Читать книгу Coleridge: Darker Reflections - Richard Holmes - Страница 46

Coleridge’s initial response was to embrace the practical, and to plunge headlong into the business of The Friend. For the next three months he worked with furious energy on every detail of the proposed paper: prospectus, subscriptions, printing arrangements, distribution, financing, and the provision of stamped paper (which was required by government regulations for weekly publications). Letters flew out to all his friends: Humphry Davy, Tom Poole, Daniel Stuart, Sir George Beaumont, Basil Montagu, John Monkhouse, and even brother George at Ottery and slippery Francis Jeffrey at the Edinburgh Review.

His rousing letter to Poole was typical of the rest:

My dear Poole, I will make a covenant with you. Begin to count my Life, as a Friend of yours, from January 1809…I promise you on my honour, that The Friend shall be the main Pipe thro’ which I shall play off the whole reservoir of my collected Knowledge and of what you are pleased to believe Genius. It is indeed Time to be doing something for myself. Hitherto I have layed my Eggs with Ostrich carelessness & Ostrich oblivion – most indeed have been crushed under foot – yet not a few have crawled forth into Light to furnish Feathers for the Caps of others, and some too to plume the shafts in the Quivers of my Enemies. My first essay (and what will be at the BOTTOM of all the rest) is on the nature and importance of Principles.²³

Coleridge’s plan to produce a weekly paper was extraordinarily ambitious in itself. But to write, edit and publish it single-handedly from Grasmere seemed almost crazily so. Most of his friends, with the signal exception of his old Fleet Street editor Daniel Stuart, thought it could never succeed. Charles Lamb voiced the general view when he wrote wryly to Hazlitt in December: “There came this morning a printed Prospectus from S. T. Coleridge, Grasmere, of a Weekly Paper to be called The Friend. A flaming Prospectus, I have no time to give the heads of it. To commence first Saturday in January [1809]. There came also Notice of a Turkey from Mr Clarkson, which I am more sanguine in expecting the accomplishment of than I am of Coleridge’s prophesy.”²⁴

Wordsworth, Southey and Tom Poole were all secretly of the same opinion. Coleridge’s disorganization, his unbusinesslike routine, his legendary prevarication over deadlines, his philosophical introspection, and above all his ill-health and opium addiction would surely destroy any chance of journalistic success. Only a man as optimistically naive as John Morgan could possibly write: “I think this plan of yours most admirably calculated for your habits of thinking…with a trifling effort you must succeed.”²⁵

Moreover Coleridge was not planning a conventional paper, with topical or polemical appeal. He distinguished his aims sharply from the regular pro-government papers, the fashionable radicalism of the newly-launched Examiner, the brilliant literary partisanship of the Edinburgh Review, or the racy political populism of William Cobbett’s Weekly Register (his nearest rival as a one-man operation, but of “undigested passionate Monologues”).

Coleridge intended to eschew all current affairs, literary novelties, personalities or political scandals. Indeed he rejected the very idea of journalistic appeal and popularity itself, even though Jeffrey and Cobbett had discovered a huge new readership for such material in an angry and discontented wartime England, disillusioned with its leadership and restless with economic deprivations. Coleridge wanted to challenge and provoke in a far deeper, more thoughtful way, and his readership would be deliberately restricted.

“My Purposes are widely different,” he wrote to Humphry Davy. “I do not write in this Work for the Multitude; but for those who by Rank, or Fortune, or official Situation, or Talents or Habits of Reflection, are to influence the Multitude. I write to found true PRINCIPLES, to oppose false PRINCIPLES, in Criticism, Legislation, Philosophy, Morals, and International Law.”²⁶

These great “principles” were supposed to emerge as the work unfolded: there was no declaration of an initial ideology or campaign motto. But Coleridge wanted to write as an opinion-former, to create a philosophical intelligentsia in a new way. His work was to be deliberately elitist: exclusive and intellectually demanding. He made no apology for this. He was not producing a set of “Labourers’ pocket knifes” for cutting bread and cheese, but a “Case of Lancets” for dissecting the anatomy of a national condition.²⁷ His target was what he came to call the “Heresy” of expediency, of short-term aims, superficial thinking; it was also the intellectual partisanship of British journalism itself.