Return to the Lakes--From Keswick to Grasmere--With Wordsworth at Allan
Bank--The _Friend_--Quits the Lake country for ever.
[1809-1810.]
From the close of this series of lectures in the month of May 1808
until the end of the year it is impossible to trace Coleridge's
movements or even to determine the nature of his occupation with any
approach to exactitude. The probability is, however, that he remained
in London at his lodgings in the _Courier_ office, and that he
supported himself by rendering assistance in various ways to Mr. Daniel
Stuart. We know nothing of him, however, with certainty until we find
him once more at the Lakes in the early part of the year 1809, but not
in his own home. Wordsworth had removed from his former abode at
Grasmere to Allan Bank, a larger house some three-quarters of a mile
distant, and there Coleridge took up his residence, more, it would
seem, as a permanent inmate of his friend's house than as a guest. The
specific cause of this migration from Greta Hall to Allan Bank does not
appear, but all the accessible evidence, contemporary and subsequent,
seems to point to the probability that it was the result of a definite
break-up of Coleridge's own home. He continued, at any rate, to reside
in Wordsworth's house during the whole seven months of his editorship
of the _Friend_, a new venture in periodical literature which he
undertook at this period; and we shall see that upon its failure he did
not resume his residence at Greta Hall, but quitted the Lake country at
once and for ever.
We need not take too literally Coleridge's declaration in the
_Biographia Literaria_ that one "main object of his in starting the
_Friend_ was to establish the philosophical distinction between the
Reason and the Understanding." Had this been so, or at least had the
periodical been actually conducted in conformity with any such purpose,
even the chagrined projector himself could scarcely have had the face
to complain, as Coleridge did very bitterly, of the reception accorded
to it by the public. The most unpractical of thinkers can hardly have
imagined that the "general reader" would "take in" a weekly
metaphysical journal published at a town in Cumberland. The _Friend_
was not quite so essentially hopeless an enterprise as that would have
been; but the accidents of mismanagement and imprudence soon made it,
for all practical purposes, sufficiently desperate. Even the forlorn
_Watchman_, which had been set on foot when Coleridge had fourteen
years' less experience of the world, was hardly more certainly
foredoomed. The first care of the founder of the _Friend_ was to
select, as the place of publication, a town exactly twenty-eight miles
from his own abode--a distance virtually trebled, as De Quincey
observes, "by the interposition of Kirkstone, a mountain only to be
scaled by a carriage ascent of three miles, and so steep in parts that
without four horses no solitary traveller can persuade the neighbouring
innkeepers to convey him." Here, however, at Penrith, "by way of
purchasing intolerable difficulties at the highest price," Coleridge
was advised and actually persuaded to set up a printer, to buy and lay
in a stock of paper, types, etc., instead of resorting to some printer
already established at a nearer place--as, for instance, Kendal, which
was ten miles nearer, and connected with Coleridge's then place of
residence by a daily post, whereas at Penrith there was no post at all.
Having thus studiously and severely handicapped himself, the projector
of the new periodical set to work, upon the strength of what seems to
have been in great measure a fancy list of subscribers, to print and,
so far as his extraordinary arrangements permitted, to circulate his
journal. With _naïve_ sententiousness he warns the readers of the
_Biographia Literaria_ against trusting, in their own case, to such a
guarantee as he supposed himself to possess. "You cannot," he observes,
"be certain that the names on a subscription list have been put down by
sufficient authority; or, should that be ascertained, it still remains
to be known whether they were not extorted by some over-zealous
friend's importunity; whether the subscriber had not yielded his name
merely from want of courage to say no! and with the intention of
dropping the work as soon as possible." Thus out of a hundred patrons
who had been obtained for the _Friend_ by an energetic canvasser,
"ninety threw up the publication before the fourth number without any
notice, though it was well known to them that in consequence of the
distance and the slowness and irregularity of the conveyance" [it is
amusing to observe the way in which Coleridge notes these drawbacks of
his own creation as though they were "the act of God"] "I was compelled
to lay in a stock of stamped paper for at least eight weeks beforehand,
each sheet of which stood me in fivepence previous to its arrival at my
printer's; though the subscription money was not to be received till
the twenty-first week after the commencement of the work; and, lastly,
though it was in nine cases out of ten impracticable for me to receive
the money for two or three numbers without paying an equal sum for the
postage."
