Chapter XI: A Journalist, a Lecturer, a Playwright (2)

I will divide my statement, which I will endeavour to send you to-morrow, into two parts, in separate letters. The latter, commencing from the Sunday night, 28 October, 1810, that is, that on which the communication was made to me, and which will contain my solemn avowal of what was said by Mr. and Mrs. Montagu, you will make what use of you please--but the former I write to _you_, and in _confidence_--yet only as far as to your own heart it shall appear evident, that in desiring it I am actuated by no wish to shrink personally from any test, not involving an acknowledgement of my own degradation, and so become a false witness against myself, but only by delicacy towards the feelings of others, and the dread of spreading the curse of dissension. But, Wordsworth! the very message you sent by Lamb and which _Lamb_ did not deliver to me from the anxiety not to add fuel to the flame, sufficiently proves what I had learnt on my first arrival at Keswick, and which alone prevented my going to Grasmere--namely, that you had prejudged the case. As soon as I was informed that you had denied having used certain expressions, I did not hesitate a moment (nor was it in my power to do so) to give you my fullest faith, and approve to my own consciousness the truth of my declaration, that I should have felt it as a blessing, though my life had the same instant been hazarded as the pledge, could I with firm conviction have given Montagu the lie, at the conclusion of his story, even as, at the very first sentence, I exclaimed--“Impossible! It is impossible!” The expressions denied were indeed only the most offensive part to the feelings--but at the same time I learnt that you did not hesitate instantly to express your conviction that Montagu never said those words and that I had invented them--or (to use your own words) “had forgotten myself.” Grievously indeed, if I know aught of my nature, must I have forgotten both myself and common honesty, could I have been villain enough to have invented and persevered in such atrocious falsehoods. Your message was that “if I declined an explanation, you begged I would no longer continue to talk about the affair.” When, Wordsworth, did I ever decline an explanation? From you I expected one, and had a right to expect it--for let Montagu have added what he may, still that which remained was most unkind and what I had little deserved from you, who might by a single question have learnt from me that I never made up my mind to lodge with Montagu and had tacitly acquiesced in it at Keswick to tranquillise Mrs. Coleridge, to whom Mrs. Montagu had made the earnest professions of watching and nursing me, and for whom this and her extreme repugnance to my original, and much wiser, resolution of going to Edinburgh and placing myself in the house, and under the constant eye, of some medical man, were the sole grounds of her assent that I should leave the North at all. Yet at least a score of times have I begun to write a detailed account, to Wales[88] and afterwards to Grasmere, and gave it up from excess of agitation,--till finally I learnt that _all_ of your family had decided against me unheard--_and that_ [you begged] _I would no longer talk about it_. If, Wordsworth, you had but done me the common justice of asking those with whom I have been most intimate and confidential since my first arrival in Town in Oct., 1810, you would have received other negative or positive proofs how little I needed the admonition or deserve the sarcasm. Talk about it? O God! it _has_ been talked about! and that it had, was the sole occasion of my disclosing it even to Mary Lamb, the first person who heard of it from me and that not voluntarily--but that morning a friend met me, and communicated what so agitated me that then having previously meant to call at Lamb’s I was compelled to do so from faintness and universal trembling, in order to sit down. Even to her I did not intend to mention it; but alarmed by the wildness and paleness of my countenance and agitation I had no power to conceal, she entreated me to tell her what was the matter. In the first attempt to speak, my feelings overpowered me; an agony of weeping followed, and then, alarmed at my own imprudence and conscious of the possible effect on her health and mind if I left her in that state of suspense, I brought out convulsively some such words as--“Wordsworth, Wordsworth has given me up. _He_ has no hope of me--I have been an absolute nuisance[89] in his family”--and when long weeping had relieved me, and I was able to relate the occurrence connectedly, she can bear witness for me that, disgraceful as it was that I should be made the topic of vulgar gossip, yet that “had the whole and ten times more been proclaimed by a speaking-trumpet from the chimneys, I should have smiled at it--or indulged indignation only as far as it excited me to pleasurable activity--but that _you_ had said it, this and this only, was the sting! the scorpion-tooth!” Mr. Morgan and afterwards his wife and her sister were made acquainted with the whole case--and why? Not merely that I owed it to their ardent friendship, which has continued to be mainly my comfort and my only support, but because they had already heard of it, in part--because a most intimate and dear friend of Mr. and Mrs. Montagu’s had urged Mr. Morgan to call at the Montagus in order to be put on his guard against me. He came to me instantly, told me that I had enemies at work against my character, and pressed me to leave the hotel and to come home with him--with whom I have been ever since, with the exception of a few intervals when, from the bitter consciousness of my own infirmities and increasing irregularity of temper, I took lodgings, against his will, and was always by his zealous friendship brought back again. If it be allowed to call any one on earth Saviour, Morgan and his family have been my Saviours, body and soul. For my moral will was, and I fear is, so weakened relatively to my duties to myself, that I cannot act, as I ought to do, except under the influencing knowledge of its effects on those I love and believe myself loved by. To him likewise I explained the affair; but neither from him or his family has one word ever escaped me concerning it. Last autumn Mr. and Mrs. Southey came to town, and at Mr. Ray’s at Richmond, as we were walking alone in the garden, the subject was introduced, and it became my duty to state the whole affair to them, even as the means of transmitting it to you. With these exceptions I do not remember ever to have made any one my confidant--though in two or three instances I have alluded to the suspension of our familiar intercourse without explanation, but even here only where I knew or fully believed the persons to have already heard of it. Such was Mrs. Clarkson, who wrote to me in consequence of one sentence in a letter to her; yet even to her I entered into no detail, and disclosed nothing that was not necessary to my own defence in not continuing my former correspondence. In short, the one only thing which I have to blame in myself was that in my first letter to Sir G. Beaumont I had concluded with a desponding remark allusive to the breach between us, not in the slightest degree suspecting that he was ignorant of it. In the letters, which followed, I was compelled to say more (though I never detailed the words which had been uttered to me) in consequence of Lady Beaumont’s expressed apprehension and alarm lest in the advertisement for my lectures the sentence “concerning the Living Poets” contained an intention on my part to attack your literary merits. The very thought, that I could be imagined capable of feeling _vindictively_ toward you at all, much more of gratifying the passion in so despicable as well as detestable manner, agitated me. I sent her Ladyship the verses composed after your recitation of the great Poem at Coleorton, and desired her to judge whether it was possible that a man, who had written that poem, could be capable of such an act, and in a letter to Sir G. B., anxious to remove from his mind the assumption that I had been agitated by the disclosure of any till then unknown actions of mine or parts of conduct, I endeavoured to impress him with the real truth that not the facts disclosed, but the manner and time and the person by whom and the person to whom they had been disclosed, formed the whole ground of the breach. And writing in great agitation I once again used the same words which had venially burst from me the moment Montagu had ended his account. “And this is cruel! this is _base_!” I did not reflect on it till it was irrevocable--and for that one word, the only word of positive reproach that ever escaped from me, I feel sorrow--and assure you, that there is no permanent feeling in my heart which corresponds to it. Talk about it? Those who have seen me and been with me, day by day, for so many many months could have told you, how anxiously every allusion to the subject was avoided--and with abundant reason--for immediate and palpable derangement of body as well as spirits regularly followed it. Besides, had there not existed in your mind--let me rather say, if ever there had existed any portion of esteem and regard for me since the autumn of 1810, would it have been possible that your quick and powerful judgement could have overlooked the gross improbability, that I should first invent and then scatter abroad for talk at public tables the phrases which (Mr. Robinson yesterday informed me) Mr. Sharon Turner was indelicate enough to trumpet abroad at Longman’s table? I at least will call on Mr. Sharon and demand his authority. It is my full conviction, that in no one of the hundred tables at which any _particulars_ of our breach have been mentioned, could the authority be traced back to those who had received the account from myself.

