Monday 30 April 2018

No Such Book As Ulricus Rinovius's "De Controversiis" (1590)



‘Essay IV’ in The Friend sets out the principles to which Coleridge declares he will adhere in the essays that follow. He won't, he says, be constantly I-ing his prose (he promises ‘solicitude’, though not ‘excessive solicitude’ when it comes to avoiding ‘the use of our first personal pronoun’), he'll try not to be too obscure, he'll do his research and support what he says with evidence, and above all he promises to do his very best to avoid ‘Arrogance’ and ‘Presumption’. Those latter qualities are the real focus of the essay, in fact. ‘The word, Presumption, I appropriate to the internal feeling [of superiority], and arrogance to the way and manner of outwardly expressing ourselves’ [Friend, 1:27]. Coleridge discusses several varieties of this arrogance as it appears in other writers, with some tart examples, and the essay ends with this lengthy sentence:
As long therefore as I obtrude no unsupported assertions on my readers; and as long as I state my opinions and the evidence which induced or compelled me to adopt them, with calmness and that diffidence in myself, which is by no means incompatible with a firm belief in the justness of the opinions themselves; while I attack no man's private life from any cause, and detract from no man's honours in his public character, from the truth of his doctrines, or the merits of his compositions, without detailing all my reasons and resting the result solely on the arguments adduced; while I moreover explain fully the motives of duty, which influenced me in resolving to institute such investigation; while I confine all asperity of censure, and all expressions of contempt, to gross violations of truth, honour, and decency, to the base corrupter and the detected slanderer; while I write on no subject, which I have not studied with my best attention, on no subject which my education and acquirements have incapacitated me from properly understanding; and above all while I approve myself, alike in praise and in blame, in close reasoning and in impassioned declamation, a steady FRIEND to the two best and surest friends of all men, TRUTH and HONESTY; I will not fear an accusation of either Presumption or Arrogance from the good and the wise, I shall pity it from the weak, and despise it from the wicked. [Friend CC 4.1: 32-33]
Wordsworth specifically praised this one sentence for its ‘architecture.’ And you can see why he liked it: it's a lovely bit of writing, constructed with enough syntactic and expressive aplomb that the reader never loses her way, but building to a very cleverly, rhetorically-weighted conclusion.

Now: this essay starts, as you can see above, with a Latin epigraph:
Si modo quæ natura et ratione concessa sint, assumpserimus, PRÆSUMPTIONIS suspicio a nobis quam longissime abesse debet. Multa Antiquitati, nobismet nihil, arrogamus. Nihilne vos? Nihil mehercule, nisi quod omnia omni animo Veritati arrogamus Sanctimoniæ. ULR. RINOV. De Controversiis

(Translation.)—If we assume only what Nature and Reason have granted, with no shadow of right can we be suspected of Presumption. To Antiquity we arrogate many things, to ourselves nothing. Nothing? Aye nothing: unless indeed it be, that with all our strength we Arrogate all things to Truth and Moral Purity. [Friend CC 4.1: 25. This is the 1818 version of this quotation and its translation; a variant text from the 1837 version edited by Henry Nelson Coleridge is screenshotted above]
Barbara Rooke, whose Bollingen edition of The Friend I'm using, annotates this passage drily: ‘source untraced’. Because in fact it's a made-up quotation (Rooke's footnote adds ‘as early as Poems (1797) C confessed that when he did not find “a suitable motto” he “invented one”’). There's no such person as Ulr. Rinov., and non-he never wrote the words attributed to him here. Coleridge concocted this Latin for the 1818 edition (this epigraph isn't part of the original 1809 text).

Still, made-up though it be, we can intuit certain things about this bit of faux-Latin, and those things shed an, I think, interesting light on Coleridge's essay, and indeed his larger project in The Friend. Ulricus Rinovius wasn't a person, but there was a 16th-century German priest and historian called Petrus Rinovius; which enables us to deduce that Ulricus was German, and to speculate that Peter might be his relative. And though no book called De Controversiis was authored by any Rinovius, there was a famous book that had that title. This one, in fact:



This is Robert Bellarmine's extremely influential defence of the legitimacy of Papal authority: Disputationes de Controversiis Christianae Fidei adversus hujus temporis Haereticos (3 vols 1581-93). So important, indeed, has this book proved to Catholicism that Pope Pius XI canonised Bellarmine in 1930 and made him a Doctor of the Church a year later. The De Controversiis remains one of the prime documents of the counter-Reformation.

