The Periodical-Friend

Certainly a good Augustinian would realize that obscurity is an important safeguard against human pride. How could self-formation take place without obstacles? How can character be built without a productive struggle?

John Hamilton, Soliciting Darkness, 140.

The story of the form and development, and ultimately the abortive demise, of the 1809-10 periodical-Friend has been extensively discussed by Barbara Rooke in the introduction to her two-volume edition of The Friend and in Deirdre Coleman’s doctoral thesis as well as her subsequent study, Coleridge and The Friend(1809-1810). The periodical-Friend was produced by Coleridge with the assistance (after the fourth number) of his amanuensis, Sara Hutchinson, after he went through a period of illness and indulgence in opium and alcohol.¹ Though it only ran to 27 numbers from June 1809 to March 1810 and ended in the middle of an essay,² the fact that it was produced at all was received as something like a miracle by members of Coleridge’s circle. It was printed on stamped paper in order to diminish the costs of distribution, and though it was modelled on Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register, while ‘Cobbett charged tenpence a copy… Coleridge would charge a shilling’.³ The price of a publication was a means of limiting its reception to those with the money to purchase it, and Coleridge’s readership was further limited by his system of soliciting subscriptions from a significant proportion of Quaker readers. It was also, as Deirdre Coleman points out, ‘part of a Tory reaction against those who questioned the need to continue the war’.⁴ Consequently, pro-war patriotism was represented with figures of anti-‘blackening’ light (and anti-war resistance with figures of darkness) in a manner invoking the battle over these figures initiated by the confrontation between Price and Burke twenty years earlier.⁵ ‘There are times’, wrote Coleridge, ‘when it would be wise to regard Patriotism as a light that is in danger of being blown out, rather than as a fire which needs to be fanned, by the winds of party spirit’.⁶ In other words, the periodical-Friend was intended to generate unity among those whom Coleridge felt could be persuaded to speak in favour of the war – or, at least, to buy The Friend.

Quite literally in spite of its form, the periodical-Friend was also intended to appeal to a readership limited in other ways. ‘[I]t is not to be a Newspaper’, wrote Coleridge to his editor and friend Daniel Stuart, ‘– it is not even meant as a work meant to attract and amuse the ordinary crowd of Readers’.⁷ Besides price and solicited distribution, the rhetorical methods by which Coleridge would restrict his readership would be introductory warnings and the thematised obscurity of The Friend’s content. Metarhetorically determining the reception of his work, Coleridge ‘freely admitted’ the ‘awkwardness of matching popular form and philosophical content’ in the first number.⁸ But any apparent similarity to The Watchman does not extend much further. Thus Coleman notes accurately that ‘[i]n style and content, The Friend appears to mark a break with The Watchman, for whereas the earlier periodical was predominantly a work of political journalism, The Friend advertised itself as an apolitical and ambitious work of moral philosophy’.⁹ Comparing his format to that of other publications, which either took the form of lasting books on lasting issues or the perishable form of weekly papers on weekly issues, he claimed that ‘[f]rom all other works the FRIEND is sufficiently distinguished either by the very form and intervals of its Publication, or by its avowed exclusion of the Events of the Day, and of all personal Politics’.¹⁰ That he still felt this type of centaurish project, of combining the head of philosophical content with the body of steady weekly publication and reading, was still possible after all of the years since The Watchman, was as much a consequence of Coleridge’s residual optimism as it was an attempt to reflexively determine the periodical-Friend’s reception.