It seemed unnatural to me, nay, it was unnatural to me to write to you or to any of your family with a cold exclusion of the feelings which almost overpower me even at this moment, and I therefore write this preparatory letter to disburthen my heart, as it were, before I sit down to detail my recollections simply, and unmixed with the anguish which, spite of my best efforts, accompany them.

But one thing more, the last complaint that you will hear from me, perhaps. When without my knowledge dear Mary Lamb, just then on the very verge of a relapse, wrote to Grasmere, was it kind or even humane to have returned such an answer, as Lamb deemed it unadvisable to shew me; but which I learnt from the only other person, who saw the answer, amounted in substance to a sneer on my reported high spirits and my wearing powder? When and to whom did I ever make a merit of my sufferings? Is it consistent _now_ to charge me with going about complaining to everybody, and _now_ with my high spirits? Was I to carry a gloomy face into every society? or ought I not rather to be grateful that in the natural activity of my intellect God had given me a counteracting principle to the intensity of my feelings, and a means of escaping from a part of the pressure? But for this I had been driven mad, and yet for how many months was there a continual brooding and going on of the one gnawing recollection behind the curtain of my outward being, even when I was most exerting myself, and exerting myself more in order the more to benumb it! I might have truly said with Desdemona:--

“I am not merry, but I do beguile
The Thing I am, by seeming otherwise.”

