|
COPYRIGHT 2001 Boston University
... Once I saw (Hallowing his Sabbath-day by quietness) A wealthy son of commerce saunter by, Bristowa's citizen: methought, it calmed His thirst of idle gold, and made him muse With wiser feelings.
--"Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement" (9-14)(1)
A WELL-KNOWN TURNING POINT IN COLERIDGE'S EARLY CAREER IS JANUary 1798, when the young poet, lecturer, journalist, and preacher received the offer of a 150 [pounds sterling] annuity from the Wedgwood family. At the time, Coleridge was preparing to accept the position of minister to the Unitarian chapel at Shrewsbury, which came with a salary of 120 [pounds sterling] and a house worth 30 [pounds sterling] rent. Coleridge's acceptance of the ministry there, I suggest, would have placed him physically and symbolically within the network of commercial Dissenters who dominated the economic and intellectual lire of Northern England. This essay fin& a fresh history of early romanticism in Coleridge's vexed relationship to nonconformist religion during the 1790s. Throughout the first hall of the eighteenth century, "old Dissent" comprised three major sects: Presbyterians, Independents, and Baptists.(2) By the end of the century, however, Unitarianism and "new Dissent," Methodism, had augmented the ranks of nonconformity. Overlooking the tensions between older and newer forms of Dissent, literary critics interested in Coleridge's Unitarianism have too often treated Dissenters as a uniform body distinct from the established Church of England. Coleridge's early career, however, manifests a dissidence foreign to the interests of old Dissent. His lectures and conversation poems anticipate the early romantic figure of Coleridge we associate with his later self-representations in his letters and the Biographia; in the 1790s, however, the disinterested persona and community imagined by Coleridge in his political, religious, and poetic writings emerge hot from a latent German idealism awaiting the discovery of Kant, Fichte, and Schelling after 1801, but from Coleridge's rejection of that nexus of middle-class interests, values, and believes that constitute the culture of old Dissent.(3)
To this culture, the Wedgwoods' annuity seemed to offer an alternative. On January 16, 1798, Coleridge reported to his friend John Prior Estlin, the Unitarian minister of Lewin's Mead chapel in Bristol: "In a letter full of elevated sentiments Mr Josiah Wedgwood offers me from himself & his brother Thomas Wedgwood `an annuity of 150 [pounds sterling] for life, legally secured to me, no condition whatever being annexed.'"(4) Although based in Bristol, Estlin well understood the nature of Coleridge's situation, for Estlin himself had been a student at the nonconformist Warrington Academy from 1764-70. Coleridge thus turns to Estlin for assistance, writing, it is "clear to me, that as two distinct & incompatible objects are proposed to me, I ought to chuse between them" (CL 1.371). These "incompatible objects" are the Unitarian ministry as a profession and the more independent and disinterested lire of a Unitarian philosopher and poet.
The terms in which Coleridge solicits Estlin's advice capture the definition of "interest" that informs Coleridge's political and poetic thought in the 1790s:
"Shall I refuse 150 [pounds sterling] a year for lire, as certain, as any fortune can be, for (I will call it) another 150 [pounds sterling] a year, the attainment of which is not yet certain, and the duration of which is precarious?--" You answer--"Yes!--the cause of Christianity & practical Religion demands your exertions. The powers of intellect, which God has given you, are given for this very purpose, that they may be employed in promoting the best interests of mankind." (CL 1.371)
For Coleridge's Estlin, religion is a trade to which the practitioner should devote his powers and talents and thereby promote the "best interests" of the whole. Estlin's imagined advice, Coleridge writes, "should be decisive on my conduct, if I could see any reason why my exertions for Christianity & practical Religion depend ... on my becoming a stipendiary & regular minister" (CL 1.371). Opposed to the interested employment of "a stipendiary & regular minister" in Northern England is the disinterested and innocent intellectual lire Coleridge envisions as made possible by the annuity.
