I cannot walk home from office but some officious friend offers
his unwelcome courtesies to accompany me.
his unwelcome courtesies to accompany me.
Selection of English Letters
I found myself cut off,
at one and the same time, from two most dear to me. 'How blest with
ye the path could I have trod of quiet life! ' In your conversation you
had blended so many pleasant fancies that they cheated me of my grief.
But in your absence the tide of melancholy rushed in again, and did
its worst mischief by overwhelming my reason. I have recovered, but
feel a stupor that makes me indifferent to the hopes and fears of
this life. I sometimes wish to introduce a religious turn of mind,
but habits are strong things, and my religious fervours are confined,
alas! to some fleeting moments of occasional solitary devotion. A
correspondence, opening with you, has roused me a little from my
lethargy, and made me conscious of existence. Indulge me in it: I will
not be very troublesome! At some future time I will amuse you with
an account, as full as my memory will permit, of the strange turn my
frenzy took. I look back upon it at times with a gloomy kind of envy:
for, while it lasted, I had many, many hours of pure happiness. Dream
not, Coleridge, of having tasted all the grandeur and wildness of
fancy till you have gone mad! All now seems to me vapid, comparatively
so.
TO THE SAME
_The tragedy_
27 _Sept_. 1796.
MY DEAREST FRIEND,
White, or some of my friends, or the public papers, by this time may
have informed you of the terrible calamities that have fallen on
our family. I will only give you the outlines: My poor dear, dearest
sister, in a fit of insanity, has been the death of our own mother. I
was at hand only time enough to snatch the knife out of her grasp. She
is at present in a madhouse, from whence I fear she must be moved to
an hospital. God has preserved to me my senses; I eat, and drink, and
sleep, and have my judgement, I believe, very sound. My poor father
was slightly wounded, and I am left to take care of him and my aunt.
Mr. Norris, of the Bluecoat School, has been very kind to us, and we
have no other friend; but, thank God, I am very calm and composed, and
able to do the best that remains to do. Write as religious a letter as
possible, but no mention of what is gone and done with. With me 'the
former things are passed away', and I have something more to do than
to feel.
God Almighty have us in His keeping!
Mention nothing of poetry. I have destroyed every vestige of past
vanities of that kind. Do as you please, but if you publish, publish
mine (I give free leave) without name or initial, and never send me a
book, I charge you.
Your own judgement will convince you not to take any notice of this
yet to your dear wife. You look after your family; I have reason
and strength left to take care of mine. I charge you, don't think of
coming to see me. Write. I will not see you if you come. God Almighty
love you and all of us!
TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
_The delights of London_
30 _Jan_. 1801.
I ought before this to have replied to your very kind invitation into
Cumberland. With you and your sister I could gang anywhere; but I am
afraid whether I shall ever be able to afford so desperate a journey.
Separate from the pleasure of your company, I don't much care if I
never see a mountain in my life. I have passed all my days in London,
until I have formed as many and intense local attachments as any of
you mountaineers can have done with dead Nature. The lighted shops of
the Strand and Fleet Street; the innumerable trades, tradesmen, and
customers, coaches, waggons, playhouses; all the bustle and wickedness
round about Covent Garden; the very women of the Town; the watchmen,
drunken scenes, rattles;--life awake, if you awake, at all hours of
the night; the crowds, the very dirt and mud, the sun shining upon
houses and pavements, the printshops, the old book-stalls, parsons
cheapening books, coffee-houses, steams of soups from kitchens, the
pantomimes--London itself a pantomime and a masquerade--all these
things work themselves into my mind, and feed me, without a power
of satiating me. The wonder of these sights impels me often into
night-walks about her crowded streets, and I often shed tears in the
motley Strand from fullness of joy at so much life. All these
emotions must be strange to you; so are your rural emotions to me. But
consider, what must I have been doing all my life, not to have lent
great portions of my heart with usury to such scenes?
My attachments are all local, purely local. I have no passion (or have
had none since I was in love, and then it was the spurious engendering
of poetry and books) to groves and valleys. The rooms where I was
born, the furniture which has been before my eyes all my life, a
book-case which has followed me about like a faithful dog, (only
exceeding him in knowledge,) wherever I have moved, old chairs,
old tables, streets, squares, where I have sunned myself, my old
school,--these are my mistresses,--have I not enough, without your
mountains? I do not envy you. I should pity you, did I not know that
the mind will make friends of anything. Your sun, and moon, and skies,
and hills, and lakes, affect me no more, or scarcely come to me in
more venerable characters, than as a gilded room with tapestry and
tapers, where I might live with handsome visible objects. I consider
the clouds above me but as a roof beautifully painted, but unable to
satisfy the mind: and at last, like the pictures of the apartment of
a connoisseur, unable to afford him any longer a pleasure. So fading
upon me, from disuse, have been the beauties of Nature, as they have
been confinedly called; so ever fresh, and green, and warm are all the
inventions of men, and assemblies of men in this great city. I should
certainly have laughed with dear Joanna.
Give my kindest love, and my sister's, to D. and yourself; and a kiss
from me to little Barbara Lewthwaite. Thank you for liking my play!
TO THOMAS MANNING
_At the Lakes_
London, 24 _Sept_. 1802.
My dear Manning,
Since the date of my last letter I have been a traveller. A strong
desire seized me of visiting remote regions. My first impulse was to
go and see Paris. It was a trivial objection to my aspiring mind, that
I did not understand a word of the language, since I certainly intend
some time in my life to see Paris, and equally certainly intend never
to learn the language; therefore that could be no objection. However,
I am very glad I did not go, because you had left Paris (I see) before
I could have set out. I believe Stoddart promising to go with me
another year prevented that plan. My next scheme (for to my restless,
ambitious mind London was become a bed of thorns) was to visit the
far-famed peak in Derbyshire, where the Devil sits, they say, without
breeches. _This_ my purer mind rejected as indelicate. And my final
resolve was a tour to the Lakes. I set out with Mary to Keswick,
without giving Coleridge any notice, for my time, being precious, did
not admit of it. He received us with all the hospitality in the world,
and gave up his time to show us all the wonders of the country. He
dwells upon a small hill by the side of Keswick, in a comfortable
house, quite enveloped on all sides by a net of mountains: great
floundering bears and monsters they seemed, all couchant and asleep.
We got in in the evening, travelling in a post-chaise from Penrith, in
the midst of a gorgeous sunshine, which transmuted all the mountains
into colours, purple, &c. , &c. We thought we had got into fairy-land.
But that went off (as it never came again; while we stayed we had no
more fine sunsets); and we entered Coleridge's comfortable study just
in the dusk, when the mountains were all dark with clouds upon their
heads. Such an impression I never received from objects of sight
before, nor do I suppose I can ever again. Glorious creatures, fine
old fellows, Skiddaw, &c. I shall never forget ye, how ye lay about
that night, like an intrenchment; gone to bed, as it seemed for the
night, but promising that ye were to be seen in the morning. Coleridge
had got a blazing fire in his study; which is a large, antique,
ill-shaped room, with an old-fashioned organ, never played upon, big
enough for a church, shelves of scattered folios, an Aeolian harp, and
an old sofa, half bed, &c. And all looking out upon the last fading
view of Skiddaw, and his broad-breasted brethren: what a night! Here
we stayed three full weeks, in which time I visited Wordsworth's
cottage, where we stayed a day or two with the Clarksons (good people,
and most hospitable, at whose house we tarried one day and night), and
saw Lloyd. The Wordsworths were gone to Calais. They have since been
in London, and passed much time with us: he is now gone into Yorkshire
to be married. So we have seen Keswick, Grasmere, Ambleside, Ulswater
(where the Clarksons live), and a place at the other end of Ulswater;
I forget the name; to which we travelled on a very sultry day, over
the middle of Helvellyn. We have clambered up to the top of Skiddaw,
and I have waded up the bed of Lodore. In fine, I have satisfied
myself that there is such a thing as that which tourists call
_romantic_, which I very much suspected before: they make such a
spluttering about it, and toss their splendid epithets around them,
till they give as dim a light as at four o'clock next morning the
lamps do after an illumination. Mary was excessively tired when she
got about half-way up Skiddaw, but we came to a cold rill (than which
nothing can be imagined more cold, running over cold stones), and with
the reinforcement of a draught of cold water, she surmounted it most
manfully. Oh, its fine black head, and the bleak air atop of it, with
a prospect of mountains all about and about, making you giddy; and
then Scotland afar off, and the border countries so famous in song and
ballad! It was a day that will stand out, like a mountain, I am sure,
in my life. But I am returned (I have now been come home near three
weeks; I was a month out), and you cannot conceive the degradation
I felt at first, from being accustomed to wander free as air among
mountains, and bathe in rivers without being controlled by any one, to
come home and _work_. I felt very _little_. I had been dreaming I was
a very great man. But that is going off, and I find I shall conform
in time to that state of life to which it has pleased God to call me.
