Or are you gone into a
nunnery?
Selection of English Letters
_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.
Do not be guided by the recommendations of friends. Nothing will
atone for or overcome an original distaste. It will only increase from
intimacy; and if you are to live separate, it is better not to come
together. There is no use in dragging a chain through life, unless
it binds one to the object we love. Choose a mistress from among your
equals. You will be able to understand her character better, and she
will be more likely to understand yours. Those in an inferior station
to yourself will doubt your good intentions, and misapprehend your
plainest expressions. All that you swear is to them a riddle or
downright nonsense. You cannot by any possibility translate your
thoughts into their dialect. They will be ignorant of the meaning of
half you say, and laugh at the rest. As mistresses, they will have no
sympathy with you; and as wives, you can have none with them.
Women care nothing about poets, or philosophers, or politicians. They
go by a man's looks and manner. Richardson calls them 'an eye-judging
sex'; and I am sure he knew more about them than I can pretend to do.
If you run away with a pedantic notion that they care a pin's point
about your head or your heart, you will repent it too late. . . .
If I were to name one pursuit rather than another, I should wish you
to be a good painter, if such a thing could be hoped. I have failed in
this myself, and should wish you to be able to do what I have not--to
paint like Claude, or Rembrandt, or Guido, or Vandyke, if it were
possible. Artists, I think, who have succeeded in their chief object,
live to be old, and are agreeable old men. Their minds keep alive
to the last. Cosway's spirits never flagged till after ninety; and
Nollekens, though nearly blind, passed all his mornings in giving
directions about some group or bust in his workshop. You have seen Mr.
Northcote, that delightful specimen of the last age. With what avidity
he takes up his pencil, or lays it down again to talk of numberless
things! His eye has not lost its lustre, nor 'paled its ineffectual
fire'. His body is but a shadow: he himself is a pure spirit. There is
a kind of immortality about this sort of ideal and visionary existence
that dallies with Fate and baffles the grim monster, Death. If I
thought you could make as clever an artist, and arrive at such an
agreeable old age as Mr. Northcote, I should declare at once for your
devoting yourself to this enchanting profession; and in that reliance,
should feel less regret at some of my own disappointments, and little
anxiety on your account!
To CHARLES COWDEN CLARKE
_The Life of Napoleon_
7 _Dec_. [1827].
DEAR SIR,
I thought all the world agreed with me at present that Buonaparte was
better than the Bourbons, or that a tyrant was better than tyranny.
In my opinion, no one of an understanding above the rank of a lady's
waiting-maid could ever have doubted this, though I alone said it ten
years ago. It might be impolicy then and now for what I know, for the
world stick to an opinion in appearance long after they have given it
up in reality. I should like to know whether the preface is thought
impolitic by some one who agrees with me in the main point, or by some
one who differs with me and makes this excuse not to have his opinion
contradicted? In Paris (_jubes regina renovare dolorem_) the preface
was thought a masterpiece, the best and only possible defence of
Buonaparte, and quite new _there_! It would be an impertinence in me
to write a Life of Buonaparte after Sir W. without some such object as
that expressed in the preface. After all, I do not care a _damn_ about
the preface. It will get me on four pages somewhere else. Shall I
retract my opinion altogether, and forswear my own book? Rayner is
right to cry out: I think I have tipped him fair and foul copy, a lean
rabbit and a fat one. The remainder of vol. ii will be ready to go on
with, but not the beginning of the third. The appendixes had better
be at the end of the second vol. Pray get them if you can: you have my
Sieyes, have you not? One of them is there. I have been nearly in the
other world. My regret was 'to die and leave the world "rough" copy'.
Otherwise I had thought of an epitaph and a good end. Hic jacent
reliquiae mortales Gulielmi Hazlitt, auctoris non intelligibilis:
natus Maidstoniae in comi [ta] tu Cantiae, Apr. 10, 1778. Obiit
Winterslowe, Dec. , 1827. I think of writing an epistle to C. Lamb,
Esq. , to say that I have passed near the shadowy world, and have had
new impressions of the vanity of this, with hopes of a better. Don't
you think this would be good policy? Don't mention it to the severe
author of the '_Press_', a poem, but me thinks the idea _arridet_
Hone. He would give sixpence to see me floating, upon a pair of
borrowed wings, half way between heaven and earth, and edifying
the good people at my departure, whom I shall only scandalize by
remaining. At present my study and contemplation is the leg of a
stewed fowl. I have behaved like a saint, and been obedient to orders.