One index of its influence was the ferocity with which it was attacked by Protestant thinkers. Indeed, attacking Bellarmine became for a while something of an industry: specific university chairs were endowed in England and Germany for scholars to disseminate Protestant counter-arguments to Bellarmine's work. The De Controversiis was attacked, as Gordon Campbell notes, ‘by Protestants of all persuasions: in England attacks were mounted by Alexander Cooke, William Whitaker, Francis Bunny, John Rainolds, Matthew Sutcliffe, and Joseph Hall; on the continent [by] Johannes Piscator, Amandus Polanus, and Francis Junius’ and Campbell thinks Milton himself prepared a rebuttal to the De Controversiis, now lost [Campbell, ‘Milton's Index Theologicus and Bellarmine's Disputationes De Controversiis’, Milton Quarterly 11 (1977), 13].

The controversiae to which the book's title refers are those points of faith in dispute between Catholicism and Protestantism. Specifically, Bellarmine discusses the question of faith versus good works, the need or otherwise for extreme unction, the status of the Pope (controversially enough he insists the Pope is not the antichrist prophesied in the Revelation of St John), issues of grace and free-will and, as you'd expect, the nature of the eucharist. He engages with the writing of various Protestant theologians, concentrating particularly on Calvin and Luther, quoting and interrogating their works. Robert Richgels calls De Controversiis ‘massive anti-Protestant summa’ (‘Bellarmine goes directly into the works of his foes, noting carefully their views and arguments on the issues and then providing the Catholic response to each point in turn’ [Richgels, ‘Scholasticism Meets Humanism in the Counter-Reformation the Clash of Cultures in Robert Bellarmine's Use of Calvin in the Controversies, The Sixteenth Century Journal 6:1 (1975), 54].)

Coleridge's imaginary addition to the extensive body of anti-Bellarmine tracts (written by a German and therefore a Protestant it would of course be an anti-Bellarmite work) does two quite interesting things in its context, here. One is that, without leaning too heavily on the reader, it connects what follows—Coleridge's discussion of the proper way of writing literary and moral essays—with the larger theological questions of the whole Reformation. It's not hard to extrapolate what the larger argument of ‘Ulricus Rinovius’ must be: that instead of blindly trusting to the authority of the (ancient) Roman Church, we must orient ourselves to God by means of our individual truth and moral purity. By appropriating this confected book to his argument, Coleridge is tacitly aligning what he does with religion; in much the same way that he'd styled thoughts on the role of the statesman in society ‘Lay Sermons’ in 1816-17. It's not belle lettres; its much more godly and important than that.

The other thing STC is doing in this made-up quotation is an etymological unpacking of the words ‘arrogance’ and ‘presumption’. By inventing a Latin quotation that actually uses the words, he picks out the way the English arrogance, ‘an extreme and foolish pride, a sense of superiority to others’ derives from the Latin arrogo, which means ‘to claim as one's own, arrogate to oneself, assume’ and so is connected with assumo (‘to take to or with one's self, to take up, receive, adopt, accept, take’). He is saying, in other words, that arrogance is a matter of unchallenged assumptions, which in turn devolves on where we ground our beliefs. If we assume (si assumpserimus), if we take up, what ‘natura et ratione’ offer us, then we cannot be accused of præsumptio, presumption; but if we instead take up the offerings of tradition, ‘antiquitas’, then we move from assumption to arrogation and thence to the outward form of presumption, arrogance. Instead of the antique, we should take up what veritas and sanctimonia proffer.

The question is how far Coleridge is aligning Catholicism with arrogance and Protestantism with assumption. Essay 4 isn't specifically about religious faith, or doctrinal affiliation, but still: his examples do seem to divide along sectarian lines. So those doughty Protestants Newton and Locke are praised, ‘despite being assailed with a full cry for [their] presumption in having deserted the philosophical system at that time generally received by the universities of Europe’ [Friend 1:28] because their genius grounded their assertions in nature. On the other hand Coleridge contrasts a Jesuitical counter-example: ‘I have,’ says Coleridge, ‘looked into a ponderous review of the corpuscular philosophy by a Sicilian Jesuit, in which the acrimonious Father frequently expresses his doubt, whether he should pronounce Boyle or Newton more impious than presumptuous, or more presumptuous than impious. They had both attacked the reigning opinions on most important subjects, opinions sanctioned by the greatest names of antiquity, and by the general suffrage of their learned contemporaries or immediate predecessors.’ This is presumably a reference to Fr Ruggerio Giuseppe Boscovich (though Croatian rather than Sicilian, he published under the Italian version of his forenames, and d'Alembert was one of many contemporaries who thought him Italian—Boscovich wrote back politely to correct his misapprehension—so STC can be forgiven for getting this wrong). Historians of science today mostly argue that Boscovich's atomic theory position him a scientist and thinker of the same stature of a Leibniz or a Locke (perhaps not quite the statue of a Newton: but then, who is?) Coleridge isn't having that, though: any Jesuit investigator into the atomic or corpuscular philosophy’ must be in the sense that Coleridge means it presumptious, because, Coleridge thinks, as a Jesuit he is bound to situate his belief in the authority of the Church rather than in reason and nature.

