God bless you!
S. T. C.
CXXXIX. TO THE SAME.
Keswick, Sunday, August 7, 1803.
(Read the last lines first; I send you this letter merely to show you how anxious I have been about your work.)
My dear Southey,—The last three days I have been fighting up against a restless wish to write to you. I am afraid lest I should infect you with my fears rather than furnish you with any new arguments, give you impulses rather than motives, and prick you with spurs that had been dipped in the vaccine matter of my own cowardliness. While I wrote that last sentence, I had a vivid recollection, indeed an ocular spectrum, of our room in College Street, a curious instance of association. You remember how incessantly in that room I used to be compounding these half-verbal, half-visual metaphors. It argues, I am persuaded, a particular state of general feeling, and I hold that association depends in a much greater degree on the recurrence of resembling states of feeling than on trains of ideas, that the recollection of early childhood in latest old age depends on and is explicable by this, and if this be true, Hartley’s system totters. If I were asked how it is that very old people remember visually only the events of early childhood, and remember the intervening spaces either not at all or only verbally, I should think it a perfectly philosophical answer that old age remembers childhood by becoming “a second childhood!” This explanation will derive some additional value if you would look into Hartley’s solution of the phenomena—how flat, how wretched! Believe me, Southey! a metaphysical solution, that does not instantly tell you something in the heart is grievously to be suspected as apocryphal. I almost think that ideas never recall ideas, as far as they are ideas, any more than leaves in a forest create each other’s motion. The breeze it is that runs through them—it is the soul, the state of feeling. If I had said no one idea ever recalls another, I am confident that I could support the assertion. And this is a digression.—My dear Southey, again and again I say, that whatever your plan may be, I will contrive to work for you with equal zeal if not with equal pleasure. But the arguments against your plan weigh upon me the more heavily, the more I reflect; and it could not be otherwise than that I should feel a confirmation of them from Wordsworth’s complete coincidence—I having requested his deliberate opinion without having communicated an iota of my own. You seem to me, dear friend, to hold the dearness of a scarce work for a proof that the work would have a general sale, if not scarce. Nothing can be more fallacious than this. Burton’s Anatomy used to sell for a guinea to two guineas. It was republished. Has it paid the expense of reprinting? Scarcely. Literary history informs us that most of those great continental bibliographies, etc., were published by the munificence of princes, or nobles, or great monasteries. A book from having had little or no sale, except among great libraries, may become so scarce that the number of competitors for it, though few, may be proportionally very great. I have observed that great works are nowadays bought, not for curiosity or the amor proprius, but under the notion that they contain all the knowledge a man may ever want, and if he has it on his shelf why there it is, as snug as if it were in his brain. This has carried off the encyclopædia, and will continue to do so. I have weighed most patiently what you said respecting the persons and classes likely to purchase a catalogue of all British books. I have endeavoured to make some rude calculation of their numbers according to your own numeration table, and it falls very short of an adequate number. Your scheme appears to be in short faulty, (1) because, everywhere, the generally uninteresting, the catalogue part will overlay the interesting parts; (2) because the first volume will have nothing in it tempting or deeply valuable, for there is not time or room for it; (3) because it is impossible that any one of the volumes can be executed as well as they would otherwise be from the to-and-fro, now here, now there motion of the mind, and employment of the industry. Oh how I wish to be talking, not writing, for my mind is so full that my thoughts stifle and jam each other. And I have presented them as shapeless jellies, so that I am ashamed of what I have written—it so imperfectly expresses what I meant to have said. My advice certainly would be, that at all events you should make some classification. Let all the law books form a catalogue per se, and so forth; otherwise it is not a book of reference, without an index half as large as the work itself. I see no well-founded objection to the plan which I first sent. The two main advantages are that, stop where you will, you are in harbour, you sail in an archipelago so thickly clustered, (that) at each island you take in a completely new cargo, and the former cargo is in safe housage; and (2dly) that each labourer working by the piece, and not by the day, can give an undivided attention in some instances for three or four years, and bring to the work the whole weight of his interest and reputation.... An encyclopædia appears to me a worthless monster. What surgeon, or physician, professed student of pure or mixed mathematics, what chemist or architect, would go to an encyclopædia for his books? If valuable treatises exist on these subjects in an encyclopædia, they are out of their place—an equal hardship on the general reader, who pays for whole volumes which he cannot read, and on the professed student of that particular subject, who must buy a great work which he does not want in order to possess a valuable treatise, which he might otherwise have had for six or seven shillings. You omit those things only from your encyclopædia which are excrescences—each volume will set up the reader, give him at once connected trains of thought and facts, and a delightful miscellany for lounge-reading. Your treatises will be long in exact proportion to their general interest. Think what a strange confusion it will make, if you speak of each book, according to its date, passing from an Epic Poem to a treatise on the treatment of sore legs? Nobody can become an enthusiast in favour of the work.... A great change of weather has come on, heavy rain and wind, and I have been very ill, and still I am in uncomfortable restless health. I am not even certain whether I shall not be forced to put off my Scotch tour; but if I go, I go on Tuesday. I shall not send off this letter till this is decided.
God bless you and
S. T. C.
CXL. TO HIS WIFE.
Friday afternoon, 4 o’clock, Sept. (1), [1803].