In the first two numbers of the periodical-Friend, and especially the sections that were later deleted in the subsequent editions, Coleridge displays an explicit understanding of the obscurity he meant to communicate to his readers, its relation to his form, and his belief that a reflexive articulation of his purposes and strategies was necessary. In the very first sentence of his very first paragraph, ominously, he expresses the necessity of a long introduction with almost Shandean self-consciousness:

[i]f it be usual with writers in general to find the first paragraph of their works that which has given them the most trouble with the least satisfaction, THE FRIEND may be allowed to feel the difficulties and anxiety of a first introduction in a more than ordinary degree. He is embarrassed [sic] by the very circumstances, that discriminate the plan and purposes of the weekly paper from those of its periodical brethren, as well as from its more dignified literary relations, which come forth at once and in full growth from their parents.¹¹

From the very beginning, that is, The Friend was about itself, or, given Coleridge’s immediate assumption of the persona of ‘THE FRIEND’, himself. The invocation of the ‘full growth’ of its ‘literary relations’ refers to both the relatively greater degree of disconnection between the parts of a so-called ‘weekly-paper’ and a coherent book, and to the positive consequence of the periodical form that ‘[u]nlike a one-off production, such as a poem or essay, a journal is necessarily open to reader influence’.¹²

In order to convince his readers to wait for a delayed comprehension of his communications, Coleridge first had to gain their confidence that the investment of labour in reading would be equivalent to that he had spent in writing. Thus he quickly interrupts himself after a staged digression and states: ‘[i]t will be long, ere I shall dare flatter myself, that I have won the confidence of my Reader sufficiently to require of him that effort of attention, which the regular Establishment of this Truth would require’.¹³ But the digression into non-introductory material has already, and carefully, introduced the subject of dangerously ‘obscure’ notions which are accompanied by ‘vivid’ ‘convictions’ – notions grounded in ‘uncorrupted feeling’ and ‘[r]egarded with awe, as guiding principles by the founders of law and religion’.¹⁴ Setting up the abstruse discussion of ‘this Truth’ as a digression, The Friend has his cake, eats it too, and even gets to bake it: he awes his readers with a difficult disquisition that thematises its own aweful difficulty, and then apologizes for their anticipated incomprehension and asks them to bear with his apologetic preparatory introduction.

The paradoxical nature of this project left The Friend unable to proceed beyond this type of backhanded apology. He continues later in the number (in a passage heavily revised in later editions): ‘I must rely on my Readers’ Indulgence for the pardon of this long and, I more than fear, prolix introductory explanation. I knew not by what means to avoid it without becoming unintelligible in my succeeding Papers, dull where animation might justly be demanded, and worse than all, dull to no purpose’.¹⁵ This delay was occasioned by the structure of his paradoxical project, which required him to habituate the reader to obscurity in order to prepare the reader for the reception of obscurity. Thus ‘the Architect conceals the Foundation of his Building beneath the Superstructure. But an Author’s Harp must be tuned in the hearing of those, who are to understand it’s after harmonies’.¹⁶ At this point Coleridge was still (ostensibly) rather optimistic, however, about the intelligibility of his ‘after harmonies’, claiming that his ensuing ‘arguments are neither abstruse, nor dependent on a long chain of Deductions, nor such as suppose previous habits of metaphysical disquisition’.¹⁷ After the disappointing reaction to the periodical-Friend and the increasing charges of obscurity, Coleridge would later claim that he had not to tune his harp to the hearing of his readers, but rather to change their hearing to accept his tune.¹⁸ ‘[A]s The Friend began to fail’, that is, Coleridge ‘bitterly inveighed against the intellectual laziness of his subscribers’,¹⁹ who merely wished he would explain his explanation.

Deirdre Coleman’s reading of this first number explains its obscurity with reference to an immediate interest, Coleridge’s cultivation of a Quaker readership. She describes this number as ‘a piece of writing so obscure as to be almost wholly unintelligible without some knowledge of the circumstances surrounding its production’.²⁰ ‘The opening number’, she notes,

…written at the home of the Quaker Thomas Wilkinson, must be one of the most riddling and obscure essays ever written by Coleridge, and… here. [sic] as elsewhere in The Friend, the difficulty of accommodating two audiences – Quakers and non-Quakers – was partly responsible for the woeful indirectness and equivocation of his writing.²¹