It's an interesting if rather stretched reading of the nature of arrogance, this, seeing it not only as a matter of pride but of from whence its assertions are taken. It would, surely, be more conventional to ground presumptious arrogance more straightforwardly in egoism and self-love. ‘Pride, simply considered,’ as Samuel Johnson famously remarked ‘is an immoderate degree of self-esteem, or an overvalue set upon a man by himself ... he that overvalues himself will undervalue others; and he that undervalues others will oppress them’ [Johnson Sermons (1688)] And, as you'd expect, Coleridge talks about pride as an underlying arrogant display: arrogance manifests in a ‘proud or petulant omission of proof or argument’ [1.29], something he promises to avoid in his own writing.

But it is more than just ego. STC diagnoses an immoderate self-esteem in the writing of the radical Thomas Paine (‘the illiterate perpetrator of the Age of Reason,’ Coleridge scoffs, ‘must have had his very conscience stupified by the habitual intoxication of presumptuous arrogance, and his common-sense over-clouded by the vapours from his heart’ [1:32]). It is in its deliberate repudiation of Christianity that The Age of Reason embodies its arrogance. Paine's radicalism ‘takes up’ a set of deist-materialist premises that lead it not into mere error but into the arrogant elevation of a hostile and destructive political faux-superiority over the status quo. The notional Jesuit, on the other hand, presumably goes too far the other way, elevating an exploded and superseded past over the necessities of the present.

One, to me, odd aspect of this argument is that Coleridge associates arrogance with both ignorance and plagiarism:
Lastly, it must be admitted as a just imputation of presumption when an individual obtrudes on the public eye, with all the high pretensions of originality, opinions and observations, in regard to which he must plead wilful ignorance in order to be acquitted of dishonest plagiarism. On the same seat must the writer be placed, who in a disquisition on any important subject proves, by falsehoods either of omission or of positive error, that he has neglected to possess himself, not only of the information requisite for this particular subject; but even of those acquirements, and that general knowledge, which could alone authorize him to commence a public instructor. This is an office which cannot be procured gratis. The industry, necessary for the due exercise of its functions, is its purchase-money; and the absence or insufficiency of the same is so far a species of dishonesty, and implies a Presumption in the literal as well as the ordinary sense of the word. He has taken a thing before he had acquired any right or title thereto.
Given the notoriety of Coleridge's own dabblings with plagiary, this rather looks like a self-own.

Coleridge in this essay is not promising he will avoid controversies in The Friend. Quite otherwise: De Controversiis Protestanticorum would be a serviceable alternate title for this whole enterprise, actually. But we'll get onto more specifically religious-themed essays a little later on.

What's going on here, I think, speaks to the heart of Coleridge's ambition to establish the project of The Friend (and, indeed, much of his output as a writer of critical prose) as the articulation of the principles upon which morals, art and life should be founded. In her excellent book-length study of The Friend, Deirdre Coleman explores the ‘unresolved conflicts’ that structure what Coleridge is doing inThe Friend: ‘This striving for absolutes or principles, and its accompanying rhetorical expansiveness, coexists with a more cautious rhetoric, and an intense dislike of abstractions’ [Coleman, Coleridge and The Friend (1809-1810) (Oxford: Clarendon 1988), 17] The more I dig into this work the more convinced I become that the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the draw towards tradition and authority on the one hand and change and spiritual refreshment on the other, is one of the main ones here. The Catholic may be prone to socially-sanctioned arrogance, with all the pomp and performative superiority of his or her Church heirarchy around them; but the Protestant needs to watch out that s/he doesn't become puffed-up with presumption, believing him/herself inwardly better than those poor benighted others.