Besides, after all, Fleet Street and the Strand are better places to
live in for good and all than amidst Skiddaw. Still, I turn back to
those great places where I wandered about, participating in their
greatness. After all, I could not _live_ in Skiddaw. I could spend
a year, two, three years among them, but I must have a prospect of
seeing Fleet Street at the end of that time, or I should mope and pine
away, I know. Still, Skiddaw is a fine creature.
My habits are changing, I think, i. e. from drunk to sober. Whether
I shall be happier or not remains to be proved. I shall certainly be
more happy in a morning; but whether I shall not sacrifice the
fat, and the marrow, and the kidneys, i. e. the night, glorious,
care-drowning night, that heals all our wrongs, pours wine into our
mortifications, changes the scene from indifferent and flat to bright
and brilliant! --O Manning, if I should have formed a diabolical
resolution, by the time you come to England, of not admitting any
spirituous liquors into my house, will you be my guest on such
shame-worthy terms? Is life, with such limitations, worth trying? The
truth is, that my liquors bring a nest of friendly harpies about
my house, who consume me. This is a pitiful tale to be read at St.
Gothard, but it is just now nearest my heart. Fenwick is a ruined man.
He is hiding himself from his creditors, and has sent his wife and
children into the country. Fell, my other drunken companion (that has
been: _nam hic caestus artemque repono_), is turned editor of a Naval
Chronicle. Godwin continues a steady friend, though the same facility
does not remain of visiting him often. X. has detached Marshall from
his house; Marshall, the man who went to sleep when the _Ancient
Mariner_ was reading; the old, steady, unalterable friend of the
Professor. Holcraft is not yet come to town. I expect to see him, and
will deliver your message. Things come crowding in to say, and no
room for 'em. Some things are too little to be told, i. e. to have a
preference; some are too big and circumstantial. Thanks for yours,
which was most delicious. Would I had been with you, benighted, &c. !
I fear my head is turned with wandering. I shall never be the same
acquiescent being. Farewell. Write again quickly, for I shall not
like to hazard a letter, not knowing where the fates have carried you.
Farewell, my dear fellow.
TO THE SAME
_Dissuasion from Tartary_
19 _Feb_. 1803.
MY DEAR MANNING,
The general scope of your letter afforded no indications of insanity,
but some particular points raised a scruple. For God's sake don't
think any more of 'Independent Tartary'. What are you to do among such
Ethiopians? Is there no _lineal descendant_ of Prester John? Is the
chair empty? Is the sword unswayed? --depend upon it they'll never
make you their king, as long as any branch of that great stock
is remaining. I tremble for your Christianity. . . . Read Sir John
Mandeville's Travels to cure you, or come over to England. There is
a Tartar-man now exhibiting at Exeter Change. Come and talk with him,
and hear what he says first. Indeed, he is no very favourable specimen
of his countrymen! But perhaps the best thing you can do, is to _try_
to get the idea out of your head. For this purpose repeat to yourself
every night, after you have said your prayers, the words, Independent
Tartary, Independent Tartary, two or three times, and associate with
them the _idea_ of _oblivion_ ('tis Hartley's method with obstinate
memories), or say, Independent, Independent, have I not already got
an _independence_? That was a clever way of the old Puritans,
pun-divinity. My dear friend, think what a sad pity it would be to
bury such _parts_ in heathen countries, among nasty, unconversable,
horse-belching, Tartar-people! Some say they are Cannibals; and then,
conceive a Tartar-fellow _eating_ my friend, and adding the _cool
malignity_ of mustard and vinegar! I am afraid 'tis the reading of
Chaucer has misled you; his foolish stories about Cambuscan, and the
ring, and the horse of brass. Believe me, there are no such things,
'tis all the poet's _invention_; but if there were such darling things
as old Chaucer sings, I would _up_ behind you on the horse of brass,
and frisk off for Prester John's country. But these are all tales;
a horse of brass never flew, and a king's daughter never talked with
birds! The Tartars, really, are a cold, insipid, smouchy set. You'll
be sadly moped (if you are not eaten) among them. Pray _try_ and cure
yourself. Take hellebore (the counsel is Horace's, 'twas none of my
thought _originally_). Shave yourself oftener. Eat no saffron, for
saffron-eaters contract a terrible Tartar-like yellow. Pray, to avoid
the fiend. Eat nothing that gives the heart-burn. _Shave the upper_
_lip_. Go about like an European. Read no books of voyages (they are
nothing but lies), only now and then a romance, to keep the fancy
_under_. Above all, don't go to any sights of _wild beasts. That
has been your ruin_. Accustom yourself to write familiar letters, on
common subjects, to your friends in England, such as are of a moderate
understanding. And think about common things more. . . . I supped last
night with Rickman, and met a merry _natural_ captain, who pleases
himself vastly with once having made a pun at Otaheite in the O.
language. 'Tis the same man who said Shakespeare he liked, because
he was so _much of the gentleman_. Rickman is a man 'absolute in all
numbers'. I think I may one day bring you acquainted, if you do not
go to Tartary first; for you'll never come back. Have a care, my dear
friend, of Anthropophagi! their stomachs are always craving. 'Tis
terrible to be weighed out at five pence a-pound. To sit at table (the
reverse of fishes in Holland), not as a guest, but as a meat.
God bless you: do come to England. Air and exercise may do great
things. Talk with some minister. Why not your father?
God dispose all for the best. I have discharged my duty.
To MRS. WORDSWORTH
_Friends' importunities_
East India House, 18 _Feb_. 1818.
MY DEAR MRS. WORDSWORTH,
I have repeatedly taken pen in hand to answer your kind letter. My
sister should more properly have done it, but she having failed, I
consider myself answerable for her debts. I am now trying to do it
in the midst of commercial noises, and with a quill which seems more
ready to glide into arithmetical figures and names of gourds, cassia,
cardemoms, aloes, ginger, or tea, than into kindly responses and
friendly recollections. The reason why I cannot write letters at home,
is, that I am never alone. Plato's--(I write to W. W. now)--Plato's
double-animal parted never longed more to be reciprocally re-united in
the system of its first creation, than I sometimes do to be but for
a moment single and separate. Except my morning's walk to the office,
which is like treading on sands of gold for that reason, I am never
so.
