With unfeigned esteem, dear sir,
Yours, etc.,
S. T. Coleridge.
P. S. I am ashamed to send you a scrawl so like in form to a servant wench’s first letter. You will see that the first half was written before I received your last letter.
CXXX. TO THE SAME.
Greta Hall, Keswick, September 10, 1802.
My dear Sir,—The books have not yet arrived, and I am wholly unable to account for the delay. I suspect that the cause of it may be Mr. Faulder’s mistake in sending them by the Carlisle waggon. A person is going to Carlisle on Monday from this place, and will make diligent inquiry, and, if he succeed, still I cannot have them in less than a week, as they must return to Penrith and there wait for the next Tuesday’s carrier. I ought, perhaps, to be ashamed of my weakness, but I must confess I have been downright vexed by the business. Every cart, every return-chaise from Penrith has renewed my hopes, till I began to play tricks with my own impatience, and say, “Well, I take it for granted that I shan’t get them for these seven days,” etc.,—with other of those half-lies that fear begets on hope. You have imposed a pleasing task on me in requesting the minutiæ of my opinions concerning your “Orestes.” Whatever these opinions may be, the disclosure of them will be a sort of map of my mind, as a poet and reasoner, and my curiosity is strongly excited. I feel you a man of genius in the choice of the subject. It is my faith that the genus irritabile is a phrase applicable only to bad poets. Men of great genius have, indeed, as an essential of their composition, great sensibility, but they have likewise great confidence in their own powers, and fear must always precede anger in the human mind. I can with truth say that, from those I love, mere general praise of anything I have written is as far from giving me pleasure as mere general censure; in anything, I mean, to which I have devoted much time or effort. “Be minute, and assign your reasons often, and your first impressions always, and then blame or praise. I care not which, I shall be gratified.” These are my sentiments, and I assuredly believe that they are the sentiments of all who have indeed felt a true call to the ministry of song. Of course, I, too, will act on the golden rule of doing to others what I wish others to do unto me. But, while I think of it, let me say that I should be much concerned if you applied this to the “First Navigator.” It would absolutely mortify me if you did more than look over it, and when a correction suggested itself to you, take your pen and make it, and let the copy go to Tomkins. What they have been, I shall know when I see the thing in print; for it must please the present times if it please any, and you have been far more in the fashionable world than I, and must needs have a finer and surer tact of that which will offend or disgust in the higher circles of life. Yet it is not what I should have advised Tomkins to do, and that is one reason why I cannot and will not accept more than a brace of copies from him. I do not like to be associated in a man’s mind with his losses. If he have the translation gratis, he must take it on his own judgment; but when a man pays for a thing, and he loses by it, the idea will creep in, spite of himself, that the failure was in part owing to the badness of the translation. While I was translating the “Wallenstein,” I told Longman it would never answer; when I had finished it I wrote to him and foretold that it would be waste paper on his shelves, and the dullness charitably laid upon my shoulders. Longman lost two hundred and fifty pounds by the work, fifty pounds of which had been paid to me,—poor pay, Heaven knows! for a thick octavo volume of blank verse; and yet I am sure that Longman never thinks of me but “Wallenstein” and the ghosts of his departed guineas dance an ugly waltz round my idea. This would not disturb me a tittle, if I thought well of the work myself. I should feel a confidence that it would win its way at last; but this is not the case with Gesner’s “Der erste Schiffer.” It may as well lie here till Tomkins wants it. Let him only give me a week’s notice, and I will transmit it to you with a large margin. Bowles’s stanzas on “Navigation”[271] are among the best in that second volume, but the whole volume is wofully inferior to its predecessor. There reigns through all the blank verse poems such a perpetual trick of moralizing everything, which is very well, occasionally, but never to see or describe any interesting appearance in nature without connecting it, by dim analogies, with the moral world proves faintness of impression. Nature has her proper interest, and he will know what it is who believes and feels that everything has a life of its own, and that we are all One Life. A poet’s heart and intellect should be combined, intimately combined and unified with the great appearances of nature, and not merely held in solution and loose mixture with them, in the shape of formal similes. I do not mean to exclude these formal similes; there are moods of mind in which they are natural, pleasing moods of mind, and such as a poet will often have, and sometimes express; but they are not his highest and most appropriate moods. They are “sermoni propriora,” which I once translated “properer for a sermon.” The truth is, Bowles has indeed the sensibility of a poet, but he has not the passion of a great poet. His latter writings all want native passion. Milton here and there supplies him with an appearance of it, but he has no native passion because he is not a thinker, and has probably weakened his intellect by the haunting fear of becoming extravagant. Young, somewhere in one of his prose works, remarks that there is as profound a logic in the most daring and dithyrambic parts of Pindar as in the “Organon” of Aristotle. The remark is a valuable one.
