The Bound-Friend

This word “obscurity” would settle on Coleridge like an albatross.

Richard Holmes, Darker Reflections, 172.

‘We live by continued acts of defence, that involve a sort of offensive warfare’

Coleridge, TF, 1.97.

Coleridge’s commitment to The Friend did not end with the publication of the final number of the periodical-Friend. He ended the last number with an at once pathetic and prophetic, parenthetical invocation of delay: ‘(To be concluded in the next Number)’.¹ He continued to contemplate changes and improvements to the project, and in 1812 the project of The Friend would finally begin to form itself into a book, as Stuart and Southey had suggested all along it should, freed from the demands of weak, weekly labour and freed from the demands of a weak, weekly public. Barbara Rooke gives an excellent account of the context and effort involved in the volume’s formation,² while Griggs offers the following succinct account of its materials, referring to Coleridge’s continual problems with procuring paper: ‘[u]nstamped paper was not obtained until Nov. 1809. As a result, the 100 or so more “sets” of The Friend available on unstamped sheets on 15. Mar. [1810] consisted of revised reprints of the first 12 numbers and original copies of the last 16’.³ His alterations to the first sixteen numbers were not substantive – one particular manuscript ‘reveals many revisions in style and emphasis but few of content’, and Rooke notes that some representative ‘alterations indicate Coleridge’s constant concern for clarity and emphasis’.⁴

Rooke seems determined to defend Coleridge’s attempt to clarify himself with alterations to the bound-Friend, and makes his concern for clarity her main argument in the explosion of the ‘myth that the revisions [to the 1812 Friend] are insignificant’.⁵ Unfortunately she does not place this defence in the context of Coleridge’s complex and problematic development of a reflexive metarhetoric of Romantic obscurity, and her evident desire to be an advocate for him leads her to relegate most charges of obscurity to a footnote and to include in the main text statements that essentially adopt The Friend’s figures of obscurity (such as Purkis’ statement about ‘caviare’).⁶ Thus, for example, Coleridge’s alteration to an important passage relating to the nature of the human intellect is represented as ‘his attempt to clarify his concepts of reason and the understanding’.⁷ Rooke even claims that Coleridge ‘revised the first seven numbers in greater detail than he did the following five, perhaps because, as he had expected, his pen, like children’s legs, had improved by exercise’.⁸ For Rooke, the negative charge of obscurity was essentially either a consequence of his readers’ impatience and uncharitability, or of the normal mistakes that benefit from a bit of editorial polishing.

Rooke does, however, note that some of the additions to the bound-Friend involve more serious changes. One such addition concerns those facts that ‘subsist in perpetual flux’.⁹ After claiming that such facts lead one inevitably into ‘unanswerable difficulties’, an important element of his argument in the book-Friend that human intelligence is ultimately limited and inherently incapable of clear and complete resolution, Coleridge adds the following statement:

[s]uch are all those facts, the knowledge of which is not received from the senses, but must be acquired by reflection; and the existence of which we can prove to others, only as far as we can prevail on them to go into themselves and make their own minds the Object of their stedfast** [sic] attention.¹⁰

If the most essential truths for a right understanding of epistemology are of the class of facts which are internal and essentially in flux, then the possibility of clear and permanent knowledge is seriously called into question. So too is the possibility that readers can be convinced to draw away from the ease of accepting the axioms of common sense (which are grounded merely in facts communicated through the transparent medium of the senses, resulting in ‘uncorrupted feeling’¹¹) and drawn towards the effort of achieving an explicit and conscious understanding of principles or demonstrated conclusions through the concentrated labour of inward-looking, transcendental self-analysis. Coleridge, perhaps perceiving that the particularly perilous epistemological position this implied should not appear so early in The Friend, removed the insertion from the book-Friend.

