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Maurice as a Commentator on Coleridge
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
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Coleridge's disciples fall into two classes: those who, like J. H. Green, felt themselves to be the appointed custodians of Coleridge's teachings and who set about the scholarly business of collecting, completing, systematizing, editing, interpreting, and preserving Coleridge's writings and sayings; and those who, like J. C. Hare and Frederick Denison Maurice, were interested chiefly in extracting from Coleridge's teaching what would be food for their own minds, and truth confirmed by their own experience. The first group of disciples sought to make Coleridge accessible and understandable; the second group attempted to apply and test what he had taught. The comments of both groups upon their teacher may be of value. Of special importance, however, are the comments of Maurice, who, a devoted but discriminating student of Coleridge and a disciple whose whole life gave testimony as to both the worth and the shortcomings of Coleridge's message, was in his own day, a prolific writer and influential teacher.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1938
References
1 The main sources of information about Maurice are The Life of Frederick Denison Maurice, Chiefly Told in His Own Letters, edited by his son, Frederick Maurice, 2 vols., 3rd edition (London, 1884) [hereafter cited as the Life]; and Maurice's own writings. The English periodicals of Maurice's day carry many articles concerning him. Charles E. Raven gives a scholarly account of Maurice's relation to the Christian Socialist movement in Christian Socialism 1848–54 (London, 1920). See also C. F. G. Masterman, Frederick Denison Maurice (London, 1907); Pieter Blaauw, F. D. Maurice, Zijn Leven en Werken (Amsterdam, 1908); C. R. Sanders, The Relation of F. D. Maurice to Coleridge, doctoral dissertation, typewritten, University of Chicago, June, 1934; and my articles: “Was F. D. Maurice a Broad-Churchman?” Church History, iii (1934), 222–231; “Coleridge as a Champion of Liberty,” SP, xxxii (1935), 618–631; and “Coleridge, F. D. Maurice, and the Distinction Between the Reason and the Understanding,” PMLA, li (1936), 459–475. My book on Coleridge and the Broad-Church Movement is in preparation. I am aware of no recent studies of Maurice except my own.
2 Life, i, 176.
3 Ibid.
4 In 1830 Arthur Hallam wrote to Gladstone that Maurice had created the spirit, though not the form, of the Apostles' Club (ibid., i, 110). See also ibid., i, 56, 165; and T. Wemys Reid, The Life, Letters, and Friendships of Richard Monckton Milnes, First Lord Houghton (New York, 1891), i, 197.
5 Life, i, 176.
6 Ibid.
7 J. C. Hare, Memoir of John Sterling, in Sterling's Essays and Tales (London, 1848), i, cxviii ff., xiv ff., cxxxvi.
8 Life, i, 56.
9 Hare, op. cit., i, xiv ff. J. C. Hare, Preface to The Mission of the Comforter (Boston, 1854), pp. xv–xviii. F. D. Maurice, “Essay on Hare's Position in the Church,” in Hare's Victory of Faith, ed. E. H. Plumptre, 3rd ed. (London, 1874), p. xxxvi f. [hereafter cited as “Hare's Position”].
10 Life, i, 177.
11 John Stuart Mill, Autobiography (New York, 1924), pp. 90–109.
12 “New School of Cockneyism,” Metropolitan Quarterly Magazine, i, 39.
13 “Age of Folly,” idem, ii, 266 n.
14 “Review of Montgomery's Pelican Island,” Westminster Review, viii, 314.
15 Ibid., pp. 317–318.
16 Ibid., p. 318.
17 Life, i, 78–79.
18 See John Sterling and Ralph Waldo Emerson, A Correspondence (Boston and New York, 1897), pp. 41–42; and Maurice's “Dedication” to The Kingdom of Christ, from the 2nd London edition (New York and Philadelphia, 1843), pp. 5–6; his Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy (New York and London, 1890), ii, 664–665; and his Sequel to the Inquiry, What Is Revelation? (Cambridge and London, 1860), pp. 178–179.
19 Life, i, 65.
20 “Mr. Jeffrey and the Edinburgh Review,”- Athenaeum, Jan. 23, 1828, pp. 49–50.
21 “Mr. Moore,” Athenaeum, Feb. 22, 1828, p. 130.
22 “Maria Edgeworth,” idem, March 28, 1828, p. 289 n.
23 “Lord Byron,” idem, April 8, 1828, p. 351.
24 Maurice consistently maintained that Coleridge should be thought of, not as a theorist and a dreamer, but as one who labored “to procure the most practical benefits for his country and for mankind” (“Dedication” to The Kingdom of Christ, p. 18). Late in life he said that Coleridge's influence was weakened just so far as Coleridge yielded to the unpractical tendencies of his mind, and that his strength came from being “in contact with the actual things which other men were thinking of, and with the thoughts which those things were awakening” (Moral arid Metaphysical Philosophy, ii, 666). Coleridge's “peculiar merit and honour,” he asserted, lay in his careful examination of subjects which “were not those to which he would have been inclined, either by his poetical or his metaphysical tendencies,” but which were “exactly those which other men were discussing in the spirit of the time” (“Dedication” to The Kingdom of Christ, pp. 13–14).
