Читать книгу Coleridge: Darker Reflections - Richard Holmes - Страница 47

There were various versions of his Prospectus, the first two printed at Kendal, and a third in London. They were circulated also as commercial advertisements by friends and booksellers in Oxford, Cambridge, Bristol, Bath, York and Leeds, with the initial intention of securing one thousand subscribers.

This relatively high circulation target was crucial to the financial viability of the project. Yet the tone of the Prospectus was far from commercial. It deliberately called attention to Coleridge’s working habits, his reputation for “unrealized schemes”, his vast and eccentric reading, and most significantly of all, the existence of his private Notebooks. This decision to make the paper a personal testament from the outset, with strong elements of intellectual autobiography, was the key to Coleridge’s journalistic approach. Like the whole venture, it was a high-risk strategy, and the one that most alarmed his friends. But in the Prospectus he committed himself from the start, with all the perilous promises of self-exposure.

At different Periods of my Life I have not only planned, but collected Material for many Works on various and important Subjects: so many indeed, that the Number of unrealized Schemes, and the Mass of my miscellaneous fragments, have often furnished my friends with a Subject of Raillery, and sometimes Regret and Reproof…I am inclined to believe, that this Want of Perseverance has been produced by Overactivity of Thought, modified by a Constitutional Indolence…I was still tempted onward by an increasing Sense of the Imperfection of my knowledge, and by the Conviction, that, in order to fully comprehend and develop any one Subject, it was necessary that I should make myself Master of some other, which again as regularly involved a third, and so on, with an ever-widening Horizon. Yet one Habit, formed during long Absences from those, with whom I converse with full Sympathy, has been of Advantage to me – that of daily noting down, in my Memorandum or Common-place Books, both Incidents and Observations; whatever had occurred to me from without, and all the Flux and Reflux of my Mind within itself. The Number of these Notices, and their Tendency, miscellaneous as they were, to one common End (what we are and what we are born to become