I cannot walk home from office but some officious friend offers
his unwelcome courtesies to accompany me. All the morning I am
pestered. I could sit and gravely cast up sums in great books, or
compare sum with sum, and write 'paid' against this, and 'unpaid'
against t'other, and yet reserve in some corner of my mind 'some
darling thoughts all my own',--faint memory of some passage in a book,
or the tone of an absent friend's voice--a snatch of Miss Burrell's
singing, or a gleam of Fanny Kelly's divine plain face. The two
operations might be going on at the same time without thwarting, as
the sun's two motions (earth's, I mean), or, as I sometimes turn
round till I am giddy, in my back parlour, while my sister is walking
longitudinally in the front; or, as the shoulder of veal twists round
with the spit, while the smoke wreathes up the chimney. But there are
a set of amateurs of the Belles Lettres--the gay science--who come to
me as a sort of rendezvous, putting questions of criticism, of British
Institutions, Lalla Rookhs, &c. --what Coleridge said at the lecture
last night--who have the form of reading men, but, for any possible
use reading can be to them, but to talk of, might as well have been
Ante-Cadmeans born, or have lain sucking out the sense of an Egyptian
hieroglyph as long as the pyramids will last, before they should
find it. These pests worrit me at business, and in all its intervals,
perplexing my accounts, poisoning my little salutary warming-time at
the fire, puzzling my paragraphs if I take a newspaper, cramming in
between my own free thoughts and a column of figures, which had come
to an amicable compromise but for them. Their noise ended, one of
them, as I said, accompanies me home, lest I should be solitary for
a moment; he at length takes his welcome leave at the door; up I go,
mutton on table, hungry as hunter, hope to forget my cares, and bury
them in the agreeable abstraction of mastication; knock at the door,
in comes Mr. ----, or Mr. ----, or Demi-gorgon, or my brother, or
somebody, to prevent my eating alone--a process absolutely
necessary to my poor wretched digestion. O, the pleasure of eating
alone! --eating my dinner alone! let me think of it. But in they
come, and make it absolutely necessary that I should open a bottle of
orange--for my meat turns into stone when anyone dines with me, if I
have not wine. Wine can mollify stones; then _that_ wine turns into
acidity, acerbity, misanthropy, a hatred of my interrupters--(God
bless 'em! I love some of 'em dearly), and with the hatred, a still
greater aversion to their going away. Bad is the dead sea they bring
upon me, choking and deadening, but worse is the deader dry sand they
leave me on, if they go before bed-time. Come never, I would say to
these spoilers of my dinner; but if you come, never go! The fact is,
this interruption does not happen very often; but every time it comes
by surprise, that present bane of my life, orange wine, with all its
dreary stifling consequences, follows. Evening company I should always
like had I any mornings, but I am saturated with human faces (_divine_
forsooth! ) and voices all the golden morning; and five evenings in a
week would be as much as I should covet to be in company, but I
assure you that is a wonderful week in which I can get two, or one, to
myself. I am never C. L. , but always C. L. & Co. He who thought it
not good for man to be alone, preserve me from the more prodigious
monstrosity of being never by myself! I forget bed-time, but even
there these sociable frogs clamber up to annoy me. Once a week,
generally some singular evening that, being alone, I go to bed at the
hour I ought always to be a-bed; just close to my bed-room window is
the club-room of a public-house, where a set of singers, I take them
to be chorus singers of the two theatres (it must be _both of them_),
begin their orgies. They are a set of fellows (as I conceive) who,
being limited by their talents to the burthen of the song at the
play-houses, in revenge have got the common popular airs by Bishop, or
some cheap composer, arranged for choruses, that is, to be sung all in
chorus. At least, I never can catch any of the text of the plain song,
nothing but the Babylonish choral howl at the tail on't. 'That fury
being quench'd'--the howl I mean--a burden succeeds of shouts and
clapping, and knocking of the table. At length overtasked nature drops
under it, and escapes for a few hours into the society of the sweet
silent creatures of dreams, which go away with mocks and mows at
cockcrow. And then I think of the words Christabel's father used
(bless me, I have dipt in the wrong ink! ) to say every morning by way
of variety when he awoke:
Every knell, the Baron saith,
Wakes us up to a world of death--
or something like it. All I mean by this senseless interrupted tale,
is, that by my central situation I am a little over-companied. Not
that I have any animosity against the good creatures that are so
anxious to drive away the harpy solitude from me. I like 'em, and
cards, and a cheerful glass; but I mean merely to give you an idea
between office confinement and after-office society, how little time
I can call my own. I mean only to draw a picture, not to make an
inference. I would not that I know of have it otherwise. I only wish
sometimes I could exchange some of my faces and voices for the faces
and voices which a late visitation brought most welcome, and carried
away, leaving regret, but more pleasure, even a kind of gratitude, at
being so often favoured with that kind northern visitation. My London
faces and noises don't hear me--I mean no disrespect, or I should
explain myself, that instead of their return 220 times a year, and
the return of W. W. , &c. , seven times in 104 weeks, some more equal
distribution might be found. I have scarce room to put in Mary's kind
love, and my poor name . . . --goes on lecturing. . . . I mean to hear some
of the course, but lectures are not much to my taste, whatever the
lecturer may be. If _read_, they are dismal flat, and you can't think
why you are brought together to hear a man read his works, which you
could read so much better at leisure yourself; if delivered extempore,
I am always in pain, lest the gift of utterance should suddenly fail
the orator in the middle, as it did me at the dinner given in honour
of me at the London Tavern. 'Gentlemen,' said I, and there I stopped;
the rest my feelings were under the necessity of supplying. Mrs.
Wordsworth _will_ go on, kindly haunting us with visions of seeing the
lakes once more, which never can be realised. Between us there is a
great gulf, not of inexplicable moral antipathies and distances, I
hope, as there seemed to be between me and that gentleman concerned
in the Stamp Office, that I so strangely recoiled from at Haydon's. I
think I had an instinct that he was the head of an office. I hate all
such people--accountants' deputy accountants. The dear abstract notion
of the East India Company, as long as she is unseen, is pretty, rather
poetical; but as she makes herself manifest by the persons of such
beasts, I loathe and detest her as the scarlet what-do-you-call-her
of Babylon. I thought, after abridging us of all our red-letter days,
they had done their worst; but I was deceived in the length to which
heads of offices, those true liberty-haters, can go. They are the
tyrants; not Ferdinand, nor Nero. By a decree passed this week, they
have abridged us of the immemorially-observed custom of going at one
o'clock of a Saturday, the little shadow of a holiday left us. Dear
W. W. , be thankful for liberty.
To SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
_The famous pigling_
9 _March_, 1822.
DEAR COLERIDGE,
It gives me great satisfaction to hear that the pig turned out so
well: they are such interesting creatures at a certain age. What a
pity such buds should blow out into the maturity of rank bacon! You
had all some of the crackling and brain sauce. Did you remember to rub
it with butter, and gently dredge it a little, just before the crisis?
Did the eyes come away kindly with no Oedipean avulsion? Was the
crackling the colour of the ripe pomegranate? Had you no complement of
boiled neck of mutton before it, to blunt the edge of delicate desire?
Did you flesh maiden teeth in it? Not that _I_ sent the pig, or can
form the remotest guess what part Owen could play in the business. I
never knew him give anything away in my life. He would not begin with
strangers. I suspect the pig, after all, was meant for me; but at the
unlucky juncture of time being absent, the present somehow went round
to Highgate. To confess an honest truth, a pig is one of those things
which I could never think of sending away. Teal, widgeon, snipes,
barn-door fowls, ducks, geese--your tame villatic things--Welsh
mutton, collars of brawn, sturgeon, fresh or pickled, your potted
char, Swiss cheeses, French pies, early grapes, muscadines, I impart
as freely unto my friends as to myself. They are but self extended,
but pardon me if I stop somewhere. Where the fine feeling of
benevolence giveth a higher smack than the sensual rarity, there my
friends (or any good man) may command me; but pigs are pigs, and
I myself therein am nearest to myself. Nay, I should think it an
affront, an undervaluing done to Nature who bestowed such a boon upon
me, if in a churlish mood I parted with the precious gift. One of the
bitterest pangs of remorse I ever felt was when a child--when my kind
old aunt had strained her pocket-strings to bestow a sixpenny
whole plum-cake upon me. In my way home through the Borough I met a
venerable old man, not a mendicant, but thereabouts; a look-beggar,
not a verbal petitionist; and in the coxcombry of taught charity I
gave away the cake to him. I walked on a little in all the pride of an
Evangelical peacock, when of a sudden my old aunt's kindness crossed
me; the sum it was to her; the pleasure she had a right to expect
that I--not the old impostor--should take in eating her cake; the
ingratitude by which, under the colour of a Christian virtue, I had
frustrated her cherished purpose. I sobbed, wept, and took it to
heart so grievously, that I think I never suffered the like; and I was
right. It was a piece of unfeeling hypocrisy, and it proved a lesson
to me ever after. The cake has long been masticated, consigned to
the dunghill with the ashes of that unseasonable pauper. But when
Providence, who is better to us than all our aunts, gives me a pig,
remembering my temptation and my fall, I shall endeavour to act
towards it more in the spirit of the donor's purpose.
Yours (short of pig) to command in every thing.
To BERNARD BARTON
_A blessing in disguise_
9 _Jan_. 1823.
'Throw yourself on the world without any rational plan of support,
beyond what the chance employ of booksellers would afford you'! ! !
Throw yourself rather, my dear sir, from the steep Tarpeian rock,
slap-dash headlong upon iron spikes. If you have but five consolatory
minutes between the desk and the bed, make much of them, and live a
century in them, rather than turn slave to the booksellers. They are
Turks and Tartars when they have poor authors at their beck. Hitherto
you have been at arm's length from them. Come not within their grasp.