Another significant addition is central to Coleridge’s attempt to distinguish between those negative obscurities which can be clarified by positive intellectual exercise or engagement, and those which are positively obscure all the way down, as it were. This distinction is meant to demonstrate that one can identify the difference between those demonic, dangerous forms of passionate obscurity associated with falsehood and violent revolution, and those divine, benevolent forms of passionate obscurity which are a consequence of our benighted condition and the sublime authority of God. There are in fact two insertions, an extended clause and a footnote. In the former, Coleridge expresses his wish ‘to reserve the deep feelings which belong, as by a natural right** to those obscure Ideas that are necessary to the moral perfection of the human being, notwithstanding, yea, even in consequence, of their obscurity’. The footnote begins after ‘belong’:

I have not expressed myself as clearly as I could wish. But the truth of the assertion, that deep feeling has a tendency to combine with obscure ideas in preference to distinct and clear notions, is proved in every Methodist meeting, and by the history of religious sects in general. The odium theologicum, or hatred excited by difference of faith, is even proverbial: and it is the common complaint of philosophers and philosophic Historians, that the passions of the Disputants are commonly violent in proportion to the subtlety and obscurity of the Questions in Dispute. Nor is this fact confined to professional Theologians: for whole nations have displayed the same agitations, and have sacrificed national policy to the more powerful Interest of a controverted Obscurity.¹²

Though the problem of inspiration and enthusiasm was particularly important in the political rhetoric of the 1790s in Britain, telling the difference between divine and demonic inspiration was an ancient problem, and instead of being resolved by the end of the project of The Friend, it was ultimately expanded to include a much wider range of people: in the book-Friend Coleridge removed the reference to the Methodists and replaced it with the more general claim that his point about obscurity ‘may be proved by the history of Fanatics and Fanaticism in all ages and countries’.¹³

This continued commitment to obscurity in the bound-Friend secured the foundation of Coleridge’s reputation for obscurity. Though it began with the reception of some of his earliest poetry, the public formation of Coleridge as a figure of obscurity reached its climax in the publications and reviews bookended by the periodical-Friend in 1809 and the book-Friend in 1818. Thus Richard Holmes writes in Darker Reflections that Coleridge’s reputation for obscurity settled on him ‘like an albatross’ after the publication of the periodical-Friend. ¹⁴ The charge of obscurity was very public and personal, private and political, its charge shifting interchangeably back and forth between the author and the text and the reader. As Holmes also suggests, ‘Coleridge’s coat-trailing into controversy (which Southey interpreted as coat-turning) was partly a response to widespread criticism of the undoubted obscurity of many of the early numbers, as Coleridge responded to reviewers and reviewers responded to him in turn.¹⁵ What the reviewers recognised was that Coleridge’s response in these years to the charge of obscurity was not so much an attempt to shoot the albatross as to capture, tame and train it, and the transferability of obscurity between writer, work, and reader meant Coleridge was personally and publicly figured in terms of obscurity.

The only review that appeared of the periodical-Friend was published (unsigned) in the Eclectic Review in October 1811 by John Foster, a republican Baptist minister who, according to the DNB, never administered baptism. Written after the periodical had been completed, it treated The Friend as a complete and coherent work (it would have been strange in any case to have written a ‘review’ of a particular number of a periodical). Foster first announces his pleasure that Coleridge ‘was in good faith employing himself… in the intellectual public service’,¹⁶ perhaps a subtle reference to the supposed waste of Coleridge’s less illustrious form of public service in Malta. Describing the material circumstances under which the paper was printed and distributed (‘printed on stamped paper, these essays were conveyed by the post, free of expence, to any part of the country’¹⁷), Foster compares ‘the exterior character’ of The Friend’s paper not to Coleridge’s foil Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register,** but rather to the Tatler and the Rambler. He notes, however, that The Friend ‘should attempt to instruct after a very different method’ and ‘might require a somewhat resolute exercise of intellect’.¹⁸ Foster also claims that the haste with which it was written precluded just and necessary revision¹⁹ and left ‘no possibility of disposing the subject in the simplest clearest order, and giving the desirable compression, and lucidness, and general finishing to the composition’.²⁰ In Foster’s account, Coleridge’s distinctions become ‘tenebrious’ and are presented in a language with an ‘obscurity of a somewhat different kind from that which may seem inevitably incident, in some degree, to the expression of thoughts of extreme abstraction’. ²¹ The tortured obscurity of The Friend even causes the reader to ‘excruciate’,²² and Foster’s references to the persona of the ‘Friend’ are placed in quotation marks as though to call attention to his dubious benevolence. For Foster, the trust we can place in The Friend is limited not only by the labour and pain his obscurity foists upon the reader, but also by the inherently questionable character of his obscure voice. In his highly figurative descriptions of this ‘Friendly’ obscurity Foster almost approaches the Hazlittian:

[the ‘Friend’] always carries on his investigation at a depth, and sometimes a most profound depth, below the uppermost and most accessible stratum; and is philosophically mining among its most recondite principles of the subject… this Spirit of the Deep.