_Non fit pugil_, &c. , I got a violent spasm by walking fifteen miles
in the mud, and getting into a coach with an old lady who would have
the window open. Delicacy, moderation, complaisance, the _suaviter in
modo_, whisper it about, my dear Clarke, these are my faults and have
been my ruin.
LEIGH HUNT
1784-1859
To JOSEPH SEVERN
_A belated letter_[1]
Vale of Health, Hampstead, 8 _March_, 1821
DEAR SEVERN,
You have concluded, of course, that I have sent no letters to Rome,
because I was aware of the effect they would have on Keats's mind; and
this is the principal cause; for, besides what I have been told about
letters in Italy, I remember his telling me upon one occasion that, in
his sick moments, he never wished to receive another letter, or ever
to see another face, however friendly. But still I should have written
to you, had I not been almost at death's door myself. You will imagine
how ill I have been, when you hear that I have but just begun writing
again for the _Examiner_ and _Indicator_, after an interval of
several months, during which my flesh wasted from me with sickness
and melancholy. Judge how often I thought of Keats, and with what
feelings. Mr. Brown tells me he is comparatively calm now, or rather
quite so. If he can bear to hear of us, pray tell him; but he knows it
already, and can put it in better language than any man. I hear that
he does not like to be told that he may get better; nor is it to
be wondered at, considering his firm persuasion that he shall not
survive. He can only regard it as a puerile thing, and an insinuation
that he shall die. But if his persuasion should happen to be no longer
so strong, or if he can now put up with attempts to console him, of
what I have said a thousand times, and what I still (upon my honour)
think always, that I have seen too many instances of recovery from
apparently desperate cases of consumption not to be in hope to the
very last. If he still cannot bear this, tell him--tell that great
poet and noble-hearted man--that we shall all bear his memory in the
most precious part of our hearts, and that the world shall bow their
heads to it, as our loves do. Or if this, again, will trouble his
spirit, tell him that we shall never cease to remember and love him;
and that, Christian or infidel, the most sceptical of us has faith
enough in the high things that nature puts into our heads, to think
all who are of one accord in mind or heart are journeying to one and
the same place, and shall unite somewhere or other again, face to
face, mutually conscious, mutually delighted. Tell him he is only
before us on the road, as he is in everything else; or, whether you
tell him the latter or no, tell him the former, and add that we shall
never forget that he was so, and that we are coming after him. The
tears are again in my eyes, and I must not afford to shed them. The
next letter I write shall be more to yourself, and more refreshing to
your spirits, which we are very sensible must have been greatly taxed.
But whether your friend dies or not, it will not be among the least
lofty of your recollections by-and-by that you helped to smooth the
sick-bed of so fine a being. God bless you, dear Severn.
[Footnote 1: Keats died in February. ]
To PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
_Outpourings of gratitude_
Stonehouse, near Plymouth, 26 _March_, 1822.
MY DEAREST FRIEND,
Your letters always contain something delightful to me, whatever news
they bring.
Surgit _amici_ aliquid, quod in ipsis _nubibus_
_ardet_.
