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Wordsworth had not seen Coleridge for nearly three months. He now wrote him an immensely long letter, largely about the editing of his own poems, “if they are ever republished during my lifetime”. He also tendered some firm advice about The Friend. “You should always be beforehand with your work. On the general question of your health, one thing is obvious, that health of mind, that is, resolution, self-denial, and well-regulated conditions of feeling, are what you must depend upon; and that Doctors can do you little or no good, and that Doctors’ stuff has been one of your greatest curses; and of course, of ours through you.” He ended with a note of encouragement: “Sara is, I think, full as well as usual.”60 Coleridge did not reply.
At the end of May, Wordsworth also wrote to Coleridge’s two staunchest supporters to give his measured assessment of his old friend’s efforts. He did not of course know of all the struggles at Penrith, but he felt able to gauge the overall position, and felt duty-bound to be realistic. To Daniel Stuart he wrote: “Of The Friend and Coleridge, I hear nothing, and am sorry to say I hope nothing. It is I think too clear that Coleridge is not sufficiently master of his own efforts to execute anything which requires a regular course of application to one object. I fear so – indeed I am assured that it is so – to my great sorrow.”61
To Thomas Poole at Stowey, he was rather more expansive. He pronounced on Coleridge’s whole future, his career, his family life and his literary gifts. It was very sad, but there was no hope, no possibility of achievement, no second act.
I am sorry to say that nothing appears more desirable than that his periodical essay should never commence. It is in fact impossible – utterly impossible – that he should carry it on; and therefore, better never begin it; far better, and if begun, the sooner it stop, also the better – the less will be the loss, and not greater the disgrace. You will consider me now as speaking to you in the most sacred confidence, and as under a strong sense of duty…I give it to you as my deliberate opinion, formed upon proofs which have been strengthening for years, that he neither will nor can execute anything of important benefit either to himself, his family or mankind. Neither his talents nor his genius mighty as they are, nor his vast information will avail him anything; they are all frustrated by a derangement in his intellectual and moral constitution…
Wordsworth added that nothing remained but to make some arrangements for Coleridge’s children, “in the case of his death”; and that it was now useless for his wife or any of his friends to remonstrate with him. He concluded by asking Poole to burn the letter.62 Such was the opinion of Coleridge’s most valued and intimate companion, his literary comrade in arms for over a decade, at this crucial moment in May 1809.
A week later, on 1 June 1809, the first issue of The Friend arrived at Allan Bank. It opened with a quotation from Petrarch’s On the Life of Solitude. “Believe me, it requires no little Confidence, to promise Help to the Struggling, Counsel to the Doubtful, Light to the Blind, Hope to the Despondent, Refreshment to the Weary…But it is my earnest wish, I confess, to employ my understanding and acquirements in that mode and direction, in which I may be enabled to benefit the largest number possible of my fellow-creatures.”
The second issue followed on 8 June; and a week later Coleridge himself came into Grasmere, having climbed over Helvellyn by the Grisedale Tarn route, “our most perilous & difficult Alpine Pass”.63
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The history of The Friend that followed, over the next ten months from June 1809 to March 1810, is a pure expression of Coleridge’s wayward genius. “I have been giving,” he wrote towards the end, “the History of my own mind.”64
Committed to weekly issues, pinned down to the “Procrustes bed” of sixteen pages – about 6,000 words per essay – and harassed to the end by printing difficulties and shortages of stamped paper, the production was chaotic and the great “exposition of Principles” continuously confused and sidetracked. Many issues ended with an unfinished sentence (“To be continued”), and many footnotes (often containing poetry) threatened to engulf the main text. Subscribers – eventually over 600 – were maddened by its obscurity. The impracticality of the subscription system, held over till the twentieth issue, involved Coleridge in a grave financial loss. From a journalistic and commercial point of view, The Friend was a disaster, exactly as Wordsworth had predicted.
