The Sun newspaper was now vaguely aware that something historic was taking place in the obscure court off Fleet Street. “The critical appearance of this Gentleman in public constitutes a prominent feature in the Literature of the times…” But Coleridge had hardly begun.
Crabb Robinson was torn between admiration and frustration. “They have been brilliant; that is, in passages; but I doubt much his capacity to render them popular.” What audience would follow his “musing over conceptions and imaginings beyond the reach of the analytic faculty”? Worse was Coleridge’s maddening habit of “apologizing, anticipating and repeating” instead of pressing forward into his subject: after four lectures they were still “in the prolegomena” and chewing over definitions of poetry. Yet Robinson always “left the room with satisfaction”, and was impressed by the large, philosophic approach.
Indeed he now had a German friend with him, a Herr Bernard Krusve, “who is delighted to find the logic & the rhetoric of his Country delivered in a foreign language. There is no doubt that Coleridge’s mind is much more German than English. My friend has pointed out striking analogies between C. & German authors whom he has never seen.”134 This was the first shadowy reference to the influence of A. W. Schlegel, which was soon to receive less welcome attention.
On 27 November, Lamb hosted a lively evening of port and post-mortems on the lectures so far. Hazlitt (who was about to start his own rival lectures at the Russell Institute) seemed particularly grudging at first: Coleridge’s definitions were “not distinct & clear”; his concept of “excitement” was unsatisfactory; his criticism of the dramatic unities had been partly anticipated by “Dr Sam Johnson of Lichfield”; and the best of his Shakespeare quotations had been supplied by Hazlitt himself. Rickman thought Coleridge didn’t always understand his own definitions. Lamb gently insisted on his originality, and was intrigued by the idea of Shakespeare “transferring himself” in spirit to the Nurse. Dyer thought he was “the fittest man for a Lecturer he had ever known”, particularly as he was always lecturing in private. Then Hazlitt, with one of his characteristic switches from witty criticism to ironic praise, said Coleridge still had “more ideas” than any other person he had ever known, but always “pushed matters” so far that he “became obscure to every body but himself”.135
The next four lectures (Nos 5–8) were based on Love’s Labours Lost and Romeo and Juliet, and Shakespeare’s subtle exploration of the varieties of love. He made particularly fine presentations of the character and psychology of Romeo, Mercutio and the Nurse. Of Romeo Coleridge observed with feeling: “Love is not like hunger: Love is an associative quality…What was the first effect of love, but to associate the feeling with every object in nature: the trees whisper, the roses exhale their perfumes, the nightingales sing…Romeo became enamoured of the ideal he had formed in his own mind & then as it were christened the first real being as that which he desired. He appeared to be in love with Rosaline, but in truth he was only in love with his own idea.”136
Mercutio, whose death was the structural key to “the whole catastrophe of the Play”, was also a subtle variation on the psychological theme of ardent youth. He was a man “possessing all the elements of a Poet: high fancy; rapid thoughts; the whole world was as it were subject to his law of association…”137 The Nurse, on the other hand, provided the tender counter-point of love in old age, and demonstrated Shakespeare’s astonishing ability to orchestrate varied characters around a single emotional theme. “Thus in the Nurse you had all the garrulity of old age and all its fondness, which was one of the great consolations of humanity.” Then Coleridge added one of those gentle, pensive comments with which he could always transfix his audience. “He had often thought what a melancholy world it would be without children, and what an inhuman world without the aged.”138
As Coleridge grew more confident with his audience, assured of holding their attention and making them laugh, he developed one of his most characteristic traits as a lecturer: the brilliantly suggestive aside. They are rarely in his Notes, and the shorthand reporters had to work hard to catch them, particularly as they often depend on a spontaneous flash of poetic imagery. But a few were successfully caught on the wing. Of Shakespeare’s puns, with their innocent energy, he suddenly observed: “they seemed as it were the first openings of the mouth of Nature”.139 Shakespeare’s wit was “like the flourishing of a man’s stick when he is walking along in the full flow of animal spirits. It was a sort of overflow of hilarity…”140