And as to the powder, it was first put in to prevent my taking cold after my hair had been thinned, and I was advised to continue it till I became wholly grey, as in its then state it looked as if I had dirty powder in my hair, and even when known to be only the everywhere-mixed-grey, yet contrasting with a face even younger than my real age it gave a queer and contradictory character to my whole appearance. Whatever be the result of this long-delayed explanation, I have loved you and yours too long and too deeply to have it in my own power to cease to do so.

S. T. COLERIDGE.

CLXXXIX. TO DANIEL STUART.

May 8, 1812.

MY DEAR STUART,--I send you seven or eight tickets,[90] entreating you, if pre-engagements or your health does not preclude it, to bring a group with you; as many ladies as possible; but gentlemen if you cannot muster ladies--for else I shall not only have been left in the lurch as to the actual receipts by my great patrons (the five hundred half-promised are likely to shrink below fifty) but shall absolutely make a ridiculous appearance. The tickets are transferable. If you can find occasion for more, pray send for them to me, as (what it really will be) a favour done to myself.

I am anxious to see you, and to learn how far Bath has improved or (to use a fashionable slang phrase) disimproved your health.

Sir James and Lady Mackintosh are I hear at Bath Hotel, Jermyn Street. Do you think it will be taken amiss if I enclosed two or three tickets and cards with my respectful congratulations on his safe return.[91] I abhor the doing anything that could be even interpreted into servility, and yet feel increasingly the necessity of not neglecting the courtesies of life....

God bless you, my dear sir, and your obliged and affectionate friend,

S. T. COLERIDGE.

P. S. Mr. Morgan has left his card for you.

CXC. TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.

71, Berners Street,
Monday afternoon, 3 o’clock, May 11, 1812.

MY DEAR WORDSWORTH,--I declare before God Almighty that at no time, even in my sorest affliction, did even the _possibility_ occur to me of ever doubting your word. I never ceased for a moment to have faith in you, to love and revere you; though I was unable to explain an unkindness, which seemed anomalous in your character. Doubtless it would have been better, wiser, and more worthy of my relation to you, had I immediately written to you a full account of what had happened--especially as the person’s language concerning your family was such as nothing but the wild general counter-panegyric of the same person almost in the same breath of yourself--as a converser, etc.,--could have justified me in not resenting to the uttermost....[92] All these, added to what I mentioned in my letter to you, may not justify, but yet must palliate, the _only_ offence I ever committed against you in deed or word or thought--that is, the not writing to you and trusting instead to our common friends. Since I left you my pocket books have been my only full confidants,[93]--and though instructed by prudence to write so as to be intelligible to no being on earth but yourself and your family, they for eighteen months together would furnish proof that in anguish or induration I yet never ceased both to _honour_ and love you.

S. T. COLERIDGE.

I need not say, of course, that your presence at the Lectures, or anywhere else, will be gratifying to me.

CXCI. TO ROBERT SOUTHEY.

[May 12, 1812.]

MY DEAR SOUTHEY,--The awful event of yester-afternoon has forced me to defer my Lectures to Tuesday, the 19th, by advice of all my patrons. The same thought struck us all at the same moment, so that our letters might be said to meet each other. I write now to urge you, if it be in your power, to give one day or two of your time to write something in your impressive way on that theme which no one I meet seems to feel as they ought to do,--which, I find scarcely any but ourselves estimate according to its true gigantic magnitude--I mean the sinking down of Jacobinism below the middle and tolerably educated classes into the readers and all-swallowing auditors in tap-rooms, etc.; and the [political sentiments in the] “Statesman,” “Examiner,” etc. I have ascertained that throughout the great manufacturing counties, Whitbread’s, Burdett’s, and Waithman’s speeches and the leading articles of the “Statesman” and “Examiner” are printed in ballad [shape] and sold at a halfpenny or a penny each. I was turned numb, and then sick, and then into a convulsive state of weeping on the first tidings--just as if Perceval[94] had been my near and personal friend. But good God! the atrocious sentiments universal among the populace, and even the lower order of householders. On my return from the “Courier,” where I had been to offer my services if I could do anything for them on this occasion, I was faint from the heat and much walking, and took that opportunity of going into the tap-room of a large public house frequented about one o’clock by the lower orders. It was really shocking, nothing but exultation! Burdett’s health drank with a clatter of pots and a sentiment given to at least fifty men and women--“May Burdett soon be the man to have sway over us!” These were the very words. “This is but the beginning.” “More of these damned scoundrels must go the same way, and then poor people may live.” “Every man might maintain his family decent and comfortable, if the money were not picked out of our pockets by these damned placemen.” “God is above the devil, _I_ say, and down to Hell with him and all his brood, the Ministers, men of Parliament fellows.” “They won’t hear Burdett; no! he is a Christian man and speaks for the poor,” etc., etc. I do not think I have altered a word.