I have known many authors want for bread, some repining, others
envying the blessed security of a counting-house, all agreeing they
had rather have been tailors, weavers--what not? rather than the
things they were. I have known some starved, some to go mad, one dear
friend literally dying in a workhouse. You know not what a rapacious,
dishonest set these booksellers are. Ask even Southey, who (a single
case almost) has made a fortune by book-drudgery, what he has found
them. Oh, you know not, may you never know, the miseries of subsisting
by authorship! 'Tis a pretty appendage to a situation like yours or
mine; but a slavery, worse than all slavery, to be a bookseller's
dependant, to drudge your brains for pots of ale, and breasts of
mutton, _to change your_ FREE THOUGHTS _and_ VOLUNTARY NUMBERS _for
ungracious_ TASK-WORK. Those fellows hate _us_. The reason I take to
be, that contrary to other trades, in which the master gets all the
credit (a jeweller or silversmith for instance,) and the journeyman,
who really does the fine work, is in the background: in _our_ work
the world gives all the credit to us, whom _they_ consider as _their_
journeymen, and therefore do they hate us, and cheat us, and oppress
us, and would wring the blood of us out, to put another sixpence in
their mechanic pouches! . . .
Keep to your bank, and the bank will keep you. Trust not to the
public; you may hang, starve, drown yourself, for anything that worthy
_personage_ cares. I bless every star, that Providence, not seeing
good to make me independent, has seen it next good to settle me upon
the stable foundation of Leadenhall. Sit down, good B. B. , in the
banking-office: what! is there not from six to eleven p. m. six days
in the week, and is there not all Sunday? Fie, what a superfluity
of man's time, if you could think so! Enough for relaxation, mirth,
converse, poetry, good thoughts, quiet thoughts. O the corroding,
torturing, tormenting thoughts, that disturb the brain of the unlucky
wight who must draw upon it for daily sustenance! Henceforth I retract
all my fond complaints of mercantile employment; look upon them as
lover's quarrels. I was but half in earnest. Welcome dead timber
of the desk, that makes me live. A little grumbling is a wholesome
medicine for the spleen, but in my inner heart do I approve and
embrace this our close, but unharassing way of life. I am quite
serious. If you can send me Fox, I will not keep it _six weeks_, and
will return it, with warm thanks to yourself and friend, without blot
or dog's-ear. You will much oblige me by this kindness.
TO THE SAME
_A cold_
9 _Jan_. 1824.
DEAR B. B. ,
Do you know what it is to succumb under an insurmountable
day-mare,--'a whoreson lethargy', Falstaff calls it,--an indisposition
to do anything, or to be anything,--a total deadness and distaste,--a
suspension of vitality,--an indifference to locality,--a numb,
soporifical, good-for-nothingness,--an ossification all over,--an
oyster-like insensibility to the passing events,--a mind-stupor,--a
brawny defiance to the needles of a thrusting-in conscience? Did you
ever have a very bad cold, with a total irresolution to submit to
water-gruel processes? This has been for many weeks my lot, and my
excuse; my fingers drag heavily over this paper, and to my thinking it
is three-and-twenty furlongs from here to the end of this demi-sheet.
I have not a thing to say; no thing is of more importance than
another; I am flatter than a denial or a pancake; emptier than Judge
----'s wig when the head is in it; duller than a country stage when
the actors are off it; a cipher, an O! I acknowledge life at all, only
by an occasional convulsional cough, and a permanent phlegmatic pain
in the chest. I am weary of the world; life is weary of me. My day is
gone into twilight, and I don't think it worth the expense of candles.
My wick hath a thief in it, but I can't muster courage to snuff it.
I inhale suffocation; I can't distinguish veal from mutton; nothing
interests me. 'Tis twelve o'clock, and Thurtell is just now coming out
upon the New Drop, Jack Ketch alertly tucking up his greasy sleeves
to do the last office of mortality, yet cannot I elicit a groan or
a moral reflection. If you told me the world will be at an end
to-morrow, I should just say, 'Will it? ' I have not volition enough
left to dot my _i's_, much less to comb my eyebrows; my eyes are
set in my head; my brains are gone out to see a poor relation in
Moorflelds, and they did not say when they'd come back again; my skull
is a Grub Street attic to let--not so much as a joint stool left in
it; my hand writes, not I, from habit, as chickens run about a
little, when their heads are off. O for a vigorous fit of gout, colic,
toothache,--an earwig in my auditory, a fly in my visual organs; pain
is life--the sharper, the more evidence of life; but this apathy, this
death! Did you ever have an obstinate cold,--a six or seven weeks'
unintermitting chill and suspension of hope, fear, conscience, and
every thing? Yet do I try all I can to cure it; I try wine, and
spirits, and smoking, and snuff in unsparing quantities, but they all
only seem to make me worse instead of better. I sleep in a damp room,
but it does me no good; I come home late o' nights, but do not find
any visible amendment! . . .
It is just fifteen minutes after twelve; Thurtell is by this time
a good way on his journey, baiting at Scorpion perhaps; Ketch is
bargaining for his cast coat and waistcoat; the Jew demurs at first at
three half-crowns, but, on consideration that he may get somewhat by
showing 'em in the town, finally closes.
WILLIAM HAZLITT
1778-1830
To Miss Sarah Stoddart
_A love-letter_
Tuesday night [_Jan. _ 1808].
MY DEAR LOVE,
Above a week has passed, and I have received no letter--not one of
those letters 'in which I live, or have no life at all'. What is
become of you? Are you married, hearing that I was dead (for so it has
been reported)? Or are you gone into a nunnery? Or are you fallen in
love with some of the amorous heroes of Boccaccio? Which of them is
it? Is it with Chynon, who was transformed from a clown into a lover,
and learned to spell by the force of beauty? Or with Lorenzo, the
lover of Isabella, whom her three brethren hated (as your brother does
me), who was a merchant's clerk? Or with Federigo Alberigi, an honest
gentleman, who ran through his fortune, and won his mistress by
cooking a fair falcon for her dinner, though it was the only means he
had left of getting a dinner for himself? This last is the man; and
I am the more persuaded of it, because I think I won your good liking
myself by giving you an entertainment--of sausages, when I had no
money to buy them with. Nay now, never deny it! Did I not ask your
consent that very night after, and did you not give it? Well, I should
be confoundedly jealous of those fine gallants, if I did not know that
a living dog is better than a dead lion; though, now I think of it,
Boccaccio does not in general make much of his lovers: it is his women
who are so delicious. I almost wish I had lived in those times, and
had been a little _more amiable_. Now if a woman had written the book,
it would not have had this effect upon me: the men would have been
heroes and angels, and the women nothing at all. Isn't there some
truth in that? Talking of departed loves, I met my old flame the other
day in the street. I did dream of her _one_ night since, and only one:
every other night I have had the same dream I have had for these two
months past. Now, if you are at all reasonable, this will satisfy you.
_Thursday morning_. The book is come. When I saw it I thought you had
sent it back in a _huff_, tired out by my sauciness, and _coldness_,
and delays, and were going to keep an account of dimities and sayes,
or to salt pork and chronicle small beer as the dutiful wife of some
fresh-looking, rural swain; so that you cannot think how surprised
and pleased I was to find them all done. I liked your note as well or
better than the extracts; it is just such a note as such a nice rogue
as you ought to write after the _provocation_ you had received. I
would not give a pin for a girl 'whose cheeks never tingle', nor for
myself if I could not make them tingle sometimes. Now, though I am
always writing to you about 'lips and noses', and such sort of stuff,
yet as I sit by my fireside (which I do generally eight or ten hours a
day), I oftener think of you in a serious, sober light. For, indeed,
I never love you so well as when I think of sitting down with you to
dinner on a boiled scrag-end of mutton, and hot potatoes. You please
my fancy more then than when I think of you in--no, you would never
forgive me if I were to finish the sentence. Now I think of it, what
do you mean to be dressed in when we are married? But it does not much
matter! I wish you would let your hair grow; though perhaps nothing
will be better than 'the same air and look with which at first my
heart was took'. But now to business. I mean soon to call upon your
brother _in form_, namely, as soon as I get quite well, which I hope
to do in about another _fortnight_; and then I hope you will come up
by the coach as fast as the horses can carry you, for I long mightily
to be in your ladyship's presence--to vindicate my character. I think
you had better sell the small house, I mean that at 4. 10, and I will
borrow £100. So that we shall set off merrily in spite of all the
prudence of Edinburgh. Goodbye, little dear!