Homer’s epics were “like a ship that had left a train of glory in its wake”.141 French poetry attained its effects “by peculiar turns of phrase, which like the beautiful coloured dust on the wings of a butterfly must not be judged of by touch”.142 The natural talent for poetry first showed in exuberance and linguistic extravagance, “it would be a hopeless symptom if he found a young man with perfect taste”.143
The mature poet remained in some sense “unsubdued, unshackled by custom”: he combined “the wonder of a child” with the “inquisitive powers of his manhood”. “The Poet is not only the man made to solve the riddle of the Universe, but he is also the man who feels where it is not solved, and [this] continually awakens his feelings…What is old and worn out, not in itself but from the dimness of the intellectual eye brought on by worldly passions, he makes new: he pours upon it the dew that glistens, and blows round us the breeze which cooled us in childhood.”144
With the conclusion of Lecture 8 on 12 December, Coleridge had reached the half-way point in the series, though he had hardly touched on more than a handful of plays. The problem was his old habit of digression, which sometimes led him spectacularly astray. In Lecture 6 he was diverted for half an hour on to the Bell–Lancaster controversy and his débâcle at the Royal Institution, in the middle of which Lamb leaned across and whispered to Robinson: “this is not so much amiss. Coleridge said in his advertisement he would speak about the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet, and so he is delivering the lecture in the character of the Nurse.” Robinson agreed, “the man is absolutely incorrigible. But his vitia are indeed, splendida.”145
By contrast Lecture 7 was “incomparably the best” since No. 2. “C. declaimed with great eloquence on Love, without wandering from his subject, Romeo and Juliet. He was spirited for the greater part, intelligible though profound. And he was methodical…”146 In Lecture 8 he was thrown off track again, this time by an interminable disquisition on the “natural morality” of sexual passion, “brotherly and sisterly affections”, and the ancient taboo against incest and “the law preserved in the Temple of Isis”.147 Some familiar demons from the Grasmere days stirred behind this “rhapsody”, but Robinson thought it the “worst” so far, and for once “lost all power of attending him any longer”.148
Yet the gathering impact of the lectures was formidable, and news of the series began to spread in various influential quarters. Sir George Beaumont sent a gift of money and announced that he would be directing his carriage towards Fleet Street. Lord Byron, who had heard rousing gossip of the “reformed schismatic” in the St James’s clubs, decided to get up a party with the banker-poet Sam Rogers – if he could fit it in between play-going and dinners.149
The painter George Dawe, newly appointed Associate of the Royal Academy, decided to make Coleridge and his work the theme of his submission to the annual Spring Exhibition at the Academy’s galleries in Piccadilly. He took a plaster life-mask (a process which Coleridge endured without “any expression of Pain or Uneasiness” despite the enforced silence for several hours), made the cast for a bust, drew a crayon portrait, and began work on a large painting to illustrate one of Coleridge’s ballads. It is interesting that his choice fell on “Love” (which he titled “Genevieve”) rather than “The Ancient Mariner”, suggesting how little Coleridge’s poetry was still known to the general public. “Love” had last been published almost a decade previously in Wordsworth’s 1802 edition of the Lyrical Ballads. But Coleridge was delighted, considering the pict
ure “very beautiful”, and the crayon portrait “far more like than any former attempt, excepting Allston’s”.150
Yet it was hardly flattering, showing a fat and melancholy personage surrounded by his books, eyes raised to heaven and waistcoat bulging, slumped in thought with one arm over the back of an easy chair. It was difficult to imagine this indolent, supine, suffering creature delivering what Robinson called his “immethodical rhapsodies…abounding in brilliant thoughts, fine flashes of rhetoric, ingenious paradoxes…”151 But perhaps that was why Coleridge liked it: it still suggested that “indolence capable of energies” he had described to John Thelwall nearly fifteen years before.
13
At this half-way point in the series, one other signal event occurred. Coleridge finally got hold of a German copy of Schlegel’s Lectures. At the same moment, in the most delicate manner possible, he was first accused of plagiarism: the spectre that would haunt the rest of his career.