[i]f he endeavours to make his voice heard from this region beneath, it is apt to be listened to as a sound of dubious import, like that which fails to bring articulate words from the remote recess of a cavern, or the bottom of the deep shaft of a mine.

He turns all things into their ghosts, and summons us to walk with him in this region of shades – this strange world of disembodied truths and entities.²³

When the reader is made to ‘feel as if he were deficient by nearly one whole faculty’,²⁴ he feels that it is rather the result of a trick or a cheat than a result of his own weakness. Having called attention to this negative possibility, Foster’s own overtly supportive claims appear deliberately ironic, like subtle warnings: ‘[t]hey [the readers] feel, decisively, that they are under the tuition of a most uncommonly powerful and far-seeing spirit, that penetrates into the essences of things, and can also strongly define their forms and even their shadows’.²⁵ Interestingly invoking what Seamus Perry has shown to be a systematic and potentially positive element of Coleridge’s supposedly disruptive, divisive digressiveness, Foster calls even the dubious authority he has given the ‘Friend’ into question: ‘And yet there is some kind of haze in the medium through which this spirit transmits its light, or there is some vexatious dimness in the mental faculty of seeing’.²⁶

When the bound-Friend was issued in June 1812 it merely contributed to the growing darkness, and reviews of Coleridge’s play Remorse (which opened at Drury Lane in January 1813) reflect its obscure rays. An unsigned review in the ToryTimes, for example, conflates the indeterminacy of the author’s mind with the indeterminacy of his language: ‘[t]he author has not brought to his task, the one greater quality which is above all and atones for all - a vigorous and combining mind, that muscular grasp of understanding, capable by its force of compressing the weak and scattered, into a firm and vigorous solidity’.²⁷ Likewise, another anonymous reviewer wrote in the Theatrical Inquisitor that Coleridge’s ‘diction’ was ‘uncouth, pedantic, and obscure’, and remarked on ‘the general confusion or obscurity of composition’ in the play.²⁸ In 1814 this reputation for obscurity was firmly established when Thomas Barnes, a former student of Christ’s Hospital and an active reviewer who was working with Leigh Hunt on the The Examiner at the time (and who in 1817 became the enormously influential editor of the Times), wrote in The Champion that

[Coleridge] looked about for fresh objects for the exercise of his intellect, and most unluckily was, all at once, spell-bound, by the incomprehensible grandeur of the philosophy of Kant.** From that time he has never been disenchanted: he has ever since affected to refine wisdom into obscurity, and to struggle with subjects which he scarcely has skill enough to touch.²⁹

The personal attack was particularly apposite considering Coleridge’s renewed interest and activity in public lecturing. Interestingly, Barnes recognizes that Coleridge appropriates obscurity as apositive charge: ‘[h]ence proceeds the great confusion in his ideas, and consequently in his language; nor is he unaware of this defect; but he ascribes it to any cause rather than the right one. He insinuates that the expressions of deep feeling must ever be obscure to general readers’.³⁰ The ghost of the periodical-Friend, and of Coleridge’s defensive appropriation of obscurity looms large behind Barnes’ Baconian defence of clarity as a sort of refined common sense coextensive with the realm of truth.