But I confess your latter ones have greatly relieved me on the subject
you speak of. They only make me long, with an extreme Homeric longing,
to be at Pisa,--I mean such an one as Achilles felt when he longed to
be with his father,--sharp in his very limbs. We have secured a ship,
the _David Walter_, which will call for us here, and sets sail
from London in a fortnight. I have written by to-day's post with
intelligence of it to Mrs. Fletcher, enclosing her the letter, and
giving her the option of going on board in London, or here. I need not
say we shall attend to her comforts in every respect. The same post
also carries a letter to Mr. Gisborne, stating your wishes, and
wonders respecting _Adonais_. If it is not published before I leave
England, I will publish my criticism upon the Pisa copy,--a criticism
which I think you will like. I take the opportunity of showing the
public why Gifford's review spoke so bitterly of _Prometheus_, and
why it pretends that the most metaphysical passage of your most
metaphysical poem is a specimen of the clearness of your general
style. The wretched priest-like cunning and undertoned malignity of
that review of _Prometheus_ is indeed a homage paid to qualities which
can so provoke it. The _Quarterly_ pretends now, that it never meddles
with you personally,--of course it never did! For this, _Blackwood_
cries out upon it, contrasting its behaviour in those delicate matters
with its own! This is better and better, and the public seem to think
so; for these things, depend upon it, are getting better understood
every day, and shall be better and better understood every day to
come. One circumstance which helps to reconcile me to having been
detained on this coast, is the opportunity it has given me to make
your works speak for themselves wherever I could; and you are in high
lustre, I assure you, with the most intelligent circles in Plymouth,
[Greek: astaer epsos]. I have, indeed, been astonished to find
how well prepared people of intelligence are to fall in with your
aspirations, and despise the mistakes and rascally instincts of your
calumniators. This place, for instance, abounds in _schoolmasters_,
who appear, to a man, to be liberal to an extreme and esoterical
degree. And such, there is reason to believe, is the case over the
greater part of the kingdom, greatly, no doubt, owing to political
causes. Think of the consequences of this with the rising generation.
I delight in _Adonais_. It is the most Delphic poetry I have seen
a long while; full of those embodyings of the most subtle and airy
imaginations,--those arrestings and explanations of the most shadowy
yearnings of our being--which are the most difficult of all things
to put into words, and the most delightful when put. I do not know
whether you are aware how fond I am of your song on the Skylark; but
you ought, if Ollier sent you a copy of the enlarged _Calendar_
_of Nature_, which he published separately under the title of the
_Months_. I tell you this, because I have not done half or a twentieth
part of what I ought to have done to make your writings properly
appreciated. But I intended to do more every day, and now that I am
coming to you, I shall be _totus_ in you and yours! For all good, and
healthy, and industrious things, I will do such wonders, that I shall
begin to believe I make some remote approach to something like a
return for your kindness. Yet how can that be? At all events, I hope
we shall all be the better for one another's society. Marianne, poor
dear girl, is still very ailing and weak, but stronger upon the whole,
she thinks, than when she first left London, and quite prepared and
happy to set off on her spring voyage. She sends you part of her best
love. I told her I supposed I must answer Marina's letter for her, but
she is quite grand on the occasion, and vows she will do it herself,
which, I assure you, will be the first time she has written a letter
for many months. Ask Marina if she will be charitable, and write one
to me. I will undertake to answer it with one double as long. But what
am I talking about, when the captain speaks of sailing in a fortnight?
I was led astray by her delightful letter to Marianne about walks, and
duets, and violets, and ladies like violets. Am I indeed to see and
be in the midst of all these beautiful things, ladies like lilies not
excepted? And do the men in Italy really leave ladies to walk in those
very amiable dry ditches by themselves? Oh! for a few strides, like
those of Neptune, when he went from some place to some other place,
and 'did it in three! ' Dear Shelley, I am glad my letter to Lord B.
pleased you, though I do not know why you should so thank me for it.
But you are ingenious in inventing claims for me upon your affection.
To HORACE SMITH
_Shelley's death_
Pisa, 25 _July_, 1822.
Dear Horace,
I trust that the first news of the dreadful calamity which has
befallen us here will have been broken to you by report, otherwise I
shall come upon you with a most painful abruptness; but Shelley, my
divine-minded friend, your friend, the friend of the universe, he has
perished at sea. He was in a boat with his friend Captain Williams,
going from Leghorn to Lerici, when a storm arose, and it is supposed
the boat must have foundered. It was on the 8th instant, about four
or five in the evening, they guess. A fisherman says he saw the boat
a few minutes before it went down: he looked again and it was gone. He
saw the boy they had with them aloft furling one of the sails. We hope
his story is true, as their passage from life to death will then have
been short; and what adds to the hope is, that in S's pocket (for the
bodies were both thrown on shore some days afterwards,--conceive our
horrible certainty, after trying all we could to hope! ) a copy of
Keats's last volume, which he had borrowed of me to read on his
passage, was found _open_ and doubled back as if it had been thrust
in, in the hurry of a surprise. God bless him! I cannot help thinking
of him as if he were alive as much as ever, so unearthly he always
appeared to me, and so seraphical a thing of the elements; and this
is what all his friends say. But what we all feel, your own heart will
tell you. . . .
