Paradoxical Procrastinator
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
Paradoxical Procrastinator The Watchman By Samuel Taylor Coleridge Edited by Lewis Patton Princeton. 477 pp. $12.50. The Friend By Samuel Taylor Coleridge Edited by Barbara E....
...Regarded as one of England's few great speculative philosophers, he wrote two classic imaginative poems, "The Ancient Mariner" and "Kubla Khan...
...These range from "Rabbinical Tales," translated by Coleridge, to a consideration of the proposition, "Does Fortune favor Fools...
...Most of the original material was Coleridge's own, although there were occasional contributions by friends...
...This excellent new edition minimizes the obscurity of the references, and provides ample background for both scholar and amateur...
...The Wordsworths advised her to leave him, she did, and the guilt-ridden Coleridge found himself unable to continue...
...And although the editor advocates "cool and guarded" language, some passages descend to the level of yellow journalism...
...Coleridge had recently separated from his wife, and was hopelessly in love with Sara Hutchinson, Wordsworth's sister-in-law...
...from a critique of Rousseau as a false reformer to a comparison of the French Philosopher with a true Reformer, Martin Luther...
...He never lost his affection for the essays, though, and reprinted them several times, finally revising and reorganizing them into a three-volume book in 1818...
...In the final number he noted acerbly, "Part of my subscribers have relinquished it because it did not contain sufficient original composition, and still a larger number because it contained too much...
...From time to time the journal printed letters aimed at stirring up profitable controversy, also largely written by Coleridge, who went so far as to invent a comic Irishman--styled in an implausible brogue--to commend the editor for his insights...
...The author candidly admitted that "the Number of my unrealized Schemes, and the Mass of my miscellaneous Fragments, have often furnished my Friends with a subject of Raillery, and sometimes of Regret and Reproof...
...The slaughter of thousands makes him all alive...
...Advertised in the prospectus as "A Literary, Moral, and Political Weekly Paper, excluding personal and party politics and the events of the day," the new journal consisted entirely of essays by Coleridge aimed at an audience of his own friends and such kindred spirits as cared to scale the steep heights of his thought...
...Like many young men of his time, he had been inspired by the French Revolution, which still looked as if it might fulfill its promise of Liberty, Equality and the Brotherhood of Man, as the American Revolution appeared to have done (there is an address by President Washington reprinted in The Watchman...
...An essay on Luther's translation of the Bible is particularly dramatic in its bold imaginative statement: "LUTHER did not write, he acted poems...
...When he writes of Pitt, "Nothing but Calms ruffle, nothing but Peace disquiets him...
...William Wordsworth, his close friend, came to the more pessimistic conclusion that Coleridge "neither will nor can execute anything of important benefit either to himself, his family, or mankind...
...He priggishly reprints a doctor's advice for the cure of alcoholism: "Whenever a glass of liquor is poured out, replace it immediately with an equal quantity of water and pursue this steadily till the effects are reduced to mere water...
...She acted as his secretary for The Friend and gave him encouragement, but the relationship became unhealthy...
...1260 pp...
...In 1796, at the age of 24, Coleridge started his first periodical, The Watchman, a miscellany of essays, poems, digests of current events, and reprints of debates and speeches by political leaders...
...The pieces progress tangentially, but they are related thematically...
...Yet he founded two magazines in his lifetime, and both have recently been reprinted in the Bollingen series reissue of the poet-critic-philosopher's complete works...
...and Famine herself shakes the horn of Plenty over his head," the Watchman has forsaken his role as Prophet (Ezekiel) for that of Hedge-preacher...
...The volumes are interspersed with "Landing Places" or "Literary Amusements," where the reader may pause and relax before resuming the ascent...
...And there is a poignant reference to Coleridge's own troubles in his observation that "the slave of vice hopes where no hope is...
...For once, Coleridge's audience had tired of a project before he did...
...He advocated pacifism with regard to Pitt's war, but showed mild revolutionary tendencies in response to the plight of the West Indian Negroes and the European peasantry...
...Pitt, then Prime Minister, was leading England against France in a war Coleridge opposed...
...They provide a fascinating picture of Coleridge's transition from youthful democrat and Unitarian to the more familiar image of contemplative philosopher, conservative, and champion of Trinitarian orthodoxy...