If the year from 1797-1798 was Coleridge’s poetic annus mirabilis, the year from 1816-1817 was certainly his annus obscuritas, when he published the works that would make the claim that his prose was ‘often either obscure or diffuse’ a commonplace.³¹ From May 1816 to July 1817 he published ‘Christabel’ and ‘Kubla Khan’, the Statesman’s Manual, the second Lay Sermon, and the Biographia. I will deal with the poems and the Biographia in my fifth and final chapter, but their contributions to Coleridge’s reputation for obscurity are critical commonplaces, made apparent in the highly politicised (though they are not always acknowledged to be so) monikers attached to them, such as ‘the mystery poems’, or, as one reviewer said in relation to ‘Christabel’ in the Critical Review, ‘those dreamlike productions whose charm partly consisted in the undefined obscurity of the conclusion’.³² In June 1816, Josiah Conder, the proprietor of the dissenting Eclectic Review, linked fear in ‘Christabel’ to ‘mysteriously transcending the notice of the senses’,³³ but the writer, editor, and barrister William Roberts wrote less sympathetically in his Tory British Review in August that ‘[i]t is not every strange phantasy, or rambling incoherency of the brain, produced perhaps amidst the vapours of indigestion, that is susceptible of poetic effect… there must be something to connect these visionary forms with the realities of existence’.³⁴ G. F. Mathew, in the European Magazine, succinctly** pronounced the poem ‘incoherently unintelligible’.³⁵ Finally, as David Erdman and Paul Zall note, John Taylor Coleridge, Coleridge’s nephew, published an anonymous review of Remorse in 1814 for the Quarterly Review, in which ‘he plays the old refrain about his uncle’s misplaced genius and eccentric obscurity: “He has been long before the public, and has acquired a reputation for ability proportioned rather to what he is supposed capable of performing, than to any thing which he has accomplished”’.³⁶

If the reaction to The Friend, Remorse and the mystery poems marks the dawn of Coleridge’s obscurity, the reaction to the Lay Sermons and the Biographia is a sort of inverted high noon. In the first number of the revamped, vamping Tory Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in October 1817, John Wilson (the infamous Christopher North), an erstwhile friend of Coleridge’s who had contributed to an exchange with Wordsworth in the periodical-Friend under the name of ‘Mathetes’,³⁷ wrote of the Biographia:

while [Coleridge] darkens what was dark before into tenfold obscurity, he so treats the most ordinary common-places as to give them the air of mysteries.³⁸

The profusion of obscurity charges laid in this article is devastating, and typical indeed of responses to the much-discussed Biographia. We even read that

[t]his Philosopher, and Theologian, and Patriot, [has] now retired to a village in Somersetshire, and, after having sought to enlighten the whole world, discovered that he himself was in utter darkness.³⁹

But Wilson is far from finished with poor STC:

he never knows when to have done, explains what requires no explanation, often leaves untouched the very difficulty he starts, and when he has poured before us a glimpse of light upon the shadeless form of some dark conception, he seems to take a wilful pleasure in its immediate extinction, and leads “us floundering on, and quite astray”, through the deepening shadows of interminable night.⁴⁰

Fittingly, an unsigned article in the Monthly Magazine in January 1817 made it clear that while obscurity might be a concept usually deployed in favour of hierarchy, at the same time the charge of obscurity functions as a sort of radical levelling: ‘Mr. Coleridge ought, by this time, to know that the high, as well as the low, mob comprehend only what is exceedingly clear’.⁴¹ It should be noted that two years later John Gibson Lockhart wrote a review in Blackwood’s of the mystery poems which appropriated the figures of Romantic, Coleridgean obscurity in a somewhat positive though still rather ironic fashion. While he claims that the ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ is ‘not capable of being described, analyzed, or criticised’, he nicely invokes the ambiguity and interchangeability of positive and negative obscurity in the following comment: ‘[d]im and shadowy, and incoherent, however, though it be, how blind, how wilfully, or how foolishly blind must they have been who refused to see any meaning or purpose in the Tale of the Mariner!’⁴²

There was, to be sure, some pun intended in Wilson’s fortuitous conflation of the man and the figure in his claim in the same article: ‘[t]he truth is, that Mr. Coleridge is but an obscure name in English literature’.⁴³ Inspired by Coleridge’s latest work and of course his positive valuation of obscurity, in 1817 Thomas Love Peacock introduced the world to his Coleridge-caricature Mr. Mystic, ‘the poeticopolitical, rhapsodicoprosaical, deisdæmoniacoparadoxographical, pseudolatriological, transcendental meteorosophist’ who tries to ‘enlighten’ his audience ‘through the medium of “darkness visible”’.⁴⁴ And 1818, of course, saw the rise of the tenebricose Mr. Flosky in Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey, who

plunged into the central opacity of Kantian metaphysics, and lay perdu several years in transcendental darkness, till the common daylight of common sense became intolerable to his eyes. He called the sun an ignis fatuus; and exhorted all who would listen to his friendly voice, which were about as many as called ‘God save King Richard,’ to shelter themselves from its delusive radiance in the obscure haunt of Old Philosophy.⁴⁵

