Chapter XXII: Letter 145: To R. L.24

26 October, 1809. Dear Sir,

When I first undertook the present Publication for the sake and with the _avowed_ object of referring Men in all things to PRINCIPLES or fundamental Truths, I was well aware of the obstacles which the plan itself would oppose to my success. For in order to the regular attainment of this object, all the driest and least attractive Essays must appear in the first fifteen or twenty Numbers, and thus subject me to the necessity of demanding effort or soliciting patience in that part of the Work, where it was most my interest to secure the confidence of my Readers by winning their favour. Though I dared warrant for the pleasantness of the Journey on the whole; though I might promise that the road would, for the far greater part of it, be found plain and easy, that it would pass through countries of various prospect, and that at every stage there would be a change of company; it still remained a heavy disadvantage, that I had to start at the foot of a high and steep hill: and I foresaw, not without occasional feelings of despondency, that during the slow and laborious ascent it would require no common management to keep my Passengers in good humour with the Vehicle and its Driver. As far as this inconvenience could be palliated by sincerity and previous confession, I have no reason to accuse myself of neglect. In the Prospectus of _The Friend_, which for this cause I re-printed and annexed to the first Number, I felt it my duty to inform such as might be inclined to patronize the Publication, that I must submit to be esteemed dull by those who sought chiefly for amusement: and this I hazarded as a _general_ confession, though in my own mind I felt a chearful confidence that it would apply almost exclusively to the earlier Numbers. I could not therefore be surprised, however much I may have been depressed, by the frequency with which you hear _The Friend_ complained of for its abstruseness and obscurity; nor did the highly flattering expressions, with which you accompanied your communication, prevent me from feeling its truth to the whole extent.

An Author's pen like Children's legs, improves by exercise. That part of the blame which rests on myself, I am exerting my best faculties to remove. A man long accustomed to silent and solitary meditation, in proportion as he encreases the power of thinking in long and connected trains, is apt to lose or lessen the talent of communicating his thoughts with grace and perspicuity. Doubtless too, I have in some measure injured my style, in respect to its facility and popularity, from having almost confined my reading, of late years, to the Works of the Ancients and those of the elder Writers in the modern languages. We insensibly imitate what we habitually admire; and an aversion to the epigrammatic unconnected periods of the fashionable _Anglo-gallican_ Taste has too often made me willing to forget, that the stately march and difficult evolutions, which characterize the eloquence of Hooker, Bacon, Milton, and Jeremy Taylor, are, notwithstanding their intrinsic excellence, still less suited to a periodical Essay. This fault I am now endeavouring to correct; though I can never so far sacrifice my judgment to the desire of being immediately popular, as to cast my sentences in the French moulds, or affect a style which an ancient critic would have deemed purposely invented for persons troubled with the asthma to read, and for those to comprehend who labour under the more pitiable asthma of a short-witted intellect. It cannot but be injurious to the human mind never to be called into effort: the habit of receiving pleasure without any exertion of thought, by the mere excitement of curiosity and sensibility, may be justly ranked among the worst effects of habitual novel reading. It is true that these short and unconnected sentences are easily and instantly understood: but it is equally true, that wanting all the cement of thought as well as of style, all the connections, and (if you will forgive so trivial a metaphor) all the _hooks-and-eyes_ of the memory, they are easily forgotten: or rather, it is scarcely possible that they should be remembered.--Nor is it less true, that those who confine their reading to such books dwarf their own faculties, and finally reduce their Understandings to a deplorable imbecility: the fact you mention, and which I shall hereafter make use of, is a fair instance and a striking illustration. Like idle morning Visitors, the brisk and breathless Periods hurry in and hurry off in quick and profitless succession; each indeed for the moments of its stay prevents the pain of vacancy, while it indulges the love of sloth; but all together they leave the Mistress of the house (the soul I mean) flat and exhausted, incapable of attending to her own concerns, and unfitted for the conversation of more rational Guests.

I know you will not suspect me of fostering so idle a hope, as that of obtaining acquittal by recrimination; or think that I am attacking one fault, in order that its opposite may escape notice in the noise and smoke of the battery. On the contrary, I shall do my best, and even make all allowable sacrifices, to render my manner more attractive and my matter more generally interesting. All the principles of my future Work, all the fundamental doctrines, in the establishment of which I must of necessity require the attention of my Reader to become my fellow-labourer; all the primary facts essential to the intelligibility of my principles, the existence of which facts I can prove to others only as far as I can prevail on them to retire _into themselves_ and make their own minds the objects of their stedfast attention; these will, all together, not occupy more than six or seven of my future Essays, and between each of these I shall interpose one or more Numbers devoted to the rational _entertainment_ of my various Readers; and, partly from the desire of gratifying particular requests, and partly as a specimen of the subjects which will henceforward have a due proportion of _The Friend_ allotted to them, I shall fill up the present Paper with a miscellany. I feel too deeply the importance of the convictions which first impelled me to the present undertaking, to leave unattempted any honourable means of recommending them to as wide a circle as possible; and though all the opinions which I shall bring forward in the course of the Work, on politics, morals, religion, literature, and the fine arts, will with all their applications, be strictly deducible from the principles established in these earlier Numbers; yet I doubt not, that being Truths and interesting Truths (and such, of course, I must be supposed to deem them) their intrinsic beauty will procure them introduction to the feelings of my Readers, even of those whose habits or avocations preclude the fatigue of close reasoning, and that each Essay of itself, by the illustrations and the auxiliary and independent arguments appropriate to it, will become sufficiently intelligible and evident.

