CHAPTER XVI

QUARREL WITH WORDSWORTH, SECOND COURSE OF LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE

[During the remainder of 1810, after the cessation of _The Friend_, Coleridge did nothing of importance except write letters to his acquaintances about new projects which grew up in the impetuosity of his conversation or in answering some enquiry to a correspondent. At the close of the year Coleridge had determined to go to London once more; and an unfortunate occurrence took place on his arrival in London. Basil Montagu with his wife and child were travelling from Scotland to London, and called upon the Wordsworths at Allan Bank, where Coleridge resided with brief intervals of absence from September 1808 to April 1810. Montagu invited Coleridge to travel to the metropolis with him in his chaise and stay some time at his residence. Wordsworth warned Montagu of Coleridge's opium habit, and said something to the effect that "he had no hope" of Coleridge, and perhaps that he had been a "nuisance" in the Wordsworth family. On his arrival in London, Montagu informed Coleridge that Wordsworth had commissioned him to say that Wordsworth had no hope of him, and that certain habits of his had made him a nuisance in the Allan Bank household (Dykes Campbell's _Life_, 179). Coleridge, of course, left the Montagus on hearing this communication, and repaired to 7, Portland Place, Hammersmith, then the abode of his old friend John Morgan, and his wife Mary Brent, and her sister Charlotte Brent, with whom the father of the ladies also lived (_Letters_, 598).

Coleridge was deeply stung that Wordsworth should have said such a thing to Montagu. Professor Knight in his _Life of Wordsworth_ gives a pretty full narrative of the event, and believes that Wordsworth, though he said he had no hope of Coleridge, did not utter the more offensive assertion about Coleridge being a nuisance in his family. Henry Crabb Robinson effected a formal reconciliation between the two poets, in which both figure to some disadvantage. Wordsworth's proposal to confront Coleridge, his best and closest friend, with Montagu, a comparative stranger to both of them, for cross-examination, and thus sift out the actual expression used by the latter to the former, seems like very hard dealing; and Coleridge's vehemence of protestation to believe whatever Wordsworth asserted to be the true version, in contradistinction to anything that Montagu might say, savours of unreality. Wordsworth's taking offence at Coleridge not going to Grasmere on the death of his child at a juncture when it was impossible for him to leave London while _Remorse_ was being put on the stage, does not redound to the credit of the Bard of Rydal; and Coleridge's failure to call on his old friend while in the Lake District for the last time is equally against the poet of Stowey. The estrangement died down rather than was reconciled; but the irritation against Wordsworth remained long in Coleridge's heart, and it is more than probable that after the excitement of the reconciliation made by Crabb Robinson was over, Coleridge believed Montagu's rather than Wordsworth's version of what had occurred. This is endorsed by the fact that Montagu was again taken into favour, and he and his wife were regular guests at the Highgate Thursdays in after times.[26]

During 1811, while in London, Coleridge again met Godwin, to whom he softened in his opinion. The following two letters indicate that he did not occupy the same attitude to the author of _Political Justice_ as he did when he wrote _The Watchman_.

LETTER 147. TO GODWIN

Tuesday, March 26, 1811.

Dear Godwin,

Mr. Grattan did me the honour of calling on me, and leaving his card, on Sunday afternoon, unfortunately a few minutes after I had gone out--and I am so unwell, that I fear I shall not be able to return the call to-day, as I had intended, though it is a grief even for a brace of days to appear insensible of so much kindness and condescension. But what need has Grattan of pride?

Ha d'uopo solo Mendicar dall' orgoglio onore e stima, Chi senza lui di vilipendio é degno.

CHIABRERA.

I half caught from Lamb that you had written to Wordsworth, with a wish that he should versify some tale or other, and that Wordsworth had declined it. I told dear Miss Lamb that I had formed a complete plan of a poem, with little plates for children, the _first_ thought, but that alone, taken from Gessner's _First Mariner_; and this thought, I have reason to believe, was not an invention of Gessner's. It is this--that in early times, in some island or part of the Continent, the ocean had rushed in, overflowing a vast plain of twenty or thirty miles, and thereby _insulating_ one small promontory or cape of high land, on which was a cottage, containing a man and his wife, and an infant daughter. This is the _one_ thought; all that Gessner has made out of it--(and I once translated into blank verse about half of the poem, but gave it up under the influence of a double disgust, moral and poetical)--I have rejected; and, strictly speaking, the tale in all its parts, that one idea excepted, would be original. The tale will contain the cause, the occasions, the process, with all its failures and ultimate success, of the construction of the first boat, and of the undertaking of the first naval expedition. Now, supposing you liked the idea (I address you and Mrs. G., and as _commerciants_, not you as the philosopher who gave us the first system in England that ever dared reveal at full that most important of all important truths, that morality might be built on its own foundation, like a castle built _from_ the rock and _on_ the rock, with religion for the ornaments and completion of its roof and upper stories--nor as the critic who, in the life of Chaucer, has given us, if not principles of _æsthetic_ or taste, yet more and better data for principles than had hitherto existed in our language)if we pulling like two friendly tradesmen together, (for you and your wife _must_ be one flesh, and I trust _are_ one heart) you approve of the plan, the next question is, Whether it should be written in prose or in verse, and if the latter, in what metre--stanzas, or eight-syllable iambics with rhymes (for in rhyme it must be), now in couplets and now in quatrains, in the manner of Cooper's admirable translation of the _Vert-Vert_ of Gresset. (N.B. not _the_ Cowper).

