Chapter XLVIII: Letter 165: To Cottle

Calne, Wiltshire, March 10, 1815.

My dear Cottle,

I have been waiting with the greatest uneasiness for a letter from you. My distresses are impatient rather than myself: inasmuch as for the last five weeks, I know myself to be a burden on those to whom I am under great obligations: who would gladly do all for me; _but who have done all they can!_ Incapable of any exertion in this state of mind, I have now written to Mr. Hood, and have at length bowed my heart down, to beg that four or five of those, who I had reason to believe, were interested in my welfare, would raise the sum I mentioned, between them, should you not find it convenient to do it. Manuscript poems, equal to one volume of 230 to 300 pages, being sent to them immediately. If not, I must instantly dispose of all my poems, fragments and all, for whatever I can get from the first rapacious bookseller, that will give anything--and then try to get my livelihood where I am, by receiving, or waiting on day-pupils, children, or adults, but even this I am unable to wait for without some assistance: for I cannot but with consummate baseness, throw the expenses of my lodging and boarding for the last five or six weeks on those who must injure and embarrass themselves in order to pay them. The _Friend_ has been long out of print, and its republication has been called for by numbers.

Indeed from the manner in which it was first circulated, it is little less than a new work. To make it a complete and circular work, it needs but about eight or ten papers. This I could and would make over to you at once in full copyright, and finish it outright, with no other delay than that of finishing a short and temperate Treatise on the Corn Laws, and their national and moral effects; which had I even twenty pounds only to procure myself a week's ease of mind, I could have printed before the bill had passed the Lords. At all events let me hear by return of post. I am confident that whether you take the property of my Poems, or of my Prose Essays, in pledge, you cannot eventually lose the money.

As soon as I can, I shall leave Calne for Bristol, and if I can procure any day pupils, shall immediately take cheap lodgings near you. My plan is to have twenty pupils, ten youths or adults, and ten boys. To give the latter three hours daily, from eleven o'clock to two, with exception of the usual school vacations, in the Elements of English, Greek, and Latin, presenting them exercises for their employment during the rest of the day, and two hours every evening to the adults (that is from sixteen and older) on a systematic plan of general knowledge; and I should hope that £15 a year would not be too much to ask from each, which excluding Sundays and two vacations, would be little more than a shilling a day, or six shillings a week, for forty-two weeks.

To this I am certain I could attend with strictest regularity, or indeed to any thing mechanical.

But composition is no voluntary business. The very necessity of doing it robs me of the power of doing it. Had I been possessed of a tolerable competency, I should have been a voluminous writer. But I cannot, as is feigned of the Nightingale, sing with my breast against a thorn. God bless you,

S. T. COLERIDGE.[92]
Saturday, Midnight.

* * * * *

To the first of these letters Cottle replied with a five-pound note; but he now believed that all Coleridge's earnings went to fill what he calls the "Circean chalice" (_Rem._, 391). He believed that Coleridge was spending £2 10_s._ a week on opium. It is as likely that Coleridge was now keeping the home of the Morgans going; although they oftener kept him than he kept them. We know that he gave them the money received for the _Christabel_ volume.

From the first letter to Cottle it will be seen that Coleridge had been collecting his poems with a view to publication, afterwards given to the world as _Sibylline Leaves_. On 3rd April 1815, he writes to Lady Beaumont requesting a copy of the Poem to Wordsworth composed on hearing the Prelude (_Coleorton Mem._, ii, 175). Wordsworth had just published the _Excursion_, and on 30th May Coleridge wrote to Wordsworth criticising that poem (Knight's _Life of Wordsworth_, ii, 255) in a long letter, which, with other notes (_Anima Poetae_) of 1802, contained the germs of the Critique of the _Biographia Literaria_. The _Biographia_ was at first merely intended as an Introduction to the _Sibylline Leaves_; but in the writing it swelled so much that it had to be published as a separate work (see Dykes Campbell's _Life_, pp. 212-14).

Coleridge has been charged with plagiarism from Schelling, in composing his _Biographia_, by Ferrier in _Blackwood's Magazine_ of 1840, and by others.[93] Some others complain that Coleridge has no formal scheme of philosophy of his own. But this is merely saying it was never written down in its entirety, not that he did not have a philosophy. One of the features of Coleridge is that he was never without a Philosophy, and could not speak without betraying the fact that he judged all things from a standpoint which was the centre of a large planetary system of dependent and interdependent ideas. Coleridge's philosophy is a combination of parts of the philosophies of Plato, Plotinus, Giordano Bruno, Vico, Berkeley, Herder, Kant, Maas, and Schelling; he took freely from all his predecessors, as every new philosopher is bound to do, and has done, before him. Nor is he merely eclectic; his borrowings are fused together into a system. His originality consists not in the ideas which he entertains in his system, but in the reconstellation of these ideas. To charge Coleridge with plagiarism for having appropriated certain trains of thinking from others is on a level with the brilliant discovery which finds that Shakespeare pilfered some of his plots and stories from Italian novels, or that Molière took his own where he found it (_Je prend mon bien où je le trouve_).

The valuable parts of the _Biographia_, however, are not the philosophical, but the critical and biographical portions. The Critique on Wordsworth's poetry will always be reckoned as the finest of our literary criticisms on Wordsworth. We may object to Coleridge's strictures on _The Daffodils_ or _Alice Fell_, but lovers of Wordsworth will give general acquiescence to the contentions of Coleridge's discriminating criticism. Coleridge stands in the front rank of those great exponents of Poetry and Art who, from Aristotle to Sainte-Beuve, have guided the taste of the nations.

The contention of the closing paragraph that Faith is but the continuation of Reason is founded on a saying of his early love, Mary Evans, that "Faith is only Reason applied to a particular subject" (_Letters_, 88). It was written in her farewell letter in 1794.

Among the works of Coleridge undertaken at Calne was the drama of _Zapolya_, in which the character of Sarolta, an offshoot from the Christabel idea, appears.

These works were composed by Coleridge to tide over the necessities of the time, but the Morgans and he were unable to hold together, and Coleridge came once more to London at the beginning of 1816. Morgan fell into ill health. Mrs. Morgan latterly had to take a situation as teacher of a charity school; Charles Lamb and Southey got up a subscription annuity of £25 for Morgan, who did not live long to enjoy it, dying in 1820 (_Southey's Life and Correspondence_, iv, 361); and after 1823 Charlotte Brent disappears from the arena of literary history (_Letters_, 722).

Coleridge's letters to Dr. Brabant of Devizes, were written between February 1815, and 5th December 1816, and are published in the _Westminster Review_ for 1870.]

FOOTNOTES:

[90] This statement requires an explanation, which none now can
give. Was the far larger proportion of this £300 appropriated
to the discharge of Opium debts? This does not seem unlikely,
as Mr. C. lived with friends, and he could contract few other
debts [Cottle]. [This note is most misleading. Coleridge's
receipt for the £300 is dated November 12, 1807 (_De Quincey
Memorials._ I, 132). At this time, and for long after it,
Coleridge never lived with friends except the Morgans, whom he
paid. Cottle's assumption is baseless.]

[91] "Of the truth of what I say."--_Early Recollections._

[92] [Letters CCV-CCVII follow 165.]

[93] [Coleridge gives a general acknowledgment of indebtedness; and
doubtless when he wrote the _Biographia_ he could not always
discriminate in his note-books what was Schelling's and what
was his own.]