Coleman’s reading of the source of Coleridge’s obscurity in her doctoral thesis and her subsequent book on the periodical-Friend exposes Coleridge’s anxious engagement with the diversity of his audience as he wrote his first number. But in focusing solely on this particular aspect of his writing, it largely takes ‘obscurity’ for granted as a dishonest equivocation through which Coleridge hid or compromised his real views for the sake of the periodical-Friend’s success. Coleman’s repeated invocations of obscurity are systematically related to her analysis of Coleridge’s rejection of, and rejection by, his Quaker subscribers. Her general claims concerning the fact that the ‘interconnection of public and private life informed Coleridge’s first conception of The Friend’²² investigate this private-public debate, consequently, through a focused consideration of the initial numbers of the periodical-Friend, after which Coleridge’s problems with his private views and his public persona became clearer and were exacerbated by his literally moving away from Quaker influence.²³ This analysis of the Quaker dimension of the project of The Friend makes Coleridge’s thematisation of obscurity a dismissable consequence of failure and the text’s obscurity a manifestation of confused principles and contradictory entrepreneurial goals on the part of the author. The philosophical and political content of obscurity is therefore in turn rejected, and Coleman does not explicitly invoke the obvious inversion of the Inner Light which Coleridge’s obscurity represents. Consequently, in Coleman’s reading an understanding of Coleridge’s relation to his Quaker readership becomes a sort of master-key of interpretation, explaining away rather than explaining his obscurity. But the dangerous obscurity thematised by Coleridge is a deliberate inversion of what was for him a naive belief in the innate perfection of the inspiration or enthusiasm of the protestant concept of the Inner Light, gazed upon by the pervasive figure of the inner eye, which leads one to follow one’s spontaneous feelings without having first made them trustworthy by habitual modification and observation of them. For The Friend, the obscure sources and guides of inspiration always had to be questioned before they could be trusted, and as Coleman notes, ‘[t]here is little doubt that Coleridge viewed English Dissent as the subversive home counterpart of French revolutionary doctrine’.²⁴ Coleridge’s Romantic obscurity was a palpable, visible historical force, not merely an ahistorical ‘style’ or a simultaneous cause and effect of a failure to be (ahistorically and apolitically) ‘clear’ in form and content with his Quaker readership, or anyone else.

The sections of the second number that Coleridge later deleted contain two introductory statements that are particularly important for an understanding of obscurity in the periodical-Friend. The first involves the metarhetorical invocation of the power of rhetoric and the inversion of clarity in a time of war and ideological battle – that is, it involves the invocation of Edmund Burke. Coleridge opens the number with a long extract from a speech of Burke’s that is intended to appeal equally to ‘both of the opposite parties’ (that is, those for and against the continuation of the war). Coleridge manages this feat by choosing a speech with all of the eloquence characteristic of the 1790s reactionary Burke, but taken from 1780, ‘from that BURKE whose latter exertions have rendered his works venerable… from a Speech delivered by him while he was the most beloved… name with the more anxious Friends of Liberty’.²⁵ The speech contains an analysis of the manner in which positive figures are fought over in battles of inversion by enemies who wish to claim this positivity for themselves. Thus, says the oracular Burke, ‘in hot reformations, in what men more zealous than considerate, call making clear work, the whole is… generally crude, so harsh, so indigested; mixed with… imprudence and… injustice’, that in such times the ‘very Idea of purity and disinterestedness in Politics falls into disrepute, and is considered as a vision of hot and inexperienced men’.²⁶ The implication is that in times of political strife, the very terms of the debate are no longer above suspicion, and even basic figures – like clarity – can be inverted over and over again. The battle is therefore staged between opposing authors (and rhetoricians) over the appropriation of these terms in the service of a particular position. Not surprisingly, this is the first moment in the project of The Friend that Coleridge offers a critique of ‘clarity’. The ‘hazardous subject’²⁷ of Burke’s speech and Coleridge’s response is therefore not so much the war, to which he makes only an oblique reference, but the power of rhetoric in relation to the internal strife at home.