It has been often feared that Shelley and Captain Williams would meet
with some accident, they were so hazardous; but when they set out on
the 8th, in the morning it was fine. Our dear friend was passionately
fond of the sea, and has been heard to say he should like it to be his
death-bed. . . .
To MRS. PROCTER
_Accepting an invitation_
5 York Buildings, 13 _March_ [1831].
MY DEAR MRS. PROCTER (for Madam, somehow, is
not the thing),
I am most pleased to be reminded of my promise, which I must have made
if you say I did. I suppose I have been coming to keep it ever since;
but it is a long road from sorrow to joy, and one is apt to get
confused on the road. Do you know your letter brought the tears into
my eyes? I hardly know why, unless it was that I saw Procter had been
pouring his kind heart into yours, and you said:--'We must have him
here instead of the coffee-house, and plant him by the fire, and warm
him like a stray bird till he sings. ' But indeed a kind word affects
me where many a hard thump does not. Nevertheless, you must not tell
this, except to the very masculine or feminine; though if you do not
take it as a compliment to yourself,--I mean the confession of
my weakness,--why, you are not Procter's wife, nor Mrs. Montagu's
daughter, nor she who wrote the letter this morning to a poor battered
author.
PS. I eat any plain joint, of the plainer order, beef or mutton:--and
you know I care for nothing at dinner, so that it does not hurt me.
Friends' company is the thing.
To A FRIEND
_Offence and punishment_
Wimbledon, 11 and 12 _August_, 1846.
.
_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.
Do not be guided by the recommendations of friends. Nothing will
atone for or overcome an original distaste. It will only increase from
intimacy; and if you are to live separate, it is better not to come
together. There is no use in dragging a chain through life, unless
it binds one to the object we love. Choose a mistress from among your
equals. You will be able to understand her character better, and she
will be more likely to understand yours. Those in an inferior station
to yourself will doubt your good intentions, and misapprehend your
plainest expressions. All that you swear is to them a riddle or
downright nonsense. You cannot by any possibility translate your
thoughts into their dialect. They will be ignorant of the meaning of
half you say, and laugh at the rest. As mistresses, they will have no
sympathy with you; and as wives, you can have none with them.
Women care nothing about poets, or philosophers, or politicians. They
go by a man's looks and manner. Richardson calls them 'an eye-judging
sex'; and I am sure he knew more about them than I can pretend to do.
If you run away with a pedantic notion that they care a pin's point
about your head or your heart, you will repent it too late. . . .
If I were to name one pursuit rather than another, I should wish you
to be a good painter, if such a thing could be hoped. I have failed in
this myself, and should wish you to be able to do what I have not--to
paint like Claude, or Rembrandt, or Guido, or Vandyke, if it were
possible. Artists, I think, who have succeeded in their chief object,
live to be old, and are agreeable old men. Their minds keep alive
to the last. Cosway's spirits never flagged till after ninety; and
Nollekens, though nearly blind, passed all his mornings in giving
directions about some group or bust in his workshop. You have seen Mr.
Northcote, that delightful specimen of the last age. With what avidity
he takes up his pencil, or lays it down again to talk of numberless
things! His eye has not lost its lustre, nor 'paled its ineffectual
fire'. His body is but a shadow: he himself is a pure spirit. There is
a kind of immortality about this sort of ideal and visionary existence
that dallies with Fate and baffles the grim monster, Death. If I
thought you could make as clever an artist, and arrive at such an
agreeable old age as Mr. Northcote, I should declare at once for your
devoting yourself to this enchanting profession; and in that reliance,
should feel less regret at some of my own disappointments, and little
anxiety on your account!
