“I have sent you all that is written of the Curse of Kehama: you offered
to print it for me; if ever I finish the poem it will be because of that offer,
though without the slightest intention of accepting it. Enough is written to
open the story of the poem, and serve as a specimen of its manner, though much
of what is to follow would be in a wilder strain.—Tell me if your ear is
offended with the rhymes when
| Ætat. 34. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 143 |
“My history as an author is not very honourable to the age in which we live. By giving up my whole time to worthless work in reviews, magazines, and newspapers, I could thrive, as by giving up half my time to them, I contrive to live. In the time thus employed every year I could certainly produce such a poem as Thalaba, and if I did I should starve. You have awakened in me projects that had been laid asleep, and recalled hopes which I had dismissed contentedly, and, as I thought, for ever. If you think Kehama deserves to be finished, I will borrow hours from sleep, and finish it by rising two hours before my customary time; and when it is finished I will try whether subscribers can be procured for five hundred copies, by which means I should receive the whole profit to myself. The bookseller’s share is too much like the lion in the fable: 30 or 33 per cent, they first deduct as booksellers, and then half the residue as publishers. I have no reason to complain of mine: they treat me with great respect and great liberality, but I wish to be independent of them; and this, if it could be effected, would make me so.
“The will and the power to produce anything great are
not often found together. I wish you would write in English, because it is a
better language than Latin, and because the disuse of English as a living and
literary language would be the greatest evil that
| 144 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 34. |
“Literary fame is the only fame of which a wise man ought to be ambitious, because it is the only lasting and living fame. Bonaparte will be forgotten before his time in Purgatory is half over, or but just remembered like Nimrod, or other cut-throats of antiquity, who serve us for the commonplaces of declamation. If you made yourself King of Crete, you would differ from a hundred other adventurers only in chronology, and in the course of a millennium or two, nothing more would be known of your conquest than what would be found in the stereotype Gebir prefixed as an account of the author. Pour out your mind in a great poem, and you will exercise authority over the feelings and opinions of mankind as long as the language lasts in which you write. . . . .
“Farewell! I wish you had purchased Loweswater instead of Llantony. I wish you were married, because the proverb about a rolling stone applies to a single heart, and I wish you were as much a Quaker as I am. Christian stoicism is wholesome for all minds; were I your confessor, I should enjoin you to throw aside Rousseau, and make Epictetus your manual. Probatum est.
