CXCIV. TO ROBERT SOUTHEY.
71, Berners Street, Tuesday, February 8, 1813.
My dear Southey,—It is seldom that a man can with literal truth apologise for delay in writing; but for the last three weeks I have had more upon my hands and spirits than my health was equal to.
The first copy I can procure of the second edition (of the play) I will do my best to get franked to you. You will, I hope, think it much improved as a poem. Dr. Bell, who is all kindness and goodness, came to me in no small bustle this morning in consequence of “a censure passed on the ‘Remorse’ by a man of great talents, both in prose and verse, who was impartial, and thought highly of the work on the whole.” What was it, think you? There were many unequal lines in the Play, but which he did not choose to specify. Dr. Bell would not mention the critic’s name, but was very earnest with me to procure some indifferent person of good sense to read it over, by way of spectacles to an author’s own dim judgement. Soon after he left me I discovered that the critic was Gifford, who had said good-naturedly that I ought to be whipt for leaving so many weak and slovenly lines in so fine a poem. What the lines were he would not say and I do not care. Inequalities have every poem, even an Epic—much more a Dramatic Poem must have and ought to have. The question is, are they in their own place dissonances? If so I am the last man to stickle for them, who am nicknamed in the Green Room the “anomalous author,” from my utter indifference or prompt facility in sanctioning every omission that was suggested. That paragraph in the “Quarterly Review”[100] respecting me, as ridiculed in “Rejected Addresses,” was surely unworthy of a man of sense like Gifford. What reason could he have to suppose me a man so childishly irritable as to be provoked by a trifle so contemptible? If he had, how could he think it a parody at all? But the noise which the “Rejected Addresses” made, the notice taken of Smith the author by Lord Holland, Byron, etc., give a melancholy confirmation of my assertion in “The Friend” that “we worship the vilest reptile if only the brainless head be expiated by the sting of personal malignity in the tail.” I wish I could procure for you the “Examiner” and Drakard’s London Paper. They were forced to affect admiration of the Tragedy, but yet abuse me they must, and so comes the old infamous crambe bis millies cocta of the “sentimentalities, puerilities, whinings, and meannesses, both of style and thought,” in my former writings, but without (which is worth notice both in these gentlemen and in all our former Zoili), without one single quotation or reference in proof or exemplification. No wonder! for excepting the “Three Graves,” which was announced as not meant for poetry, and the poem on the Tethered Ass, with the motto Sermoni propriora,[101] and which, like your “Dancing Bear,” might be called a ludicro-splenetic copy of verses, with the diction purposely appropriate, they might (as at the first appearance of my poems they did) find, indeed, all the opposite vices. But if it had not been for the Preface to W.’s “Lyrical Ballads,” they would never themselves have dreamt of affected simplicity and meanness of thought and diction. This slang has gone on for fourteen or fifteen years against us, and really deserves to be exposed. As far as my judgement goes, the two best qualities of the tragedy are, first, the simplicity and unity of the plot, in respect of that which, of all the unities, is the only one founded on good sense—the presence of a one all-pervading, all-combining Principle. By Remorse I mean the anguish and disquietude arising from the self-contradiction introduced into the soul by guilt, a feeling which is good or bad according as the will makes use of it. This is expressed in the lines chosen as the motto:—
Remorse is as the heart in which it grows:
If that be gentle, it drops balmy dews
Of true repentance; but if proud and gloomy,
It is a poison tree that, pierced to the inmost,
Weeps only tears of poison!
Act i. sc. 1.
And Remorse is everywhere distinguished from virtuous penitence. To excite a sanative remorse Alvar returns, the Passion is put in motion at Ordonio’s first entrance by the appearance of Isidore’s wife, etc.; it is carried still higher by the narration of Isidore, Act ii. sc. 1; higher still by the interview with the supposed wizard; and to its acme by the Incantation Scene and Picture. Now, then, we are to see its effects and to exemplify the second part of the motto, “but if proud and gloomy, It is a poison tree,” etc. Ordonio, too proud to look steadily into himself, catches a false scent, plans the murder of Isidore and the poisoning of the Sorcerer, perpetrates the one, and, attempting the other, is driven by Remorse and the discovery of Alvar to a temporary distraction; and, finally, falling a victim to the only crime that had been realized, by the hand of Alhadra, breathes his last in a pang of pride: “O couldst thou forget me!” As from a circumference to a centre, every ray in the tragedy converges to Ordonio. Spite of wretched acting, the passage told wonderfully in which, as in a struggle between two unequal Panathlists or wrestlers, the weaker had for a moment got uppermost, and Ordonio, with unfeigned love, and genuine repentance, says, “I will kneel to thee, my Brother! Forgive me, Alvar!” till the Pride, like the bottom-swell on our lake, gusts up again in “Curse me with forgiveness!” The second good quality is, I think, the variety of metres according as the speeches are merely transitive, or narrative, or passionate, or (as in the Incantation) deliberate and formal poetry. It is true they are all, or almost all, Iambic blank verse, but under that form there are five or six perfectly distinct metres. As to the outcry that the “Remorse” is not pathetic (meaning such pathos as convulses in “Isabella” or “The Gamester”) the answer is easy. True! the poet never meant that it should be. It is as pathetic as the “Hamlet” or the “Julius Cæsar.” He woo’d the feelings of the audience, as my wretched epilogue said:—
With no TOO real Woes that make you groan
(At home-bred, kindred grief, perhaps your own),
Yet with no image compensate the mind,
Nor leave one joy for memory behind.
As to my thefts from the “Wallenstein,” they came on compulsion from the necessity of haste, and do not lie on my conscience, being partly thefts from myself, and because I gave Schiller twenty for one I have taken, and in the mean time I hope they will lie snug. “The obscurest Haunt of all our mountains,”[102] I did not recognize as Wordsworth till after the play was all printed. I must write again to-morrow on other subjects.
The House was crowded again last night, and the Manager told me that they lost £200 by suspending it on [the] Saturday night that Jack Bannister came out.
(No signature.)