To CHARLES COWDEN CLARKE
_The Life of Napoleon_
7 _Dec_. [1827].
DEAR SIR,
I thought all the world agreed with me at present that Buonaparte was
better than the Bourbons, or that a tyrant was better than tyranny.
In my opinion, no one of an understanding above the rank of a lady's
waiting-maid could ever have doubted this, though I alone said it ten
years ago. It might be impolicy then and now for what I know, for the
world stick to an opinion in appearance long after they have given it
up in reality. I should like to know whether the preface is thought
impolitic by some one who agrees with me in the main point, or by some
one who differs with me and makes this excuse not to have his opinion
contradicted? In Paris (_jubes regina renovare dolorem_) the preface
was thought a masterpiece, the best and only possible defence of
Buonaparte, and quite new _there_! It would be an impertinence in me
to write a Life of Buonaparte after Sir W. without some such object as
that expressed in the preface. After all, I do not care a _damn_ about
the preface. It will get me on four pages somewhere else. Shall I
retract my opinion altogether, and forswear my own book? Rayner is
right to cry out: I think I have tipped him fair and foul copy, a lean
rabbit and a fat one. The remainder of vol. ii will be ready to go on
with, but not the beginning of the third. The appendixes had better
be at the end of the second vol. Pray get them if you can: you have my
Sieyes, have you not? One of them is there. I have been nearly in the
other world. My regret was 'to die and leave the world "rough" copy'.
Otherwise I had thought of an epitaph and a good end. Hic jacent
reliquiae mortales Gulielmi Hazlitt, auctoris non intelligibilis:
natus Maidstoniae in comi [ta] tu Cantiae, Apr. 10, 1778. Obiit
Winterslowe, Dec. , 1827. I think of writing an epistle to C. Lamb,
Esq. , to say that I have passed near the shadowy world, and have had
new impressions of the vanity of this, with hopes of a better. Don't
you think this would be good policy? Don't mention it to the severe
author of the '_Press_', a poem, but me thinks the idea _arridet_
Hone. He would give sixpence to see me floating, upon a pair of
borrowed wings, half way between heaven and earth, and edifying
the good people at my departure, whom I shall only scandalize by
remaining. At present my study and contemplation is the leg of a
stewed fowl. I have behaved like a saint, and been obedient to orders.
_Non fit pugil_, &c. , I got a violent spasm by walking fifteen miles
in the mud, and getting into a coach with an old lady who would have
the window open. Delicacy, moderation, complaisance, the _suaviter in
modo_, whisper it about, my dear Clarke, these are my faults and have
been my ruin.
LEIGH HUNT
1784-1859
To JOSEPH SEVERN
_A belated letter_[1]
Vale of Health, Hampstead, 8 _March_, 1821
DEAR SEVERN,
You have concluded, of course, that I have sent no letters to Rome,
because I was aware of the effect they would have on Keats's mind; and
this is the principal cause; for, besides what I have been told about
letters in Italy, I remember his telling me upon one occasion that, in
his sick moments, he never wished to receive another letter, or ever
to see another face, however friendly. But still I should have written
to you, had I not been almost at death's door myself. You will imagine
how ill I have been, when you hear that I have but just begun writing
again for the _Examiner_ and _Indicator_, after an interval of
several months, during which my flesh wasted from me with sickness
and melancholy. Judge how often I thought of Keats, and with what
feelings. Mr. Brown tells me he is comparatively calm now, or rather
quite so. If he can bear to hear of us, pray tell him; but he knows it
already, and can put it in better language than any man. I hear that
he does not like to be told that he may get better; nor is it to
be wondered at, considering his firm persuasion that he shall not
survive. He can only regard it as a puerile thing, and an insinuation
that he shall die. But if his persuasion should happen to be no longer
so strong, or if he can now put up with attempts to console him, of
what I have said a thousand times, and what I still (upon my honour)
think always, that I have seen too many instances of recovery from
apparently desperate cases of consumption not to be in hope to the
very last. If he still cannot bear this, tell him--tell that great
poet and noble-hearted man--that we shall all bear his memory in the
most precious part of our hearts, and that the world shall bow their
heads to it, as our loves do. Or if this, again, will trouble his
spirit, tell him that we shall never cease to remember and love him;
and that, Christian or infidel, the most sceptical of us has faith
enough in the high things that nature puts into our heads, to think
all who are of one accord in mind or heart are journeying to one and
the same place, and shall unite somewhere or other again, face to
face, mutually conscious, mutually delighted. Tell him he is only
before us on the road, as he is in everything else; or, whether you
tell him the latter or no, tell him the former, and add that we shall
never forget that he was so, and that we are coming after him. The
tears are again in my eyes, and I must not afford to shed them. The
next letter I write shall be more to yourself, and more refreshing to
your spirits, which we are very sensible must have been greatly taxed.