Sunday 29 April 2018

'Schlaget du mit Schwert und Munde' (?1808) Traced



In late 1808, or perhaps in 1809 (in either case, around the time he was directing all his energy into the early stages of The Friend) Coleridge wrote the four lines above into his notebook. Kathleen Coburn [(ed) The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Volume 3 1808-1819 (London: Routledge 1973), 3:2, 3425] says: ‘in ink. Source not traced’ and translates as follows:
If you strike with words and steel
True, such wounds will often heal:
But we keep the scar and smart
On our skin and in our heart.
You'll be pleased to hear the source is now traced. It's a four-line poem called ‘Verwundungen’ (‘Wounds’) by Adam Olearius (1599-1671; his German, rather than his Latin, name was Adam Ölschläger). Coleridge came across it in Christian Wernicke's Überschriften, nebst Opitzens, Tschernings, Andreas Gryphius und Adam Olearius: Epigrammatischen Gedichten (Leipzig 1780) where it appears on p.480. Coleridge owned this book, and indeed translated quote a few of Wernicke's epigrammatic poems out of it [see J C C Mays' Poetical Works, the poems numbered 305-319 inclusive].


Coleridge's translations were all published in the Morning Post in 1802 and some of them were reprinted in The Friend, which suggests that Coleridge re-opened his old copy of Wenecke as he began readying material for the journal.

Coleridge, "The Friend" and Polygamy: the Thelyphthora Connection




:1:

Sometimes pedantically taking the trouble to track down the source of an obscure Latin quotation in one of Coleridge's prose works can pay unexpected dividends. Not often, of course; but sometimes. And this, I think, is one such time.

So: a couple of days ago I posted about the start of my read-through of The Friend, the magazine Coleridge edited, wrote (almost entirely) and published intermittently 1809-10. The first essay of this miscellany ends with Coleridge quoting some Erasmus (in the later 1818 rifacimento the first essay ends with a cue to this passage, which is then printed as the epigraph to the second essay). Its placement in either case shows that it was important to Coleridge's sense of the larger project.



Nobody had tracked down where that passage came from, so I did; and you can read the exciting results of that enterprise here. Long story short: it's a passage from Erasmus's introduction to his famous 1516 Latin-and-Greek edition of the New Testament. This one, in fact:



But something about it didn't feel quite right to me. Coleridge wasn't a great reader of Erasmus (though he read Luther avidly), and whilst it was certainly possible he was picking his way through the hundreds of close-printed pages of Latin that constitute the introduction to the Novum Instrumentum omne, in one or other of the hefty, expensive and rare editions published between 1516 and 1536, and this passage just leapt out at him, this didn't strike me as very likely, really. Did Wordsworth (with whom Coleridge was staying at this time) even own a copy of this rare book? Something was off.

So I went back to the quoted text and did some more rummaging around. Long story short: I don't think Coleridge found this passage in the original Erasmus. I think he found it here:



Those, as you can see, are pages xxxiii and xxiv from the introduction to the book whose title-page heads this blog: Martin Madan's Thelyphthora, or A Treatise on Female Ruin (1780). In that once-notorious work Madan, a barrister and Methodist clergyman, advocated Biblically-sanctioned polygamy as the remedy for the evils of social and sexual immorality. The unusual title is Madan's Greek coinage: the suffix Θηλ- refers to women—θηλυκός means ‘female’ and τὼ θηλᾱ́ are a woman's breasts—and φθορά means ‘ruin, death’ but also ‘seduction’ and ‘rape’. Here's Madan, and his English translation:
What Erasmus wrote on the treatment which he met with from many quarters on account of his publication deserves our notice …
‘Sic oportet ad librum legendum accedere lectorem, ut solet ad convivium conviva civilis. Convivator annititur omnibus satisfacere: & tamen siquid apponitur, quod hujus aut illius palato non respondeat, urbane vel dissimulant, vel probant etiam, ne quid contristent convivatorem. Quis enim eum convivam ferat, qui tantum hoc animo veniat ad mensam, ut carpens quæ apponuntur, ne vescatur ipse, nec alios vesci sinat?