Poetic feelings, like the flexuous boughs
Of mighty oaks! yield homage to the gale,
Toss in the strong winds, drive before the gust,
Themselves one giddy storm of fluttering leaves;
Yet, all the while, self-limited, remain
Equally near the fix’d and parent trunk
Of truth in nature—in the howling blast,
As in the calm that stills the aspen grove.[272]
That this is deep in our nature, I felt when I was on Scafell. I involuntarily poured forth a hymn[273] in the manner of the Psalms, though afterwards I thought the ideas, etc., disproportionate to our humble mountains.... You will soon see it in the “Morning Post,” and I should be glad to know whether and how far it pleased you. It has struck me with great force lately that the Psalms afford a most complete answer to those who state the Jehovah of the Jews, as a personal and national God, and the Jews as differing from the Greeks only in calling the minor Gods Cherubim and Seraphim, and confining the word “God” only to their Jupiter. It must occur to every reader that the Greeks in their religious poems address always the Numina Loci, the Genii, the Dryads, the Naiads, etc., etc. All natural objects were dead, mere hollow statues, but there was a Godkin or Goddessling included in each. In the Hebrew poetry you find nothing of this poor stuff, as poor in genuine imagination as it is mean in intellect. At best, it is but fancy, or the aggregating faculty of the mind, not imagination or the modifying and coadunating faculty. This the Hebrew poets appear to me to have possessed beyond all others, and next to them the English. In the Hebrew poets each thing has a life of its own, and yet they are all our life. In God they move and live and have their being; not had, as the cold system of Newtonian Theology represents, but have. Great pleasure indeed, my dear sir, did I receive from the latter part of your letter. If there be any two subjects which have in the very depths of my nature interested me, it has been the Hebrew and Christian Theology, and the Theology of Plato. Last winter I read the Parmenides and the Timæus with great care, and oh, that you were here—even in this howling rainstorm that dashes itself against my windows—on the other side of my blazing fire, in that great armchair there! I guess we should encroach on the morning ere we parted. How little the commentators of Milton have availed themselves of the writings of Plato, Milton’s darling! But alas, commentators only hunt out verbal parallelisms—numen abest. I was much impressed with this in all the many notes on that beautiful passage in “Comus” from l. 629 to 641. All the puzzle is to find out what plant Hæmony is; which they discover to be the English spleenwort, and decked out as a mere play and licence of poetic fancy with all the strange properties suited to the purpose of the drama. They thought little of Milton’s platonizing spirit, who wrote nothing without an interior meaning. “Where more is meant than meets the ear,” is true of himself beyond all writers. He was so great a man that he seems to have considered fiction as profane unless where it is consecrated by being emblematic of some truth. What an unthinking and ignorant man we must have supposed Milton to be, if, without any hidden meaning, he had described it as growing in such abundance that the dull swain treads on it daily, and yet as never flowering. Such blunders Milton of all others was least likely to commit. Do look at the passage. Apply it as an allegory of Christianity, or, to speak more precisely, of the Redemption by the Cross, every syllable is full of light! “A small unsightly root.”—“To the Greeks folly, to the Jews a stumbling-block”—“The leaf was darkish and had prickles on it”—“If in this life only we have hope, we are of all men the most miserable,” and a score of other texts. “But in another country, as he said, Bore a bright golden flower”—“The exceeding weight of glory prepared for us hereafter”—“But not in this soil; Unknown and like esteemed and the dull swain Treads on it daily with his clouted shoon”—The promises of Redemption offered daily and hourly, and to all, but accepted scarcely by any—“He called it Hæmony.” Now what is Hæmony? αἷμα οἶνος, Blood-wine. “And he took the wine and blessed it and said, ‘This is my Blood,’”—the great symbol of the Death on the Cross. There is a general ridicule cast on all allegorising of poets. Read Milton’s prose works, and observe whether he was one of those who joined in this ridicule. There is a very curious passage in Josephus [De Bello Jud. 6, 7, cap. 25 (vi. § 3)] which is, in its literal meaning, more wild and fantastically absurd than the passage in Milton; so much so, that Lardner quotes it in exultation and says triumphantly, “Can any man who reads it think it any disparagement to the Christian Religion that it was not embraced by a man who would believe such stuff as this? God forbid that it should affect Christianity, that it is not believed by the learned of this world!” But the passage in Josephus, I have no doubt, is wholly allegorical.
Ἔστησε signifies “He hath stood,”[274] which, in these times of apostasy from the principles of freedom or of religion in this country, and from both by the same persons in France, is no unmeaning signature, if subscribed with humility, and in the remembrance of “Let him that stands take heed lest he fall!” However, it is, in truth, no more than S. T. C. written in Greek—Es tee see.
Pocklington will not sell his house, but he is ill, and perhaps it may be to be sold, but it is sunless all winter.