But whether your friend dies or not, it will not be among the least
lofty of your recollections by-and-by that you helped to smooth the
sick-bed of so fine a being. God bless you, dear Severn.
[Footnote 1: Keats died in February. ]
To PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
_Outpourings of gratitude_
Stonehouse, near Plymouth, 26 _March_, 1822.
MY DEAREST FRIEND,
Your letters always contain something delightful to me, whatever news
they bring.
Surgit _amici_ aliquid, quod in ipsis _nubibus_
_ardet_.
But I confess your latter ones have greatly relieved me on the subject
you speak of. They only make me long, with an extreme Homeric longing,
to be at Pisa,--I mean such an one as Achilles felt when he longed to
be with his father,--sharp in his very limbs. We have secured a ship,
the _David Walter_, which will call for us here, and sets sail
from London in a fortnight. I have written by to-day's post with
intelligence of it to Mrs. Fletcher, enclosing her the letter, and
giving her the option of going on board in London, or here. I need not
say we shall attend to her comforts in every respect. The same post
also carries a letter to Mr. Gisborne, stating your wishes, and
wonders respecting _Adonais_. If it is not published before I leave
England, I will publish my criticism upon the Pisa copy,--a criticism
which I think you will like. I take the opportunity of showing the
public why Gifford's review spoke so bitterly of _Prometheus_, and
why it pretends that the most metaphysical passage of your most
metaphysical poem is a specimen of the clearness of your general
style. The wretched priest-like cunning and undertoned malignity of
that review of _Prometheus_ is indeed a homage paid to qualities which
can so provoke it. The _Quarterly_ pretends now, that it never meddles
with you personally,--of course it never did! For this, _Blackwood_
cries out upon it, contrasting its behaviour in those delicate matters
with its own! This is better and better, and the public seem to think
so; for these things, depend upon it, are getting better understood
every day, and shall be better and better understood every day to
come. One circumstance which helps to reconcile me to having been
detained on this coast, is the opportunity it has given me to make
your works speak for themselves wherever I could; and you are in high
lustre, I assure you, with the most intelligent circles in Plymouth,
[Greek: astaer epsos]. I have, indeed, been astonished to find
how well prepared people of intelligence are to fall in with your
aspirations, and despise the mistakes and rascally instincts of your
calumniators. This place, for instance, abounds in _schoolmasters_,
who appear, to a man, to be liberal to an extreme and esoterical
degree. And such, there is reason to believe, is the case over the
greater part of the kingdom, greatly, no doubt, owing to political
causes. Think of the consequences of this with the rising generation.