But from a literary perspective, The Friend was a unique achievement and sustained in a way that astonished Coleridge’s severest critics. In the end it ran for twenty-eight weekly issues (the Watchman had lasted ten issues), for which Coleridge wrote over 140,000 words of original copy (the equivalent of two modern novels), Exactly like his talk, it became a digressive masterpiece of learning, poetic insight, and thought-provoking asides and suggestions. Within its Amazonian jungle of tangled, unparagraphed, discursive prose, lay limpid pools of story-telling, criticism, memoir-writing and philosophic reflection.
For all its apparent lack of structure, it adapted and developed as Coleridge steadily responded to his readers. Three movements became evident as the weeks progressed. For the first ten issues, Coleridge concentrated largely on his original programme of political philosophy, dealing with themes as diverse as the concept of language and truth-telling in society, the freedom of the press, the function of taxation, and the Burkean notion of an organic community of reciprocal “rights and duties”. He mounted a sustained attack on the Jacobin concept of the “Rights of Man”, as a form of totalitarianism, and looked back at the English liberal reaction to the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon.
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For the next eleven issues, from November 1809, he attempted to make the paper more popular by introducing a whole range of miscellaneous subjects: travel-writing, tales of the paranormal, reflections on education and childhood, and much poetry. Broadly speaking, these illustrated his views on the psychology of the Imagination.
Finally, in the last seven issues, from January 1810, he tried to pull together his political and psychological themes, in a biographical study of wartime leadership as illustrated by the careers of Nelson and Sir Alexander Ball. But by this time he was exhausted, and the control of his materials became increasingly erratic. Nevertheless, the final issues of The Friend contain some of its most vivid and memorable writing, on what may be called his “title motif”: friendship, courage, human solidarity amidst disaster.
Throughout The Friend Coleridge tried to remain true to his original, underlying purpose of pressing beneath the topical issues of the day, to examine what he saw as the animating principles and verities of human behaviour in society. His conscious rival was Cobbett’s weekly Political Register (with five times his circulation and perhaps twenty times his readership), a forerunner of the modern tabloid packed with “news” and radical commentary. In this he was taking issue with the very notion of journalism itself, the cult of “novelty”, personality and current affairs, which he felt destroyed the true, inner life of the mind.
To understand the world, his readers must look into themselves. To avoid superficiality, partisanship, and ultimately fanaticism, The Friend urged self-reflection and self-understanding. In this Coleridge wrote, as always at his best, as a poet who was bringing his own internal life to bear on the loud, exterior clamour of events.
Many of his most radiant and memorable passages expand this central thesis, paradoxically acknowledging that this was precisely why The Friend was doomed to failure in journalistic terms. As so often in his actual poetry, he took failure itself as his most liberating and radical subject. In issue No. 5, he wrote:
But how shall I avert the scorn of those Critics who laugh at the oldness of my Topics, Evil and Good, Necessity and Arbitrement, Immortality and the Ultimate Aim. By what shall I regain their favour? My themes must be new, a French Constitution; a Balloon; a change of Ministry; a fresh Batch of Kings on the Continent, or of Peers in our happier Island; or who had the best of it of two Parliamentary Gladiators, and whose Speech, on th
e subject of Europe bleeding at a thousand wounds, or our own country struggling for herself and all human nature, was cheered by the greatest Number of Laughs, loud Laughs, and very loud Laughs: (which, carefully marked by italics, form most conspicuous and strange parenthesis in the Newspaper Reports)…Something new, however it must be, quite new and quite out of themselves: for whatever is within them, whatever is deep within them, must be as old as the first dawn of human Reason.
Against this parody of contemporary journalism and its heartless immediacy, Coleridge sought to champion “the blessed machinery of language” and its powers to “support, to kindle, to project the Spirit”. His essays would seek to renew what was eternally fresh and questioning in the hearts of his readers, and to make them think like poets rather than like men and women of the world.