TO HIS SON
_Marriage, and the choice of a profession_
[1822. ]
. . . If you ever marry, I would wish you to marry the woman you like.
at one and the same time, from two most dear to me. 'How blest with
ye the path could I have trod of quiet life! ' In your conversation you
had blended so many pleasant fancies that they cheated me of my grief.
But in your absence the tide of melancholy rushed in again, and did
its worst mischief by overwhelming my reason. I have recovered, but
feel a stupor that makes me indifferent to the hopes and fears of
this life. I sometimes wish to introduce a religious turn of mind,
but habits are strong things, and my religious fervours are confined,
alas! to some fleeting moments of occasional solitary devotion. A
correspondence, opening with you, has roused me a little from my
lethargy, and made me conscious of existence. Indulge me in it: I will
not be very troublesome! At some future time I will amuse you with
an account, as full as my memory will permit, of the strange turn my
frenzy took. I look back upon it at times with a gloomy kind of envy:
for, while it lasted, I had many, many hours of pure happiness. Dream
not, Coleridge, of having tasted all the grandeur and wildness of
fancy till you have gone mad! All now seems to me vapid, comparatively
so.
TO THE SAME
_The tragedy_
27 _Sept_. 1796.
MY DEAREST FRIEND,
White, or some of my friends, or the public papers, by this time may
have informed you of the terrible calamities that have fallen on
our family. I will only give you the outlines: My poor dear, dearest
sister, in a fit of insanity, has been the death of our own mother. I
was at hand only time enough to snatch the knife out of her grasp. She
is at present in a madhouse, from whence I fear she must be moved to
an hospital. God has preserved to me my senses; I eat, and drink, and
sleep, and have my judgement, I believe, very sound. My poor father
was slightly wounded, and I am left to take care of him and my aunt.
Mr. Norris, of the Bluecoat School, has been very kind to us, and we
have no other friend; but, thank God, I am very calm and composed, and
able to do the best that remains to do. Write as religious a letter as
possible, but no mention of what is gone and done with. With me 'the
former things are passed away', and I have something more to do than
to feel.
God Almighty have us in His keeping!
Mention nothing of poetry. I have destroyed every vestige of past
vanities of that kind. Do as you please, but if you publish, publish
mine (I give free leave) without name or initial, and never send me a
book, I charge you.
Your own judgement will convince you not to take any notice of this
yet to your dear wife. You look after your family; I have reason
and strength left to take care of mine. I charge you, don't think of
coming to see me. Write. I will not see you if you come. God Almighty
love you and all of us!
TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
_The delights of London_
30 _Jan_. 1801.
I ought before this to have replied to your very kind invitation into
Cumberland. With you and your sister I could gang anywhere; but I am
afraid whether I shall ever be able to afford so desperate a journey.
Separate from the pleasure of your company, I don't much care if I
never see a mountain in my life. I have passed all my days in London,
until I have formed as many and intense local attachments as any of
you mountaineers can have done with dead Nature. The lighted shops of
the Strand and Fleet Street; the innumerable trades, tradesmen, and
customers, coaches, waggons, playhouses; all the bustle and wickedness
round about Covent Garden; the very women of the Town; the watchmen,
drunken scenes, rattles;--life awake, if you awake, at all hours of
the night; the crowds, the very dirt and mud, the sun shining upon
houses and pavements, the printshops, the old book-stalls, parsons
cheapening books, coffee-houses, steams of soups from kitchens, the
pantomimes--London itself a pantomime and a masquerade--all these
things work themselves into my mind, and feed me, without a power
of satiating me. The wonder of these sights impels me often into
night-walks about her crowded streets, and I often shed tears in the
motley Strand from fullness of joy at so much life. All these
emotions must be strange to you; so are your rural emotions to me. But
consider, what must I have been doing all my life, not to have lent
great portions of my heart with usury to such scenes?
My attachments are all local, purely local. I have no passion (or have
had none since I was in love, and then it was the spurious engendering
of poetry and books) to groves and valleys. The rooms where I was
born, the furniture which has been before my eyes all my life, a
book-case which has followed me about like a faithful dog, (only
exceeding him in knowledge,) wherever I have moved, old chairs,
old tables, streets, squares, where I have sunned myself, my old
school,--these are my mistresses,--have I not enough, without your
mountains? I do not envy you. I should pity you, did I not know that
the mind will make friends of anything. Your sun, and moon, and skies,
and hills, and lakes, affect me no more, or scarcely come to me in
more venerable characters, than as a gilded room with tapestry and
tapers, where I might live with handsome visible objects. I consider
the clouds above me but as a roof beautifully painted, but unable to
satisfy the mind: and at last, like the pictures of the apartment of
a connoisseur, unable to afford him any longer a pleasure. So fading
upon me, from disuse, have been the beauties of Nature, as they have
been confinedly called; so ever fresh, and green, and warm are all the
inventions of men, and assemblies of men in this great city. I should
certainly have laughed with dear Joanna.
Give my kindest love, and my sister's, to D. and yourself; and a kiss
from me to little Barbara Lewthwaite. Thank you for liking my play!
TO THOMAS MANNING
_At the Lakes_
London, 24 _Sept_. 1802.
My dear Manning,
Since the date of my last letter I have been a traveller. A strong
desire seized me of visiting remote regions. My first impulse was to
go and see Paris. It was a trivial objection to my aspiring mind, that
I did not understand a word of the language, since I certainly intend
some time in my life to see Paris, and equally certainly intend never
to learn the language; therefore that could be no objection. However,
I am very glad I did not go, because you had left Paris (I see) before
I could have set out. I believe Stoddart promising to go with me
another year prevented that plan. My next scheme (for to my restless,
ambitious mind London was become a bed of thorns) was to visit the
far-famed peak in Derbyshire, where the Devil sits, they say, without
breeches. _This_ my purer mind rejected as indelicate. And my final
resolve was a tour to the Lakes. I set out with Mary to Keswick,
without giving Coleridge any notice, for my time, being precious, did
not admit of it. He received us with all the hospitality in the world,
and gave up his time to show us all the wonders of the country. He
dwells upon a small hill by the side of Keswick, in a comfortable
house, quite enveloped on all sides by a net of mountains: great
floundering bears and monsters they seemed, all couchant and asleep.
We got in in the evening, travelling in a post-chaise from Penrith, in
the midst of a gorgeous sunshine, which transmuted all the mountains
into colours, purple, &c. , &c. We thought we had got into fairy-land.
But that went off (as it never came again; while we stayed we had no
more fine sunsets); and we entered Coleridge's comfortable study just
in the dusk, when the mountains were all dark with clouds upon their
heads. Such an impression I never received from objects of sight
before, nor do I suppose I can ever again. Glorious creatures, fine
old fellows, Skiddaw, &c. I shall never forget ye, how ye lay about
that night, like an intrenchment; gone to bed, as it seemed for the
night, but promising that ye were to be seen in the morning. Coleridge
had got a blazing fire in his study; which is a large, antique,
ill-shaped room, with an old-fashioned organ, never played upon, big
enough for a church, shelves of scattered folios, an Aeolian harp, and
an old sofa, half bed, &c. And all looking out upon the last fading
view of Skiddaw, and his broad-breasted brethren: what a night! Here
we stayed three full weeks, in which time I visited Wordsworth's
cottage, where we stayed a day or two with the Clarksons (good people,
and most hospitable, at whose house we tarried one day and night), and
saw Lloyd. The Wordsworths were gone to Calais. They have since been
in London, and passed much time with us: he is now gone into Yorkshire
to be married. So we have seen Keswick, Grasmere, Ambleside, Ulswater
(where the Clarksons live), and a place at the other end of Ulswater;
I forget the name; to which we travelled on a very sultry day, over
the middle of Helvellyn. We have clambered up to the top of Skiddaw,
and I have waded up the bed of Lodore. In fine, I have satisfied
myself that there is such a thing as that which tourists call
_romantic_, which I very much suspected before: they make such a
spluttering about it, and toss their splendid epithets around them,
till they give as dim a light as at four o'clock next morning the
lamps do after an illumination. Mary was excessively tired when she
got about half-way up Skiddaw, but we came to a cold rill (than which
nothing can be imagined more cold, running over cold stones), and with
the reinforcement of a draught of cold water, she surmounted it most
manfully. Oh, its fine black head, and the bleak air atop of it, with
a prospect of mountains all about and about, making you giddy; and
then Scotland afar off, and the border countries so famous in song and
ballad! It was a day that will stand out, like a mountain, I am sure,
in my life. But I am returned (I have now been come home near three
weeks; I was a month out), and you cannot conceive the degradation
I felt at first, from being accustomed to wander free as air among
mountains, and bathe in rivers without being controlled by any one, to
come home and _work_. I felt very _little_. I had been dreaming I was
a very great man. But that is going off, and I find I shall conform
in time to that state of life to which it has pleased God to call me.