I delight in _Adonais_. It is the most Delphic poetry I have seen
a long while; full of those embodyings of the most subtle and airy
imaginations,--those arrestings and explanations of the most shadowy
yearnings of our being--which are the most difficult of all things
to put into words, and the most delightful when put. I do not know
whether you are aware how fond I am of your song on the Skylark; but
you ought, if Ollier sent you a copy of the enlarged _Calendar_
_of Nature_, which he published separately under the title of the
_Months_. I tell you this, because I have not done half or a twentieth
part of what I ought to have done to make your writings properly
appreciated. But I intended to do more every day, and now that I am
coming to you, I shall be _totus_ in you and yours! For all good, and
healthy, and industrious things, I will do such wonders, that I shall
begin to believe I make some remote approach to something like a
return for your kindness. Yet how can that be? At all events, I hope
we shall all be the better for one another's society. Marianne, poor
dear girl, is still very ailing and weak, but stronger upon the whole,
she thinks, than when she first left London, and quite prepared and
happy to set off on her spring voyage. She sends you part of her best
love. I told her I supposed I must answer Marina's letter for her, but
she is quite grand on the occasion, and vows she will do it herself,
which, I assure you, will be the first time she has written a letter
for many months. Ask Marina if she will be charitable, and write one
to me. I will undertake to answer it with one double as long. But what
am I talking about, when the captain speaks of sailing in a fortnight?
I was led astray by her delightful letter to Marianne about walks, and
duets, and violets, and ladies like violets. Am I indeed to see and
be in the midst of all these beautiful things, ladies like lilies not
excepted? And do the men in Italy really leave ladies to walk in those
very amiable dry ditches by themselves? Oh! for a few strides, like
those of Neptune, when he went from some place to some other place,
and 'did it in three! ' Dear Shelley, I am glad my letter to Lord B.
pleased you, though I do not know why you should so thank me for it.
But you are ingenious in inventing claims for me upon your affection.
To HORACE SMITH
_Shelley's death_
Pisa, 25 _July_, 1822.
Dear Horace,
I trust that the first news of the dreadful calamity which has
befallen us here will have been broken to you by report, otherwise I
shall come upon you with a most painful abruptness; but Shelley, my
divine-minded friend, your friend, the friend of the universe, he has
perished at sea. He was in a boat with his friend Captain Williams,
going from Leghorn to Lerici, when a storm arose, and it is supposed
the boat must have foundered. It was on the 8th instant, about four
or five in the evening, they guess. A fisherman says he saw the boat
a few minutes before it went down: he looked again and it was gone. He
saw the boy they had with them aloft furling one of the sails. We hope
his story is true, as their passage from life to death will then have
been short; and what adds to the hope is, that in S's pocket (for the
bodies were both thrown on shore some days afterwards,--conceive our
horrible certainty, after trying all we could to hope! ) a copy of
Keats's last volume, which he had borrowed of me to read on his
passage, was found _open_ and doubled back as if it had been thrust
in, in the hurry of a surprise. God bless him! I cannot help thinking
of him as if he were alive as much as ever, so unearthly he always
appeared to me, and so seraphical a thing of the elements; and this
is what all his friends say. But what we all feel, your own heart will
tell you. . . .
It has been often feared that Shelley and Captain Williams would meet
with some accident, they were so hazardous; but when they set out on
the 8th, in the morning it was fine. Our dear friend was passionately
fond of the sea, and has been heard to say he should like it to be his
death-bed. . . .
To MRS. PROCTER
_Accepting an invitation_
5 York Buildings, 13 _March_ [1831].
MY DEAR MRS. PROCTER (for Madam, somehow, is
not the thing),
I am most pleased to be reminded of my promise, which I must have made
if you say I did. I suppose I have been coming to keep it ever since;
but it is a long road from sorrow to joy, and one is apt to get
confused on the road. Do you know your letter brought the tears into
my eyes? I hardly know why, unless it was that I saw Procter had been
pouring his kind heart into yours, and you said:--'We must have him
here instead of the coffee-house, and plant him by the fire, and warm
him like a stray bird till he sings. ' But indeed a kind word affects
me where many a hard thump does not. Nevertheless, you must not tell
this, except to the very masculine or feminine; though if you do not
take it as a compliment to yourself,--I mean the confession of
my weakness,--why, you are not Procter's wife, nor Mrs. Montagu's
daughter, nor she who wrote the letter this morning to a poor battered
author.
PS. I eat any plain joint, of the plainer order, beef or mutton:--and
you know I care for nothing at dinner, so that it does not hurt me.
Friends' company is the thing.
To A FRIEND
_Offence and punishment_
Wimbledon, 11 and 12 _August_, 1846.
.