But to find no contradiction in the union of old and new, to contemplate the ANCIENT OF DAYS with feelings as fresh as if they sprang forth at his own fiat, this characterizes the minds that feel the Riddle of the World, and may help to unravel it! To carry on the feelings of Childhood into the powers of Manhood, to combine the Child’s sense of wonder and novelty with the Appearances which every day for perhaps forty years had rendered familiar,
With Sun and Moon and Stars throughout the year,
And Man and Woman – this is the character and privilege of Genius, and one of the marks which distinguish Genius from Talents.65
Thus he stated the central Romantic doctrine of The Friend, the inwardness of Truth, and its power as a Platonic revelation of what exists – or pre-exists – eternally within us all.
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The early issues of The Friend remained irregular, until Stuart sent a second large batch of stamped paper in September. There were two in June, none in July, and one in August. But with No. 4 and No. 5 on 7 and 14 September, Coleridge got into his stride and continued weekly until January 1809. From No. 5 Asra became his trusted amanuensis, taking the essays from his dictation, some of them completed in hectic bursts of forty-eight hours’ almost unbroken work.
The initial subject of “The Communication of Truth and the Rightful Liberty of the Press”, expanded to an attack on the whole totalitarian nature of the Napoleonic regime. In this the wartime character of the paper was much in evidence (Coleridge reprinted a long extract from his “Fears in Solitude” in No. 2).
But his real object was a philosophical critique of Jacobinism itself, characterized as a government of abstract Reason denying all human continuity and tradition. Coleridge was driving towards a psychological as well as a historical analysis of the Jacobin spirit. This was revealed in Nos 8 and 9 in brilliantly original series of paired portraits, of Erasmus versus Voltaire, and Luther versus Rousseau.
The portrait of Luther is certainly one of the early triumphs of The Friend (No. 8, 5 October). Coleridge was attempting to define the inward, fanatical personality of the revolutionary spirit, the man whose private visions will be projected on to society around him, to bring forth angels or monsters. Luther, though a fundamentally religious man, was an archetype of the secular visionary like Rousseau, who would inflame an entire civilization with his dreams. The fundamental principle, as Coleridge analysed it, was a form of hysteria. It was exemplified by his famous vision of the Devil in his study at Warteburg. Coleridge presented this scene with poetic force, and drawing on what were clearly his own experiences with opium.
It is evident from his Letters that he suffered under great irritability of his nervous System, the common effect of deranged Digestion in men of sedentary habits, who are at the same time intense thinkers: and his irritability added to, and revivifying the impressions made upon his early life, and fostered by the theological Systems of his Manhood, is abundantly sufficient to explain all his Apparitions and his nightly combats with evil Spirits. I see nothing improbable in the supposition, that in one of those unconscious half-sleeps, or rather those rapid alternations of the sleeping with the half-waking state, which is the true witching-time,
“…the season
Wherein the spirits hold their wont to walk” the fruitful matrix of Ghosts – I see nothing improbable, that in some one of those momentary Slumbers, into which the suspension of all Thought in the perplexity of intense thinking so often passes; Luther should have had a full view of the Room in which he was sitting, of his writing Table and all the Implements of his Study, as they really existed, and at the same time a brain-image of the Devil, vivid enough to have acquired apparent Outness, and a distance regulated by the proportion of its distinctness to that of the objects really impressed on the outward sense.66
To this vividly realized scene, Coleridge attached a typically dazzling series of further speculations. He had viewed similar phenomena in his own study at Keswick, when at the moment of twilight his windows became partial mirrors, holding the night sky and the interior reflections of his firelit library in a simultaneous image: “my Books on the side shelves of the room were lettered, as it were, on their backs with Stars…”
This beautiful, and yet homely, poetic image provides the key to the mechanism of Luther’s hallucinations. “Now substitute the Phantom from the brain for the Images of reflected light (the Fire for instance) and the Forms of the room and its furniture for the transmitted rays, and you have a fair resemblance of an Apparition, and a just conception of the manner in which it is seen together with real objects.”*
He drew further analogies with Shakespeare’s dramatic techniques of inward imagery (“for in certain sorts of dreams the dullest Wight becomes a Shakespeare”), and also added the long footnote on Tom Wedgwood’s principles of psychological self-observation. He promised a further dissertation on the subject of “Dreams, Visions, Ghosts, Witchcraft etc.”, and linked this with his ballad of “The Three Graves” and its study of obsession, already published in issue No. 6.
