{"id":3994,"date":"2021-12-06T10:25:17","date_gmt":"2021-12-06T10:25:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=3994"},"modified":"2022-09-03T22:29:07","modified_gmt":"2022-09-03T22:29:07","slug":"on-this-day-in-1821-samuel-taylor-coleridges-little-known-love-for-aphorisms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=3994","title":{"rendered":"On This Day in 1821: Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Little-Known Love For Aphorisms"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The BARS \u2018On This Day\u2019 Blog series<\/a> celebrates the 200th anniversary of literary and historical events of the Romantic period. Want to contribute a future post? Get in touch<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In solidarity with the University College Union strikes for pensions and improved working conditions<\/a><\/strong> which took place in the first week of December 2021, BARS observed a digital picket line, and out of respect for this, the author and editor of this post agreed to delay its publication from the 3rd of December.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The 3rd of December 2021 is the 200th anniversary of a strange, meandering and gnomic letter from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to his friend Thomas Allsop. Poet and Coleridge scholar Adam Neikirk takes us through this letter to explore<\/strong> the poet’s fascinating and esoteric approach to the aphorism.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAb Hydromani\u00e2 Hydrophobia: from Water-lust comes Water-dread. But this is a violent metaphor, and disagreeable to boot. Suppose then by some caprice or colic of Nature an Aqueduct split on this side of the Slider or Sluice-gate, the two parts removed some 20 or 30 feet distance from [each] other, and the communication kept up only by a hollow Reed split lengthways, of just enough width and depth to lay one\u2019s finger or at most one\u2019s fist in\u2014the Likeness would be fantastic, to be sure; but still it would be no inapt likeness or emblem of the state of mind, in which I feel myself, as often as I have just received a letter from you<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Collected Letters, <\/em>V, p.1283<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

On 3 December, 1821, Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote to his friend Thomas Allsop (1795 \u2013 1880), a businessman who had first heard him lecture in London in 1818. Attempting in his usual long-winded way to express his \u201cstate of mind\u201d about receiving a friendly letter, Coleridge begins by invoking, and then dismissing, an aphorism\u2014\u201cAb Hydromani\u00e2 Hydrophobia,\u201d which neatly summarizes how a person can both enjoy writing letters and also be unable to answer correspondence in a timely fashion, apparently dreading the indulgence. And in a way this sort of opening is precisely emblematic of the Micawberishness which Virginia Woolf attributed to Coleridge in her essay \u201cThe Man at the Gate\u201d (from the 1942 collection The Death of the Moth<\/em>). Why use a \u2018violent\u2019 aphorism when something more befuddling, original, and sympathetic will do?<\/p>\n\n\n

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Figure 1: Max Beerbohm, ‘Coleridge Table-Talking’, from The Poet’s Corner <\/em>(London: Heinemann, 1904)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

Coleridge\u2019s reputation, which was active even among his contemporaries, for gentle, highly abstract, and ultimately sleep-inducing conversation, was founded in part on the lectures on literature and philosophy, as well as on the brilliant private talk, which had made of Allsop such a devoted friend: one who was willing to forgive protracted gaps in Coleridge\u2019s correspondence (unlike, say, his wife). As usual, Coleridge is in this opening performing his learnedness and his role as \u201cSage of Highgate\u201d (he had moved to Highgate in 1816 to live under the care of the physician James Gillman), attempting to improve upon a received witticism. This sense of advancing on something permanent was exactly what the younger generation liked about Coleridge (when they did like him).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It may come as some surprise to the reader, then, to hear Coleridge gushing, in 1821, about his love for aphorisms: those brief turns of phrase, usually sparkling with wit, which we typically associate with thinkers like Coleridge\u2019s contemporary, the French novelist Stendhal (1783 \u2013 1842) and, later, one of Stendhal\u2019s biggest fans, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 \u2013 1900). We do not think of Coleridge as a user or coiner of aphorisms. Yet, here he is in his private notebooks, around the time of his letter to Allsop, recounting the way certain linguistic nuggets have allowed him to cultivate his understanding (and his good behavior) in a world full of conflicting accounts of the truth:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I should like to know, whether or how far the delight, I feel & have always felt, in adages or aphorisms of universal or very extensive application, is a general or common feeling with man, or a peculiarity of my own mind. I cannot describe how much pleasure I have derived from \u201cExtremes meet\u201d for instance; or \u201cTreat every thing according to its Nature\u201d, and \u201cBe\u201d! In the last I bring in <\/s>all inward Rectitude to its Test, in the former all outward Morality to its Rule, and in the first all <problematic> Results to their Solution, and reduce apparent Contraries to correspondent Opposites. How many hostile Tenets has it enabled me to contemplate, as Fragments of the Truth\u2014false only by negation, and mutual exclusion\u2014.<\/p>Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Collected Notebooks, <\/em> \u00a7 4380<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Coleridge\u2019s writing is interesting here and gives us a surprisingly wide glimpse into the philosophy of his later thought (a complex area which is still being explored; see, e.g., Murray Evans, Sublime Coleridge <\/em>(Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); or Jeffrey Barbeau, Coleridge\u2019s Assertion of Religion <\/em>(Peeters, 2006), which both deal with the unpublished \u2018Opus Maximum\u2019 fragments). For one thing, we see his famous syncretism on display in the equation of \u201chostile Tenets\u201d with \u201cFragments of the Truth\u2014false only by negation, and mutual exclusion\u2014\u201d. Coleridge is signalling to Allsop that the universality of his approach is vindicated by the cognitive meaning of an aphorism. And what his approach involves is the acceptance of viewpoints which are different from his own: philosophical syncretism which bleeds into the private life. The connections he makes between certain aphorisms and their meaning for the moral or intellectual conduct of the person who follows them parallels the letter to Allsop, when the aphorism on water is unpacked into a kind of living emblem of the writer\u2019s dread and love of composition; and yet it is changed in the unpacking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Coleridge\u2019s pairing of aphorism to its expanded meaning is oddly sequenced (probably on purpose), so I will make it more explicit:<\/p>\n\n\n\n