My love to Sara, and I have received everything right. The plate will go as desired, and among it a present to Sariola and Edith from good old Mr. Brent, who had great delight in hearing them talked of. It was wholly the old gentleman’s own thought. Bless them both!

The affair between Wordsworth and me seems settled, much against my first expectation from the message I received from him and his refusal to open a letter from me. I have not yet seen him, but an explanation has taken place. I sent by Robinson an attested, avowed statement of what Mr. and Mrs. Montagu told me, and Wordsworth has sent me an unequivocal denial of the whole _in spirit_ and of the most offensive passages in letter as well as spirit, and I instantly informed him that were ten thousand Montagus to swear against it, I should take his word, not ostensibly only, but with inward faith!

To-morrow I will write out the passage from “Apuleius,” and send the letter to Rickman. It is seldom that want of leisure can be fairly stated as an excuse for not writing; but really for the last ten days I can honestly do it, if you will but allow a due portion to agitated feelings. The subscription is languid indeed compared with the expectations. Sir T. Bernard almost pledged himself for my success. However, he has done his best, and so has Lady Beaumont, who herself procured me near thirty names. I should have done better by myself for the present, but in the future perhaps it will be better as it is.

CXCII. TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.[95]

71, Berners Street,
Monday noon, December 7, 1812.

Write? My dear Friend! Oh that it were in my power to be with you myself instead of my letter. The Lectures I could give up; but the rehearsal of my Play commences this week, and upon this depends my best hopes of leaving town after Christmas, and living among you as long as I live. Strange, strange are the coincidences of things! Yesterday Martha Fricker dined here, and after tea I had asked question after question respecting your children, first one, then the other; but, more than all, concerning Thomas, till at length Mrs. Morgan said, “What ails you, Coleridge? Why don’t you talk about Hartley, Derwent, and Sara?” And not two hours ago (for the whole family were late from bed) I was asked what was the matter with my eyes? I told the fact, that I had awoke three times during the night and morning, and at each time found my face and part of the pillow wet with tears. “Were you dreaming of the Wordsworths?” she asked.--“Of the children?” I said, “No! not so much of them, but of Mrs. W. and Miss Hutchinson, and yourself and sister.”

Mrs. Morgan and her sister are come in, and I have been relieved by tears. The sharp, sharp pang at the heart needed it, when they reminded me of my words the very yester-night: “It is not possible that I should do otherwise than love Wordsworth’s children, all of them; but Tom is nearest my heart--I so often have him before my eyes, sitting on the little stool by my side, while I was writing my essays; and how quiet and happy the affectionate little fellow would be if he could but touch one, and now and then be looked at.”

O dearest friend! what comfort can I afford you? What comfort ought I not to afford, who have given you so much pain? Sympathy deep, of my whole being.... In grief, and in joy, in the anguish of perplexity, and in the fulness and overflow of confidence, it has been ever what it is! There is a sense of the word, Love, in which I never felt it but to you and one of your household! I am distant from you some hundred miles, but glad I am that I am no longer distant in spirit, and have faith, that as it has happened but once, so it never can happen again. An awful truth it seems to me, and prophetic of our future, as well as declarative of our present _real_ nature, that one mere thought, one feeling of suspicion, jealousy, or resentment can remove two human beings farther from each other than winds or seas can separate their bodies.

The words “_religious_ fortitude” occasion me to add that my faith in our progressive nature, and in all the doctrinal facts of Christianity, is become habitual in my understanding, no less than in my feelings. More cheering illustrations of our survival I have never received, than from the recent study of the instincts of animals, their clear heterogeneity from the reason and moral essence of man and yet the beautiful analogy. Especially, on the death of children, and of the _mind_ in childhood, altogether, many thoughts have accumulated, from which I hope to derive consolation from that most oppressive feeling which hurries in upon the first anguish of such tidings as I have received; the sense of uncertainty, the fear of enjoyment, the pale and deathy gleam thrown over the countenances of the living, whom we love.... But this is bad comforting. Your own virtues, your own love itself, must give it. Mr. De Quincey has left town, and will by this time have arrived at Grasmere. On Sunday last I gave him a letter for you; but he (I have heard) did not leave town till Thursday night, by what accidents prevented I know not. In the oppression of spirits under which I wrote that letter, I did not make it clear that it was only Mr. Josiah’s half of the annuity[96] that was withdrawn from me. My answer, of course, breathed nothing but gratitude for the past.

