CLXXXIII. TO SIR G. BEAUMONT.
J. J. Morgan’s, Esq., 7, Portland Place, Hammersmith,
Saturday morning, December 7, 1811.
Dear Sir George,—On Wednesday night I slept in town in order to have a mask[72] taken, from which, or rather with which, Allston means to model a bust of me. I did not, therefore, receive your letter and the enclosed till Thursday night, eleven o’clock, on my return from the lecture; and early on Friday morning, I was roused from my first sleep by an agony of toothache, which continued almost without intermission the whole day, and has left my head and the whole of my trunk, “not a man but a bruise.”[73] What can I say more, my dear Sir George, than that I deeply feel the proof of your continued friendship, and pray from my inmost soul that more perseverance in efforts of duty may render me more worthy of your kindness than I at present am? Ingratitude, like all crimes that are at the same time vices—bad as malady, and worse as symptom—is of so detestable a nature that an honest man will mourn in silence under real injuries, [rather] than hazard the very suspicion of it, and will be slow to avail himself of Lord Bacon’s remark[74] (much as he may admire its profundity),—“Crimen ingrati animi, quod magnis ingeniis haud raro objicitur, sæpius nil aliud est quam perspicacia quædam in causam beneficii collati.” Yet that man has assuredly tenfold reason to be grateful who can be so, both head and heart, who, at once served and honoured, knows himself more delighted by the motive that influenced his friend than by the benefit received by himself; were it only perhaps for this cause—that the consciousness of always repaying the former in kind takes away all regret that he is incapable of returning the latter.
Mr. Dawe, Royal Associate, who plastered my face for me, says that he never saw so excellent a mask, and so unaffected by any expression of pain or uneasiness. On Tuesday, at the farthest, a cast will be finished, which I was vain enough to desire to be packed up and sent to Dunmow. With it you will find a chalk drawing of my face,[75] which I think far more like than any former attempt, excepting Allston’s full-length portrait of me,[76] which, with all his casts, etc., two or three valuable works of the Venetian school, and his Jason—almost finished, and on which he had employed eighteen months without intermission—are lying at Leghorn, with no chance of procuring them. There will likewise be an epistolary essay for Lady Beaumont on the subject of religion in reference to my own faith; it was too long to send by the post.
Dawe is engaged on a picture (the figures about four feet) from my poem of Love.
She leaned beside the armed man,
The statue of the armed knight;
She stood and listened to my harp
Amid the lingering light.
His dying words—but when I reached, etc.
All impulses of soul and sense, etc.
His sketch is very beautiful, and has more expression than I ever found in his former productions—excepting, indeed, his Imogen.
Allston is hard at work on a large Scripture piece—the dead man recalled to life by touching the bones of the Prophet. He models every figure. Dawe, who was delighted with the Cupid and Psyche, seemed quite astonished at the facility and exquisiteness with which Allston modelled. Canova at Rome expressed himself to me in very warm terms of admiration on the same subject. He means to exhibit but two or at the most three pictures, all poetical or history painting, in part by my advice. It seemed to me impolitic to appear to be trying in half a dozen ways, as if his mind had not yet discovered its main current. The longer I live the more deeply am I convinced of the high importance, as a symptom, of the love of beauty in a young painter. It is neither honourable to a young man’s heart or head to attach himself year after year to old or deformed objects, comparatively too so easy, especially if bad drawing and worse colouring leaves the spectator’s imagination at lawless liberty, and he cries out, “How very like!” just as he would at a coal in the centre of the fire, or at a frost-figure on a window pane. It is on this, added to his quiet unenvious spirit, to his lofty feelings concerning his art, and to the religious purity of his moral character, that I chiefly rest my hopes of Allston’s future fame. His best productions seem to please him principally because he sees and has learnt something which enables him to promise himself, “I shall do better in my next.”
I have not been at the “Courier” office for some months past. I detest writing politics, even on the right side, and when I discovered that the “Courier” was not the independent paper I had been led to believe, and had myself over and over again asserted, I wrote no more for it. Greatly, indeed, do I prefer the present Ministers to the leaders of any other party, but indiscriminate support of any class of men I dare not give, especially when there is so easy and honourable an alternative as not to write politics at all, which, henceforth, nothing but blank necessity shall compel me to do. I will write for the Permanent, or not at all. “The Comet” therefore I have never seen or heard of it, yet most true it is that I myself have composed some verses on the comet, but I am quite certain that no one ever saw them, for the best of all reasons, that my own brain is the only substance on which they have been recorded. I will, however, consign them to paper, and send them to you with the “Courier” poem as soon as I can procure it, for the curiosity of the thing....
My most affectionate respects to Lady Beaumont, and believe me, dear Sir George, with heartfelt regard,
Your obliged and grateful friend,
S. T. Coleridge.
P. S. Were you in town, I should be very sorry, indeed, to see you in Fetter Lane.[77] The lectures were meant for the young men of the City. Several of my friends join to take notes, and if I can correct what they can shape out of them into any tolerable form, I will send them to you. On Monday I lecture on “Love and the Female Character as displayed by Shakespeare.” Good Dr. Bell is in town. He came from Keswick, all delight with my little Sara, and quite enchanted with Southey. Some flights of admiration in the form of questions to me (“Did you ever see anything so finely conceived? so profoundly thought? as this passage in his review on the Methodists? or on the Education?” etc.) embarrassed me in a very ridiculous way; and, I verily believe, that my odd way of hesitating left on Bell’s mind some shade of a suspicion, as if I did not like to hear my friend so highly extolled. Half a dozen words from Southey would have precluded this, without diminution to his own fame—I mean, in conversation with Dr. Bell.