Et tamen his quoque reperias inciviliores, qui palam, qui sine fine damnent ac lacerent opus, quod nunquam legerint. Atque hoc sane faciunt quidam, qui se Christiana pietatis doctores profitentur, & religionis antistites; cum sit plus quam sycophaticum, damnare quod nescias.’
As I have too much reason to think that some of the unlearned, as well as the learned, stand much in need of being acquainted with the above, I will give it in English.
‘A reader should come to the perusal of a book, as a courteous guest comes to a feast, The giver of the feast does his endeavour to satisfy all; yet, if any thing be brought to table, which may not be agreeable to the palate of this or that person, they politely dissemble their dislike, or even approve, rather than grieve him who has invited them. For who could bear with that guest, who comes to the table only with a disposition to find fault, and neither to partake himself, nor suffer others to partake of the entertainment? Yet you may find others more uncivil than these, who openly, and without end, will condemn and tear a work to pieces, which they have never red. And some do this, who profess themselves teachers of Christian piety, and eminent professors of religion. Whereas, to condemn that of which you are ignorant, is beyond the baseness of the basest informer.’
The Latin Coleridge quotes starts and ends exactly where Madan's passage does. And compare Madan's English above with Coleridge's, here:
A reader should sit down to a book, especially of the miscellaneous kind, as a well-behaved visitor does to a banquet. The master of the feast exerts himself to satisfy all his guests; but if after all his care and pains there should still be something or other put on the table that does not suit this or that person's taste, they politely pass it over without noticing the circumstance, and commend other dishes, that they may not distress their kind host, or throw any damp on his spirits. For who could tolerate a guest that accepted an invitation to your table with no other purpose but that of finding fault with every thing put before him, neither eating himself, or suffering others to eat in comfort. And yet you may fall in with a still worse set than even these, with churls that in all companies and without stop or stay, will condemn and pull to pieces a work which they had never read. But this sinks below the baseness of an Informer, yea, though he were a false witness to boot! The man, who abuses a thing of which he is utterly ignorant, unites the infamy of both—and in addition to this, makes himself the pander and sycophant of his own and other men's envy and malignity.
In my earlier post I noted puzzlement that, having translated sycophantes as ‘sycophant’, Coleridge also made reference to ‘the baseness of an Informer,’ something which I simply couldn't find in the original Latin. But if we work with the theory that Coleridge found the passage in the Thelyphthora here, then the puzzle goes away: since Madan translates ‘sycophantes’ into English precisely as ‘the basest informer’. It was much more likely that Wordsworth would own Madan's book than an old copy of Erasmus's bilingual New Testament. Madan, who had died only a few years earlier in 1790, was the cousin of William Cowper, a poet whom Coleridge admired immensely, and whose blank verse directly influenced Wordsworth's own. And it was a famous, or at any rate a notorious, book; it's very possible Wordsworth had a copy.


:2:

The thing is: this apparently small datum unpacks in quite significant ways in terms of reading The Friend. It is really quite interesting that, as he started writing the essays that would constitute this magazine, Coleridge was reading a book that made the earnest argument that men ought be allowed to marry more than one woman. Quite interesting in terms of the intellectual context out of which this text was produced, and very interesting in terms of the emotional context.

In 1806 Coleridge had finally separated from his wife, Sara Fricker. He continued to support her financially as she raised their children, but the marriage was dead. One cause of this separation was their evident mutual incompatibility, but another more pressing one was that, in 1799, STC had met and fallen in love with Sara Hutchinson, the younger sister of Wordsworth's wife Mary Hutchinson. This was a desperate, unreciprocated passion that wrenched Coleridge. He poured his misery into entries in his notebook and sometimes into poems, disguising her identity under the flimsy anagram ‘Asra’. Sara H was in many ways a good friend to Coleridge, but she did not love him, and even if marriage between them had been a legal possibility (which it wasn't: the Matrimonial Causes Act was half a century away) it's very hard to believe she would have accepted his proposal, however passionate he was about her. And boy was he smitten.

There were long stretches of tantalising physical proximity through the first few years of the 1800s, and then in 1804 Coleridge moved to Malta, in part as a deliberate break with Sara H and an attempt to cauterise his infatuation. It doesn't seem to have helped. On his return from the Mediterranean Coleridge several times visited the Wordsworths, and therefore Sara, who was living with them, and found himself still as smitten. In December 1806 Coleridge and his ten-year-old son Hartley arrived at Coleorton to spend Christmas with the Wordsworths. During this visit something happened, the traumatic something which Coleridge notated in his Notebook as ‘the EPOCH’. It looks as though, one morning, Coleridge blundered into Sara's room to find her in bed with Wordsworth. It's hard to be sure, in part because Coleridge spent years trying to talk himself into believing that whatever he had seen that morning had just been a kind of hallucination (a ‘morbid Day-Dream’, ‘a mere phantasm and yet what anguish, what gnawings of despair, what throbbings and lancinations of positive Jealousy!’)

