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COPYRIGHT 2000 Boston University
IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, AIDS TO REFLECTION MAY HAVE BEEN Coleridge's most influential work of prose. On both sides of the Atlantic, Aids's psychology of "Reason" (the "source and substance of truths above sense") and "the Understanding" (the faculty which judges "according to sense") persuaded many readers of the value of spiritual as well as intellectual reflection at a time otherwise dominated by Wesleyan enthusiasm, Calvinist reaction, and Unitarian rationalism. Perhaps the best proof of this 1825 book's inspiration is the variety of Victorian intellectual movements it spawned, including the Cambridge Apostles, the Broad Churchmen, the Oxford Movement, the American Transcendentalists, and even American Pragmatism.(1) The tremendous reach of Aids into the nineteenth century confirms John Stuart Mill's assurance in his 1840 essay on "Coleridge" that "no one has contributed more to shape the opinions of those among its younger men."(2)
One overlooked but potential source of the book's great influence is its genre. A collection of aphorisms, Aids was among the first in a small renaissance of the form in the 1820s and '30s, prompting Mill to examine the trend in an 1837 article for the Westminster Review. And, yet, no modern critic has examined Coleridge's use of the aphorism in Aids. This neglect may seem surprising at first. Why, for example, have no critics investigated the apparent paradox of Coleridge's bemoaning in 1817 the "corruption" of metaphysics "by certain immethodical aphorisming Eclectics" and his turning in 1825 to this practice himself?(3)
Two modern critical convictions, I think, make such an investigation seem unnecessary. The first conviction is that Coleridge could finish no project, so that, as Thomas McFarland puts it, the choice for him was often between "neurotically constructed vehicles and no publication at all." One therefore reads Coleridge's prose with a certain generosity about matters of form.(4) The second conviction--based upon a large critical literature is that the English romantics wrote fragments, not aphorisms (as Coleridge insists on calling them in Aids). Along with maxims, aphorisms are assumed to be part of a "wisdom literature" that was little more than a fashion in the early Victorian period.(5)
The first critical conviction--that Coleridge's generic choices were always "desultory or localized plans" (McFarland 3)--is generally well-founded. However, in letters about the production of Aids as well as in Aids itself, Coleridge does state specific reasons for using the aphorism that have yet to be explored. These reasons, I will argue, recall the distinctly republican reasons Coleridge gives for using others genres in his experimental newspaper of 1809--10, The Friend. The second critical conviction--that the romantics wrote fragments, the Victorians aphorisms--will be held to one side for most of this article, which examines instead the continuity of Coleridge's republican thought in the 1795 lectures, the 1809-10 Friend, and--taking into account the purpose of its aphorisms--the 1825 Aids. However, my conclusion--that Coleridge's political legacy to the Victorians (based on a brief analysis of Mill's 1840 essay) must be judged as something closer to "republican" than "conservative"--suggests that the generic periodization supported by the second conviction obscures what Coleridge was formally and consistently trying to accomplish in his prose writings over the course of his career.
Modern Republicanism and Coleridge's Early Prose
Republicans view humans as political beings who realize their full potential through the acts of civic virtue that sustain republics.(6) Republicans therefore prize humans as citizens, those who rule and are ruled, as Aristotle put it. In the modern era, historians have identified two versions of republicanism, classical and liberal. Classical republicanism originated with Machiavelli. Noting how professional armies tended to corrupt republics (i.e., turn them into tyrannies), Niccolo Machiavelli defined civic virtue (which he called virtu) primarily as participation in a citizen militia. Interpreting history cyclically (as the ancients had), Machiavelli concluded that republics were threatened not only by internal corruption but contingencies in general, a cosmos Machiavelli designated fortuna. Machiavelli often expanded his definition of virtu to connote the citizen's ability to repel (and occasionally draw upon) fortuna in order to sustain the republic.
