Chapter LVIII: Letter 173: To Allsop

Dec. 2nd, 1818.

My Dear Sir,

I cannot express how kind I felt your letter. Would to Heaven I had had many with feelings like yours, "accustomed to express themselves warmly and (as far as the word is applicable to you, even) enthusiastically." But, alas! during the prime manhood of my intellect I had nothing but cold water thrown on my efforts. I speak not now of my systematic and most unprovoked maligners. On _them_ I have retorted only by pity and by prayer. These may have, and doubtless _have_, joined with the frivolity of "the reading public" in checking and almost in preventing the sale of my works; and so far have done injury to my _purse_. _Me_ they have not injured. But I have loved with enthusiastic self-oblivion those who have been so well pleased that I should, year after year, flow with a hundred nameless rills into _their_ main stream, that they could find nothing but cold praise and effective discouragement of every attempt of mine to roll onward in a distinct current of my own; who _admitted_ that the _Ancient Mariner_, the _Christabel_, the _Remorse_, and some pages of the _Friend_ were not without merit, but were abundantly anxious to acquit their judgments of any blindness to the very numerous defects. Yet they _knew_ that to _praise_, as mere praise, I was characteristically, almost constitutionally, indifferent. In sympathy alone I found at once nourishment and stimulus; and for sympathy _alone_ did my heart crave. They knew, too, how long and faithfully I had acted on the maxim, never to admit the _faults_ of a work of genius to those who denied or were incapable of feeling and understanding the _beauties_; not from wilful partiality, but as well knowing that in _saying_ truth, I should, to such critics, convey falsehood. If, in one instance, in my literary life, I have appeared to deviate from this rule, first, it was not till the fame of the writer[100] (which I had been for fourteen years successively toiling like a second Ali to build up) had been established; and, secondly and chiefly, with the purpose and, I may safely add, with the _effect_ of rescuing the necessary task from Malignant Defamers, and in order to set forth the excellences and the trifling proportion which the defects bore to the excellences. But this, my dear sir, is a mistake to which affectionate natures are too liable, though I do not remember to have ever seen it noticed,--the mistaking those who are desirous and well pleased to be loved _by_ you, for those who love you. Add, as a more general cause, the fact that I neither am nor ever have been of any party. What wonder, then, if I am left to decide which has been my worse enemy, the broad, pre-determined abuse of the _Edinburgh Review_, &c., or the cold and brief compliments, with the warm _regrets_, of the _Quarterly_? After all, however, I have now but one sorrow relative to the ill success of my literary toils (and toils they have been, _though not undelightful toils_), and this arises wholly from the almost insurmountable difficulties which the anxieties of to-day oppose to my completion of the great work, the form and materials of which it has been the employment of the best and most genial hours of the last twenty years to mature and collect.

If I could but have a tolerably numerous audience to my first, or first and second Lectures on the HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY, I should entertain a strong hope of success, because I know that these lectures will be found by far the most interesting and _entertaining_ of any that I have yet delivered, independent of the more permanent interests of rememberable instruction. Few and unimportant would the errors of men be, if they did but know, first, _what they themselves meant_; and, secondly, what the _words_ mean by which they attempt to convey their meaning; and I can conceive no subject so well fitted to exemplify the mode and the importance of these two points as the History of Philosophy, treated as in the scheme of these lectures. Trusting that I shall shortly have the pleasure of seeing you here,

I remain, my dear Sir,
Yours, most sincerely,
S. T. COLERIDGE.[101]
T. Allsop, Esq.

* * * * *

At the close of 1818, Coleridge published his _Essay on Method_, an introduction to the _Encyclopedia Metropolitana_, which exhibits his grasping ambitious intellect.

The two following letters to Mr. Britton were written regarding his lectures. Neither Thomas Ashe nor Dykes Campbell has been able to find any evidence that Coleridge delivered lectures on Shakespeare seventeen years before 1819. He must have been labouring under a delusion on this matter and mistaking the date of his lectures delivered in 1808.