CXCV. TO THOMAS POOLE.
February 13, 1813.
Dear Poole,—Love so deep and so domesticated with the whole being, as mine was to you, can never cease to be. To quote the best and sweetest lines I ever wrote:[103]—
Alas! they had been Friends in Youth!
But whisp’ring Tongues can poison Truth;
And Constancy lives in Realms above;
And Life is thorny; and Youth is vain;
And to be wroth with one we love
Doth work, like Madness, in the Brain!
And so it chanced (as I divine)
With Roland and Sir Leoline.
Each spake words of high Disdain
And Insult to his heart’s best Brother:
They parted—ne’er to meet again!
But never either found another
To free the hollow Heart from Paining—
They stood aloof, the Scars remaining,
Like Cliffs, which had been rent asunder,
A dreary Sea now flows between!—
But neither Frost, nor Heat, nor Thunder,
Shall wholly do away, I ween,
The marks of that which once hath been!
Stung as I have been with your unkindness to me, in my sore adversity, yet the receipt of your two heart-engendered lines was sweeter than an unexpected strain of sweetest music, or, in humbler phrase, it was the only pleasurable sensation which the success of the “Remorse” has given me. I have read of, or perhaps only imagined, a punishment in Arabia, in which the culprit was so bricked up as to be unable to turn his eyes to the right or the left, while in front was placed a high heap of barren sand glittering under the vertical sun. Some slight analogue of this, I have myself suffered from the mere unusualness of having my attention forcibly directed to a subject which permitted neither sequence of imagery, or series of reasoning. No grocer’s apprentice, after his first month’s permitted riot, was ever sicker of figs and raisins than I of hearing about the “Remorse.” The endless rat-a-tat-tat at our black-and-blue-bruised door, and my three master-fiends, proof sheets, letters (for I have a raging epistolophobia), and worse than these—invitations to large dinners, which I cannot refuse without offence and imputation of pride, or accept without disturbance of temper the day before, and a sick, aching stomach for two days after, so that my spirits quite sink under it.
From what I myself saw, and from what an intelligent friend, more solicitous about it than myself, has told me, the “Remorse” has succeeded in spite of bad scenes, execrable acting, and newspaper calumny. In my compliments to the actors, I endeavoured (such is the lot of this world, in which our best qualities tilt against each other, ex. gr., our good nature against our veracity) to make a lie edge round the truth as nearly as possible. Poor Rae (why poor? for Ordonio has almost made his fortune) did the best in his power, and is a good man ... a moral and affectionate husband and father. But nature has denied him person and all volume and depth of voice; so that the blundering coxcomb Elliston, by mere dint of voice and self-conceit, out-dazzled him. It has been a good thing for the theatre. They will get £8,000 or £10,000, and I shall get more than all my literary labours put together; nay, thrice as much, subtracting my heavy losses in the “Watchman” and “Friend,”—£400 including the copyright.
You will have heard that, previous to the acceptance of “Remorse,” Mr. Jos. Wedgwood had withdrawn from his share of the annuity![104] Well, yes, it is well!—for I can now be sure that I loved him, revered him, and was grateful to him from no selfish feeling. For equally (and may these words be my final condemnation at the last awful day, if I speak not the whole truth), equally do I at this moment love him, and with the same reverential gratitude! To Mr. Thomas Wedgwood I felt, doubtless, love; but it was mingled with fear, and constant apprehension of his too exquisite taste in morals. But Josiah! Oh, I ever did, and ever shall, love him, as a being so beautifully balanced in mind and heart deserves to be!
’Tis well, too, because it has given me the strongest impulse, the most imperious motive I have experienced, to prove to him that his past munificence has not been wasted!
You perhaps may likewise have heard (in the Whispering Gallery of the World) of the year-long difference between me and Wordsworth (compared with the sufferings of which all the former afflictions of my life were less than flea-bites), occasioned (in great part) by the wicked folly of the arch-fool Montagu.
A reconciliation has taken place, but the feeling, which I had previous to that moment, when the (three-fourth) calumny burst, like a thunderstorm from a blue sky, on my soul, after fifteen years of such religious, almost superstitious idolatry and self-sacrifice. Oh, no! no! that, I fear, never can return. All outward actions, all inward wishes, all thoughts and admirations will be the same—are the same, but—aye, there remains an immedicable But. Had W. said (what he acknowledges to have said) to you, I should have thought it unkind, and have had a right to say, “Why, why am I, whose whole being has been like a glass beehive before you for five years, why do I hear this from a third person for the first time?” But to such ... as Montagu! just when W. himself had forewarned me! Oh! it cut me to the heart’s core.