Besides, after all, Fleet Street and the Strand are better places to
live in for good and all than amidst Skiddaw. Still, I turn back to
those great places where I wandered about, participating in their
greatness. After all, I could not _live_ in Skiddaw. I could spend
a year, two, three years among them, but I must have a prospect of
seeing Fleet Street at the end of that time, or I should mope and pine
away, I know. Still, Skiddaw is a fine creature.
My habits are changing, I think, i. e. from drunk to sober. Whether
I shall be happier or not remains to be proved. I shall certainly be
more happy in a morning; but whether I shall not sacrifice the
fat, and the marrow, and the kidneys, i. e. the night, glorious,
care-drowning night, that heals all our wrongs, pours wine into our
mortifications, changes the scene from indifferent and flat to bright
and brilliant! --O Manning, if I should have formed a diabolical
resolution, by the time you come to England, of not admitting any
spirituous liquors into my house, will you be my guest on such
shame-worthy terms? Is life, with such limitations, worth trying? The
truth is, that my liquors bring a nest of friendly harpies about
my house, who consume me. This is a pitiful tale to be read at St.
Gothard, but it is just now nearest my heart. Fenwick is a ruined man.
He is hiding himself from his creditors, and has sent his wife and
children into the country. Fell, my other drunken companion (that has
been: _nam hic caestus artemque repono_), is turned editor of a Naval
Chronicle. Godwin continues a steady friend, though the same facility
does not remain of visiting him often. X. has detached Marshall from
his house; Marshall, the man who went to sleep when the _Ancient
Mariner_ was reading; the old, steady, unalterable friend of the
Professor. Holcraft is not yet come to town. I expect to see him, and
will deliver your message. Things come crowding in to say, and no
room for 'em. Some things are too little to be told, i. e. to have a
preference; some are too big and circumstantial. Thanks for yours,
which was most delicious. Would I had been with you, benighted, &c. !
I fear my head is turned with wandering. I shall never be the same
acquiescent being. Farewell. Write again quickly, for I shall not
like to hazard a letter, not knowing where the fates have carried you.
Farewell, my dear fellow.
TO THE SAME
_Dissuasion from Tartary_
19 _Feb_. 1803.
MY DEAR MANNING,
The general scope of your letter afforded no indications of insanity,
but some particular points raised a scruple. For God's sake don't
think any more of 'Independent Tartary'. What are you to do among such
Ethiopians? Is there no _lineal descendant_ of Prester John? Is the
chair empty? Is the sword unswayed? --depend upon it they'll never
make you their king, as long as any branch of that great stock
is remaining. I tremble for your Christianity. . . . Read Sir John
Mandeville's Travels to cure you, or come over to England. There is
a Tartar-man now exhibiting at Exeter Change. Come and talk with him,
and hear what he says first. Indeed, he is no very favourable specimen
of his countrymen! But perhaps the best thing you can do, is to _try_
to get the idea out of your head. For this purpose repeat to yourself
every night, after you have said your prayers, the words, Independent
Tartary, Independent Tartary, two or three times, and associate with
them the _idea_ of _oblivion_ ('tis Hartley's method with obstinate
memories), or say, Independent, Independent, have I not already got
an _independence_? That was a clever way of the old Puritans,
pun-divinity. My dear friend, think what a sad pity it would be to
bury such _parts_ in heathen countries, among nasty, unconversable,
horse-belching, Tartar-people! Some say they are Cannibals; and then,
conceive a Tartar-fellow _eating_ my friend, and adding the _cool
malignity_ of mustard and vinegar! I am afraid 'tis the reading of
Chaucer has misled you; his foolish stories about Cambuscan, and the
ring, and the horse of brass. Believe me, there are no such things,
'tis all the poet's _invention_; but if there were such darling things
as old Chaucer sings, I would _up_ behind you on the horse of brass,
and frisk off for Prester John's country. But these are all tales;
a horse of brass never flew, and a king's daughter never talked with
birds! The Tartars, really, are a cold, insipid, smouchy set. You'll
be sadly moped (if you are not eaten) among them. Pray _try_ and cure
yourself. Take hellebore (the counsel is Horace's, 'twas none of my
thought _originally_). Shave yourself oftener. Eat no saffron, for
saffron-eaters contract a terrible Tartar-like yellow. Pray, to avoid
the fiend. Eat nothing that gives the heart-burn. _Shave the upper_
_lip_. Go about like an European. Read no books of voyages (they are
nothing but lies), only now and then a romance, to keep the fancy
_under_. Above all, don't go to any sights of _wild beasts. That
has been your ruin_. Accustom yourself to write familiar letters, on
common subjects, to your friends in England, such as are of a moderate
understanding. And think about common things more. . . . I supped last
night with Rickman, and met a merry _natural_ captain, who pleases
himself vastly with once having made a pun at Otaheite in the O.
language. 'Tis the same man who said Shakespeare he liked, because
he was so _much of the gentleman_. Rickman is a man 'absolute in all
numbers'. I think I may one day bring you acquainted, if you do not
go to Tartary first; for you'll never come back. Have a care, my dear
friend, of Anthropophagi! their stomachs are always craving. 'Tis
terrible to be weighed out at five pence a-pound. To sit at table (the
reverse of fishes in Holland), not as a guest, but as a meat.
God bless you: do come to England. Air and exercise may do great
things. Talk with some minister. Why not your father?
God dispose all for the best. I have discharged my duty.
To MRS. WORDSWORTH
_Friends' importunities_
East India House, 18 _Feb_. 1818.
MY DEAR MRS. WORDSWORTH,
I have repeatedly taken pen in hand to answer your kind letter. My
sister should more properly have done it, but she having failed, I
consider myself answerable for her debts. I am now trying to do it
in the midst of commercial noises, and with a quill which seems more
ready to glide into arithmetical figures and names of gourds, cassia,
cardemoms, aloes, ginger, or tea, than into kindly responses and
friendly recollections. The reason why I cannot write letters at home,
is, that I am never alone. Plato's--(I write to W. W. now)--Plato's
double-animal parted never longed more to be reciprocally re-united in
the system of its first creation, than I sometimes do to be but for
a moment single and separate. Except my morning's walk to the office,
which is like treading on sands of gold for that reason, I am never
so.