Then came the Friend. The point to remember about Coleridge's praxis in writing was that he dictated and relied upon amanuenses to write up what he said; and in the case of the Friend that amanuensis was Sara Hutchinson. ‘Coleridge was dictating every issue directly to Sara Hutchinson, closeted in his study,’ notes Richard Holmes, adding, in striking phrase: ‘so that if the mouth was his the hand was Asra's’.
Coleridge now had that daily, and even nightly, intimacy with Asra that he had so long and so passionately desired. But it was not easy for either of them. The shared pressure, and even excitement, of their literary work (often witnessed by Asra's breathless notes to Brown the printer, reporting on progress) hid far deeper emotions and conflicts. [Holmes, Darker Visions (1998), 176].
It was hardest on Coleridge himself: his notebooks ‘ranged back obsessively’ over his memories of Asra, and he debated with himself whether to write an essay for the Friend on what he considered to be the two models of falling in love, one a passive ‘irresistible’ passion and the other a more controlled ‘act of will’. But, as Holmes says, ‘he could not dictate such an essay to Asra, and it was only written long after ... indeed, perhaps because of their very physical proximity, Coleridge could never speak openly to Asra of his feelings’.

In this context, the fact that Coleridge—married to one woman, desperately in love with another woman—was reading a book that used scripture to justify polygamy is remarkable. Though piously-intended, Madan's Thelyphthora quickly became one of the more notorious books of the later eighteenth-century. The scandal occasioned by its main argument was kept alive by Madan's habit of responding with articles and pamphlets to the many published attacks on his work: at least nineteen separate titles critiqued Madan's book in the 1780s alone, including an Anti-Thelyphthora by Madan's own cousin William Cowper.

In fact the sexual element of polygamy, though the thought of it inevitably tickles our lubriciousnesses, plays little part in Madan's argument. Instead he is exercised by a more strictly theological question: did the coming of Christ entirely overthrow the old Mosaic law (under which, of course, men could marry more than one woman) or not? Madan argued it did not. Indeed, he called the orthodox view that Christ set up a new law, more pure and holy, in opposition to the law of the Old Testament, ‘a doctrine ... replete with folly and blasphemy’ [Thelyphthora, 1:326-27].
By God's express command from Mount Sinai, where the laws concerning moral good and evil, were eternally and unalterably fixed, no man could take a virgin and then abandon her. ‘He shall surely endow her to be his wife’ Exod. xxii.16. And again Deut. xxii. 29. ‘She shall be his wife; BECAUSE HE HAS HUMBLED HER, he may not put her away all his days.’ [Thelyphthora, 1:10]
E B Murray summarises the through-line argument of Madan's book:
In practice Madan interpreted this [Biblical text] to mean that any man who seduced a virgin, even if he was already married, had, in effect, wed her and should be so held accountable to her for all his days. While the system of human contrivance that found Madan comprehensively opposed to his Biblical sanctions was civil marriage, with its insistence on monogamy, his immediate object was (as his full title indicates) the repeal of the so called Marriage Act of 1753, which prohibited clandestine marriages. [E B Murray, ‘Thel, Thelyphthora, and the Daughters of Albion’, Studies in Romanticism 20:3 (1981), 275-76]
When Coleridge wasn't dictating the Friend to Asra, he was using his notebooks to explore the tantalising idea that she might be his wife after all, if only he could get himself off opium:
Again: as Mother of my children—how utterly improbable dared I hope it: How impossible for me (most pure indeed are my heart & fancy from such a thought) even to think of it, much less desire it! and yet at the encouraging prospect of emancipation from narcotics, of health & activity of mind & body, worthy of the unutterably [in cipher: dear one], it is felt within me like an ordinance of adamantine Destiny! [Notebooks, 3: 3547]
Perhaps Coleridge found in Madan a justification for this daydream: he was married, true; but by falling so deeply in love with Asra had he not, in some spiritual sense, already married another woman? Might scripture not sanction such heart-polygamy?

In other words, the Friend was all bound up with Asra, and Coleridge's feelings for Asra. Why did Coleridge decide on The Friend as title for his magazine? He was advised against it: people who didn't know better, he was told, would assume it to be a Quaker journal, which might limit circulation. But Coleridge was adamant. His previous attempt as a magazine had been The Watchmen, and his eighteenth-century prototype for the entire enterprise was expressly the Spectator: in 1804 Coleridge wrote in his Notebook that ‘I should like to dare look forward to the Time when Wordsworth & I with contributions from Lamb and Southey—& from a few others should publish a Spectator’ [Notebooks, 2:2074]. But merely spectating, or even watching as a guardian might, no longer chimed with what Coleridge wanted. He was looking now for a friend: in Latin amicus or amica (has anybody wondered what the gender of Coleridge's magazine's title is?) a word hovering between the more distant friend and the more intimate lover—its root is amo, I love, after all (the Greek φίλος similarly balances between friend and lover in meaning).

