Sold – Coleridge Articulates His Philosophy in Assessing Channing

I have been more absorbed in the depth of the Mystery of Spiritual Life - he more engrossed by the loveliness of the manifestations.

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The 19th century saw the emergence of a native American literary and philosophical movement, Transcendentalism. In the town of Concord, Mass., Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, Bronson Alcott and others, raised in an environment of bleak Calvinism, turned inward for answers, rejected establishment doctrine and wrote prolifically and...

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Sold – Coleridge Articulates His Philosophy in Assessing Channing

I have been more absorbed in the depth of the Mystery of Spiritual Life - he more engrossed by the loveliness of the manifestations.

The 19th century saw the emergence of a native American literary and philosophical movement, Transcendentalism. In the town of Concord, Mass., Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, Bronson Alcott and others, raised in an environment of bleak Calvinism, turned inward for answers, rejected establishment doctrine and wrote prolifically and famously on self reliance.  But this movement grew from a seed planted on the other side of the Atlantic, where a British literary giant translated the works of German philosophers like Schiller and Kant for the eyes of English-speakers to read. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a poet, philosopher, and romantic visionary, an inescapable presence in early 19th-century England. John Stuart Mill coupled him with Jeremy Bentham as “the two great seminal minds of England of their age.” In 1796, after making waves in backing the Unitarian movement at Cambridge, Coleridge took up the study of German and brought back with him many works he would translate.  Coleridge matched the German metaphysical bent with his romantic inclinations.  He would eventually abandon Unitarianism altogether. “I make the greatest difference between ans and isms. I should deal insincerely with you if I said I thought Unitarianism was Christianity,” he wrote, “but God forbid that I should doubt that..many…Unitarians…are very good Christians.”  This was in 1805.

The next year, intrigued by an exhibition he had seen in London, he went to Rome to meet the young Washington Allston, the similarly minded American romantic artist.  Allston would paint his portrait, now at Harvard.  Both men had that unique transcendental outlook that placed perception and reason, intuition, on a high plane.  Both had lofty and romantic ambitions and the two remained lifelong friends. Coleridge, along with Wordsworth, would launch the British Romantic age; Allston would pioneer the American Romantic movement.  This relationship would form Coleridge’s transatlantic bridge.  In 1812, he published The Friend, which presented the philosophy of Friedrich Schelling in elegant and inspirational English.  In 1817, he published the enigmatic and dense Biographia Literaria, in which he made a vital contribution to Transcendental poetic theory in his discussion of the Imagination.

With these two works he established himself on the American screen.  But the link was not complete. 

Dr. William Ellery Channing was an active Unitarian minister, the leading preacher of that church in the U.S., whose productive years predated and anticipated many of the ideas adopted by Emerson and Theodore Parker, in particular, so much that Emerson would say respectfully, “He is our Bishop.”  Unlike Emerson, Channing never broke with the church and so his interactions with his contemporaries of that school are a fascinating window into its development.  What we now know as Transcendentalism first arose among liberal New England Congregationalists who opposed the Puritan picture of inescapable human depravity.  They emphasized unity rather than the “Trinity” of God (hence the term “Unitarian,” originally a term of abuse that they came to adopt).  Channing’s sermon “Unitarian Christianity” (1819) helped give the Unitarian movement its name. Emerson began as a minister there and famously split with it later.  This mirrors Coleridge’s progression.  Channing never formally left.

In 1823, Channing left New England for Europe to recover his failing health. While there, he sought a meeting with Coleridge and to do so, he turned to his brother in law, Washington Allston.  Channing would be the first of that American philosophical circle to meet with Coleridge.  The two straddled the Transcendental line at the very dawn of its creation, the one a man of the church, the other now an outsider looking in.  Allston was the pivot point for all that followed, providing an introduction, a sounding board for Coleridge and a window for a growing American school of thinking to the sources of information from which they culled much of their greatest accomplishments. What did Coleridge think of this free thinking Unitarian?  He wrote Allston, and showed some of the appreciation that would cause so many strict Transcendentalists to love Channing, while simultaneously highlighting the differences. It is also evocative of the great philosophical debates that would happen a decade later when Emerson would meet Coleridge and Thomas Carlyle. In this letter, Coleridge spells out in Transcendental terminology his life’s aims.

