Thursday 10 May 2018

Coleridge and Wordsworth: Jerome and Paul


In the middle of a discussion of political matters, and the need for Governments to follow principles of sound and religious Reason, Coleridge drops-in a reference to his onetime collaborator Wordsworth. Matters were actually a little strained between the two men 1809-10, but Coleridge praises his friend effusively here:
But if my readers wish to see the question of the efficacy of principles and popular opinions for evil and for good proved and illustrated with an eloquence worthy of the subject, I can refer them with the hardiest anticipation of their thanks, to the late work concerning the relations of Great Britain, Spain, and Portugal, by my honoured friend, William Wordsworth, quem quoties lego, non verba mihi videor audire, sed tonitrua! [Friend, 1:182]
The reference is to Wordsworth's pamphlet On the Convention of Cintra (1809), and the Latin means ‘when I read him it seems to me I am not hearing words, but thunder!’ But where's it from? ‘Source untraced’ says Barbara Rooke, ‘but perhaps Coleridge's’.

It's not Coleridge's, though: it's Saint Jerome's (there he is, at the head of this post, nattily painted by Domenico Ghirlandaio, 1480). It's from his Regula Monachorum and refers to Saint Paul—Donne quotes the Latin in his Sermon XLIV, which is where I think Coleridge came across the phrase. Jerome, of course, is most famous for translating holy scripture into Latin, the great Vulgate Bible still in use today.

What's interesting about this, I think, is the way this quotation is used not only to praise Wordsworth's thunderous eloquence, but, tacitly, to position Coleridge as Jerome to Wordsworth's Paul. That would be characteristic of STC's attitudes more generally, actually: that Wordsworth was the one genuinely inspired, and Coleridge just the bookish and scholarly drudge, plugging away interpreting the inspiration of others. It's not true, of course (however great Wordsworth was as a poet he neither wrote nor was capable of writing a poem as exceptional as ‘Kubla Khan’) but it was Coleridge's view, and it acquires extra emotional piquancy following the difficulties of C.'s post-EPOCH relations to W.

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