Sunday 29 April 2018

Coleridge, "The Friend" and Polygamy: the Thelyphthora Connection




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Sometimes pedantically taking the trouble to track down the source of an obscure Latin quotation in one of Coleridge's prose works can pay unexpected dividends. Not often, of course; but sometimes. And this, I think, is one such time.

So: a couple of days ago I posted about the start of my read-through of The Friend, the magazine Coleridge edited, wrote (almost entirely) and published intermittently 1809-10. The first essay of this miscellany ends with Coleridge quoting some Erasmus (in the later 1818 rifacimento the first essay ends with a cue to this passage, which is then printed as the epigraph to the second essay). Its placement in either case shows that it was important to Coleridge's sense of the larger project.



Nobody had tracked down where that passage came from, so I did; and you can read the exciting results of that enterprise here. Long story short: it's a passage from Erasmus's introduction to his famous 1516 Latin-and-Greek edition of the New Testament. This one, in fact:



But something about it didn't feel quite right to me. Coleridge wasn't a great reader of Erasmus (though he read Luther avidly), and whilst it was certainly possible he was picking his way through the hundreds of close-printed pages of Latin that constitute the introduction to the Novum Instrumentum omne, in one or other of the hefty, expensive and rare editions published between 1516 and 1536, and this passage just leapt out at him, this didn't strike me as very likely, really. Did Wordsworth (with whom Coleridge was staying at this time) even own a copy of this rare book? Something was off.

So I went back to the quoted text and did some more rummaging around. Long story short: I don't think Coleridge found this passage in the original Erasmus. I think he found it here:



Those, as you can see, are pages xxxiii and xxiv from the introduction to the book whose title-page heads this blog: Martin Madan's Thelyphthora, or A Treatise on Female Ruin (1780). In that once-notorious work Madan, a barrister and Methodist clergyman, advocated Biblically-sanctioned polygamy as the remedy for the evils of social and sexual immorality. The unusual title is Madan's Greek coinage: the suffix Θηλ- refers to women—θηλυκός means ‘female’ and τὼ θηλᾱ́ are a woman's breasts—and φθορά means ‘ruin, death’ but also ‘seduction’ and ‘rape’. Here's Madan, and his English translation:
What Erasmus wrote on the treatment which he met with from many quarters on account of his publication deserves our notice …
‘Sic oportet ad librum legendum accedere lectorem, ut solet ad convivium conviva civilis. Convivator annititur omnibus satisfacere: & tamen siquid apponitur, quod hujus aut illius palato non respondeat, urbane vel dissimulant, vel probant etiam, ne quid contristent convivatorem. Quis enim eum convivam ferat, qui tantum hoc animo veniat ad mensam, ut carpens quæ apponuntur, ne vescatur ipse, nec alios vesci sinat?

Et tamen his quoque reperias inciviliores, qui palam, qui sine fine damnent ac lacerent opus, quod nunquam legerint. Atque hoc sane faciunt quidam, qui se Christiana pietatis doctores profitentur, & religionis antistites; cum sit plus quam sycophaticum, damnare quod nescias.’
As I have too much reason to think that some of the unlearned, as well as the learned, stand much in need of being acquainted with the above, I will give it in English.
‘A reader should come to the perusal of a book, as a courteous guest comes to a feast, The giver of the feast does his endeavour to satisfy all; yet, if any thing be brought to table, which may not be agreeable to the palate of this or that person, they politely dissemble their dislike, or even approve, rather than grieve him who has invited them. For who could bear with that guest, who comes to the table only with a disposition to find fault, and neither to partake himself, nor suffer others to partake of the entertainment? Yet you may find others more uncivil than these, who openly, and without end, will condemn and tear a work to pieces, which they have never red. And some do this, who profess themselves teachers of Christian piety, and eminent professors of religion. Whereas, to condemn that of which you are ignorant, is beyond the baseness of the basest informer.’
The Latin Coleridge quotes starts and ends exactly where Madan's passage does. And compare Madan's English above with Coleridge's, here:
A reader should sit down to a book, especially of the miscellaneous kind, as a well-behaved visitor does to a banquet. The master of the feast exerts himself to satisfy all his guests; but if after all his care and pains there should still be something or other put on the table that does not suit this or that person's taste, they politely pass it over without noticing the circumstance, and commend other dishes, that they may not distress their kind host, or throw any damp on his spirits. For who could tolerate a guest that accepted an invitation to your table with no other purpose but that of finding fault with every thing put before him, neither eating himself, or suffering others to eat in comfort. And yet you may fall in with a still worse set than even these, with churls that in all companies and without stop or stay, will condemn and pull to pieces a work which they had never read. But this sinks below the baseness of an Informer, yea, though he were a false witness to boot! The man, who abuses a thing of which he is utterly ignorant, unites the infamy of both—and in addition to this, makes himself the pander and sycophant of his own and other men's envy and malignity.
In my earlier post I noted puzzlement that, having translated sycophantes as ‘sycophant’, Coleridge also made reference to ‘the baseness of an Informer,’ something which I simply couldn't find in the original Latin. But if we work with the theory that Coleridge found the passage in the Thelyphthora here, then the puzzle goes away: since Madan translates ‘sycophantes’ into English precisely as ‘the basest informer’. It was much more likely that Wordsworth would own Madan's book than an old copy of Erasmus's bilingual New Testament. Madan, who had died only a few years earlier in 1790, was the cousin of William Cowper, a poet whom Coleridge admired immensely, and whose blank verse directly influenced Wordsworth's own. And it was a famous, or at any rate a notorious, book; it's very possible Wordsworth had a copy.