Autograph Letter Signed, Highgate, June 13, 1823, to “My dear Allston. It was more than a gratification – it was a great comfort for all of us to see, sit, walk and converse with two such dear and dearly respected friends of yours as Mr. and Mrs. Channing. Mr. C.  could not be said to have known in part before. It is enough to add that the reality differed from my previous conception of it only by being more amiable, more discriminating, and more free from prejudices than my experience had permitted me to anticipate. His affection for the Good as the Good, and his earnestness for the True as the True, with that harmonious subordination of the latter to the former without encroachment on the absolute worth of either, present in him a character which in my heart’s heart I believe to be the very rarest on earth. If you will excuse a play on words in speaking of such a man, I will say that Mr. Channing is a philosopher in both the possible renderings of the word. He has the Love of Wisdom and the Wisdom of Love. I was unfortunately absent (at Sir George Beaumont’s) evening. Had they been prevented from reparting their visit, I should have been vexed indeed – and yet not so much vexed as (I now know) I should have had reason to be. I feel convinced that the few  differences in opinion between Mr. Channing and myself not only are, but would by him be found to be, apparent not real – the same Truth seen in different relations. Perhaps I have been more absorbed in the depth of the Mystery of Spiritual Life – he more engrossed by the loveliness of the manifestations.

“But what should I say of Mrs. Channing? I was no little pleased, but that I dislike the phrase, I should say flattered, by the opinion or fancy of Mrs. Gilman & her sisters, that there was a likeness in her of my countenance. She certainly reminded me strongly of my half sister, who was the very image of my Father. Be this as it may, Mrs. Channing is one of those women who seem made for a man of sense and sensibility to have been mad in love with under thirty, and to love and honor truly and cordially even to his 80th year – or for five score and ten, if he lived so long.

“Thus I, and thus your affectionate friends Mr. and Mrs. Gilman think of your dear relatives. What they think of us, and how we all are, you will hear from them. The only thing that gave us any pain – and we could not so entirely conquer ourselves as to hear it unpained – is the small or no chance of your returning to England, even as a sojourner. You will hear from Leslie of Haydon’s affairs – his debts (Sir George B. told me) amount to L10,000!! And O! that that were the worst of the evil. That worthy man, Wilkie, is indefatigable in his exertions for him. I will not speak of Haydon’s colossal picture of Lazarus – for one of the very few disagreements in matters of taste between you and me was our appreciations of his genius. God bless you, my dear friend Allston! and your affectionate friend, S.T. Coleridge.

“P.S. Sir George’s Lady B. always enquires after you, & at least half an hour’s talk follows of you & your works. He spoke on Tuesday of Haydon’s Lazarus as almost worthy of Michelangelo. I told him frankly and with perfect sincerity that I had never heard that said without thinking it a great exaggeration, one only instance accepted. And that was your dead man revived by touching the bones of the prophet. I did not see Haydon till the morning after I went with Lady B. I strove to divest my mind of every prejudice, but could not do away or recover from my first impression – that that it was a very commonplace, theatrical conception – the true ghost stalk & ghost stare.”

Coleridge’s references in the second part of this letter are to Benjamin Haydon and his work, the Resurrection of Lazarus, which was completed but put him into serious debt. He would end up in debtors prison as a result.  C.R. Leslie was another artist friend of Allston.  Coleridge and Allston often forged their philosophical debates around art.

In 1825, Coleridge wrote Aids to Reflection, and in 1829 it was published in the U.S. with an introduction by Dr. James Marsh, the president of the University of Vermont.  This book, which almost single-handedly initiated the American Transcendentalist movement, refuted the sensationalist school of John Locke, fused the material and the spiritual, and advanced the crucial distinction between the Reason and the Understanding.

What did Channing think of Coleridge?  He would later claim that he owed more to Coleridge than almost any other philosopher. As Octavius Frothingham, the first historian of Transcendentalism wrote, “The brilliant men of his period acknowledged his surpassing brilliancy; the deep men confessed his depth; the spiritual men went to him for inspiration…the name of Coleridge was spoken with reverence, his books were studied industriously, and the terminology of transcendentalism was as familiar in the circles of divines and men of letters.”

Channing returned to the pulpit to preach his brand of Unitary doctrine, though his frailty required an assistant. As Charles Brooks writes in William Ellery Channing: A Centennial Memorial, “It was now that Dr. Channing established his literary fame.”  His sermon on a “modern ministry” appeared in 1824.  His articles were also published beginning in 1825 in the Christian Examiner, in which his conviction in the divinity of the human soul was evident.

This famous letter was obtained from the descendants of Washington Allston and has never been offered for sale before. It has been published in The Life of William Ellery Channing, by William Ellery Channing; The Coleridge Connection, by Thomas McFarland; and The Correspondence of Washington Allston, by Washington Allston. 

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