Although Coleridge claimed in July 1796 that "local and temporary Politics are my aversion" (CL 1.222), from 1794 to 1798, the period to which we owe his early poetry, Coleridge hardly rejected explicitly political and religious discourses in favor of the poetic and hermeneutic writings for which he is most often remembered. Numerous studies have examined Coleridge's political,(5) religious,(6) and philosophical(7) development during the 1790S, and these are the terms I accordingly wish to keep in play.(8) After the Bristol political lectures of February 1795 and the religious lectures of May to June, after the publication of The Watchman ceased in May 1796, and especially after the trip to Germany from September 1798 to July 1799, Coleridge's aversion to "local and temporary Politics" seems to accord well with his proclaimed "love of `the Great', & `the Whole'" (CL 1.354), his devotion to the vast and universal: "My mind feels as if it ached to behold & know something great--something one & indivisible" (CL 1.349). Opposed to the universal is the particular, the "local and temporary," what Coleridge refers to as "parts--and all parts are necessarily little" (CL 1.354). Following Jerome McGann's influential study of 1983 and the work of historicist critics such as Marjorie Levinson and Alan Liu, many readers of romantic poetry have seen this rejection of the particular in favor of the universal as a defining moment of "Romantic Ideology," the celebration of the private, internal, and ideal and, conversely, the repression of the public, external, and material.(9) The paradigm of the romantic poet is thus shaped by the disinterested aesthetic judgment of Kant's third critique, and Coleridge's growth away from his early associationism, Unitarianism, and radicalism comes to represent the triumph of romantic ideology over the material interests and political particularities of late-eighteenth-century life.
I argue, however, that what Coleridge rejects is, to a significant degree, the legacy of old middle-class Dissent, the commercialist culture of Arminian and Arian nonconformity.(10) Whereas many critics discuss Coleridge's nonconformist religion in the 1790s, they frequently fail to distinguish between Unitarianism, to which Coleridge came from the Church of England at age 21, and the old Dissent of Presbyterian and General Baptist families, especially in the north of England. A clear distinction between the Dissenting beliefs of Coleridge and the Dissenting culture of provincial nonconformity explains how the disinterested community imagined by Coleridge in his political and religious writings of the mid 1790s informs the conversation poems of 1796-1802. Coleridge's resistance to the commercial interests of Northern old Dissent, I propose, corresponds to his opposition to property in the Bristol lectures, which I discuss in order to demonstrate the connection between Coleridge's religion and his vision of an ideal community, the "small but glorious band ... of thinking and disinterested Patriots" (CC 1.40) in Conciones ad Populum (1795).(11) These political and religious writings of the mid-1790s, then, serve as the primary context for the conversation poems, providing the opportunity for a reevaluation of "Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement," in relation, especially, to "The Eolian Harp" and "Frost at Midnight."
1. Coleridge's Unitarianism, Dissent, and Commerce
Coleridge's Unitarianism represents a relatively late development in eighteenth-century Dissenting sectarianism. Whereas the Socinian doctrine survives from the sixteenth century, the English sect in its Enlightenment form becomes recognizable in the 1770s, with Joseph Priestley's defenses of Socinianism in pamphlets and sermons and with the foundation of the Essex Street congregation by Theophilus Lindsey in 1774.(12) Although late eighteenth-century Unitarianism represents a discrete phenomenon, it has often been indiscriminately described along with the other branches of Dissent. One salient example of this failure to discriminate between distinct communities is Burke's scornful attack in the Reflections on Richard Price for encouraging Dissent for its own sake:
Let the noble teachers but dissent, it is no matter from whom or from what. This great point once secured, it is taken for granted their religion will be rational and manly. I doubt whether religion would reap all the benefits which the calculating divine computes from this "great company of preachers." It would certainly be a valuable addition of nondescripts to the ample collection of known classes, genera and species, which at present beautify the hortus siccus of dissent.(13)
Burke's famous reduction of Dissent to a hortus siccus in the eighteenth century, echoed by Hazlitt in the nineteenth, represents an early moment in a long tradition that has affected both those hostile and sympathetic to religious dissidence. For many writers before and since Burke, Dissent has been divided into various classes, genera, and species, but essentially these have too often conformed to one unified image of Enlightenment rationality and Whiggish opposition to the establishment in Church and State. The "great point" of their Dissent from the Church of England homogenizes the collective identities of Dissenters and flattens the very real cultural and social distinctions that accompany their theological differences.
Especially in idiosyncratic cases such as Coleridge, however, Dissent needs to be understood with a particularity seldom afforded in critical treatments of religion in late-eighteenth-century and romantic literature and culture. The case of Coleridge in the 1790s demands that we treat Dissent in precise terms if it is to tell us anything new about his early positions and productions, for several strands of Dissenting religion come together in the history of Coleridge's early romanticism. More extreme in its rationalist creed of Christ's humanity than Arminian...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