...Still, the reader's effort is more than repaid by the depth of the philosophical speculation and the heights of the wit and style...
...Those who knew the editor well were skeptical of The Watchman, and one friend even predicted that "after three or four numbers the sheets will contain nothing but Parliamentary Debates, and Coleridge will add a note at the bottom of the page: T should think myself deficient in my duty to the Public if I did not give these Interesting Debates at lull length.'" In fact, The Watchman only ran to 10 issues, and in the concluding number fewer essays appeared, but the real cause of the magazine's failure was that it did not meet publication costs...
...plus subtle and wry political insights, "Hobbes has said that Laws without the sword are but bits of parchment...
...The Friend proves itself one of the major works in English, a fit companion to the Biographia Literaria, and we who can only know Samuel Taylor Coleridge through his writings end by being amazed at the unique breadth of learning, imagination and knowledge in what he has left us...
...His definitions often have a smug patness, leading him to describe a patriot as one who "indulges himself in no comfort which, if society were properly constituted, all men might not enjoy...
...His rambling Biographia Literaria, for all its idiosyncracies, has been considered the most important critical work since Aristotle's Poetics...
...However unjust Wordsworth's evaluation, Coleridge would not seem a likely candidate for editor of a journal...
...The Watchman's avowed policy was to "proclaim the State of the Political Atmosphere, and preserve Freedom and her Friends from the attacks of Robbers and Assassins...
...Years later Coleridge was to write of popular uprising, "Like Sampson, the people were strong--like Sampson, the people were blind...
...But this sort of levity, refreshing to the modern reader, was not always appreciated by his contemporaries...
...One essay satirically defends the Established Church on the grounds of its "similitude to the grand and simple Laws of the Planetary System...
...But Coleridge was also a famous procrastinator, who tended to discuss his ideas until he had lost the impetus to write them down...
...Yet Coleridge is often at his best in The Watchman during his less serious moods, an example being his proposal to conduct war by cock fighting...
...Well...
...While The Friend was more directly in line with Coleridge's interest than The Watchman, and more suited to his talents, it only ran to 28 issues...
...20.00...
...Thirteen years later, in 1809, Coleridge founded another magazine, this time exchanging the role of Watchman for that of The Friend...
...But in 1796 he was fired by youthful idealism to attack such familiar issues as social injustice, slavery, exploitation of the poor, and the heavy taxes levied for the war...
...Outside the political arena Coleridge's writing generally improves...
...The political sections of The Watchman are admittedly of little interest now, save to the historian, and some sections of The Friend may seem as difficult and obscure to us as they were to the author's acquaintances...
...but without the Laws the sword is but a piece of iron...
...He ruefully admitted that ending an "Essay on Fasts" with an epigraph from Isaiah--"Wherefore my Bowels shall sound like an Harp"--"lost me near five hundred of my subscribers at one blow...
...That these essays were not light reading the author readily confessed, but "the obstinate (and toward the contemporary Writer, the contemptuous) aversion to all intellectual effort is the mother of evil of all which I had proposed to war against, the Queen Bee in the hive of our errors and misfortunes, both private and national...
...Reviewed by Phoebe Pettingell Samuel Taylor Coleridge was as much a paradox in his own time as in ours...
...This time, however, the subscribers were not at fault...
...Two Vols...
...The Friend By Samuel Taylor Coleridge Edited by Barbara E. Rooke Princeton...
...Much of Coleridge's political writing seems superficial, no matter how worthy the sentiment...
...Coleridge's own addiction should have taught him better...
...His annoying habit of claiming to have finished a manuscript that existed only in his own imagination may possibly have been influenced by his addiction to opium...
...The Friend contains much of Coleridge's best writing: brilliant aphorisms such as "A being without morality is either a beast or a fiend, according as we conceive this want of conscience to be natural or self-produced...
...The first volume is concerned with the individual writer and the problems of communication...
...arresting poetic similes, "The statute of libel is like a vast aviary, which incages the awakening cock and the geese whose alarum preserved the capitol no less than the babbling magpie and the ominous screech owl...
...the third with what Coleridge chooses to call the "Science of Method," a means of reconciling philosophical systems and inductive science...
...the second with political relationships and the problems of group morality...
Vol. 54 • April 1971 • No. 7