Hitherto, my dear Sir, I have been employed in laying the Foundation of my Work. But the proper merit of a foundation is its massiveness and solidity. The conveniences and ornaments, the gilding and stucco work, the sunshine and sunny prospects, will come with the Superstructure. Yet I dare not flatter myself, that any endeavours of mine, compatible with the duty I owe to Truth and the hope of permanent utility, will render _The Friend_ agreeable to the majority of what is called the reading Public. I never expected it. How indeed could I, when I was to borrow so little from the influence of passing Events, and absolutely excluded from my plan all appeals to personal curiosity and personal interests? Yet even this is not my greatest impediment. No real information can be conveyed, no important errors rectified, no widely injurious prejudices rooted up, without requiring some effort of thought on the part of the Reader. But the obstinate (and toward a contemporary Writer, the contemptuous) aversion to all intellectual effort is the mother evil of all which I had proposed to war against, the Queen Bee in the Hive of our errors and misfortunes, both private and national. The proof of the Fact, positively and comparatively, and the enumeration of its various causes, will, as I have already hinted form the preliminary Essay of the disquisition on the elements of our moral and intellectual faculties. To solicit the attention of those on whom these debilitating causes have acted to their full extent, would be no less absurd than to recommend exercise with the dumb bells, as the only mode of cure, to a patient paralytic in both arms. You, my dear Sir, well know, that my expectations were more modest as well as more rational. I hoped, that my Readers in general would be aware of the impracticability of suiting every Essay to every Taste in _any_ period of the work; and that they would not attribute wholly to the Author, but in part to the necessity of his plan, the austerity and absence of the lighter graces in the first fifteen or twenty Numbers. In my cheerful moods I sometimes flattered myself, that a few even among those, who foresaw that my lucubrations would at all times require more attention than from the nature of their own employments they could afford them, might yet find a pleasure in supporting _The Friend_ during its infancy, so as to give it a chance of attracting the notice of others, to whom its style and subjects might be better adapted. But my main anchor was the Hope, that when circumstances gradually enabled me to adopt the ordinary means of making the Publication generally known, there might be found throughout the Kingdom a sufficient number of meditative minds, who, entertaining similar convictions with myself, and gratified by the prospect of seeing them reduced to form and system, would take a warm interest in the work from the very circumstance, that it wanted those allurements of transitory interest, which render particular patronage superfluous, and for the brief season of their Blow and Fragrance attract the eye of thousands, who would pass unregarded

Flowers
Of sober tint, and Herbs of med'cinable powers.

I hoped that a sufficient number of such Readers would gradually be obtained, as to secure for the Paper that small extent of circulation and immediate Sale, which would permit the Editor to carry it on to its conclusion, and that they might so far interest themselves in recommending it to men of kindred judgments among their acquaintances, that the alterations in my list of Subscribers should not be exclusively of a discouraging nature. Hitherto, indeed, I have only to express gratitude, and acknowledge constancy; but I do not attempt to disguise from myself that I owe this, in many instances, to a generous reluctance hastily to withdraw from an Undertaking in its first struggles, and before the Adventurer had had a fair opportunity of displaying the quality of his goods, or the foundations of his credit.

* * *--the one tantum vidi: the other I know by his works only and his public character. To profess indifference to their praises would convict me either of insensibility or insincerity. Yet (and I am sure, that you will both understand, and sympathize with, the feeling) my delight was not unalloyed by a something like pain, as if I were henceforward less free to express my admiration of them with the same warmth and affection, which I have been accustomed to do, before I had even anticipated the honour of such a communication. You will therefore not judge me too harshly, if so confirmed and cheered, I have sometimes in the warmth of composition, and while I was reviewing the materials of the more important part of my intended Essays, if I had sometimes permitted my Hopes a bolder flight; and counted on a share of favour and protection from the soberly zealous among the professionally Learned, when the Principles of _The Friend_ shall have been brought into clear view, and Specimens have been given of the mode and the direction in which I purpose to apply and enforce them.

There are charges, the very suspicion of which is painful to an ingenuous mind in exact proportion as they are unfounded and inapplicable. I can bear with resignation a charge of enthusiasm. Even if accused of presumption, I will repay myself by deriving from the accusation an additional motive to increased watchfulness over myself, that I may remain entitled to plead, Not guilty! to it in the Court of my own conscience. But if my anxiety to obviate hasty judgments and misapprehensions is imputed to a less honourable motive than the earnest wish to exert my best faculties, as to the most beneficial purposes, so in the way most likely to effectuate them, I can give but one answer: that however great my desires of _profit_ may be, they cannot be greater than my ignorance of the world, if I have chosen a weekly paper planned, as _The Friend_ is, written on such subjects, and composed in such a style, as the most promising method of gratifying them.

S. T. C.