Yours, dear Godwin,
Letter 148. To Godwin
Friday morning, March 29, 1811.
Dear Godwin,
My chief motive in undertaking The First Mariner is merely to weave a few tendrils around your destined walking-stick, which, like those of the woodbine (that, serpent-like climbing up, and with tight spires embossing the straight hazel, rewards the lucky schoolboy’s search in the winter copse) may remain on it, when the woodbine, root and branch, lies trampled in the earth. I shall consider the work as a small plot of ground given up to you, to be sown at your own hazard with your own seed (gold-grains would have been but a bad saw, and besides have spoilt the metaphor). If the increase should more than repay your risk and labour, why then let me be one of your guests at Hendcot House. Your last letter impressed and affected me strongly. Ere I had yet read or seen your works, I, at Southey’s recommendation, wrote a sonnet in praise of the author. When I had read them, religious bigotry, the but half-understanding your principles, and the not half-understanding my own, combined to render me a warm and boisterous anti-Godwinist. But my warfare was open; my unfelt and harmless blows aimed at an abstraction I had christened with your name; and at that time, if not in the world’s favor, you were among the captains and chief men in its admiration. I became your acquaintance, when more years had brought somewhat more temper and tolerance; but I distinctly remember that the first turn in my mind towards you, the first movements of a juster appreciation of your merits, was occasioned by my disgust at the altered tone of language of many whom I had long known as your admirers and disciples—some of them, too, men who had made themselves a sort of reputation in minor circles as your acquaintances, and therefore your echoes by authority, who had themselves aided in attaching an unmerited ridicule to you and your opinions by their own ignorance, which led them to think the best settled truths, and indeed every thing in your Political Justice, whether assertion, or deduction, or conjecture, to have been new thoughts—downright creations! and by their own vanity, which enabled them to forget that everything must be new to him who knows nothing; others again, who though gifted with high talents, had yet been indebted to you and the discussions occasioned by your work, for much of their development, who had often and often styled you the Great Master, written verses in your honour, and, worse than all, had now brought your opinions—with many good and worthy men—into as unmerited an odium, as the former class had into contempt, by attempts equally unfeeling and unwise, to realize them in private life, to the disturbance of domestic peace. And lastly, a third class; but the name of —— spares me the necessity of describing it. In all these there was such a want of common sensibility, such a want of that gratitude to an intellectual benefactor, which even an honest reverence for their past selves should have secured, as did then, still does, and ever will, disgust me. As for ——, I cannot justify him; but he stands in no one of the former classes. When he was young he just looked enough into your books to believe you taught republicanism and stoicism; ergo, that he was of your opinion and you of his, and that was all. Systems of philosophy were never his taste or forte. And I verily believe that his conduct originated wholly and solely in the effects which the trade of reviewing never fails to produce at certain times on the best minds,—presumption, petulance, callousness to personal feelings, and a disposition to treat the reputations of their contemporaries as playthings placed at their own disposal. Most certainly I cannot approve of such things; but yet I have learned how difficult it is for a man who has from earliest childhood preserved himself immaculate from all the common faults and weaknesses of human nature, and who, never creating any small disquietudes, has lived in general esteem and honour, to feel remorse, or to admit that he has done wrong. Believe me, there is a bluntness of conscience superinduced by a very unusual infrequency, as well as by a habit of frequency of wrong actions. “Sunt quibus cecidisse prodesset,” says Augustine. To this add that business of review-writing, carried on for fifteen years together, and which I have never hesitated to pronounce an immoral employment, unjust to the author of the books reviewed, injurious in its influences on the public taste and morality, and still more injurious on its influences on the head and heart of the reviewer himself. The prægustatores among the luxurious Romans soon lost their taste; and the verdicts of an old prægustator were sure to mislead, unless when, like dreams, they were interpreted into contraries. Our reviewers are the genuine descendants of these palate-seared taste dictators. I am still confined by indisposition, but mean to step out to Hazlitt’s—almost my next door neighbour—at his particular request. It is possible that I may find you there.
With kind remembrances to Mrs. Godwin,
Yours, dear Godwin, affectionately,
From 19th April to 27th September 1811 Coleridge (Essays on his Own Times, 733–938) was busy contributing articles again to The Courier on all subjects of the day, their irony as bright, their imagery as fresh, their philosophy as sound as anything he had formerly written. But Coleridge ceased to write for The Courier when he discovered that it was not an independent paper. An article on the Duke of York written by Coleridge, after having been set up in type, was suppressed, at the instigation of the Government. He wrote to Beaumont on 7th December 1811: “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.... I will write for the Permanent, or not at all.” (Coleorton Memorials ii, 162, 7th December 1811.)
During the winter of 1811–12 Coleridge did something for the Permanent in the shape of a new course of Lectures on Shakespeare. The course lasted from the beginning of November 1811 to 28th January 1812. The Lectures are published in T. Ashe’s edition (Bohn Library, pp. 33–165). The finest of the Lectures is No. IX, given on 16th December 1811. The Lectures were delivered at the London Philosophical Society’s Rooms, Fetter Lane, and were attended, according to Henry Crabb Robinson, by enthusiastic audiences; and the course closed with éclat. On one occasion Rogers and Byron were present. The following letter to Dr. Andrew Bell, whom, it will be remembered, he corresponded with while he was giving his first course, is a characteristic bit of Coleridge’s application of the Law of Association.