25 “Mr. Crabbe,” Athenaeum, July 30, 1828, p. 623.
26 See Coleridge's The Friend, Works, ed. W. G. T. Shedd (New York, 1884), ii, 130–137.
27 “Review of T. Davies' The Estimate of the Human Mind,” Athenaeum, Aug. 6, 1828, pp. 641–642, 642 n.
28 “Review of Hares' Guesses at Truth,” idem, Aug. 13, 1828, p. 656.
29 “Lord Byron's Monument,” idem, Oct. 1, 1828, p. 768.
30 See Sir Edward Strachey, “Recollections of F. D. Maurice,” Cornhill Magazine, ixxv (1897), p. 537; Maurice's “Dedication” to The Kingdom of Christ, p. 6; and the Life, i, 176.
31 “Dedication” to The Kingdom of Christ, p. 6.
32 J. C. Hare, Memoir of John Sterling, i, xiv–xvi.
33 Ibid., i, xiv ff. Sterling's notes, which Hare printed, show how skillfully Sterling could communicate his impression of Coleridge's talk. See also a letter which Sterling wrote to R. C. Trench very soon after Sterling's first visit to Coleridge. R. C. Trench, Letters and Memorials (London, 1888), i, 8–9. The most celebrated, though probably not the most trustworthy, account of Coleridge's conversation is of course that in Carlyle's Life of John Sterling (Boston, 1851), pp. 69–80. See also the lines on Coleridge's talk in Arthur Hallam's “Timbucktoo,” Poems (London and New York, 1893), pp. 25–26, beginning “Methought I saw a face whose every line.” One of the most amusing comments on Coleridge's talk is that of Dean Milman, given in Caroline Fox's Memories of Old Friends (Philadelphia, 1882), p. 320. Milman, who heard Coleridge talk many times, said: “I used to be wicked enough to divide it [C's talk] into three parts: one third was admirable, beautiful in language and exalted in thought; another third was sheer absolute nonsense; and of the remaining third, I knew not whether it were sense or nonsense.”
34 Trench, op. cit., i, 135; cf. also pp. 163–164.
35 Eustace Conway (London, 1834), iii, 27.
36 Ibid., ii, 171–172.
37 The whole letter is printed in the Life, i, 164–165. John Stuart Mill, in a letter to Carlyle, also praised Eustace Conway very highly. J. S. Mill, Letters (London, New York, etc., 1910), i, 99.
38 Trench, op. cit., i, 163–164. By 1853, if not before, Maurice had lost confidence in Green's ability to do justice to Coleridge's philosophy (Life, ii, 194).
39 See Coleridge's Constitution of the Church and State According to the Idea of Each, Works, vi, 53.
40 Life, i, 224. Cf. also Maurice's Has the Church or the State the Power to Educate the Nation? (London, 1839), p. 364.
41 Life, i, 203.
42 Ibid., i, 250–251.
43 Strachey, op. cit., pp. 545 ff.
44 P. 7.
45 Ibid. Maurice was fond of quoting Coleridge's poetry. See The Kingdom of Christ, p. 376; Life, i, 261; The Old Testament (London, 1851), pp. 102–103; The Patriarchs and Lawgivers of the Old Testament (5th ed.; London, 1878), p. 121; Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy, ii, 668–669.
46 “Dedication” to The Kingdom of Christ, p. 6.