Second, this number contains various passages concerning Coleridge himself, in which he dismisses the importance of his early work.²⁸ ‘[T]hough the title of my address is general’, he writes,

yet, I own, I direct myself more particularly to those among my readers, who from various printed and unprinted calumnies have judged most unfavourably of my political tenets; and to those, whose favour I have chanced to win in consequence of a similar, though not equal, mistake.** To both I affirm, that the opinions and arguments, I am about to detail, have been the settled convictions of my mind for the last ten or twelve years, with some brief intervals of fluctuation, and those only in lesser points, and known only to the Companions of my Fire-side.²⁹

By adopting the position of one defending himself against unmerited attacks, Coleridge could communicate to his readers a sympathetic projection of his new identity. The transformed Coleridge was meant to inspire confidence in his sincerity as a true ‘Friend of Liberty’ in 1809 and afterwards – that is, one who promoted war in accordance with the conservative establishment and from within an ‘Island’ nation subject to a ‘wide diffusion of moral information’ in circumstances ‘where the instruction has been acquired without the stupifying [sic] influences of terror or actual calamity’.³⁰ Barbara Rooke states of such passages that ‘[m]uch of the first two numbers was discarded because, as [Coleridge] realized soon after their publication, they were prolegomena to rather than an enunciation of the principles he had promised’.³¹ But the sections were in fact replaced at the opening of the 1818 book-Friend with even more reflexive introductory material in which Coleridge could ‘state [his] own convictions at full on the nature of obscurity’³² - on the nature of the obscurity, that is, of the project of The Friend. In order to revise his readers, The Friend had to revise himself, and this recursive, circular defence of his defences was developed in response to the mortifying charges of obscurity that originated in personal and public circles of reception. In the end The Friend became, in a sense, nothing more and nothing less than an endless introduction to the indefinite delay of its own Romantic obscurity, the endless explanation of an explanation.

Coleridge’s response to the charge of obscurity in his private correspondence throughout the production of the periodical-Friend demonstrates how his rhetoric of obscurity changed from a humiliating form of confession into the ‘methodical’ defence of a positive, thematised Romantic obscurity. The most relevant and focused period of this transition took place from early June 1809 and the publication of the first numbers of the periodical-Friend and ends, significantly, in a letter written in late January 1810, just before the departure of Sara, his amanuensis. In this series of letters Coleridge initially apologises for his obscurity as a fault, but as the series of charges from friends and the pressures from readers multiply, he begins to apologize for his obscurity as a virtue. It was through a reaction to private in addition to public pressures that Coleridge developed the strategies he would deploy in the rest of the project of The Friend as he explicitly pursued the improvement of his readers through the communication of the strength that comes from wrestling with darkness. Or, as his many detractors would inversively argue, as he wasted their strength by training them to box with shadows.

In mid-June, Coleridge wrote an encouraging letter to Stuart associating his newfound vigour with the projected clarity of his introductory numbers.³³ The following numbers had to be written clearly, Coleridge claimed, for the sake of their successful reception and as evidence of his labour: ‘I had altered my plan for the introductory Essays after my arrival at Penrith, which cost me exceeding trouble – but the Numbers to come are in a very superior style of Polish & easy Intelligibility’.³⁴ For Coleridge, that is, clarity is unnatural, a highly artificial style, a laborious exercise. The political significance of his preoccupation with clarity is articulated in the same letter, where, perhaps once again engaging in a form of projection, he mentions his worry that Wordsworth’s pamphlet on the Cintra Convention ‘does not possess the more profitable excellence of translating this down into that style which might easily convey it to the understandings of common readers’ and that ‘the long Porch may prevent Readers from entering the Temple’.³⁵ Clarity was, indeed, so important even in the introduction of individual numbers that Coleridge later suggested to his printer John Brown that he was willing to leave out a note on the distinctions between sense, reason, and understanding, usuallyannounced as an essential principle of his ‘philosophy’, for the sake of introducing a new number clearly.³⁶

