Romantic Mentoring and Mathetes' Letter to "The Friend"

Abstract

To himself every fresh idea appears instruction. --The Friend WRITTEN BY JOHN WILSON AND ALEXANDER BLAIR, THE LETTER FROM 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 which derives from New Testament Greek for pupil or disciple. (1) The name itself apt, as the of Wilson and Blair presents himself to The Friend as one seeking guidance. The late second-century epistle from which it presumably taken an apology, however--addressed by one to a pagan named Diognetus wishing to learn about Christianity--rather than the apostolic text that it suggests. The disciple 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 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 another question. His reply suggests a wholly serious flame of mind. Since he actually named by as a Teacher who has been given to our own age (2: 228), (2) he was an obvious choice for respondent. Wordsworth 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 an apology, though perhaps this could be described as an apostle in search of an apologist. And to some extent, Wordsworth that apologist. The solace he offers 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 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 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 based on the fact that Coleridge had no direct hand in the letter and its response or on more substantive reasons 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 to write his letter on behalf of a generation of young minds in need of guidance among the intellectual thickets of post-Pittite England. …