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?