William Godwin: his Friends and Contemporaries
Ch. VIII. 1811-1814
Samuel Taylor Coleridge to William Godwin, 29 March 1811
“Dear Godwin,—My chief motive in
undertaking ‘the first
mariner’ is merely to weave a few tendrils around your
destined walking stick, which, like those of the wood-bine (that, serpent-like
climbing up, and with tight spires embossing the straight hazel, rewards the
lucky school-boy’s search in the hazel-copse), may remain on it when the
wood-bine, root and branch, lies trampled in the earth. I shall consider the
work as a small plot of ground given up to you to be sown at your own hazard
with your own seed (gold grains would have been but a bad pun, and besides have
spoiled the metaphor). If the increase should more than repay your risk and
labour, why then let me be one of your guests at Harvest Home.
“Your last letter impressed and affected me strongly.
Ere I had yet read or seen your works, I, at Southey’s recommendation, wrote a sonnet in praise of the author. When I
had read them, religious bigotry, the but half-understanding of your
principles, and the not half-understanding my own, combined to render me a warm
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and boisterous
anti-Godwinist. But my warfare was open; my unfelt and harmless blows aimed at
an abstraction I had christened with your name; and you at that time, if not in
the world’s favour, were among the captains and chief men in its
admiration. I became your acquaintance when more years had brought somewhat
more temper and tolerance; but I distinctly remember that the first turn in my
mind towards you, the first movements of a juster appreciation of your merits,
was occasioned by my disgust at the altered tone and language of many whom I
had long known as your admirers and disciples. Some of them, too, were men who
had made themselves a sort of reputation in minor circles as your acquaintance,
and were therefore your echoes by authority, themselves
aided in attaching an unmerited ridicule to you and your opinions by their own
ignorance, which led them to think the best settled thoughts, and indeed
everything in your ‘Political Justice,’ whether ground, or deduction, or
conjecture, to have been new thoughts, downright creations. Their own vanity
enabled them to forget that everything must be new to him that knows nothing.
Others again, who though gifted with high talents had yet been indebted to you,
and the discussions occasioned by your wish for much of their development, who
had often and often styled you the Great Master, written verses in your honour,
and, worse than all, had brought your opinions with many good and worthy men
into as unmerited an odium as the former class had into contempt by the
attempt, equally unfeeling and unwise to realise them in private life, to the
disturbance of domestic peace. And lastly, a third class; but the name of
—— spares me the necessity of describing it. In all
these there was such a want of common sensibility, such a want of that
gratitude to an intellectual benefactor which even an honest reverence for
their great selves should have secured, as did then, still does, and ever will
disgust me.
“As for ——, I
cannot justify him; but he stands in no one of the former classes. When he was
young he just looked enough into your books to believe you taught republicanism
and stoicism; ergo, that he was of your opinion and you of his, and that was
all. ![]()
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Systems of philosophy were never his taste or
forte. And I verily believe that his conduct originated wholly and solely in
the effects which the trade of reviewing never fails to produce at certain
times on the best minds,—presumption, petulance, callousness to personal
feelings, and a disposition to treat the reputations of their contemporaries as
playthings placed at their own disposal. Most certainly I cannot approve of
such things; but yet I have learned how difficult it is for a man who has from
earliest childhood preserved himself immaculate from all the common faults and
weaknesses of human nature, and who, never creating any small disquietudes, has
lived in general esteem and honour, to feel remorse, or to admit that he has
done wrong. Believe me, there is a bluntness of conscience superinduced by a
very unusual infrequency, as well as by a habit of frequency of wrong actions.
‘Sunt, quibus cecidisse
prodesset,’ says Augustine. To this add that business of
review-writing, carried on for fifteen years together, and which I have never
hesitated to pronounce an immoral employment, unjust to the author of the books
reviewed, injurious in its effects on the public taste and morality, and still
more injurious in its influences on the head and heart of the reviewer himself.
The pragustatores among the luxurious Romans soon lost their taste; and the
verdicts of an old praigustator were sure to mislead, unless when, like dreams,
they were interpreted into contraries. Our Reviewers are the genuine
descendants of these palate-scared taste dictators.
“I am still confined by indisposition, but intend to
step out to Hazlitt’s, almost my
next door neighbour, at his particular request. It is possible that I may find
you there.
“Yours, dear Godwin, affectionately,
Saint Augustine (354-430)
Bishop of Hippo (395), author of
Confessions and
The City of God.
William Godwin (1756-1836)
English novelist and political philosopher; author of
An Inquiry
concerning the Principles of Political Justice (1793) and
Caleb
Williams (1794); in 1797 he married Mary Wollstonecraft.
William Hazlitt (1778-1830)
English essayist and literary critic; author of
Characters of
Shakespeare's Plays (1817),
Lectures on the English Poets
(1818), and
The Spirit of the Age (1825).
Robert Southey (1774-1843)
Poet laureate and man of letters whose contemporary reputation depended upon his prose
works, among them the
Life of Nelson, 2 vols (1813),
History of the Peninsular War, 3 vols (1823-32) and
The Doctor, 7 vols (1834-47).