It seems that Coleridge had had enough of spectating, or of being spectated. At exactly the time, in the last months of 1808, that he was formalising The Friend with a detailed prospectus to be distributed to possible subscribers he was also writing Wordsworth a long letter of passionate accusation expressive of his heart-sickness with respect to Asra. We no longer have that letter but we do have a draft of Wordsworth's reply, which, to quote Richard Holmes again, ‘by trying to refute Coleridge's accusations point by point’ thus gives us ‘some idea of what Coleridge had actually written to him’:
It is a series of most intimate reproaches: they had supervised Asra's letters; they had regarded his influence as ‘poison entering into her mind’; they had told Asra that she was ‘the cause’ of all his misery. It's clear that Wordsworth was shocked ... Coleridge's accusations [he replied] were made ‘in a lamentably insane state of mind’. His obsession with Asra, and suspicions over Wordsworth's own conduct towards her, his ‘transports of passion’, were all ‘unmanly and ungentlemanly’ and the product of a perverted sexual imagination. [Holmes, Coleridge: Darker Reflections, 139]
Coleridge clearly felt that he was being unfairly surveiled, even spied upon (it would make sense, I think, to date Coleridge's Verecundia poem to the end of 1808: it's also about this fevered mood)

To return to his expansive translation of the Erasmus passage in this context is to be struck by the way he renders the one word sycophantes not once but into four separate terms: once as ‘sycophant’, then again by picking up Madan's ‘Informer’ and expanding it into ‘the baseness of an Informer [and] a false witness to boot!’ and finally by doubling up ‘sycophant’ with ‘pander’. Something in this plain-seeming paragraph from Erasmus touched a tender spot in Coleridge's subconscious, and it has more to do with than just its ostensible content of exhorting his readers to keep an open mind. Pander, with its sexual meaning, mingles with the sense of a spy in the house, an informer against him, a general dishonesty, all connected intimately with Coleridge's friend-who-is-more-than-a-friend.

Thursday 26 April 2018

Friend Erasmus


I'm going to spend the next few weeks properly reading The Friend, Coleridge's fascinating if, in the end, abortive attempt at a magazine that ran between 1809 and 1810. It was supposed to be an intellectual and cultural weekly, but since Coleridge not only wrote all the content (pretty much) but undertook much of the labour of publishing it as well, and since he, not particularly reliable at the best of times, was undergoing a series of personal and emotional crises during this period, this schedule was only spottily adhered to. I've previously dipped into the Friend of course, and I have read its most famous essays, but I've never sat down and read the whole thing from cover to cover, an omission I intend now to rectify.

The options are: to read the original series of 1809-10 issues in order, or to read the 1818 three-volume collection of the same material, which Coleridge himself called a rifacciamento (more orthodox spellers would call this a rifacimento), a term originally from architecture now applied to any literary work or musical composition recast to adapt it to a change in the circumstances of the time. The 1818 three-volume reissue includes myriad revisions, small and not so small, selection, rearrangement and so on; but it also represents Coleridge's last wishes for the material comprising the Friend as such, and that's the one I'm going to read. Of course, the true Friendphile—a tautology if ever I saw one—needs to keep both versions in view when it comes to closer analysis of what STC is doing.