A revealing account appeared in a letter which Coleridge hastily drafted on the weekend before his ninth lecture. The draft was written on the back of a handbill advertising his 21 November lecture, and later annotated “intended to have been copied and sent to Lord B[yron]”, though this may have been an afterthought. Coleridge wrote:
After the close of my Lecture on Romeo and Juliet [No. 8], a German Gentleman, a Mr Bernard Krusve, introduced himself to me, and after some courteous Compliments said, Were it not almost impossible, I must have believed that you had either heard or read my Countryman Schlegel’s Lecture on this play, given at Vienna: the principles, thought, and the very illustrations are so nearly the same – But the Lectures were but just published as I left Germany, scarcely more than a week since – and the only two Copies of the Work in England I have reason to think, that I myself brought over. One I retain: the other is at Mr Boosy’s [bookseller] – I replied that I had not even heard of these Lectures, nor had indeed seen any work of Schlegel’s except a volume of translations from Spanish Poetry, which the Baron von Humboldt had lent me when I was at Rome.152
This circumstantial account is a fine amalgam of truth and falsehood. From all the notes and shorthand reports of the first eight lectures, it is clear that Coleridge had not yet seen Schlegel’s lectures as such. But he certainly knew of their existence, and it is nonsense to suggest that he was not aware of Schlegel’s Shakespeare criticism in general. He had very probably read Schlegel’s famous essay on Romeo and Juliet, published in 1798 (there are echoes of it in Lecture No. 8). He had praised Schlegel’s work on Shakespeare to Von Humboldt in 1806, and urgently asked Robinson to obtain the new Schlegel Lectures on 6 November 1811. He was more familiar with the new German Romantic criticism than anyone else in England. Even in the 1808 lectures Crabb Robinson had noted with admiration his specific references to Herder, Lessing, Schiller and Kant – and indeed he had openly championed the revolutionary German approach as superior to the Shakespeare criticism of Johnson or Pope.153 Part of his claim to originality (as a good deal of the charges of “obscurity and paradox”) lay precisely in his daring interpretations of German theory, combined with his own uniquely poetic and psychological approach. He was “anxious” to read Schelgel as the latest advance in “Continental” criticism, and he fully intended to use him in forthcoming lectures, which he did in a way already suggested by his private adaptations of Jean-Paul Richter.
What seems so puzzling is not the question of Schlegel’s influence at all, but Coleridge’s panic and mendacity when challenged about it. Instead of proclaiming his knowledge and intentions, he hid them. This guilty reflex suggests an almost pathological failure of self-confidence. He felt all his work would be shown up as valueless by a hostile critic, and that he would be shown to have done nothing, thought nothing, written nothing on his own account.
According to the letter, Mr Krusve called round to Hammersmith the following morning and “made him a present” of Schlegel. Coleridge read it avidly over the weekend, and found it full of “anticipations” of his own work. This he stated quite openly, giving the reasonable explanation that as they had both studied Kant, their criticism had developed not merely on parallel lines but on closely overlapping ones, outside the English tradition. He freely admitted that it looked astonishingly as if he had plagiarized Schlegel. “Not in one Lecture, but in all the Lectures that related to Shakespeare, or to Poetry in general, the Grounds, Train of Reasoning etc. were different in language only – & often not even in that – The Thoughts too were so far peculiar, that to the best of my knowledge they did not exist in any prior work of Criticism.”
Yet Coleridge still firmly denied plagiarism. He explained, with every appearance of conviction, that he had “anticipated” Schlegel in the 1808 and the first half of the 1811 series. “Yet I was far more flattered, or to speak more truly, I was more confirmed, than surprised. For Schlegel and myself had both studied deeply and perseverantly the philosophy of Kant, the distinguishing feature of which is to treat every subject in reference to the operation of the mental Faculties, to which it specially appertains…” They drew the “same trains of reasoning from the same principles”, and they wrote “to one purpose & with one spirit”.154
This part of the letter seems an admirable statement of his position. For the rest, he expanded into a general discussion of plagiarism in poetry, and made a generous defence of Scott’s apparent borrowings from “Christabel”. He summed up: “He who can catch the Spirit of an original, has it already.” There is no evidence that Coleridge ever sent this letter to Byron, or anyone else. But it was perhaps a preparation of his defence, and the question was how he would now use it in public.