Another thought has struck me within the last month, of a school-book in two octavo volumes, of Lives in the manner of Plutarch--not, indeed, of comparing and coupling Greek with Roman, Dion with Brutus, and Cato with Aristides, of placing ancient and modern together: Numa with Alfred, Cicero with Bacon, Hannibal with Gustavus Adolphus, and Julius Cæsar with Buonaparte--or what perhaps might be at once more interesting and more instructive, a series of lives, from Moses to Buonaparte, of all those great men, who in states or in the mind of man had produced great revolutions, the effects of which still remain, and are more or less distant causes of the present state of the world.

I remain, with unfeigned and affectionate esteem,

Yours, dear Godwin, S. T. COLERIDGE.[27]

LETTER 148. TO GODWIN

Friday morning, March 29, 1811.

Dear Godwin,

My chief motive in undertaking _The First Mariner_ is merely to weave a few tendrils around your destined walking-stick, which, like those of the woodbine (that, serpent-like climbing up, and with tight spires embossing the straight hazel, rewards the lucky schoolboy's search in the winter copse) may remain on it, when the woodbine, root and branch, lies trampled in the earth. I shall consider the work as a small plot of ground given up to you, to be sown at your own hazard with your own seed (gold-grains would have been but a bad saw, and besides have spoilt the metaphor). If the increase should more than repay your risk and labour, why then let me be one of your guests at Hendcot House. Your last letter impressed and affected me strongly. Ere I had yet read or seen your works, I, at Southey's recommendation, wrote a sonnet in praise of the author. When I had read them, religious bigotry, the but half-understanding your principles, and the _not_ half-understanding my own, combined to render me a warm and boisterous anti-Godwinist. But my warfare was open; my unfelt and harmless blows aimed at an abstraction I had christened with your name; and at that time, if not in the world's _favor_, you were among the captains and chief men in its admiration. I became your acquaintance, when more years had brought somewhat more temper and tolerance; but I distinctly remember that the first turn in my mind towards you, the first movements of a juster appreciation of your merits, was occasioned by my disgust at the altered tone of language of many whom I had long known as your admirers and disciples--some of them, too, men who had made themselves a sort of reputation in minor circles as your acquaintances, and therefore your echoes by authority, who had themselves aided in attaching an unmerited ridicule to you and your opinions by their own ignorance, which led them to think the best settled truths, and indeed _every_ thing in your _Political Justice_, whether assertion, or deduction, or conjecture, to have been new thoughts--downright creations! and by their own vanity, which enabled them to forget that everything must be new to him who knows _nothing_; others again, who though gifted with high talents, had yet been indebted to you and the discussions occasioned by your work, for much of their development, who had often and often styled you the Great Master, written verses in your honour, and, worse than all, had now brought your opinions--with many good and worthy men--into as unmerited an odium, as the former class had into contempt, by attempts equally unfeeling and unwise, to realize them in private life, to the disturbance of domestic peace. And lastly, a third class; but the name of ---- spares me the necessity of describing it. In all these there was such a want of common sensibility, such a want of that gratitude to an intellectual benefactor, which even an honest reverence for their past selves should have secured, as did then, still does, and ever will, disgust me. As for ----, I cannot justify him; but he stands in no one of the former classes. When he was young he just looked enough into your books to believe you taught republicanism and stoicism; ergo, that he was of your opinion and you of his, and that was all. Systems of philosophy were never his taste or forte. And I verily believe that his conduct originated wholly and solely in the effects which the trade of reviewing never fails to produce at certain times on the best minds,--presumption, petulance, callousness to personal feelings, and a disposition to treat the reputations of their contemporaries as playthings placed at their own disposal. Most certainly I cannot approve of such things; but yet I have learned how difficult it is for a man who has from earliest childhood preserved himself immaculate from all the common faults and weaknesses of human nature, and who, never creating any small disquietudes, has lived in general esteem and honour, to feel remorse, or to admit that he has done wrong. Believe me, there is a bluntness of conscience superinduced by a very unusual infrequency, as well as by a habit of frequency of wrong actions. "Sunt quibus cecidisse prodesset," says Augustine. To this add that business of review-writing, carried on for fifteen years together, and which I have never hesitated to pronounce an immoral employment, unjust to the author of the books reviewed, injurious in its influences on the public taste and morality, and still more injurious on its influences on the head and heart of the reviewer himself. The _prægustatores_ among the luxurious Romans soon lost their taste; and the verdicts of an old prægustator were sure to mislead, unless when, like dreams, they were interpreted into contraries. Our reviewers are the genuine descendants of these palate-seared taste dictators. I am still confined by indisposition, but mean to step out to Hazlitt's--almost my next door neighbour--at his