47 Ibid., p.8.
48 Ibid., pp. 9–10.
49 Ibid., pp. 10–12.
50 Ibid.
51 Ibid., pp. 12–13.
52 Ibid., p. 13.
53 Maurice's first wife and Sterling's wife were sisters.
54 Life, i, 502.
55 Tennyson's beautiful poem inviting Maurice to visit him on the Isle of Wight was written at this time. As Maurice gradually became a more conspicuous public figure, contemporary observers, some of whom noted the Coleridge leaven working in Maurice's thought, praised or denounced him according to their own beliefs. Derwent Coleridge, about 1840, said that he rejoiced to detect his father's influence in Maurice's The Kingdom of Christ (“Dedication” to The Kingdom of Christ, p. [5]). In 1846 Lady Caroline Fox, after talking with Derwent Coleridge, wrote of him: “He feels the likeness between Maurice's method and aim and that of S. T. Coleridge, and devoutly loves it accordingly” (Memories of Old Friends, p. 224). In February, 1840, there appeared in the Eclectic Review (lxxi, 163) a review of the first edition of The Kingdom of Christ (1838) in which the anonymous author attacked Maurice for having “utterly betrayed the cause of his own church, by having followed out his own ‘idea,‘ or Coleridge's, to the neglect of the Spirit's mind in the Word.” Maurice wrote that the only two reviews of this book which he knew, the one an attack, the other complimentary, both associated his name with Coleridge's (“Dedication” to The Kingdom of Christ, p. 6). The article in the Eclectic was probably one of these. I have been unable to find the other. In December, 1848, William Palmer, then editor of the English Review, in an unsigned article in that magazine entitled “On Tendencies towards the Subversion of Faith,” launched a savage attack on Hare, Bunsen, Carlyle, Coleridge, Emerson, Thirlwall, Maurice, Francis Newman, Mill, Samuel Wilberforce, Thomas Arnold, and R. C. Trench, a group of men whom he associated with the deceased John Sterling. Sterling, Palmer said, was a very dangerous character, Coleridge's most ardent disciple and a person who sympathized with Coleridge's vicious fondness for German philosophy. Palmer declared that Coleridge had brought to England the philosophy from which the questionable tendencies of all these men had sprung. The brunt of his attack fell on Hare and Maurice, both of whom were quick to assert their loyalty to Coleridge (Life, i, 504–506). Carlyle, in The Life of John Sterling, written to some extent as a protest against Hare's Memoir of Sterling, represented Coleridge and Maurice in none too favorable a
light. When he was writing the biography (1851), Carlyle seemed to consider Maurice an antagonist who, in the period following Coleridge's death, when Sterling was gradually getting away from Coleridge's influence and slipping more and more under Carlyle's, was always ready to remind Sterling of his former teacher.
56 “Dedicatory Letter” to The Doctrine of Sacrifice (new ed.; London, 1879), p. xiv.
57 “Essay on Hare's Position,” pp. xxxvi–xliii.—In 1856 James Martineau published in the National Review (iii, 452 ff.) an article entitled “Personal Influences on Our Present Theology” which was probably the most clear, scholarly, and accurate discussion of Maurice's relation to Coleridge that appeared in Maurice's lifetime. Martineau said that Hare and Maurice were the men through whom Coleridge's “Platonic gospel” had passed into the heart of the new generation. He declared that religious Realism, the inner essence
of Coleridge's philosophy, was the “living seed” of the development in Maurice's school. He added: “It is chiefly from inapprehension of this character, and from the inveterate training of the English mind in the opposite habit of thought, that so many readers complain of obscurity in the writings of the Chaplain of Lincoln's Inn [Maurice].” Martineau connected both Coleridge and Maurice with the reaction against empirical psychology, utilitarian ethics, and the academic text-books by Locke and Paley which both studied at Cambridge.
58 “Mr. Kingsley and the Saturday Review,” Macmillan's Magazine, i (1859), 119. One of the most able attacks on Coleridge and his followers appeared in 1857. It was launched in the form of a book entitled Modern Anglican Theology, the author of which, J. H. Rigg, a staunch Methodist, argued with considerable skill, but with unrestrained emotion and inadequate comprehension, from the Evangelical point of view. He described Coleridge's followers in this manner: “Hare was the freest and most independent, as he was the most distinguished, of this school: Maurice and Kingsley, Siamese twins in theology, though very different in genius, are its present chief representatives.”
59 Pp. 178–179. Maurice also defended (p. 113) the passage in the Aids to Reflection where Coleridge makes the distinction between “Mathesis, or the process by which a student like Pythagoras arrived at a truth in Geometry, and the process of enunciating and demonstrating the same truth.”
60 New ed. (London and New York, 1890), ii, 214–216.
61 Ibid., ii, 665.
62 Ibid., ii, 665–666.
63 Ibid., ii, 669–670.
64 Ibid., ii, 670.
65 Ibid., ii, 671–672. In the Bibliotheca Sacra for October, 1865, J. M. Hoppin published an article identifying Maurice with the “new Coleridgean school.” Its dominant characteristic, he said, was the special emphasis which it placed on the distinction between the reason and the understanding (p. 653).
66 Second ed. (London, 1872), pp. 42–43.
67 Life, i, 176–177.
68 “Preface to the Third Edition,” The Prophets and Kings of the Old Testament (London, 1879), pp. xvi-xvii.
69 Space here permits only a brief summary of Maurice's somewhat extensive strictures on Coleridge. Maurice asserted that Coleridge's teachings, although invaluable, were not entirely adequate for the new generation. He deplored what he considered Coleridge's failure to be a consistent disciple of Plato and the fondness for closely defined logical terms, the use of formal intellectual devices, and the desire to construct a complete system of philosophy which to him indicated that Coleridge was partly under the influence of Aristotle. He said that as a critic Coleridge displayed “an acquired incapacity for looking straight at a man,” overintellectualized his material, and was too much addicted to logical formulas, technical literary terms, and long sentences. When thus objecting to the lack of simplicity in Coleridge's language, he was particularly hostile toward Coleridge's distinction between subjective and objective and was greatly displeased at its growing popularity. He also found fault with Coleridge for indulging too much in abstract thought and thus ignoring “facts” in his search for “truth.”
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