One small note before I plunge in. At the very end of the very first issue of the magazine (Thursday June 1st 1809)—a passage moved in the 1818 edition so as to be the epigraph of the second essay—Coleridge quotes ‘the words of one, who was himself at once a great Critic and a great Genius’. He means Erasmus:
Sic oportet ad librum, presertim miscellanei generis, legendum accedere lectorem, ut solet ad convivium conviva civilis. Convivator annititur omnibus satisfacere: et tamen si quid apponitur, quod hujus aut illius palato non respondeat, et hic et ille urbane dissimulant, et alia fercula probant, ne quid contristent convivatorem. Quis enim eum convivam ferat, qui tantum hoc animo veniat ad mensam, ut carpens quae apponuntur nec vescatur ipse, nec alias vesci sinat? et tamen his quoque reperias inciviliores, qui palam, qui sine fine damnent ac lacerent opus, quod nunquam legerint. Ast hoc plusquam sycophanticum est damnare quod nescias. ERASMUS
It's a small example of the way the 1818 shapes its material, this: because in that later version of the material the last line of Essay 1 (‘And yet—and yet—but it will be time to be serious, when my visitors have sat down’) leads directly into this epigraph to Essay 2, which means, in Coleridge's own translation:
A reader should sit down to a book, especially of the miscellaneous kind, as a well-behaved visitor does to a banquet. The master of the feast exerts himself to satisfy all his guests; but if after all his care and pains there should still be something or other put on the table that does not suit this or that person's taste, they politely pass it over without noticing the circumstance, and commend other dishes, that they may not distress their kind host, or throw any damp on his spirits. For who could tolerate a guest that accepted an invitation to your table with no other purpose but that of finding fault with every thing put before him, neither eating himself, or suffering others to eat in comfort. And yet you may fall in with a still worse set than even these, with churls that in all companies and without stop or stay, will condemn and pull to pieces a work which they had never read. But this sinks below the baseness of an Informer, yea, though he were a false witness to boot! The man, who abuses a thing of which he is utterly ignorant, unites the infamy of both—and in addition to this, makes himself the pander and sycophant of his own and other men's envy and malignity.
Accedere doesn't really mean ‘sit down’ so much as ‘approach’, ‘join’ or ‘enter’; but the simile of the banquet allows a certain latitude in the rendering, I think. On the other hand the reference to the Informer, a very Napoleonic-Wars touch, is not in the Latin at all. We take the general point, though.

The standard scholarly edition of The Friend is Barbara E Rooke's Princeton/Routledge Bollingen one from 1969. Of this passage Rooke annotates: ‘source untraced’ [Friend, 1:14]. In fact it's from the introduction to Erasmus's celebrated edition of the New Testament (five versions of which were issued between 1516 and 1536).


The actual text (a screenshot from the 1536 edition, as it happens) heads this post. Source untraced no longer!

Tracking this down is more than a matter of mere pedantry, though. The quoted passage was important enough to Coleridge's sense of the larger project to stand, in effect, at the head of it: actually so in the 1809 version of the work (this quotation is the last thing cited in that first issue, as a kind of climactic summing up), effectively so in the 1818 rifacimento, where the first essay is a whimsical prelude that ends by telling the read to sit down and pay attention, before segueing straight into this quotation.

Two things immediately strike me. One is that Erasmus is not talking about sitting down properly to read any old book. He's talking about the Bible. Is Coleridge, by appropriating the passage, finding a way of cannily elevating the importance of his own writing (the 1818 subtitle describes the project as ‘a series of essays in three volumes to aid in the formation of fixed principles in politics, morals and religion with literary amusements interspersed’) without explicitly making the blasphemous comparison? Maybe not. Consider the changes Coleridge makes in quoting it. This, as you can see from the screenshot above, is what Erasmus actually wrote:
Sic oportet ad librum legendum accedere lectorem, ut solet ad convivium conviva civilis. Convivator annititur omnibus satisfacere: et tamen si quid apponitur, quod hujus aut illius palato non respondeat, urbane vel dissimulant convivae vel probant etiam, ne quid contristent convivatorem. Quis enim eum convivam ferat, qui tantum hoc animo veniat ad mensam, ut carpens quae apponuntur nec vescatur ipse, nec alias vesci sinat? et tamen his quoque reperias inciviliores, qui palam, qui sine fine damnent ac lacerent opus, quod nunquam legerint. Atque hoc sane faciunt quidam qui se Christianae pietatis doctors profitentum et religionis antistites; quum sit plusquam sycophanticum damnare quod nescias.
There are a couple of little changes here (for instance, Coleridge adds the Latin presertim miscellanei generis, ‘especially [books] of the miscellaneous kind’ into the first sentence; it would make no sense in the Erasmus), and one bigger change: namely that Coleridge has omitted a whole Erasmian sentence regarding the doctors of the church: atque hoc sane faciunt quidam qui se Christianae pietatis doctors profitentum et religionis antistites; quum sit plusquam sycophanticum damnare quod nescias; ‘and indeed there is the supposed piety of those among the Christian doctors themselves, who professed themselves the only true overseers of religious matters’ (antistites, ‘overseer’, also means: ‘high priest’, ‘somebody who has mastered an art or skill’ and sometimes ‘bishop’). These two things together tend to repurpose Erasmus's original sentiment, downplaying its original, specifically Biblical context and expanding it to apply to all literature, or at least all serious literature. Is this a kind of religious superstition on Coleridge's part, as if he doesn't want to over-reach his claims for his own magazine? Or is it a more active reconfiguration, consonant with a sense that the best secular literature merits the sort of attentiveness previously reserved for scripture and theology?