The deliberate optimism of these claims, which represent as much a statement of conciliation to the commercially-minded Stuart as they do Coleridge’s real beliefs about the clarity of the first numbers, was later retracted as charges concerning the obscurity of the introductory numbers came pouring in. ‘I am fully aware’, he wrote to Stuart in early September, ‘that the Numbers hitherto are in too hard and laborious a style; but I trust, you will find Nos. 7. 8. 9. & 10. greatly improved - & that every No. after these will become more & more entertaining’.³⁷ Disturbingly, the heavy introductory foundation of the periodical-Friend had expanded to include the first six numbers, and the seventh itself included a brief defence of this introductory proliferation. It was shortly thereafter that Coleridge showed the first serious signs of pride in, rather than remorse for, his obscurity. He contradicted his earlier letter to Stuart and claimed ‘[i]t was in the necessity of the Plan, and I stated it as such in the first No. p.7, that my foundations could not be as attractive as I hoped to make the super-structure’.³⁸ On 9 October Coleridge claimed to be quite in the dark concerning the charge of obscurity made by his friends, with the exception of those made by his annuity-benefactor Josiah Wedgwood and Stuart himself: ‘[f]rom the commencement of the Friend to the present hour I have never heard one word concerning it, either by letter or by word of mouth, except some raptures from Lady Beaumont, and a passage in Mr Wedgewood’s letter corresponding with your’s concerning it’s occasional Obscurity, & the error of running one number into another’.³⁹

But Coleridge had heard similar complaints from others, and had evidently chosen this day to answer the charge (in a typical burst of activity) to multiple correspondents. Writing to Poole, Coleridge articulated as a weakness what he later defended as a strength in the Friends: ‘[t]here is too often an entortillage in the sentences & even the thoughts, which nothing can justify; and, always almost, a stately piling up of Story on Story in one architectural period…. But be assured, that the Nos. will improve’.⁴⁰ Again on the same busy day, Coleridge wrote to his imposing brother George:

I am, & was at the very first number of The Friend, sensible of my defect in facility of Style, and more desirous to avoid obscurity than successful in the attempt. Habits of abstruse and continuous thought, and the almost exclusive perusal of the Greek Historians & Philosophers, of the German Metaphysicians & Moralists, and of our English Writers from Edward VIth to James IInd, have combined to render my sentences more piled up and architectural, than is endurable in so illogical an age as the present, in which all the cements of Style are dismissed.⁴¹

The reference to his personal weakness was a typical trope in his self-deprecating letters to his stern brother, but they do reflect the vestiges of Coleridge’s strategy of mounting an apology for obscurity grounded on personal failure. Coleridge, however, doubles the responsibility for his obscurity by placing it not merely on his particular readers, but also on the people of an entire age, perhaps not heeding Stuart’s implicit claim that readers in the age were logical enough to accept the ‘cements of Style’, but not in a newspaper.⁴² Later in the letter, Coleridge again mentions entortillage, evidently the word of the day, but once again contradicts himself by transforming his obscurity into an architectural necessity: ‘it is essential to my plan, that I should first lay the foundations well, but the merit of a foundation is it’s depth and solidity’.⁴³ The next day, in letters to Richard Sharp and Samuel Purkis, Coleridge continued his defensive attack, invoking an important set of figures interchangeable with obscurity and clarity: heaviness and lightness, the former necessarily existing in the foundation and the latter in the upper reaches of his super-structure.⁴⁴ Obscurity is associated with figures of a labour heavy, deep, and hard. Ultimately, the figures in these private, friendly exchanges were imparted to The Friend in its revised form in 1818.