At this point it should be no surprise that we can hear a curious echo of Wilson in Byron’s hawkish caricature of Coleridge in the 1819 dedication to ‘Don Juan’⁴⁶:

And Coleridge, too, has lately taken wing,
But like a hawk encumber'd with his hood, 
Explaining Metaphysics to the nation---
I wish he would explain his explanation (13-16).

Two years later, in his ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’, Shelley wrote of Coleridge⁴⁷:

You will see Coleridge - he who sits obscure
In the exceeding lustre and the pure
Intense irradiation of a mind,
Which, with its own internal lightnings blind,
Flags wearily through darkness and despair-
A cloud-encircled meteor of the air,
A hooded eagle among blinking owls (202-208).

By this point, the albatross of obscurity was, indeed, weighing heavily about Coleridge’s shoulders, and was to become as infamous and ubiquitous an element of discussions of his identity as is the figure of the Mariner himself.

It is a connection perhaps deliberately invoked by the ‘head Coleridge-baiter’,⁴⁸ William Hazlitt, in his brilliant analysis of the periodical-Friend through a naval analogy:

[t]his work is so obscure, that it has been supposed to be written in cypher and that it is necessary to read it upwards and downwards, or backwards and forwards, as it happens, to make head or tail of it. The effect is monstrously like the qualms produced by the heaving of a ship becalmed at sea; the motion is so tedious, improgressive, and sickening.⁴⁹

Hazlitt’s preoccupation with Coleridge’s obscurity is driven by his devotion to a dissenting rhetoric of clarity and radical information, and it helps him figure in this period as a day star in contrast to Coleridge’s dark star.⁵⁰ In 1816 Hazlitt wrote what was ostensibly a review of the forthcoming Statesman’s Manual but was, in effect, a devastating review of the periodical-Friend and the character of The Friend. Hazlitt strikes at the heart of the revisionary, metarhetorical reflexivity which characterises the development of the periodical-Friend:

[w]hat is his Friend itself but an enormous Title-page; the longest and most tiresome Prospectus that was ever written; an endless Preface to an imaginary work; a Table of Contents that fills the whole volume; a huge bill of fare of all possible subjects, with not an idea to be had for love or money?⁵¹

Coleridge later complained that ‘that wretch Hazlitt, no man but a monster’ was hired ‘to review me. Me, I say: for the work was a mere pretext and opportunity’.⁵² Obscurity, indeed, was a central theme of Hazlitt’s constant attacks on Coleridge’s political shift, and his shiftless attempt to obscure it. Coleridge had little (on this score at least) to justly complain of. The identities of The Friend of Coleridge had been systematically and thematically transpositioned since Coleridge’s staged re-emergence in the public sphere in 1809. Thus there is a multi-layered significance in Hazlitt’s claim that ‘if… the author is caught in the fact of a single intelligible passage, we will be answerable for Mr. Coleridge’s loss of character’.⁵³

After the Statesman’s Manual actually came out, Coleridge’s determined adherence to obscurity made it easy for Hazlitt to sustain in his ruse, or appear prescient upon its exposure. As Anthony Harding has pointed out, ‘[a]fter the Edinburgh Review had dismissed his Statesman’s Manual as incomprehensible, and rebuked him for having “lost himself in the depths of philosophy”, the sobriquet of “German metaphysician” followed Coleridge to Highgate and hampered his every attempt at publication’.⁵⁴ Hazlitt writes throughout of Coleridge, the figure of obscurity, and only indirectly of the texts themselves, locating the origin of this figuration in its own explicit origin: ‘[w]e do not pretend to understand the philosophical principles of that anomalous production, The Friend’.⁵⁵ Thus:

[c]louds do not shift their places more rapidly, dreams do not drive one another out more unaccountably, than Mr. Coleridge’s reasonings.