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The thing is: this apparently small datum unpacks in quite significant ways in terms of reading The Friend. It is really quite interesting that, as he started writing the essays that would constitute this magazine, Coleridge was reading a book that made the earnest argument that men ought be allowed to marry more than one woman. Quite interesting in terms of the intellectual context out of which this text was produced, and very interesting in terms of the emotional context.

In 1806 Coleridge had finally separated from his wife, Sara Fricker. He continued to support her financially as she raised their children, but the marriage was dead. One cause of this separation was their evident mutual incompatibility, but another more pressing one was that, in 1799, STC had met and fallen in love with Sara Hutchinson, the younger sister of Wordsworth's wife Mary Hutchinson. This was a desperate, unreciprocated passion that wrenched Coleridge. He poured his misery into entries in his notebook and sometimes into poems, disguising her identity under the flimsy anagram ‘Asra’. Sara H was in many ways a good friend to Coleridge, but she did not love him, and even if marriage between them had been a legal possibility (which it wasn't: the Matrimonial Causes Act was half a century away) it's very hard to believe she would have accepted his proposal, however passionate he was about her. And boy was he smitten.

There were long stretches of tantalising physical proximity through the first few years of the 1800s, and then in 1804 Coleridge moved to Malta, in part as a deliberate break with Sara H and an attempt to cauterise his infatuation. It doesn't seem to have helped. On his return from the Mediterranean Coleridge several times visited the Wordsworths, and therefore Sara, who was living with them, and found himself still as smitten. In December 1806 Coleridge and his ten-year-old son Hartley arrived at Coleorton to spend Christmas with the Wordsworths. During this visit something happened, the traumatic something which Coleridge notated in his Notebook as ‘the EPOCH’. It looks as though, one morning, Coleridge blundered into Sara's room to find her in bed with Wordsworth. It's hard to be sure, in part because Coleridge spent years trying to talk himself into believing that whatever he had seen that morning had just been a kind of hallucination (a ‘morbid Day-Dream’, ‘a mere phantasm and yet what anguish, what gnawings of despair, what throbbings and lancinations of positive Jealousy!’)

Then came the Friend. The point to remember about Coleridge's praxis in writing was that he dictated and relied upon amanuenses to write up what he said; and in the case of the Friend that amanuensis was Sara Hutchinson. ‘Coleridge was dictating every issue directly to Sara Hutchinson, closeted in his study,’ notes Richard Holmes, adding, in striking phrase: ‘so that if the mouth was his the hand was Asra's’.
Coleridge now had that daily, and even nightly, intimacy with Asra that he had so long and so passionately desired. But it was not easy for either of them. The shared pressure, and even excitement, of their literary work (often witnessed by Asra's breathless notes to Brown the printer, reporting on progress) hid far deeper emotions and conflicts. [Holmes, Darker Visions (1998), 176].
It was hardest on Coleridge himself: his notebooks ‘ranged back obsessively’ over his memories of Asra, and he debated with himself whether to write an essay for the Friend on what he considered to be the two models of falling in love, one a passive ‘irresistible’ passion and the other a more controlled ‘act of will’. But, as Holmes says, ‘he could not dictate such an essay to Asra, and it was only written long after ... indeed, perhaps because of their very physical proximity, Coleridge could never speak openly to Asra of his feelings’.

In this context, the fact that Coleridge—married to one woman, desperately in love with another woman—was reading a book that used scripture to justify polygamy is remarkable. Though piously-intended, Madan's Thelyphthora quickly became one of the more notorious books of the later eighteenth-century. The scandal occasioned by its main argument was kept alive by Madan's habit of responding with articles and pamphlets to the many published attacks on his work: at least nineteen separate titles critiqued Madan's book in the 1780s alone, including an Anti-Thelyphthora by Madan's own cousin William Cowper.