The revision of his role from patient to healer, another programmatic projection of his personal efforts and activities, begins with his next letter to Purkis. It was at this point that the vehemence and superlative language with which he began to apologize for his obscurity took on real political, moral, and even religious significance: ‘but still I feel the sadning conviction, that no real information can be given, no important errors overthrown in Politics, Morals, or Literature without requiring some effort of Thought - & that the aversion from this is the mother Evil of all the other Evils, that I have to attack’.⁴⁵ The feminised, gendered aversion he mentions is to personal political, moral and aesthetic development (a significant combination) and is identical with the aversion to intellectual exercise, to the mental labour required by obscurity. The cure Dr. Coleridge proposes for this endemic weakness is exposure to the source of the disease, and what follows in the letter is Coleridge’s first strong articulation of the paradox of obscurity after which this chapter has been named: ‘consequently, I am like a Physician who prescribes exercise with the dumb bells to a Patient paralytic in both arms’.⁴⁶ It was a figure that would become central to the project of The Friend, and was not accidentally coincident with Coleridge’s transferral of the burden of labour to the reader’s own weakness in the dark face of the mother Evil, obscurity.

Coleridge’s confident, comprehensive, and reactionary defence of the periodical-Friend entailed the rather absurd contradiction that he intended it to fail. He therefore represents himself as a self-lacerating martyr to inspired benevolence, like the misunderstood outcast in Coleridge’s old favourite, the ‘Fable of the Madning Rain’.⁴⁷ In a significant letter to Southey also written in mid-October 1810, Coleridge complained that ‘[w]hat really makes me despond is the daily confirmation I receive of my original apprehension, that the plan and execution of The Friend is so utterly unsuitable to the public taste as to preclude all rational hopes of its success’ and that he would be less dejected ‘if I could attribute [the evident failure of The Friend] wholly to any removable error of my own’. Well aware that his work was so far dark, rayless, cold and uninviting, he claimed that all which is attractive in rhetoric required a sustained delay in the periodical-Friend for the sake of the reader’s intellectual and moral exercise with obscurity.

After asserting that no effort of his can cure his patients, Coleridge proceeds to despair of his readers’ will or ability to return his effort and reward him with effectiveness, repeating his claim about the mother evil and the dumbbells.⁴⁸

Coleridge’s corresponding development of these progressively honed figures of obscurity, which were later deployed in his public work, has at this point reached a climax. Unlike the radical rhetorics of clarity and fact, which endorsed a spontaneous, effortless spread of social information like fire, the Romantic information represented here involves not only the sluggish delay of a mortifying labour, but also an avowal of its own impossibility. In the next sentence, Coleridge expresses the function of obscurity in his writing and in his character as a writer, marking the major turning point from his early, radical optimism concerning the ideal progressive potential for personal and social development: ‘[w]hatever I publish, and in whatever form, this obstacle’ – obscurity – ‘will be felt’.⁴⁹ Obscurity was not just a problem for the periodical-Friend: it was now thematised as the central aspect of all Coleridge’s future public writing, and the defining characteristic of The Friend in his war on ‘the mother evil’, the feminised aversion to mental labour, and its negative moral, political, and aesthetic offspring.

Coleridge chose to resolve the mounting charges of obscurity by commissioning a letter from Southey for publication and to which Coleridge would respond in the same number. Southey complied with a letter which detailed the nature of The Friend’s obscurity, its inherent dangers, and various strategies for achieving clarity. But becauseSouthey’s response was delayed by a Porlockian porter who ‘kept [Coleridge’s] letter, manuring it in his Pocket,⁵⁰ Coleridge did not publish it. Rather, he chose to publish only his own ‘letter’, framing it as a response to a probably fictional and ultimately unidentifiable correspondent, R.L.⁵¹ This was a device which Coleridge would later employ in a slightly altered manner in the famous faked letter in the thirteenth chapter of the Biographia Literaria (a paramount example of the obscurity of delay). This letter on obscurity was later repositioned as one of the initial passages of the book-Friend and figured as a foundation to its structure. As a reformulation (represented nonetheless as the articulation of an original plan and purpose) of the reflexive significance of the periodical-Friend, the letter is Coleridge’s first lengthy and self-conscious public thematisation of obscurity. And as a section in the beginning of the book-Friend, it constitutes not a revision but indeed the founding formulation of a new work, a fiat obscurum.

