Wednesday, December 17, 1794.
When I am unhappy a sigh or a groan does not feel sufficient to relieve the oppression of my heart. I give a long whistle. This by way of a detached truth.
“How infinitely more to be valued is integrity of heart than effulgence of intellect!” A noble sentiment, and would have come home to me, if for “integrity” you had substituted “energy.” The skirmishes of sensibility are indeed contemptible when compared with the well-disciplined phalanx of right-onward feelings. O ye invincible soldiers of virtue, who arrange yourselves under the generalship of fixed principles, that you would throw up your fortifications around my heart! I pronounce this a very sensible, apostrophical, metaphorical rant.
I dined yesterday with Perry and Grey (the proprietor and editor of the “Morning Chronicle”) at their house, and met Holcroft. He either misunderstood Lovell, or Lovell misunderstood him. I know not which, but it is very clear to me that neither of them understands nor enters into the views of our system. Holcroft opposes it violently and thinks it not virtuous. His arguments were such as Nugent and twenty others have used to us before him; they were nothing. There is a fierceness and dogmatism of conversation in Holcroft for which you receive little compensation either from the veracity of his information, the closeness of his reasoning, or the splendour of his language. He talks incessantly of metaphysics, of which he appears to me to know nothing, to have read nothing. He is ignorant as a scholar, and neglectful of the smaller humanities as a man. Compare him with Porson! My God! to hear Porson crush Godwin, Holcroft, etc. They absolutely tremble before him! I had the honour of working H. a little, and by my great coolness and command of impressive language certainly did him over. “Sir!” said he, “I never knew so much real wisdom and so much rank error meet in one mind before!” “Which,” answered I, “means, I suppose, that in some things, sir, I agree with you, and in others I do not.” He absolutely infests you with atheism; and his arguments are such that the nonentities of Nugent consolidate into oak or ironwood by comparison! As to his taste in poetry, he thinks lightly, or rather contemptuously, of Bowles’ sonnets; the language flat and prosaic and inharmonious, and the sentiments only fit for girls! Come, come, Mr. Holcroft, as much unintelligible metaphysics and as much bad criticism as you please, but no blasphemy against the divinity of a Bowles! Porson idolizes the sonnets. However it happened, I am higher in his good graces than he in mine. If I am in town I dine with him and Godwin, etc., at his house on Sunday.
I am astonished at your preference of the “Elegy.” I think it the worst thing you ever wrote.
“Qui Gratio non odit, amet tua carmina, Avaro!”[91]
Why, ’tis almost as bad as Lovell’s “Farmhouse,” and that would be at least a thousand fathoms deep in the dead sea of pessimism.
“The hard world scoff’d my woes, the chaste one’s pride,
Mimic of virtue, mock’d my keen distress,
[92]And Vice alone would shelter wretchedness.
Even life is loathsome now,” etc.
These two stanzas are exquisite, but the lovely thought of the “hot sun,” etc., as pitiless as proud prosperity loses part of its beauty by the time being night. It is among the chief excellences of Bowles that his imagery appears almost always prompted by surrounding scenery.
Before you write a poem you should say to yourself, “What do I intend to be the character of this poem; which feature is to be predominant in it?” So you make it unique. But in this poem now Charlotte speaks and now the Poet. Assuredly the stanzas of Memory, “three worst of fiends,” etc., and “gay fancy fond and frolic” are altogether poetical. You have repeated the same rhymes ungracefully, and the thought on which you harp so long recalls too forcibly the Εὕδεις βρέφος of Simonides. Unfortunately the “Adventurer” has made this sweet fragment an object of popular admiration. On the whole, I think it unworthy of your other “Botany Bay Eclogues,” yet deem the two stanzas above selected superior almost to anything you ever wrote; quod est magna res dicere, a great thing to say.