Enough appears in this undesignedly droll account of the venture to
show pretty clearly that, even had the _Friend_ obtained a reasonable
measure of popularity at starting, the flagrant defects in the methods
of distributing and financing it must have insured its early decease.
But, as a matter of fact, it had no chance of popularity from the
outset. Its first number appeared on 1st August 1809, and Coleridge,
writing to Southey on 20th October of the same year, speaks of his
"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. "Much," he continues, "might have been done to
have made the former numbers less so, by the interposition of others
written more expressly for general interest;" and he promises to do his
best in future to "interpose tales and whole numbers of amusement,
which will make the periods lighter and shorter." Meanwhile he begs
Southey to write a letter to the _Friend_ in a lively style, rallying
its editor on "his Quixotism in expecting that the public will ever
pretend to understand his lucubrations or feel any interest in subjects
of such sad and unkempt antiquity." Southey, ever good-natured,
complied, even amid the unceasing press of his work, with the request;
and to the letter of lightly-touched satire which he contributed to the
journal he added a few private lines of friendly counsel, strongly
urging Coleridge to give two or three amusing numbers, and he would
hear of admiration on every side. "Insert too," he suggested, "a few
more poems--any that you have, except _Christabel_, for that is of too
much value. And write _now_ that character of Bonaparte, announced in
former times for 'to-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow.'" It was too
late, however, for good advice to be of any avail: the _Friend_ was
past praying for. It lingered on till its twenty-eighth number, and
expired, unlike the Watchman, without any farewell to its friends, in
the third week of March 1810.
The republication of this periodical, or rather selections from it,
which appeared in 1818, is hardly perhaps described with justice in De
Quincey's words as "altogether and absolutely a new work." A reader
can, at any rate, form a pretty fair estimate from it of the style and
probable public attractions of the original issue; and a perusal of it,
considered in its character as a bid for the patronage of the general
reader, is certainly calculated to excite an astonishment too deep for
words. We have, of course, to bear in mind that the standard of the
readable in our grandfathers' days was a more liberal and tolerant one
than it is in our own. In those days of leisurely communications and
slowly moving events there was relatively at least a far larger public
for a weekly issue of moral and philosophical essays, under the name of
a periodical, than it would be found easy to secure at present, when
even a monthly discourse upon things in general requires Mr. Euskin's
brilliancy of eloquence, vivacity of humour, and perpetual charm of
unexpectedness to carry it off. Still the _Spectator_ continued to be
read in Coleridge's day, and people therefore must have had before them
a perpetual example of what it was possible to do in the way of
combining entertainment with instruction. How, then, it could have
entered into the mind of the most sanguine projector to suppose that
the _longueurs_ and the difficulty of the _Friend_ would be patiently
borne with for the sake of the solid nutriment which it contained it is
quite impossible to understand. Even supposing that a weekly, whose
avowed object was "to aid in the formation of fixed principles in
politics, morals, and religion," could possibly be floated, even "with
literary amusements interspersed," it is evident that very much would
depend upon the character of these "amusements" themselves. In the
republication of 1817 they appear under the heading of
"landing-places." One of them consists of a parallel between Voltaire
and Erasmus, and between Rousseau and Luther, founded, of course, on
the respective attitudes of the two pairs of personages to the
Revolution and the Reformation. Another at the end of the series
consists of a criticism of, and panegyric on, Sir Alexander Ball, the
governor of Malta. Such are the landing-places. But how should any
reader, wearied with "for ever climbing up the climbing wave" of
Coleridge's eloquence, have found rest or refreshment on one of these
uncomfortable little sandbanks? It was true that the original issue of
the _Friend_ contained poetical contributions which do not appear in
the republication; but poetry in itself, or, at any rate, good poetry,
is not a relief to the overstrained faculties, and, even if it were,
