Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Vol. 2 (of 2)

by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I rise every morning at five, and work three hours before breakfast, either in letter-writing or serious composition....

I take for granted that more than the poor £60 has been expended in the paper I have received. But I have written to Mr. Clarkson to see what can be done; for it would be a sad thing to give it all up now I am going on so well merely for want of means to provide the first twenty weeks paper. My present stock will not quite suffice for three numbers. I printed 620 of No. 1, and 650 of No. 2, and so many more are called for that I shall be forced to reprint both as soon as I hear from Clarkson. The proof sheet of No. 3 goes back to-day, and with it the copy of No. 4, so that henceforth we shall be secure of regularity; indeed it was not all my fault before, but the printer’s inexperience and the multitude of errors, though from a very decent copy, which took him a full day and more in correcting. I had altered my plan for the Introductory Essays after my arrival at Penrith, which cost me exceeding trouble; but the numbers to come are in a very superior style of polish and easy intelligibility. The only thing at present which I am under the necessity of applying to you for respects Clement. It may be his interest to sell “The Friend” at his shop, and a certain number will always be sent; but I am quite in the dark as to what profits he expects. Surely not book-profits for a newspaper that can circulate by the post? And it is certainly neither my interest, nor that of the regular purchasers of “The Friend,” to have it bought at a shop, instead of receiving it as a franked letter. All I want to know is his terms, for I have quite a horror of booksellers, whose mode of carrying on trade in London is absolute rapacity....

On this ruinous plan poor Southey has been toiling for years, with an industry honourable to human nature, and must starve upon it were it not for the more profitable employment of reviewing; a task unworthy of him, or even of a man with not one half of his honour and honesty.

I have just read Wordsworth’s pamphlet, and more than fear that your friendly expectations of its sale and influence have been too sanguine. Had I not known the author I would willingly have travelled from St. Michael’s Mount to Johnny Groat’s House on a pilgrimage to see and reverence him. But from the public I am apprehensive, first, that it will be impossible to rekindle an exhausted interest respecting the Cintra Convention, and therefore that the long porch may prevent readers from entering the Temple. Secondly, that, partly from Wordsworth’s own style, which represents the chain of his thoughts and the movements of his heart, admirably for me and a few others, but I fear does not possess the more profitable excellence of translating these down into that style which might easily convey them to the understandings of common readers, and partly from Mr. De Quincey’s strange and most mistaken system of punctuation—(The periods are often alarmingly long, perforce of their construction, but De Quincey’s punctuation has made several of them immeasurable, and perplexed half the rest. Never was a stranger whim than the notion that , ; : and . could be made logical symbols, expressing all the diversities of logical connection)—but, lastly, I fear that readers, even of judgement, may complain of a want of shade and background; that it is all foreground, all in hot tints; that the first note is pitched at the height of the instrument, and never suffered to sink; that such depth of feeling is so incorporated with depth of thought, that the attention is kept throughout at its utmost strain and stretch; and—but this for my own feeling. I could not help feeling that a considerable part is almost a self-robbery from some great philosophical poem, of which it would form an appropriate part, and be fitlier attuned to the high dogmatic eloquence, the oracular [tone] of impassioned blank verse. In short, cold readers, conceited of their supposed judgement, on the score of their possessing nothing else, and for that reason only, taking for granted that they must have judgement, will abuse the book as positive, violent, and “in a mad passion;” and readers of sense and feeling will have no other dread, than that the Work (if it should die) would die of a plethora of the highest qualities of combined philosophic and poetic genius. The Apple Pie they may say is made all of Quinces. I much admired our young friend’s note on Sir John Moore and his despatch;[59] it was excellently arranged and urged. I have had no opportunity, as yet, to speak a word to Wordsworth himself about it; I wrote to you as usual in full confidence.

I shall not be a little anxious to have your opinion of my third number. Lord Lonsdale blames me for excluding party politics and the events of the day from my plan. I exclude both the one and the other, only as far as they are merely party, i. e. personal and temporal interests, or merely events of To-day, that are defunct in the To-morrow. I flatter myself that I have been the first, who will have given a calm, disinterested account of our Constitution as it really is and how it is so, and that I have, more radically than has been done before, shown the unstable and boggy grounds on which all systematic reformers hitherto have stood. But be assured that I shall give up this opinion with joy, and consider a truer view of the question a more than recompense for the necessity of retracting what I have written.

God bless you! Do, pray, let me hear from you, though only three lines.

S. T. Coleridge.

CLXXVI. TO THOMAS POOLE.

October 9, 1809.

My dear Poole,—I received yours late last night, and sincerely thank you for the contents. The whole shall be arranged as you have recommended. Yet if I know my own wishes, I would far rather you had refused me, and said you should have an opportunity in a few days of explaining your motives in person, for oh, the autumn is divine here. You never beheld, I will answer for it, such combinations of exquisite beauty with sufficient grandeur of elevation, even in Switzerland. Besides, I sorely want to talk with you on many points.