Dear Wordsworth,—Three whole days the going through the first book cost me, though only to find fault. But I cannot find fault, in pen and ink, without thinking over and over again, and without some sort of an attempt to suggest the alteration; and, in so doing, how soon an hour is gone! so many half seconds up to half minutes are lost in leaning back in one’s chair, and looking up, in the bodily act of contracting the muscles of the brow and forehead, and unconsciously attending to the sensation. Had I the MS. with me for five or six months, so as to amuse myself off and on, without any solicitude as to a given day, and, could I be persuaded that if as well done as the nature of the thing (viz., a translation of Virgil,[194] in English) renders possible, it would not raise but simply sustain your well-merited fame for pure diction, where what is not idiom is never other than logically correct, I doubt not that the irregularities could be removed. But I am haunted by the apprehension that I am not feeling or thinking in the same spirit with you, at one time, and at another too much in the spirit of your writings. Since Milton, I know of no poet with so many felicities and unforgettable lines and stanzas as you. And to read, therefore, page after page without a single brilliant note, depresses me, and I grow peevish with you for having wasted your time on a work so much below you, that you cannot stoop and take. Finally, my conviction is, that you undertake an impossibility, and that there is no medium between a prose version and one on the avowed principle of compensation in the widest sense, that is, manner, genius, total effect. I confine myself to Virgil when I say this.
I must now set to work with all my powers and thoughts to my Leighton,[195] and then to my logic, and then to my opus maximum! if indeed it shall please God to spare me so long, which I have had too many warnings of late (more than my nearest friends know of) not to doubt. My kind love to Dorothy.
S. T. Coleridge.
CCXXXIX. TO JOHN TAYLOR COLERIDGE.
Grove, Highgate, Friday, April 8, 1825.
My dear Nephew,—I need not tell you that no attention in my power to offer shall be wanting to Dr. Reich. As a foreigner and a man of letters he might claim this in his own right; and that he came from you would have ensured it, even though he had been a Frenchman. But that he is a German, and that you think him a worthy and deserving man, and that his lot, like my own, has been cast on the bleak north side of the mountain, make me reflect with pain on the little influence I possess, and the all but zero of my direct means, to serve or to assist him. The prejudices excited against me by Jeffrey, combining with the mistaken notion of my German Metaphysics to which (I am told) some passages in some biographical gossip book about Lord Byron[196] have given fresh currency, have rendered my authority with the Trade worse than nothing. Of the three schemes of philosophy, Kant’s, Fichte’s, and Schelling’s (as diverse each from the other as those of Aristotle, Zeno, and Plotinus, though all crushed together under the name Kantean Philosophy in the English talk) I should find it difficult to select the one from which I differed the most, though perfectly easy to determine which of the three men I hold in highest honour. And Immanuel Kant I assuredly do value most highly; not, however, as a metaphysician, but as a logician who has completed and systematised what Lord Bacon had boldly designed and loosely sketched out in the Miscellany of Aphorisms, his Novum Organum. In Kant’s “Critique of the Pure Reason” there is more than one fundamental error; but the main fault lies in the title-page, which to the manifold advantage of the work might be exchanged for “An Inquisition respecting the Constitution and Limits of the Human Understanding.” I can not only honestly assert, but I can satisfactorily prove by reference to writings (Letters, Marginal Notes, and those in books that have never been in my possession since I first left England for Hamburgh, etc.) that all the elements, the differentials, as the algebraists say, of my present opinions existed for me before I had even seen a book of German Metaphysics, later than Wolf and Leibnitz, or could have read it, if I had. But what will this avail? A High German Transcendentalist I must be content to remain, and a young American painter, Leslie (pupil and friend of a very dear friend of mine, Allston), to whom I have been in the habit for ten years and more of shewing as cordial regards as I could to a near relation, has, I find, introduced a portrait of me in a picture from Sir W. Scott’s “Antiquary,” as Dr. Duster Swivil, or whatever his name is.[197] Still, however, I will make any attempt to serve Dr. Reich, which he may point out and which, I am not sure, would dis-serve him! I do not, of course, know what command he has over the English language. If he wrote it fluently, I should think that it would answer to any one of our great publishers to engage him in the translation of the best and cheapest Natural History in existence, viz., Okens, in three thick octavo volumes, containing the inorganic world, and the animals from the Πρωτόζωα and animalcula of Infusions, to man. The Botany was not published two years ago. Whether it is now I do not know. There is one thin quarto of plates. It is by far the most entertaining as well as instructive book of the kind I ever saw; and with a few notes and the omission (or castigation) of one or two of Oken’s adventurous whimsies, would be a valuable addition to our English literature. So much for this.
I will not disguise from you, my dearest nephew, that the first certain information of your having taken the “Quarterly”[198] gave me a pain, which it required all my confidence in the soundness of your judgement to counteract. I had long before by conversation with experienced barristers got rid of all apprehension of its being likely to injure you professionally. My fears were directed to the invidiousness of the situation, it being the notion of publishers that without satire and sarcasm no review can obtain or keep up a sale. Perhaps pride had some concern in it. For myself I have none, probably because I had time out of mind given it up as a lost cause, given myself over, I mean, a predestined author, though without a drop of true author blood in my veins. But a pride in and for the name of my father’s house I have, and those with whom I live know that it is never more than a dog-sleep, and apt to start up on the slight alarms. Now, though very sillily, I felt pain at the notion of any comparisons being drawn between you (to whom with your sister my heart pulls the strongest) and Mr. Gifford, even though they should be [to] your advantage; and still more, the thought that ... Murray should be or hold himself entitled to have and express an opinion on the subject. The insolence of one of his proposals to me, viz., that he would publish an edition of my Poems, on the condition that a gentleman in his confidence (Mr. Milman![199] I understand) was to select, and make such omissions and corrections as should be thought advisable—this, which offered to myself excited only a smile in which there was nothing sardonic, might very possibly have rendered me sorer and more sensitive when I boded even an infinitesimal ejusdem farinæ in connection with you.
But henceforward I shall look at the thing in a sunnier mood. Mr. Frere is strongly impressed with the importance and even dignity of the trust, and on the power you have of gradually giving a steadier and manlier tone to the feelings and principles of the higher classes. But I hope very soon to converse with you on this subject, as soon as I have finished my Essay for the Literary Society, (in which I flatter myself I have thrown some light on the passages in Herodotus respecting the derivation of the Greek Mythology from Egypt, and in what respect that paragraph respecting Homer and Hesiod is to be understood), and have, likewise, got my “Aids to Reflection” out of the Press. But I have more to do for the necessities of the day, and which are Nos non nobis, than I can well manage so as to go on with my own works, though I work from morning to night, as far as my health admits and the loss of my friendly amanuensis. For the slowness with which I get on with the pen in my own hand contrasts most strangely with the rapidity with which I dictate. Your kind letter of invitation did not reach me, but there was one which I ought to have answered long ago, which came while I was at Ramsgate. We have had a continued succession of illness in our family here, at one time six persons confined to their beds. I have been sadly afraid that we should lose Mrs. Gillman, who would be a loss indeed to the whole neighbourhood, young and old. But she seems, thank God! to recover strength, though slowly. As I hope to write again in a few days with my book, I shall now desire my cordial regards to Mrs. J. Coleridge, and with my affectionate love to the little ones.
With the warmest interest of affection and esteem, I am, my dear John, your sincere friend,
S. T. Coleridge.