Lecture No. 9 followed on 16 December, and was based on The Tempest. Byron attended and seems to have been amused, since he came at least once again. Crabb Robinson criticized the ‘desultory” opening, which repeated “old remarks” on classical drama, but thought the later parts “beautifully” handled and “most excellent”.155
In fact the “old remarks” drew on Schlegel’s twelfth lecture on the ancient drama, and show the first clear evidence of phrases and concepts partly drawn from his texts.156 It is significant that Robinson did not think they represented a new line in Coleridge’s thought. Coleridge then openly and publicly raised the question of his “anticipations” of German criticism. Collier reported his statement as follows: “Yesterday afternoon a friend had left for him a Work by a German writer of which Coleridge had had time only to read a small part but what he had read he approved & he should praise the book much more highly were it not that in truth it would be praising himself, as the sentiments contained in it were so coincident with those Coleridge had expressed at the Royal Institution.”157 This account was essentially the same as the letter, except that it contained two protective devices: it implied Coleridge had received the book at the end of the weekend, rather than the beginning (with much less time to read); and it signally failed to mention Schlegel by name.
Coleridge then went on to praise German criticism of Shakespeare, as he had done in 1808, and attacked English criticism for failing to appreciate properly “Shakespeare’s mighty genius”. He added an interesting sociological explanation for the theoretical advances in Germany. In the great struggle against Napoleon, that “evil Genius of the Planet”, the British mind was attuned to action and the defence of traditional values. But the German mind, forced into inactivity by the Napoleonic occupations, had been driven inward “into speculation” and a reinterpretation of “ancient philosophy”. All national feelings had been “forced back into the thinking and reasoning mind”. They had developed the line of Kantian idealism: “incapable of acting outwardly, they have acted internally”.
This intriguing suggestion also contained an autobiographical shadow. It aligned Coleridge’s private experiences in the study with those of German thinkers in a subjected Europe. Both had existed and developed under conditions of intellectual siege. Both had undergone an enforced period of intense introversion (the p
arallel with Hamlet is implicit), and their thought had developed accordingly. In this he and Schlegel (like Richter) were spiritual soul-mates. But for all this, Coleridge again failed to mention Schlegel by name, and gave no further hint that he would draw directly upon his texts. Had he once done so, the question of plagiarism might never have arisen. But he did not do so.158
Interestingly, Crabb Robinson, who would have known all the details of the Schlegel saga, made no criticism. When later in February 1812 he read Schlegel for himself, after the lectures were over, his comment was: “read, in the evening, Schlegel’s Lectures on Shakespeare. Coleridge, I find, did not disdain to borrow observations from Schlegel, though the coincidences between the two lectures are, for the greater part, coincidences merely and not the one caused by the other.”159
Coleridge’s “borrowings” in Lecture 9, one of the most fully recorded of the series, were characteristic of everything that came later and present typical problems of interpretation. They show vividly how his mind was working, with its extraordinary mixture of recognizing what he already knew, expropriating what he had not exactly thought himself, and beautifully developing what was entirely original.
In the middle of the lecture he suddenly announced, with a clarity that he had never previously found, the theory of “organic form”. Collier recorded: “Coleridge here explained the difference between what he called mechanic and organic regularity. In the former the copy must be made as if it had been formed in the same mould as the original. – In the latter there is a law which all the parts obey conforming themselves to the outward symbols & manifestations of the essential principle. He illustrated this distinction by referring to the growth of Trees…”160 Apart from the reference to trees, this was taken virtually word for word from Schlegel’s twelfth lecture.
Coleridge- Darker Reflections Page 33
