CLXXVI. TO THOMAS POOLE.
October 9, 1809.
My dear Poole,—I received yours late last night, and sincerely thank you for the contents. The whole shall be arranged as you have recommended. Yet if I know my own wishes, I would far rather you had refused me, and said you should have an opportunity in a few days of explaining your motives in person, for oh, the autumn is divine here. You never beheld, I will answer for it, such combinations of exquisite beauty with sufficient grandeur of elevation, even in Switzerland. Besides, I sorely want to talk with you on many points.
All the defects you have mentioned I am perfectly aware of, and am anxiously endeavouring to avoid. There is too often an entortillage in the sentences and even in the thought (which nothing can justify), and, always almost, a stately piling up of story on story in one architectural period, which is not suited to a periodical essay or to essays at all (Lord Bacon, whose style mine more nearly resembles than any other, in his greater works, thought Seneca a better model for his Essays), but least of all suited to the present illogical age, which has, in imitation of the French, rejected all the cements of language, so that a popular book is now a mere bag of marbles, that is, aphorisms and epigrams on one subject. But be assured that the numbers will improve; indeed, I hope that if the dire stoppage have not prevented it, you will have seen proof of improvement already in the seventh and eighth numbers,—still more in the ninth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth numbers. Strange! but the “Three Graves” is the only thing I have yet heard generally praised and inquired after!! Remember how many different guests I have at my Round Table. I groan beneath the Errata, but I am thirty miles cross-post from my printer and publisher, and Southey, who has been my corrector, has been strangely oscitant, or, which I believe is sometimes the case, has not understood the sentences, and thought they might have a meaning for me though they had not for him. There was one direful one,[60] No. 5, p. 80, lines 3 and 4. Read,—“its functions being to take up the passive affections of the senses into distinct thoughts and judgements, according to its own essential forms, formæ formantes in the language of Lord Bacon in contradistinction to the formæ formatæ.”
My greatest difficulty will be to avoid that grievous defect of running one number into another, I not being present at the printing. To really cut down or stretch out every subject to the Procrustes-Bed of sixteen pages is not possible without a sacrifice of my whole plan, but most often I will divide them polypus-wise, so that the first half should get itself a new tail of its own, and the latter a new head, and always take care to leave off at a paragraph. With my best endeavours I am baffled in respect of making one Essay fill one number. The tenth number is, W. thinks, the most interesting, “On the Errors of both Parties,” or “Extremes Meet;” and, do what I would, it stretched to seven or eight pages more; but I have endeavoured to take your advice in toto, and shall announce to the public that, with the exception of my volume of Political Essays and State Memorials, and some technical works of Logic and Grammar, I shall consider “The Friend” as both the reservoir and the living fountain of all my mind, that is, of both my powers and my attainments, and shall therefore publish all my poems in “The Friend,” as occasion rises. I shall begin with the “Fears in Solitude,” and the “Ode on France,” which will fill up the remainder of No. 11; so that my next Essay on vulgar Errors concerning Taxation, in which I have alluded to a conversation with you, will just fill No. 12 by itself.
I have been much affected by your efforts respecting poor Blake. Cannot you with propriety give me that narrative? But, above all, if you have no particular objection, no very particular and insurmountable reason against it, do, do let me have that divine narrative of John Walford,[61] which of itself stamps you a poet of the first class in the pathetic, and the painting of poetry so very rarely combined.
As to politics, I am sad at the very best. Two cabinet ministers duelling on Cabinet measures like drunken Irishmen. O heaven, Poole! this is wringing the dregs in order to drink the last drops of degradation. Such base insensibility to the awfulness of their situation and the majesty of the country! As soon as I can get them transcribed, I will send you some most interesting letters from the ablest soldier I ever met with (extra aide-de-camp to Sir J. Moore, and shot through the body at Flushing, but still alive); they will serve as a key to more than one woe-trumpet in the Apocalypse of national calamity. But the truth is, that to combine a government every way fitted as ours is for quiet, justice, freedom, and commercial activity at home, with the conditions of raising up that individual greatness, and of securing in every department the very man for the very place, which are requisite for maintaining the safety of our Empire and the Majesty of our power abroad, is a state-riddle which yet remains to be solved. I have thought myself as well employed as a private citizen can be, in drawing off well-intentioned patriots from the wrong scent and pointing out what the true evils are and why, and the exceeding difficulty of removing them without hazarding worse.... I was asked for a motto for a market clock. I uttered the following literally, without a moment’s premeditation:—
What now, O man! thou dost or mean’st to do
Will help to give thee peace, or make thee rue,
When hovering o’er the Dot this hand shall tell
The moment that secures thee Heaven or Hell.[62]
May God bless you! My kindest remembrances to Mr. Chubb, and to Ward. Pray remember me when you write to your sister and Mr. King. Oh, but Poole! do stretch a point and come. If the F. rises to a 1,000 I will frank you. Do come; never will you have layed out money better.