In fact the sexual element of polygamy, though the thought of it inevitably tickles our lubriciousnesses, plays little part in Madan's argument. Instead he is exercised by a more strictly theological question: did the coming of Christ entirely overthrow the old Mosaic law (under which, of course, men could marry more than one woman) or not? Madan argued it did not. Indeed, he called the orthodox view that Christ set up a new law, more pure and holy, in opposition to the law of the Old Testament, ‘a doctrine ... replete with folly and blasphemy’ [Thelyphthora, 1:326-27].
By God's express command from Mount Sinai, where the laws concerning moral good and evil, were eternally and unalterably fixed, no man could take a virgin and then abandon her. ‘He shall surely endow her to be his wife’ Exod. xxii.16. And again Deut. xxii. 29. ‘She shall be his wife; BECAUSE HE HAS HUMBLED HER, he may not put her away all his days.’ [Thelyphthora, 1:10]
E B Murray summarises the through-line argument of Madan's book:
In practice Madan interpreted this [Biblical text] to mean that any man who seduced a virgin, even if he was already married, had, in effect, wed her and should be so held accountable to her for all his days. While the system of human contrivance that found Madan comprehensively opposed to his Biblical sanctions was civil marriage, with its insistence on monogamy, his immediate object was (as his full title indicates) the repeal of the so called Marriage Act of 1753, which prohibited clandestine marriages. [E B Murray, ‘Thel, Thelyphthora, and the Daughters of Albion’, Studies in Romanticism 20:3 (1981), 275-76]
When Coleridge wasn't dictating the Friend to Asra, he was using his notebooks to explore the tantalising idea that she might be his wife after all, if only he could get himself off opium:
Again: as Mother of my children—how utterly improbable dared I hope it: How impossible for me (most pure indeed are my heart & fancy from such a thought) even to think of it, much less desire it! and yet at the encouraging prospect of emancipation from narcotics, of health & activity of mind & body, worthy of the unutterably [in cipher: dear one], it is felt within me like an ordinance of adamantine Destiny! [Notebooks, 3: 3547]
Perhaps Coleridge found in Madan a justification for this daydream: he was married, true; but by falling so deeply in love with Asra had he not, in some spiritual sense, already married another woman? Might scripture not sanction such heart-polygamy?

In other words, the Friend was all bound up with Asra, and Coleridge's feelings for Asra. Why did Coleridge decide on The Friend as title for his magazine? He was advised against it: people who didn't know better, he was told, would assume it to be a Quaker journal, which might limit circulation. But Coleridge was adamant. His previous attempt as a magazine had been The Watchmen, and his eighteenth-century prototype for the entire enterprise was expressly the Spectator: in 1804 Coleridge wrote in his Notebook that ‘I should like to dare look forward to the Time when Wordsworth & I with contributions from Lamb and Southey—& from a few others should publish a Spectator’ [Notebooks, 2:2074]. But merely spectating, or even watching as a guardian might, no longer chimed with what Coleridge wanted. He was looking now for a friend: in Latin amicus or amica (has anybody wondered what the gender of Coleridge's magazine's title is?) a word hovering between the more distant friend and the more intimate lover—its root is amo, I love, after all (the Greek φίλος similarly balances between friend and lover in meaning).

It seems that Coleridge had had enough of spectating, or of being spectated. At exactly the time, in the last months of 1808, that he was formalising The Friend with a detailed prospectus to be distributed to possible subscribers he was also writing Wordsworth a long letter of passionate accusation expressive of his heart-sickness with respect to Asra. We no longer have that letter but we do have a draft of Wordsworth's reply, which, to quote Richard Holmes again, ‘by trying to refute Coleridge's accusations point by point’ thus gives us ‘some idea of what Coleridge had actually written to him’:
It is a series of most intimate reproaches: they had supervised Asra's letters; they had regarded his influence as ‘poison entering into her mind’; they had told Asra that she was ‘the cause’ of all his misery. It's clear that Wordsworth was shocked ... Coleridge's accusations [he replied] were made ‘in a lamentably insane state of mind’. His obsession with Asra, and suspicions over Wordsworth's own conduct towards her, his ‘transports of passion’, were all ‘unmanly and ungentlemanly’ and the product of a perverted sexual imagination. [Holmes, Coleridge: Darker Reflections, 139]
Coleridge clearly felt that he was being unfairly surveiled, even spied upon (it would make sense, I think, to date Coleridge's Verecundia poem to the end of 1808: it's also about this fevered mood)

To return to his expansive translation of the Erasmus passage in this context is to be struck by the way he renders the one word sycophantes not once but into four separate terms: once as ‘sycophant’, then again by picking up Madan's ‘Informer’ and expanding it into ‘the baseness of an Informer [and] a false witness to boot!’ and finally by doubling up ‘sycophant’ with ‘pander’. Something in this plain-seeming paragraph from Erasmus touched a tender spot in Coleridge's subconscious, and it has more to do with than just its ostensible content of exhorting his readers to keep an open mind. Pander, with its sexual meaning, mingles with the sense of a spy in the house, an informer against him, a general dishonesty, all connected intimately with Coleridge's friend-who-is-more-than-a-friend.

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