English classical republicanism originated during the Interregnum when James Harrington argued in his utopian Oceana (1656) that English citizens exercised civic virtue less through martial prowess than through reflection, a meaning he understood to fall within Machiavelli's elastic definition of virtu. Harrington reasoned that civic reflection is a direct function of freeheld land. His logic follows Aristotle's in the Politics: cultivated land (or the oikos) provides freeholders with the leisure to discuss affairs of the state (in the polis). Freeheld property also gives citizens a self-interested reason to protect the republic. Harrington also modified Machiavelli's cosmology to satisfy English taste the whims of fortuna were meshed with Puritan millennialism--but the result was still recognizably Machiavellian: republics are only sustained (against sin now as well as corruption and contingency) through acts of virtue (which could be intellectual as well as physical).
During the eighteenth century, English and Scottish classical republicans drew on Harrington's agrarianism to advocate republics founded upon private property, individualistic (and elite) citizens, rural values, and martial prowess. In the first three-quarters of the eighteenth century, an English "country" argument was shaped by political reactionaries like Lord Bolingbroke and poetical ones like Oliver Goldsmith, who were opposed to the new commercial state. At the same time, another, primarily Scottish, version of republicanism emerged to challenge this dependence on the agrarian model. The same urban markets that English Tories denounced as corrupting were hailed by Scottish political economists as underwriting the independence (economic and intellectual) that Harrington had deemed essential to citizenship in a republic. Rather than simply disseminating luxuries, doux commerce (as Montesquieu referred to it) in fact "sweetened" the citizenry, supplying them with the comforts necessary to cultivate the modern independent mind. This second version of republicanism, today designated liberal republicanism, still concerned itself with the civic virtue of citizens, but democracy and a market economy had replaced Harrington's essentially feudal structure.
Although classical and liberal republicans differed over how to guarantee it, a virtuous citizenry remained the ultimate objective of both camps. Both agreed that corruption (in forms ranging from political tyranny to material luxury) and citizens' consequent loss of their intellectual independence posed the greatest threat to a republic. The task for all republicans, then, was to define the setting most conducive to the cultivation of free and civic minds. Classical republicans relied on traditional means to insure political stability, especially an agrarian economy and mandatory participation in the militia. Liberal republicans, on the other hand, believed that appropriate commodities, generated by a modern commercial society, would actually liberate citizens from material concerns--sweeten them, just as freeheld property once had--so that they could pursue their civic calling.
Coleridge began his intellectual career as a classical "country" republican. In Bristol with Robert Southey in 1795, in search of funding for their agrarian "pantisocracy," Coleridge read Moses Lowman's A Dissertation of the Civil Government of the Hebrews (1740), which argued that the Old Testament Hebrews realized Harrington's Oceana.(7) Coleridge drew upon the Dissertation when composing six lectures for the Assembly Coffeehouse in Bristol (delivered in May and June of 1795), in which he contrasts the virtuous Hebrew republic with the current and corrupt British empire. Compare, Coleridge says, the Hebrew's free militia to our own standing (i.e., professional) army, especially how the former "preserved the people in a state of discipline while it prevented the possibility of military Despotism" (Works 1.129). Note, too, how with the Hebrews questions of war and elections were decided by "authority of the whole people" while in Britain such questions are left to a rotten Parliament of "Place-men" (Works 1.13031). The Jews, unlike the British, avoided monarchical pomp, for it led to luxury, high taxes, and inequality, the last being tantamount to a reversion to idolatry ([Works 1.134).(8)
Most of all, though, Coleridge admired the Hebrew's elimination of private property. Coleridge's rhetoric here is typical of country republicanism:
Commerce then is useless except to continue Imposture and oppression. Its Evils are vast and various-- ... Cities[,] Drunkenness, Prostitution, Rapine, Beggary and Diseases--Can we walk the Streets of a City without observing them in all their most loathsome forms? Add to these Irreligion. The smokes that rise from our crowded Towns hide from us the face of Heaven. In the country, the Love and Power of the great Invisible are everywhere perspicuous, and by degrees we become partakers of that which we are accustomed to contemplate. (Works 1.223-24)
While this includes the same kind of language that can be found in poems from Alexander Pope's "Windsor Forest" (1713) to Oliver Goldsmith's "The Deserted Village" (1770), Coleridge has also grasped--perhaps more than most country republicans--the essential purpose of Harrington's agrarian: to prompt civic reflection, or as Coleridge puts it, to make us...
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