Finally, he brought the whole discussion back to Luther’s obsessive religious temperament, and argued in a superb closing passage that if he had been born into a later, secular age, his dreams and fantasies would have become political, like Rousseau’s.
Conceive him a Citizen of Geneva, and a contemporary of Voltaire…His impetuous temperament, his deep-working mind, his busy and vivid Imagination – would they not have been a trouble to him in a World where nothing was to be altered, where nothing was to obey his power…? His Pity, that so easily passed into Rage, would it not have found in the inequalities of Mankind, in the oppression of Governments, and the miseries of the Governed, an entire instead of a divided object? And might not a perfect Constitution, a Government of Pure Reason, a renovation of the social Contract, have easily supplied the place of the reign of Christ in the new Jerusalem…?67
Charles Lamb, having followed Coleridge’s struggles from London, now recognized that something extraordinary was emerging from the tentative and uncertain progress of the paper, and wrote urging Coleridge on. “The account of Luther in Warteburg is as fine as anything I ever read. God forbid that a Man who has such things to say should be silenced for want of £100. This Custom & Duty Age, would have made the Preacher on the Mount take out a License, and St Paul’s Epistle not admissible without a Stamp.”68
In his highly original and digressive way, Coleridge was building towards a central philosophic principle of The Friend, what he called in No. 10 (19 October) “The Errors of Party Spirit: or Extremes Meet”. It was a larger and more subtle argument than the simple political revisionism that he would later be accused of by Hazlitt and other critics. It was an ideological and psychological critique of the extremist mentality itself. Coleridge identified this in the increasing polarization of English politics. “If the Jacobins ran wild with the Rights of Man, and the abstract Sovereignty of the People, their Antagonists flew off as extravagantly from the sober good sense of our Forefathers and idolized as pure an abstraction in the Rights of Sovereigns.”69
Coleridge could also bring the point home with personal anecdote. “During the last War, an acquaintance of mine
(least of all men a political Zealot) had christened a Vessel he had just built – ‘The Liberty’; and was seriously admonished by his aristocratic Friends to change it for some other name. What? – replied the Owner very innocently – should I call it ‘The Freedom’? That (it was replied) would be far better, as people might then think only of Freedom of Trade; whereas ‘Liberty’ has a jacobinical sound with it! Alas!…is there no medium between an Ague-fit and a Frenzy-fever?”70
He even took the risk in No. 11 (26 October) of recounting his own youthful flirtation with Jacobinism, in the Pantisocratic scheme of 1794. “I was a sharer in the general vortex, though my little World described the path of its Revolution in an orbit of its own.” It was a defensive account, passing off his passionate and millennial beliefs as “air-built Castles” of the day, hot air balloons of “youthful Enthusiasm”.71
This version particularly incensed Southey, who thought that if Coleridge himself had not once been a Jacobin, he did not know “who the devil” was. At the same time he was alarmed by Coleridge’s increasing degree of political self-exposure in The Friend, in an attempt to hold his readers. Indeed the account is still historically fascinating, containing as it does what is probably the first recorded description of the phenomenon of the political “fellow-traveller”. “We had been travelling with the crowd of less imaginative malcontents, through the dark lanes and foul bye-roads of ordinary Fanaticism. But Oh! There were thousands as young and innocent as myself who…were driven along with the general current!”72
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