Typically, Coleridge begins the letter by claiming his ‘plan’ would present itself with serious obstacles.⁵² Thus he formulates one of the fundamental paradoxes of his new/preconceived project: that ‘in order to the regular attainment of [his] object’,

all the driest and least attractive Essays must appear in the first fifteen or twenty Numbers, and thus subject me to the necessity of demanding effort or soliciting patience in that part of the Work, where it was most my interest to secure the confidence of my Readers by winning their favour.⁵³

This claim is underwritten by the landscape-journey metaphor of ‘laborious ascent’, as The Friend laments his need to ‘start at the foot of a high and steep hill’.⁵⁴ In its stated attempt to remedy the intimately related evils of weak thinking and reading, it is important to note that the project of The Friend thus figures the philosophical information of its readers in a manner that invokes the function of Christian meditative spiritual reading exercise. Discussing Aids to Reflection, Douglas Hedley locates this activity in a particularly Platonic-Christian tradition, and, representing the process of reading the Aids as an ‘ascent’, he remarks that Coleridge ‘believes fervently in the identity of knowledge and virtue, and it is quite appropriate that in his greatest work we should find “exercises” rather than a store house or, worse, museum full of elaborate and unverifiable doctrines about the supersensible empyrean’.⁵⁵ John Hamilton, in an extended discussion of the importance of obscurity in the Christian tradition, nicely articulates the figurative economics of labour and delay in this Augustinian doctrine. Commenting on the emergence of Christian obscurity from the pagan and quoting from Augustine’s On Christian Doctrine, Hamilton remarks that ‘[r]itual darkness is thereby installed as an idea of the highest value, being interpreted as the prerequisite for the movement toward true apocalypse… [and for Augustine in On Christian Doctrine] “those things which are easily discovered seem frequently to become worthless”’.⁵⁶ Likewise, Mehtonen writes in his own study of Augustinian obscurity that Petrarch and Boccaccio agree with Augustine that ‘the more difficult the search, the greater the pleasure of ultimate discovery’.⁵⁷ This transformation of labour through obscurity into a metaphor of pleasurable spiritual and intellectual ascent is later incorporated into the explicit structure of the book-Friend through the device of ‘landing-places’ devoted to intellectual rest, ‘INTERPOSED FOR AMUSEMENT / RETROSPECT AND PREPARATION’.⁵⁸ In the letter to R. L. Coleridge insists that he means The Friend to do more than merely convey philosophical content of an obscure nature to his readers: he means for it simultaneously to transform his readers into philosophers of a positive obscurity.

In the mock-privacy of an epistolary response, Coleridge proceeds to introduce the pro-obscurity figures that had been slowly accumulating in the previous numbers of The Friend. He launches his defensive attack by claiming that

I could not therefore be surprized, however much I may have been depressed, by the frequency with which you hear The Friend complained of for its’ abstruseness and obscurity; nor did the highly flattering expressions, with which you accompanied your communication, prevent me from feeling its’ truth to the whole extent.⁵⁹

Having read his acknowledgment of the charge of obscurity, the readers of The Friend are prompted to imagine that the following pages would take the form of a remorseful apology in which obscurity was held up as The Friend’s failure. What they get instead is an apology in defence of obscurity, and an attack on both clarity and, crucially, the desire for it. The first figure Coleridge uses is that of the ‘Author’s pen’ which like ‘Children’s legs, improves by exercise’⁶⁰ – a tacit admission that his obscurity is the consequence of his need to develop more experience with periodical writing in the project of The Friend. But this initial act of self-blame is quickly turned into a sort of virtue, as the author claims he acquired his valuable obscurity through internal hard work. Obscurity is a sign and an effect of the depth and significance of the author’s investment of labour. Coleridge therefore asks for a delay in the reader’s judgment until The Friend will have ‘had a fair opportunity of displaying the quality of his goods or the foundations of his credit’.⁶¹