I will write in a few days again to you. To-morrow is my lecture night, “On the _human_ causes of the spread of Christianity, and its effects after the establishment of Christendom.” Dear Mary! dear Dorothy! dearest Sara! Oh, be assured, no thought relative to myself has half the influence in inspiring the wish and effort to _appear_ and to _act_ what I always in my will and heart have been, as the knowledge that few things could more console you than to see me healthy, and worthy of myself! Again and again, my dearest Wordsworth!!! I am affectionately and truly yours,

S. T. COLERIDGE.

CXCIII. TO HIS WIFE.

Wednesday afternoon [January 20,] 18[13].

MY DEAR SARA,--_Hitherto_ the “Remorse” has met with _unexampled applause_, but whether it will _continue_ to fill the _house_, that is quite another question, and of this, my friends are, in my opinion, far, far too sanguine. I have disposed not of the copyright but of edition by edition to Mr. Pople, on terms advantageous to me as an author and honourable to him as a publisher. The expenses of printing and paper (at the trade-price) advertising, etc., are to be deducted from the total produce, and the net profits to be divided into three equal parts, of which Pople is to have one, and I the other two. And at any future time, I may publish it in any volume of my poems _collectively_. Mr. Arnold (the manager) has just left me. He called to urge me to exert myself a little with regard to the daily press, and brought with him “The Times”[97] of Monday as a specimen of the _infernal lies_ of which a newspaper scribe can be capable. Not only is not _one_ sentence in it true; but every one is in the direct face of a palpable truth. The misrepresentations must have been wilful. I must now, therefore, write to “The Times,” and if Walter refuses to insert, I will then, recording the circumstance, publish it in the “Morning Post,” “Morning Chronicle,” and “The Courier.” The dirty malice of Antony Pasquin[98] in the “Morning Herald” is below notice. This, however, will explain to you why the shortness of this letter, the main business of which is to desire you to draw upon Brent and Co., No. 103 Bishopsgate Street Within, for an hundred pounds, at a month’s date from the drawing, or, if that be objected to, for three weeks, only let me know which. In the course of a month I have no hesitation in promising you another hundred, and I hope likewise before Midsummer, if God grant me life, to repay you whatever you have expended for the children.

My wishes and purposes concerning Hartley and Derwent I will communicate as soon as this bustle and endless rat-a-tat-tat at our door is somewhat over. I concluded my Lectures last night most triumphantly, with loud, long, and enthusiastic applauses at my entrance, and ditto in yet fuller chorus as, and for some minutes after I had retired. It was lucky that (as I never once thought of the Lecture till I had entered the Lecture Box), the two last were the most impressive and really the best. I suppose that no dramatic author ever had so large a number of unsolicited, unknown yet _predetermined_ plauditors in the theatre, as I had on Saturday night. One of the malignant papers asserted that I had collected all the saints from Mile End turnpike to Tyburn Bar. With so many warm friends, it is impossible, in the present state of human nature, that I should not have many unprovoked and unknown enemies. You will have heard that on my entering the box on Saturday night, I was discovered by the pit, and that they all turned their faces towards our box, and gave a treble cheer of claps.

I mention these things because it will please Southey to hear that there is a large number of persons in London who hail with enthusiasm my prospect of the stage’s being purified and rendered classical. My success, if I succeed (of which I assure you I entertain doubts in my opinion well founded, both from the want of a prominent actor for Ordonio, and from the want of vulgar pathos in the play itself--nay, there is not enough even of _true_ dramatic pathos), but if I succeed, I succeed for others as well as myself....

S. T. COLERIDGE.

P. S. I _pray you_, my dear Sara! do take on yourself the charge of instantly sending off by the waggon Mr. Sotheby’s folio edition of all Petrarch’s Works, which I left at Grasmere. (I am ashamed to meet Sotheby till I have returned it.) At the same time my quarto MS. Book with the German Musical Play in it,[99] and the two folio volumes of the Greek Poets may go. For I want them hourly and I must try to imitate W. Scott in making hay while the sun shines.

Kisses and heartfelt loves for my sweet Sara, and scarce less for dear little Herbert and Edith.

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.)

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.

S. T. COLERIDGE.

CHAPTER XII

A MELANCHOLY EXILE

1813-1815