Coleridge: Friend or Partizan?‐I

Extract

‘Unfortunately, in the great theatre of literature there are no authorized door-keepers: for our anonymous critics are self-elected. I shall not fear the charge of calumny if I add, that they have lost all credit with wise men, by unfair dealing: such as their refusal to receive an honest man’s money (that is, his argument) because they anticipate and dislike his opinion, while others of suspicious character and most unseemly appearance, are suffered to pass without payment, or by virtue of orders which they have themselves distributed to known partizans.’ (I, 227).

Coleridge’s comment on ‘those, who under the name of Reviewers, volunteer this office’, of the door-keepers of literature, seems to have passed unnoticed by many of his own reviewers. Of the reviews of The Friend I have seen, few have departed from the model drearily and anonymously exemplified in The Times Literary Supplement: a meticulous account, drawn almost entirely from Barbara Rooke’s scholarly introduction, of the immediate circumstances in which The Friend was first published and later revised; a few (very well-deserved) compliments on the superb editing, and a final paragraph asserting the profundity and continuing worth of Coleridge’s thought—and the job is done. Such a response is doubly inappropriate in this case: because on Coleridge’s own grounds the value of scholarship lies in the re-disclosure of the relevant in the dated, and because this particular work is concerned precisely with an attempt to outline underlying, ‘fixed principles in politics, morals and religion’ (title-page). To assert its continuing worth is to acknowledge both points; but—as Coleridge would agree—mere assertion is inadequate.