatively to Mr. Wilberforce, whose services I deem to have been overrated, not, perhaps, so much absolutely as by comparison. At all events, some following passages should have been omitted, as they are in blank contradiction to the paragraph inserted, and betrayed a co-presence of two writers in one article. As to the longer paragraph, Wordsworth thinks you on the true side; and Clarkson himself that you were not far from the truth. As to my own opinion, I believed what I wrote, and deduced my belief from all the facts pro and con, with which Mr. Clarkson’s conversation have furnished [me]; but such is my detestation of that pernicious Minister,[49] such my contempt of the cowardice and fatuity of his measures, and my horror at the yet unended train of their direful consequences, that, if obedience to truth could ever be painful to me, this would have been. I acted well in writing what on the whole I believed the more probable, and I was pleased that you acted equally well in altering it according to your convictions.
I had hoped to have furnished a letter of more interesting contents to you, but an honest gentleman in London having taken a great fancy to two thirds of the possible profits of my literary labours without a shadow of a claim, and having over-hurried the business through overweening of my simplicity and carelessness, has occasioned me some perplexity and a great deal of trouble and letter-writing. I will write, however, again to you my first leisure evening, whether I hear from you or no in the interim.
I trust you have received my scrawl with the prospectus[50] and feel sincerely thankful to you for your kindness on the arrival of the prospectuses, prior to your receipt of the letter which was meant to have announced them. But our post here is very irregular as well as circuitous—but three times a week—and then, too, we have to walk more than two miles for the chance of finding letters. This you will be so good as to take into account whenever my answers do not arrive at the time they might have been expected from places in general. I remain, dear sir, with kind and respectful feeling, your obliged,
S. T. Coleridge.
I entirely coincide in your dislike of “speculative gloom”—it is illogical as well as barbarous, and almost as bad as “picturesque eye.” I do not know how I came to pass it; for when I first wrote it, I undermarked it, not as the expression, but as a remembrancer of some better that did not immediately occur to me. “Year-long absences” I think doubtful—had any one objected to it, I should have altered it; but it would not much offend me in the writings of another. But to “moral impulses” I see at present no objections, nor does any other phrase suggest itself to me which would have expressed my meaning. That there is a semblance of presumptuousness in the manner I exceedingly regret, if so it be—my heart bears me witness that the feeling had no place there. Yet I need not say to you that it is impossible to succeed in such a work unless at the commencement of it there be a quickening and throb in the pulse of hope; and what if a blush from inward modesty disguise itself on these occasions, and the hectic of unusual self-assertion increase the appearance of that excess which it in reality resists and modifies? It will amuse you to be informed that from two correspondents, both of them men of great literary celebrity, I have received reproof for a supposed affectation of humility in the style of the prospectus. In my own consciousness I was guilty of neither. Yet surely to advance as a teacher, and in the very act to declare yourself inferior to those whom you propose to teach, is incongruous; and must disgust a pure mind by its evident hypocrisy.
CLXXII. TO THOMAS WILKINSON.[51]
Grasmere, December 31, 1808.
