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COPYRIGHT 2006 Boston University
"To himself every fresh idea appears instruction."
--The Friend
WRITTEN BY JOHN WILSON AND ALEXANDER BLAIR, THE LETTER FROM Mathetes in Coleridge's The Friend (1809-10) seems to owe even its pseudonymous signature to the equivocal intellectual guidance regretted by its young authors in their age. Blair would recall that Thomas De Quincey proposed the signature "Mathetes," which derives from New Testament Greek for pupil or disciple. (1) The name itself is apt, as the Mathetes of Wilson and Blair presents himself to The Friend as one seeking guidance. The late second-century epistle from which it is presumably taken is an apology, however--addressed by one Mathetes to a pagan named Diognetus wishing to learn about Christianity--rather than the apostolic text that it suggests. The disciple is the teacher, then, though Diognetus himself has been plausibly identified with a teacher of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, thus further complicating (or enriching) the epistle's pedagogical premise. It is difficult to say whether, in proposing "Mathetes" as a pseudonym, De Quincey was following eighteenth-century commentators who mistakenly identified the epistle as apostolic or whether he simply liked the paradox involved in an epistle from a disciple offering guidance to a teacher. The fact that the 1818 edition of The Friend introduces Mathetes' Letter with a motto from Marcus Aurelius suggests that Coleridge liked the paradox.
Whether William Wordsworth, who wrote The Friend's response to Mathetes, liked it is another question. His reply suggests a wholly serious flame of mind. Since he is actually named by Mathetes as a "Teacher who has been given to our own age" (2: 228), (2) he was an obvious choice for respondent. Wordsworth is no more a Diognetus to Wilson's and Blair's Mathetes, however--at least in the terms of the original second-century epistle--than the letter addressed to him is an apology, though perhaps this Mathetes could be described as an apostle in search of an apologist. And to some extent, Wordsworth is that apologist. The solace he offers is typically Wordsworthian, looking back to the consolatory admonitions of Poems, in Two Volumes (1807) with its advice that, faced with the prospect of a degenerate age, disillusioned youth should look within and find strength in what remains behind. While in the end backing away from a directly pedagogical role, Wordsworth promises that the guidance sought by Mathetes "will in course of time flow naturally from my labours" (2: 230)--an unmistakable allusion to the "philosophical poem" that would issue, partially at least, as The Excursion (1814).
What little critical commentary Mathetes' letter has attracted focuses on Wordsworth's response, especially as it addresses assertions made by Mathetes about nature as preceptor. (3) Recently, however, Deirdre Coleman has dismissed both letter and response as "peripheral" to Coleridge's concerns in 1809. (4) Whether this exclusion is based on the fact that Coleridge had no direct hand in the letter and its response or on more substantive reasons is not clear. Coleridge himself seems to have felt that they were pertinent enough to be included not only in 1809 but in subsequent editions of The Friend as well. The present essay argues that this brief, but auspiciously presented, (5) correspondence does in fact speak to Coleridge's concerns in 1809, and on the same philosophical/pedagogical grounds as those on which The Friend treats Regency manners and morals. In his seminal essay on The Friend, in Coleridge's Blessed Machine of Language, Jerome Christensen argues that more than any other of Coleridge's works The Friend "is the test of language itself as a vehicle of anything but itself, as being capable of communicating true principle or, at the very least, the truth of principle." (6) Similar doubts about language have surely prompted Mathetes to write his letter on behalf of a generation of young minds in need of guidance among the intellectual thickets of post-Pittite England. While Wordsworth responds to this letter, and is effectively nominated as the living "Teacher" who can provide the guidance it calls for, the letter is addressed in the first instance to the editor of The Friend. If Wordsworth's response speaks to Mathetes' doubts, it is The Friend that has crystallized those doubts through its reflections on the vexed relation of truth and language. The letter from Mathetes provides a current focus for Coleridge's concern with the price exacted of truth by its transmission and reception, effectively the pedagogical premise of The Friend.
This premise is established by Mathetes when he describes the form taken by temptation to young minds. "To such the season of that entrance into the world is a season of fearful importance," he observes; "not for the seduction of it's passions, but of it's opinions" (2: 222). The first number of The Friend testifies to the deceptive nature of opinion in an age when "guiding principles" must be drawn from circumstances existing in "perpetual flux, without definite place or fixed quantity" (2: 2). Further complicating this state of affairs is the influence of "false philosophy"--Coleridge takes his text here from the sophistry of Milton's fallen angels (2: 7n)--which is dangerous not merely for the errors it inculcates but for its delusive plausibility. Among the "universal persuasions" making the human mind susceptible to these influences is its tendency to associate the most contingent circumstances, even those as involuntary as youthful vigor, with whatever intellectual system happens to be current at a given time:
In health and youth we may indeed connect the glow and buoyance of our bodily sensations with the words of a theory, and imagine that we hold it with a firm belief. The pleasurable heat which the Blood or the Breathing generates, the sense of external reality which comes with the strong Grasp of the hand or the vigorous Tread of the foot, may indifferently become associated with the rich eloquence of a Shaftesbury, imposing on us man's possible perfections for his existing nature; or with the cheerless and hardier impieties of a Hobbes, while cutting the Gordian knot he denies the reality of either vice or virtue, and explains away the mind's self-reproach into a distempered ignorance, an epidemic affection of the human nerves and their habits of motion. (2: 7)
In effect felt in the blood, such theories persuade by means of sheer sensation, insinuating themselves as the impression rather than the conviction of truth. As Coleridge notes, among its other purposes The Friend has been conceived "to prove, how distinct and different the sensation of positiveness is from the sense of certainty" (2: 7). It is this power of distinction, so difficult under the stresses of ordinary mental life, that Mathetes seeks from the right teacher.
Coleridge distinguishes rhetorical probability from logical certainty in his statement of purpose. To be sure, the ultimate certainty for him is faith, but despite its gestures toward absolute conviction The Friend is chiefly concerned with those certainties possible in what Mathetes terms "the real scene of living men" (2: 223) where both truth and falsehood may appear as their opposites. Coleridge's remarks about the fallacious relation possible between rude health and "the words of a theory" speak to more than the general anti-rationalism running through The Friend. His cautionary examples, Shaftesbury's "rich eloquence" and Hobbes's "cheerless and hardier impieties," seem as much to emphasize the characteristic rhetorics of these thinkers as their philosophical systems. According to this account, the means by which either might win over impressionable young enthusiasts would appear to be wholly contingent, a mere accident of association. For confirmation of his fears, Coleridge need look no further than the so-called New Rhetoric of the late eighteenth century and its less respectable kin in Elocutionary doctrine. (7) While a somewhat miscellaneous group, including George Campbell, Joseph Priestley, and Hugh Blair among others, the New Rhetoricians find a common ground in their assimilation of empirical psychology, attempting, in the words of Campbell's preface to The Philosophy...
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