In this state of voluntary self-delusion, into which he has thrown himself, he mistakes hallucinations for truths, though he still has his misgivings, and dares not communicate them to others, except in distant hints, lest the spell should be broken, and the vision disappear. Plain sense and plain speaking would put an end to those “thick-coming fancies”, that lull him to repose.

He has a thousand shadowy thoughts that rise before him, and hold each a glass, in which they point to others yet more dim and distant.

In the world of shadows, in the succession of bubbles, there is no preference but of the most shadowy, no attachment but to the shortest-lived.

[t]he whole of this Sermon is written to sanction the principle of Catholic dictation, and to reprobate that diffusion of free inquiry – that difference of private, and ascendancy of public opinion, which has been the necessary consequence, and the great benefit of the Reformation.⁵⁶

Hazlitt systematically exposes Coleridge’s various metarhetorical defences as attacks on the reading public, and speculates that ‘the mob-hating Mr. Coleridge’ must intend to lead culture back into the (surprise, surprise) ‘dark ages’.⁵⁷ Hazlitt was following Coleridge’s lead by invoking obscurity as the concept of central importance to the project of The Friend, but he deliberately inverted and re-appropriated the authority and superiority the obscure Coleridge had adopted in relation to his reader by the time of the emergence of the Statesman’s Manual.

Though Coleridge does not explicitly invoke the stairway figure as a structure for the Biographia, in his reviews of that work Hazlitt once again displays his prescience – or perhaps provides Coleridge with the opportunity for a deliberate riposte in the book-Friend – by stating that, as Coleridge moves towards his infamous philosophical chapters he ‘begins the formidable ascent of that mountainous and barren ridge of clouds piled on precipices and precipices on clouds’.⁵⁸ At the same time Hazlitt offers a rarity in the criticism of Coleridge’s negative obscurity: a focused and self-conscious (though far from comprehensive) defence of his own beloved and traditionally dissenting virtue of plain speaking.⁵⁹ The politics of plainness or clarity, for Hazlitt, as they were for Paine and other late eighteenth-century British radicals, are implicated in a discussion that goes well beyond ‘style’ to include the epistemological and ideological implications not only in one’s language, but also in one’s explicit or implicit support for a social and natural philosophy which either limits the mind to a narrow sphere in subordination to God, or to a rising series of expanding human spheres of knowledge. Thus he claims that

[t]here is, no doubt, a simple and familiar language, common to almost all ranks, and intelligible through many ages, which is the best fitted for the direct expression of strong sense and deep passion, and which, consequently, is the language of the best poetry as well as of the best prose.⁶⁰

Hazlitt goes on to expand this argument to include the expression of the intellect through ‘the middle or natural style, which is a mere transparent medium of the thoughts’.⁶¹ In an informative discussion of Hazlitt’s commitment to plainness and radical information, Tom Paulin has argued that in Hazlitt the ‘adjective “transparent” carries not simply the sense of being perspicuous, but the idea of a warmly illuminated transparency, so that the term communicates a powerful visual presence’.⁶² Transparency is not an absence, but a presence, and the title of The Plain Speaker, for Hazlitt as for all in the tradition of the rhetoric of clarity, ‘implies honesty’.⁶³ However, it must be noted that Hazlitt’s concept of transparency as a presence and the connection of it with plainness and virtue invokes not only classical and radical commonplaces, but also their contradictions and paradoxes. If clarity is artificial, if it is a presence, a style, it can be imitated – and so, therefore, can virtue.

Given his interest in the sincere communication of passions, Hazlitt does offer one backhanded endorsement of the intentions behind Coleridge’s style in the Biographia in particular, and of his works in the project of The Friend in general: ‘[i]t is his impatience to transfer his conceptions entire, living, in all their rapidity, strength, and glancing variety – to the minds of others, that constantly pushes him to the verge of extravagance, and yet supports him there in dignified security’.⁶⁴ Coleridge’s desire, like the ancient orators, to communicate directly, without even the aid of a transparent medium, is in its own way honest, but for Hazlitt even this blessing is transformed in the practice of obscurity into a ‘dignified security’ through the abuse of a constant delay which renders what would otherwise be a failure into a successful imposition. For Hazlitt, Paulin observes, ‘Coleridge travels in a light poetic “bark” whose arrival in its destined harbour we await in vain’.⁶⁵