Dear Sir,—I thank you for your exertions in my behalf, and—which more deeply interests me—for the openness with which you have communicated your doubts and apprehensions. So much, indeed, am I interested, that I cannot lay down my head on my pillow in perfect tranquillity, without endeavoring to remove them. First, however, I must tell you that ... “The Friend” will not appear at the time conditionally announced. There are, besides, great difficulties at the Stamp Office concerning it. But the particulars I will detail when we meet. Myself, with William Wordsworth and the family, are glad that we are so soon to see you. Now then for what is so near my heart. Only a certain number of prospectuses were printed at Kendal, and sent to acquaintances. The much larger number, which were to have been printed at London, have not been printed. When they are, you will see in the article, noted in this copy, that I neither intend to omit, nor from any fear of offence have scrupled to announce my intention of treating, the subject of religion. I had supposed that the words “speculative gloom” would have conveyed this intention. I had inserted another article, which I was induced to omit, from the fear of exciting doubts and queries. This was: On the transition of natural religion into revelation, or the principle of internal guidance: and the grounds of the possibility of the connection of spiritual revelation with historic events; that is, its manifestation in the world of the senses. This meant as a preliminary—leaving, as already performed by others, the proof of the reality of this connection in the particular fact of Christianity. Herein I wished to prove only that true philosophy rather leads to Christianity, than contained anything preclusive of it, and therefore adopted the phrase used in the definition of philosophy in general: namely, The science which answers the question of things actual, how they are possible? Thus the laws of gravitation illustrate the possibility of the motion of the heavenly bodies, the action of the lever, etc.; the reality of which was already known. I mention this, because the argument assigned which induced me to omit it in a prospectus was, that by making a distinction between revelation in itself (i. e. a principle of internal supernatural guidance), and the same revelation conjoined with the power of external manifestation by supernatural works, would proclaim me to be a Quaker, and “The Friend” as intended to propagate peculiar and sectarian principles. Think then, dear Friend! what my regret was at finding that you had taken it for granted that I denied the existence of an internal monitor! I trust I am neither of Paul, or of Apollos, or of Cephas; but of Christ. Yet I feel reverential gratitude toward those who have conveyed the spirit of Christ to my heart and understanding so as to afford light to the latter and vital warmth to the former. Such gratitude I owe and feel toward W. Penn. Take his Preface to G. Fox’s Journal, and his Letter to his Son,—if they contain a faithful statement of genuine Christianity according to your faith, I am one with you. I subscribe to each and all of the principles therein laid down; and by them I propose to try, and endeavour to justify, the charge made by me (my conscience bears me witness) in the spirit of entire love against some passages of the journals of later Friends. Oh—and it is a groan of earnest aspiration! a strong wish of bitter tears and bitter self-dissatisfaction,—Oh that in all things, in self-subjugation, unwearied beneficence, and unfeigned listening and obedience to the Voice within, I were as like the evangelic John Woolman, as I know myself to be in the belief of the existence and the sovran authority of that Voice! When we meet, I will endeavour to be wholly known to you as I am, in principle at least.
A few words more. Unsuspicious of the possibility of misunderstanding, I had inserted in this prospectus Dress and Dancing among the fine Arts, the principles common to which I was to develope. Now surely anything common to Dress or Dancing with Architecture, Gardening, and Poetry could contain nothing to alarm any man who is not alarmed by Gardening, Poetry, etc., and secondly, principles common to Poetry, Music, etc., etc., could hardly be founded in the ridiculous hopping up and down in a modern ball-room, or the washes, paints, and patches of a fine lady’s toilet. It is well known how much I admired Thomas Clarkson’s Chapter on Dancing. The truth is, that I referred to the drapery and ornamental decoration of Painting, Statuary, and the Greek Spectacles; and to the scientific dancing of the ancient Greeks, the business of a life confined to a small class, and placed under the direction of particular magistrates. My object was to prove the truth of the principles by shewing that even dress and dancing, when the ingenuity and caprice of man had elaborated them into Fine Arts, were bottomed in the same principles. But desirous even to avoid suspicion, the passage will be omitted in the future prospectuses. Farewell! till we meet.
S. T. Coleridge. See P. S.
P. S. Do you not know enough of the world to be convinced that by declaring myself a warm defender of the Established Church against all sectarians, or even by attacking Quakerism in particular as a sect hateful to the bigots of the day from its rejection of priesthood and outward sacraments, I should gain twenty subscribers to one? It shocks me even to think that so mean a motive could be supposed to influence me. I say aloud everywhere, that in the essentials of their faith I believe as the Quakers do, and so I make enemies of the Church, of the Calvinists, and even of the Unitarians. Again, I declare my dissatisfaction with several points both of notion and of practice among the present Quakers—I dare not conceal my convictions—and therefore receive little good opinion even from those, with whom I most accord. But Truth is sacred.