## particular request. It is possible that I may find you there.

With kind remembrances to Mrs. Godwin,

Yours, dear Godwin, affectionately, S. T. COLERIDGE.

From 19th April to 27th September 1811 Coleridge (_Essays on his Own Times_, 733-938) was busy contributing articles again to _The Courier_ on all subjects of the day, their irony as bright, their imagery as fresh, their philosophy as sound as anything he had formerly written. But Coleridge ceased to write for _The Courier_ when he discovered that it was not an independent paper. An article on the Duke of York written by Coleridge, after having been set up in type, was suppressed, at the instigation of the Government. He wrote to Beaumont on 7th December 1811: "I have not been at _The Courier_ office for some months past. I detest writing politics even on the right side; and when I discovered that _The Courier_ was not the independent paper I had been led to believe, and had myself over and over again asserted, I wrote no more for it.... I will write for the _Permanent_, or not at all." (Coleorton _Memorials_ ii, 162, 7th December 1811.)

During the winter of 1811-12 Coleridge did something for the _Permanent_ in the shape of a new course of Lectures on Shakespeare. The course lasted from the beginning of November 1811 to 28th January 1812. The Lectures are published in T. Ashe's edition (Bohn Library, pp. 33-165). The finest of the Lectures is No. IX, given on 16th December 1811. The Lectures were delivered at the London Philosophical Society's Rooms, Fetter Lane, and were attended, according to Henry Crabb Robinson, by enthusiastic audiences; and the course closed with _éclat_. On one occasion Rogers and Byron were present. The following letter to Dr. Andrew Bell, whom, it will be remembered, he corresponded with while he was giving his first course, is a characteristic bit of Coleridge's application of the Law of Association.

LETTER 149. TO DR. ANDREW BELL (Southey's _Life of Bell_, ii, 645)

Mr. Pople's, 67 Chancery Lane Holborn, 30 November 1811.

My Dear Sir,

The room I lecture in is very comfortable, and of a grave academic appearance; the company highly respectable, though (unluckily) rather scanty; but the entrance, which is under a short passage from Fetter Lane, some thirty doors or more from Fleet Street, is disagreeable even to foot-comers, and far more so to carriages, from the narrowness and bendings of the lane. This, and in truth, the very name of _Fetter_ Lane, renowned exclusively for pork and sausages, have told against me; and I pay an exorbitant price in proportion to the receipts. I should doubtless feel myself honoured by your attendance on some one night; but such is your distance, and such is the weather, that I scarce dare _wish_ it, much less ask or expect it.

I wrote a long letter to you concerning the sophistications of your system at present in vogue, the inevitable consequences on the whole mass of moral feelings, even of the dissenters themselves, and the courage as well as fortitude, required for the effort to do one's duty. But I asked myself why I should give you pain, and destroyed it. Yet come what will, the subject shall be treated fully, intrepidly, and by close deduction from settled first principles, in the first volume of the recommencing _Friend_, which I hope to bring out early in the spring, on a quarterly or four-monthly plan, in partnership with a publisher who is personally my friend, and who will take on himself all the _business_, and leave me exclusively occupied in the composition. Even to this day I have not received nearly one-half of the subscriptions for the former numbers, and am expiating the error by all sorts of perplexities and embarrassments. A man who has nothing better than prudence is fit for no world to come; and he who does not possess it in full activity, is as unfit for the present world. What then shall we say? Have both prudence and the moral sense, but subordinate the former to the latter; and so possess the flexibility and address of the serpent to glide through the brakes and jungles of this life, with the wings of the dove to carry us upward to a better!

May the Almighty bless and preserve you, my dear Sir! With most unfeigned love and honour, I remain--and till I lose all sense of my better being, of the veiled immortal within me, ever must remain, your obliged and grateful friend,

S. T. COLERIDGE.]

FOOTNOTES:

[26] [See _Letters_, p. 590, and Professor Knight's _Life of Wordsworth_, ch. XXV, for full account of the misunderstanding.]

[27] [Letter CLXXXI precedes our 147.]

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