I cannot walk home from office but some officious friend offers
his unwelcome courtesies to accompany me. All the morning I am
pestered. I could sit and gravely cast up sums in great books, or
compare sum with sum, and write 'paid' against this, and 'unpaid'
against t'other, and yet reserve in some corner of my mind 'some
darling thoughts all my own',--faint memory of some passage in a book,
or the tone of an absent friend's voice--a snatch of Miss Burrell's
singing, or a gleam of Fanny Kelly's divine plain face. The two
operations might be going on at the same time without thwarting, as
the sun's two motions (earth's, I mean), or, as I sometimes turn
round till I am giddy, in my back parlour, while my sister is walking
longitudinally in the front; or, as the shoulder of veal twists round
with the spit, while the smoke wreathes up the chimney. But there are
a set of amateurs of the Belles Lettres--the gay science--who come to
me as a sort of rendezvous, putting questions of criticism, of British
Institutions, Lalla Rookhs, &c. --what Coleridge said at the lecture
last night--who have the form of reading men, but, for any possible
use reading can be to them, but to talk of, might as well have been
Ante-Cadmeans born, or have lain sucking out the sense of an Egyptian
hieroglyph as long as the pyramids will last, before they should
find it. These pests worrit me at business, and in all its intervals,
perplexing my accounts, poisoning my little salutary warming-time at
the fire, puzzling my paragraphs if I take a newspaper, cramming in
between my own free thoughts and a column of figures, which had come
to an amicable compromise but for them. Their noise ended, one of
them, as I said, accompanies me home, lest I should be solitary for
a moment; he at length takes his welcome leave at the door; up I go,
mutton on table, hungry as hunter, hope to forget my cares, and bury
them in the agreeable abstraction of mastication; knock at the door,
in comes Mr. ----, or Mr. ----, or Demi-gorgon, or my brother, or
somebody, to prevent my eating alone--a process absolutely
necessary to my poor wretched digestion. O, the pleasure of eating
alone! --eating my dinner alone! let me think of it. But in they
come, and make it absolutely necessary that I should open a bottle of
orange--for my meat turns into stone when anyone dines with me, if I
have not wine. Wine can mollify stones; then _that_ wine turns into
acidity, acerbity, misanthropy, a hatred of my interrupters--(God
bless 'em! I love some of 'em dearly), and with the hatred, a still
greater aversion to their going away. Bad is the dead sea they bring
upon me, choking and deadening, but worse is the deader dry sand they
leave me on, if they go before bed-time. Come never, I would say to
these spoilers of my dinner; but if you come, never go! The fact is,
this interruption does not happen very often; but every time it comes
by surprise, that present bane of my life, orange wine, with all its
dreary stifling consequences, follows. Evening company I should always
like had I any mornings, but I am saturated with human faces (_divine_
forsooth! ) and voices all the golden morning; and five evenings in a
week would be as much as I should covet to be in company, but I
assure you that is a wonderful week in which I can get two, or one, to
myself. I am never C. L. , but always C. L. & Co. He who thought it
not good for man to be alone, preserve me from the more prodigious
monstrosity of being never by myself! I forget bed-time, but even
there these sociable frogs clamber up to annoy me. Once a week,
generally some singular evening that, being alone, I go to bed at the
hour I ought always to be a-bed; just close to my bed-room window is
the club-room of a public-house, where a set of singers, I take them
to be chorus singers of the two theatres (it must be _both of them_),
begin their orgies. They are a set of fellows (as I conceive) who,
being limited by their talents to the burthen of the song at the
play-houses, in revenge have got the common popular airs by Bishop, or
some cheap composer, arranged for choruses, that is, to be sung all in
chorus. At least, I never can catch any of the text of the plain song,
nothing but the Babylonish choral howl at the tail on't. 'That fury
being quench'd'--the howl I mean--a burden succeeds of shouts and
clapping, and knocking of the table. At length overtasked nature drops
under it, and escapes for a few hours into the society of the sweet
silent creatures of dreams, which go away with mocks and mows at
cockcrow. And then I think of the words Christabel's father used
(bless me, I have dipt in the wrong ink! ) to say every morning by way
of variety when he awoke:
Every knell, the Baron saith,
Wakes us up to a world of death--
or something like it. All I mean by this senseless interrupted tale,
is, that by my central situation I am a little over-companied. Not
that I have any animosity against the good creatures that are so
anxious to drive away the harpy solitude from me. I like 'em, and
cards, and a cheerful glass; but I mean merely to give you an idea
between office confinement and after-office society, how little time
I can call my own. I mean only to draw a picture, not to make an
inference. I would not that I know of have it otherwise. I only wish
sometimes I could exchange some of my faces and voices for the faces
and voices which a late visitation brought most welcome, and carried
away, leaving regret, but more pleasure, even a kind of gratitude, at
being so often favoured with that kind northern visitation. My London
faces and noises don't hear me--I mean no disrespect, or I should
explain myself, that instead of their return 220 times a year, and
the return of W. W. , &c. , seven times in 104 weeks, some more equal
distribution might be found. I have scarce room to put in Mary's kind
love, and my poor name . . . --goes on lecturing. . . . I mean to hear some
of the course, but lectures are not much to my taste, whatever the
lecturer may be. If _read_, they are dismal flat, and you can't think
why you are brought together to hear a man read his works, which you
could read so much better at leisure yourself; if delivered extempore,
I am always in pain, lest the gift of utterance should suddenly fail
the orator in the middle, as it did me at the dinner given in honour
of me at the London Tavern. 'Gentlemen,' said I, and there I stopped;
the rest my feelings were under the necessity of supplying. Mrs.
Wordsworth _will_ go on, kindly haunting us with visions of seeing the
lakes once more, which never can be realised. Between us there is a
great gulf, not of inexplicable moral antipathies and distances, I
hope, as there seemed to be between me and that gentleman concerned
in the Stamp Office, that I so strangely recoiled from at Haydon's. I
think I had an instinct that he was the head of an office. I hate all
such people--accountants' deputy accountants. The dear abstract notion
of the East India Company, as long as she is unseen, is pretty, rather
poetical; but as she makes herself manifest by the persons of such
beasts, I loathe and detest her as the scarlet what-do-you-call-her
of Babylon. I thought, after abridging us of all our red-letter days,
they had done their worst; but I was deceived in the length to which
heads of offices, those true liberty-haters, can go. They are the
tyrants; not Ferdinand, nor Nero. By a decree passed this week, they
have abridged us of the immemorially-observed custom of going at one
o'clock of a Saturday, the little shadow of a holiday left us. Dear
W. W. , be thankful for liberty.
To SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
_The famous pigling_
9 _March_, 1822.
DEAR COLERIDGE,
It gives me great satisfaction to hear that the pig turned out so
well: they are such interesting creatures at a certain age. What a
pity such buds should blow out into the maturity of rank bacon! You
had all some of the crackling and brain sauce. Did you remember to rub
it with butter, and gently dredge it a little, just before the crisis?
Did the eyes come away kindly with no Oedipean avulsion? Was the
crackling the colour of the ripe pomegranate? Had you no complement of
boiled neck of mutton before it, to blunt the edge of delicate desire?
Did you flesh maiden teeth in it? Not that _I_ sent the pig, or can
form the remotest guess what part Owen could play in the business. I
never knew him give anything away in my life. He would not begin with
strangers. I suspect the pig, after all, was meant for me; but at the
unlucky juncture of time being absent, the present somehow went round
to Highgate. To confess an honest truth, a pig is one of those things
which I could never think of sending away. Teal, widgeon, snipes,
barn-door fowls, ducks, geese--your tame villatic things--Welsh
mutton, collars of brawn, sturgeon, fresh or pickled, your potted
char, Swiss cheeses, French pies, early grapes, muscadines, I impart
as freely unto my friends as to myself. They are but self extended,
but pardon me if I stop somewhere. Where the fine feeling of
benevolence giveth a higher smack than the sensual rarity, there my
friends (or any good man) may command me; but pigs are pigs, and
I myself therein am nearest to myself. Nay, I should think it an
affront, an undervaluing done to Nature who bestowed such a boon upon
me, if in a churlish mood I parted with the precious gift. One of the
bitterest pangs of remorse I ever felt was when a child--when my kind
old aunt had strained her pocket-strings to bestow a sixpenny
whole plum-cake upon me. In my way home through the Borough I met a
venerable old man, not a mendicant, but thereabouts; a look-beggar,
not a verbal petitionist; and in the coxcombry of taught charity I
gave away the cake to him. I walked on a little in all the pride of an
Evangelical peacock, when of a sudden my old aunt's kindness crossed
me; the sum it was to her; the pleasure she had a right to expect
that I--not the old impostor--should take in eating her cake; the
ingratitude by which, under the colour of a Christian virtue, I had
frustrated her cherished purpose. I sobbed, wept, and took it to
heart so grievously, that I think I never suffered the like; and I was
right. It was a piece of unfeeling hypocrisy, and it proved a lesson
to me ever after. The cake has long been masticated, consigned to
the dunghill with the ashes of that unseasonable pauper. But when
Providence, who is better to us than all our aunts, gives me a pig,
remembering my temptation and my fall, I shall endeavour to act
towards it more in the spirit of the donor's purpose.
Yours (short of pig) to command in every thing.
To BERNARD BARTON
_A blessing in disguise_
9 _Jan_. 1823.
'Throw yourself on the world without any rational plan of support,
beyond what the chance employ of booksellers would afford you'! ! !
Throw yourself rather, my dear sir, from the steep Tarpeian rock,
slap-dash headlong upon iron spikes. If you have but five consolatory
minutes between the desk and the bed, make much of them, and live a
century in them, rather than turn slave to the booksellers. They are
Turks and Tartars when they have poor authors at their beck. Hitherto
you have been at arm's length from them. Come not within their grasp.
