“My dear Godwin,—I have this evening sent your
tragedy (directed to you) to Penrith to go from thence to London by the mail.
You will probably receive it on Saturday. . . . It would be needless to recount
the pains and evils that prevented me from sending it on the day I meant to do.
Your letter of this morning has given me some reason to be glad that I was
prevented. My criticisms were written in a style, and with a boyish freedom of
censure and ridicule, that would have given you pain and perhaps offence. I
will re-write them, abridge, or rather extract from them their absolute
meaning, and send them in the way of a letter. In the tragedy I have frequently
used the following marks: *, T, I, ‡. Of these, the first calls your attention
to my suspicions that your language is false or intolerable English. The second
marks the passages which struck me as flat or mean. The
third is a note of reprobation, levelled at these sentences in which you have
adopted that worst sort of vulgar language, common-place book language: such as
‘Difficulties that mock narration,’ ‘met my
view,’ ‘bred in the lap of luxury.’ The last
mark implies bad metre. I was much interested by the last three acts, indeed, I
greatly admire
| 80 | WILLIAM GODWIN |
“You must have been in an odd mood when you could
write to a poor fellow with a sick stomach, a giddy head, and swoln and limping
limbs, to a man on whom the dews of heaven cannot fall without diseasing him,
‘You want, or at least you think you want, neither accommodation
nor society as ministerial to your happiness,’ and strangely
credulous too, when you could gravely repeat that in the island of St
Michael’s, the chief town of which contains 14,000 inhabitants, no other
residence was procurable than ‘an unwindowed cavern scooped in the
rock.’ I must have been an idle fool indeed to have resolved so
deeply without having made enquiries how I was to be housed and fed.
Accommodations are necessary to my life, and society to my happiness, though I
can find that society very interesting and good which you perhaps would find
dull and uninstructive. One word more. You say I do not tolerate you in the
degree of partiality you feel for Mrs
I., and will not allow your admiration of Hume, and the pleasure you derive from Virgil, from Dryden,
even in a certain degree from Rowe.
Hume and Rowe I for myself hold
very cheap, and have never feared to say so, but never had any objection to any
one’s differing from me. I have received, and I hope still shall, great
delight from Virgil, whose versification I admire beyond
measure, and very frequently his language. Of Dryden I am,
and always have been, a passionate admirer. I have always placed him among our
greatest men. You must have misunderstood me, and considered me as detracting
when I considered myself only as discriminating. But were my opinions
otherwise, I should fear that others would not tolerate me in holding opinions
different from those of people in general, than feel any difficulty in
tolerating
| CORRESPONDENCE WITH COLERIDGE. | 81 |