The Friend quickly introduces the second major theme of obscurity in the letter: the division by ability, inclination, nature, class or cultivation, of readers into various groups. It is an old Coleridgean tactic, certainly, but one which, in the course of the project of The Friend, became increasingly hierarchical and exclusive. He transfers the obscurity of his work to the projection of his readers, who are unaccustomed to his older, more English style, and are instead accustomed to a foreign, French, unconnected style.⁶² As Richard Holmes has argued, ‘[t]he question of a difficult style was crucial to [Coleridge], for he believed that the brief, punchy, short-sentenced and epigrammatic style of journalism was itself a form of superficiality’.⁶³ When Coleridge calls his attachment to the older, heavier style a ‘fault’, he is speaking less than half the truth, as he goes on to state: ‘I can never so far sacrifice my judgment to the desire of being immediately popular, as to cast my sentences in the French moulds’.⁶⁴ Like the stereotypical French, his weaker readers have injured their minds through ‘the habit of receiving pleasure without any exertion of thought, by the mere excitement of curiosity and sensibility’.⁶⁵ At this point in his fictional letter The Friend becomes decidedly unfriendly. Those readers who accuse him of obscurity are ‘asthmatic’ (another example of the medical figures of obscurity), they ‘dwarf their own faculties’, and ‘reduce their Understandings to a deplorable imbecility’, or, like a feminised ‘Mistress’, they are exhausted from the meaningless flow of ‘idle morning Visitors’ who come and go talking of nothing in particular.⁶⁶

But the reader’s labour is required to cure him of his asthma, his effeminate exhaustion, and his dwarfed intellect, and the author cannot do this work for him. ‘All the principles of my future Work, all the fundamental doctrines, in the establishment of which I must of necessity require the attention of my Reader to become my fellow-labourer’, he writes, will require that his readers learn to love exercise by engaging in the very exercise they hate, learning obscurity through obscurity, and learning ‘to retire into themselves and make their own minds the objects of their stedfast attention’.⁶⁷ The affected indirection of The Friend’s prescriptions to his readers here loses any claim to subtlety, as he invokes another privately developed series of phrases and arguments in his mock letter, again referring referring to the mother evil (here a ‘Queen Bee’) and the paradox of the dumb bells.⁶⁸ The Friend’s promises of future clarity and entertainment, of ‘lighter graces’ and a ‘clear view’⁶⁹ result, in the following numbers of the periodical, only in further obscurity and, indeed, incoherence, as the steep hill was transformed, instead, into a downward track leading to the failure of the periodical-Friend and Coleridge’s personal collapse. The course of this decline involved the meaningful intermixture of private and public discourse and labour invoked in the ‘fictive’ letter that was, as I have shown, after all composed in part by elements from his personal correspondence.

Jerome Christensen has observed in his book on the book-Friend that Coleridge (in the persona of The Friend) uses the ‘fictive’ letter ‘to introduce the discussion of his style’ and ‘gradually [turn] the handicap of obscurity into a virtue’.⁷⁰ It is as he introduces the letter that Christensen begins to approach the climax of his own work and defines the central function of obscurity in Coleridge’s blessed machine of language, discussing the themes of labour and deferral or delay. Christensen’s focus on the book-Friend allows him conveniently to consider the work as a whole produced, as it were, at once, and the letter as an initial introduction of an obscure plan. For Deirdre Coleman, who discusses the periodical, the letter represents instead a response to increasing complaints of obscurity. Thus she argues that it marks ‘the end of Coleridge’s political theory and the beginning of a quite different, more miscellaneous journal’,⁷¹ instead of the beginning of a coherent book. But as I have shown, the altered placement of the ‘letter’ in both works demonstrates the importance of considering The Friend as a project that represents a process, rather than three distinct works. This indirect and typically Coleridgean fictional intervention at once informs his projected readers of his purposes and projects an image of his ideal (and unideal) readers. It is therefore both an ending and a beginning, and a central articulation of Coleridge’s Romantic obscurity. As Coleridge said of human experience, so it is that the periodical-Friend, in its endlessly preliminary reactions and retrospections, ‘like the stern lights of a ship at sea, illumines only the path which we have passed over’.⁷²