I have known many authors want for bread, some repining, others
envying the blessed security of a counting-house, all agreeing they
had rather have been tailors, weavers--what not? rather than the
things they were. I have known some starved, some to go mad, one dear
friend literally dying in a workhouse. You know not what a rapacious,
dishonest set these booksellers are. Ask even Southey, who (a single
case almost) has made a fortune by book-drudgery, what he has found
them. Oh, you know not, may you never know, the miseries of subsisting
by authorship! 'Tis a pretty appendage to a situation like yours or
mine; but a slavery, worse than all slavery, to be a bookseller's
dependant, to drudge your brains for pots of ale, and breasts of
mutton, _to change your_ FREE THOUGHTS _and_ VOLUNTARY NUMBERS _for
ungracious_ TASK-WORK. Those fellows hate _us_. The reason I take to
be, that contrary to other trades, in which the master gets all the
credit (a jeweller or silversmith for instance,) and the journeyman,
who really does the fine work, is in the background: in _our_ work
the world gives all the credit to us, whom _they_ consider as _their_
journeymen, and therefore do they hate us, and cheat us, and oppress
us, and would wring the blood of us out, to put another sixpence in
their mechanic pouches! . . .
Keep to your bank, and the bank will keep you. Trust not to the
public; you may hang, starve, drown yourself, for anything that worthy
_personage_ cares. I bless every star, that Providence, not seeing
good to make me independent, has seen it next good to settle me upon
the stable foundation of Leadenhall. Sit down, good B. B. , in the
banking-office: what! is there not from six to eleven p. m. six days
in the week, and is there not all Sunday? Fie, what a superfluity
of man's time, if you could think so! Enough for relaxation, mirth,
converse, poetry, good thoughts, quiet thoughts. O the corroding,
torturing, tormenting thoughts, that disturb the brain of the unlucky
wight who must draw upon it for daily sustenance! Henceforth I retract
all my fond complaints of mercantile employment; look upon them as
lover's quarrels. I was but half in earnest. Welcome dead timber
of the desk, that makes me live. A little grumbling is a wholesome
medicine for the spleen, but in my inner heart do I approve and
embrace this our close, but unharassing way of life. I am quite
serious. If you can send me Fox, I will not keep it _six weeks_, and
will return it, with warm thanks to yourself and friend, without blot
or dog's-ear. You will much oblige me by this kindness.
TO THE SAME
_A cold_
9 _Jan_. 1824.
DEAR B. B. ,
Do you know what it is to succumb under an insurmountable
day-mare,--'a whoreson lethargy', Falstaff calls it,--an indisposition
to do anything, or to be anything,--a total deadness and distaste,--a
suspension of vitality,--an indifference to locality,--a numb,
soporifical, good-for-nothingness,--an ossification all over,--an
oyster-like insensibility to the passing events,--a mind-stupor,--a
brawny defiance to the needles of a thrusting-in conscience? Did you
ever have a very bad cold, with a total irresolution to submit to
water-gruel processes? This has been for many weeks my lot, and my
excuse; my fingers drag heavily over this paper, and to my thinking it
is three-and-twenty furlongs from here to the end of this demi-sheet.
I have not a thing to say; no thing is of more importance than
another; I am flatter than a denial or a pancake; emptier than Judge
----'s wig when the head is in it; duller than a country stage when
the actors are off it; a cipher, an O! I acknowledge life at all, only
by an occasional convulsional cough, and a permanent phlegmatic pain
in the chest. I am weary of the world; life is weary of me. My day is
gone into twilight, and I don't think it worth the expense of candles.
My wick hath a thief in it, but I can't muster courage to snuff it.
I inhale suffocation; I can't distinguish veal from mutton; nothing
interests me. 'Tis twelve o'clock, and Thurtell is just now coming out
upon the New Drop, Jack Ketch alertly tucking up his greasy sleeves
to do the last office of mortality, yet cannot I elicit a groan or
a moral reflection. If you told me the world will be at an end
to-morrow, I should just say, 'Will it? ' I have not volition enough
left to dot my _i's_, much less to comb my eyebrows; my eyes are
set in my head; my brains are gone out to see a poor relation in
Moorflelds, and they did not say when they'd come back again; my skull
is a Grub Street attic to let--not so much as a joint stool left in
it; my hand writes, not I, from habit, as chickens run about a
little, when their heads are off. O for a vigorous fit of gout, colic,
toothache,--an earwig in my auditory, a fly in my visual organs; pain
is life--the sharper, the more evidence of life; but this apathy, this
death! Did you ever have an obstinate cold,--a six or seven weeks'
unintermitting chill and suspension of hope, fear, conscience, and
every thing? Yet do I try all I can to cure it; I try wine, and
spirits, and smoking, and snuff in unsparing quantities, but they all
only seem to make me worse instead of better. I sleep in a damp room,
but it does me no good; I come home late o' nights, but do not find
any visible amendment! . . .
It is just fifteen minutes after twelve; Thurtell is by this time
a good way on his journey, baiting at Scorpion perhaps; Ketch is
bargaining for his cast coat and waistcoat; the Jew demurs at first at
three half-crowns, but, on consideration that he may get somewhat by
showing 'em in the town, finally closes.
WILLIAM HAZLITT
1778-1830
To Miss Sarah Stoddart
_A love-letter_
Tuesday night [_Jan. _ 1808].
MY DEAR LOVE,
Above a week has passed, and I have received no letter--not one of
those letters 'in which I live, or have no life at all'. What is
become of you? Are you married, hearing that I was dead (for so it has
been reported)? Or are you gone into a nunnery? Or are you fallen in
love with some of the amorous heroes of Boccaccio? Which of them is
it? Is it with Chynon, who was transformed from a clown into a lover,
and learned to spell by the force of beauty? Or with Lorenzo, the
lover of Isabella, whom her three brethren hated (as your brother does
me), who was a merchant's clerk? Or with Federigo Alberigi, an honest
gentleman, who ran through his fortune, and won his mistress by
cooking a fair falcon for her dinner, though it was the only means he
had left of getting a dinner for himself? This last is the man; and
I am the more persuaded of it, because I think I won your good liking
myself by giving you an entertainment--of sausages, when I had no
money to buy them with. Nay now, never deny it! Did I not ask your
consent that very night after, and did you not give it? Well, I should
be confoundedly jealous of those fine gallants, if I did not know that
a living dog is better than a dead lion; though, now I think of it,
Boccaccio does not in general make much of his lovers: it is his women
who are so delicious. I almost wish I had lived in those times, and
had been a little _more amiable_. Now if a woman had written the book,
it would not have had this effect upon me: the men would have been
heroes and angels, and the women nothing at all. Isn't there some
truth in that? Talking of departed loves, I met my old flame the other
day in the street. I did dream of her _one_ night since, and only one:
every other night I have had the same dream I have had for these two
months past. Now, if you are at all reasonable, this will satisfy you.
_Thursday morning_. The book is come. When I saw it I thought you had
sent it back in a _huff_, tired out by my sauciness, and _coldness_,
and delays, and were going to keep an account of dimities and sayes,
or to salt pork and chronicle small beer as the dutiful wife of some
fresh-looking, rural swain; so that you cannot think how surprised
and pleased I was to find them all done. I liked your note as well or
better than the extracts; it is just such a note as such a nice rogue
as you ought to write after the _provocation_ you had received. I
would not give a pin for a girl 'whose cheeks never tingle', nor for
myself if I could not make them tingle sometimes. Now, though I am
always writing to you about 'lips and noses', and such sort of stuff,
yet as I sit by my fireside (which I do generally eight or ten hours a
day), I oftener think of you in a serious, sober light. For, indeed,
I never love you so well as when I think of sitting down with you to
dinner on a boiled scrag-end of mutton, and hot potatoes. You please
my fancy more then than when I think of you in--no, you would never
forgive me if I were to finish the sentence. Now I think of it, what
do you mean to be dressed in when we are married? But it does not much
matter! I wish you would let your hair grow; though perhaps nothing
will be better than 'the same air and look with which at first my
heart was took'. But now to business. I mean soon to call upon your
brother _in form_, namely, as soon as I get quite well, which I hope
to do in about another _fortnight_; and then I hope you will come up
by the coach as fast as the horses can carry you, for I long mightily
to be in your ladyship's presence--to vindicate my character. I think
you had better sell the small house, I mean that at 4. 10, and I will
borrow £100. So that we shall set off merrily in spite of all the
prudence of Edinburgh. Goodbye, little dear!
TO HIS SON
_Marriage, and the choice of a profession_
[1822. ]
. . . If you ever marry, I would wish you to marry the woman you like.