the relief would have been provided at too infrequent intervals to
affect the general result. The fact is, however, that Coleridge's own
theory of his duty as a public instructor was in itself fatal to any
hope of his venture proving a commercial success. Even when entreated
by Southey to lighten the character of the periodical, he accompanies
his admission of the worldly wisdom of the advice with something like a
protest against such a departure from the severity of his original
plan. His object, as he puts it with much cogency from his own
unpractical point of view--his object being to teach men how to think
on politics, religion, and morals, and thinking being a very arduous
and distasteful business to the mass of mankind, it followed that the
essays of the _Friend_ (and particularly the earlier essays, in which
the reader required to be "grounded" in his subject) could hardly be
agreeable reading. With perfect frankness indeed does he admit in his
prospectus that he must "submit to be thought dull by those who seek
amusement only." He hoped, however, as he says in one of his earlier
essays, to become livelier as he went on. "The proper merit of a
foundation is its massiveness and solidity. The conveniences and
ornaments, the gilding and stucco-work, the sunshine and sunny
prospects, will come with the superstructure." But the building, alas!
was never destined to be completed, and the architect had his own
misgivings about the attractions even of the completed edifice. "I dare
not flatter myself that any endeavours of mine, compatible with the
duty I owe to the truth and the hope of permanent utility, will render
the _Friend_ agreeable to the majority of what is called the reading
public. I never expected it. How indeed could I when, etc." Yet, in
spite of these professions, it is clear from the prospectus that
Coleridge believed in the possibility of obtaining a public for the
_Friend_. He says that "a motive for honourable ambition was supplied
by the fact that every periodical paper of the kind now attempted,
which had been conducted with zeal and ability, was not only well
received at the time, but has become popular;" and he seems to regard
it as a comparatively unimportant circumstance that the _Friend_ would
be distinguished from "its celebrated predecessors, the _Spectator_ and
the like," by the "greater length of the separate essays, by their
closer connection with each other, and by the predominance of one
object, and the common bearing of all to one end." It was, of course,
exactly this _plus_ of prolixity and _minus_ of variety which lowered
the sum of the _Friend's_ attractions so far below that of the
_Spectator_ as to deprive the success of Addison of all its value as a
precedent.
Nor is it easy to agree with the editor of the reprint of 1837 that the
work, "with all its imperfections, is perhaps the most vigorous" of its
author's compositions. That there are passages in it which impress us
by their force of expression, as well as by subtlety or beauty of
thought, must of course be admitted. It was impossible to a man of
Coleridge's literary power that it should be otherwise. But "vigorous"
is certainly not the adjective which seems to me to suggest itself to
an impartial critic of these too copious disquisitions. Making every
allowance for their necessary elasticity of scope as being designed to
"prepare and discipline the student's moral and intellectual being, not
to propound dogmas and theories for his adoption," it must, I think, be
allowed that they are wanting in that continuity of movement and
co-ordination of parts which, as it seems to me, enters into any
intelligible definition of "vigour," as attributed to a work of moral
and political exposition considered as a whole. The writer's
discursiveness is too often and too vexatiously felt by the reader to
permit of the survival of any sense of theorematic unity in his mind;
he soon gives up all attempts at periodical measurement of his own and
his author's progress towards the prescribed goal of their journey; and
he resigns himself in this, as in so many other of Coleridge's prose
works, to a study of isolated and detached passages. So treated,
however, one may freely admit that the _Friend_ is fully worthy of the
admiration with which Mr. H. N. Coleridge regarded it. If not the most
vigorous, it is beyond all comparison the most characteristic of all
his uncle's performances in this field of his multiform activity. In no
way could the peculiar pregnancy of Coleridge's thoughts, the more than
scholastic subtlety of his dialectic, and the passionate fervour of his
spirituality be more impressively exhibited than by a well-made
selection of _loci_ from the pages of the _Friend_.