Читать книгу The Letters Volume 2 - Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Страница 20

Monday, (?) September 15, 1806.

My dear Stuart,—I arrived in town safe, but so tired by the next evening, that I went to bed at nine and slept till past twelve on Sunday. I cannot keep off my mind from the last subject we were talking about; though I have brought my notions concerning it to hang so well on the balance that I have in my own judgment few doubts as to the relative weight of the arguments persuasive and dissuasive. But of this “face to face.” I sleep at the “Courier” office, and shall institute and carry on the inquiry into the characters of Mr. Pitt and Mr. Fox, and having carried it to the Treaty of Amiens, or rather to the recommencement of the War, I propose to give a full and severe Critique of the “Enquiry into the State of the Nation,” taking it for granted that this work does, on the whole, contain Mr. Fox’s latest political creed; and this for the purpose of answering the “Morning Chronicle”(!) assertions, that Mr. Fox was the greatest and wisest statesman; that Mr. Pitt was no statesman. I shall endeavour to show that both were undeserving of that high character; but that Mr. Pitt was the better; that the evils which befell him were undoubtedly produced in great measure by blunders and wickedness on the Continent which it was almost impossible to foresee; while the effects of Mr. Fox’s measures must in and of themselves produce calamity and degradation.

To confess the truth, I am by no means pleased with Mr. Street’s character of Mr. Fox as a speaker and man of intellect. As a piece of panegyric, it falls woefully short of the Article in the “Morning Chronicle” in style and selection of thoughts, and runs at least equally far beyond the bounds of truth. Persons who write in a hurry are very liable to contract a sort of snipt, convulsive style, that moves forward by short repeated pushes, with iso-chronous asthmatic pants, “He—He—He—He—,” or the like, beginning a dozen short sentences, each making a period. In this way a man can get rid of all that happens at any one time to be in his memory, with very little choice in the arrangement and no expenditure of logic in the connection. However, it is the matter more than the manner that displeased me, for fear that what I shall write for to-morrow’s “Courier” may involve a kind of contradiction. To one outrageous passage I persuaded him to add a note of amendment, as it was too late to alter the Article itself. It was impossible for me, seeing him satisfied with the Article himself, to say more than that he appeared to me to have exceeded in eulogy. But beyond doubt in the political position occupied by the “Courier,” with so little danger of being anticipated by the other papers in anything which it ought to say, except some obvious points which being common to all the papers can give credit to none, it would have been better to have announced his death, and simply led the way for an after disquisition by a sort of shy disclosure with an appearance of suppression of the spirit with which it could be conducted.

There are letters at the Post Office, Margate, for me. Be so good as to send them to me, directed to the “Courier” office. I think of going to Mr. Smith’s^[35] to-morrow, or not at all. Whether Mr. Fox’s death^[36] will keep Mr. S. in town, or call him there, I do not know. At all events I shall return by the time of your arrival.

May God bless you! I am ever, my dear sir, as your obliged, so your affectionately grateful friend,

S. T. Coleridge.