Coleridge- Darker Reflections

by Richard Holmes

  There can be no doubt that Coleridge was conscious of the German source for the passage, for he later translated Schlegel even more fully in his written notes for subsequent lectures in 1813. In these written notes he assigned it to “a Continental critic”, but still without mentioning Schlegel’s name. When published nearly a hundred years later, it came to be regarded as the classic statement of “organic” theory, and was accepted as essentially Coleridge’s. Here was plagiarism.161

  Or was it? Coleridge had been discussing the “organic” nature of poetic forms for years, ever since his letters to Sotheby of 1802 on the “one Life” of the Imagination.162 At Valletta in 1805 he had made the long note (from the Greek philosopher Athenagoras) distinguishing between “Fabrication” and “Generation” in the birth of a child, and the consequent distinction between mechanically “imposed” forms and organically “evolved” ones.163 It was clear that he instantly recognized the point of Schlegel’s distinction, and felt he had anticipated it. What he had not done was express it so succinctly in a public lecture.

  Moreover the illustration from the life of trees was his own, and took the argument further. (Schlegel had referred to flowers and crystalline salts.) Coleridge explained that the organic “principle” was not merely an internal evolution, but a response to environmental conditions outside. Poems were like “Trees, which from peculiar circumstances of soil, air or position differed from trees of the same kind – but every man was able to decide at first sight which was an ash or a poplar.” So a poem or play was both “generated” from within by the poet’s imagination to become a unique form, and yet also responded to external “circumstances” of social reality to become a type. Shakespeare’s genius lay in combining the two.

  The same ambiguity applied to Coleridge’s use of Schlegel’s remarks on The Tempest. The difference in style and development is shown by their contrasted treatment of Caliban. Schlegel made the suggestive, but very general point that while Ariel’s name implies air, Caliban implies earth, and together they represent an opposition of nature’s two fundamental elements in the play. “Caliban signifies the heavy element of earth.” But for Coleridge Shakespeare’s genius lay in what he did with the earth element, somehow making it both heavy (“brutish”) and yet simultaneously noble. Caliban has the power to excite human sympathy. The miracle lay in creating an earth-monster (as Johnson saw him) who was also profoundly touching. How did Shakespeare do it?

  In his reply Coleridge anticipated a long line of monstrous creations from Mary Shelley’s outcast creature in Frankenstein, to Hollywood’s King Kong. “The character of Caliban is wonderfully conceived: he is a sort of creature of the earth partaking of the qualities of the brute and distinguished from them…” He has understanding, but “without moral reason”; and at the same time he is “a noble being: a man in the sense of the imagination”. All his images “are drawn from nature & are all highly poetical…Caliban gives you images from the Earth – Ariel images from the air.” There is nothing mean in his “animal passions”, only the “sense of repugnance at being commanded”, by Prospero. We sympathize with Caliban because we feel he is enslaved.164 This was a crucial, and characteristically psychological advance over Schlegel’s reading.

  The lecture concluded with a line-by-line analysis of Prospero’s “solemnity of phraseology”, showing how Shakespeare gave him the language of “the Magician, whose very art seems to consider all objects in nature in a mysterious point of view”.165 This notion of Prospero as essentially a poet, recreating the island-world of The Tempest for Miranda’s benefit, was also entirely original. It was this part that Robinson thought “most excellent”.166*

  14

  On 2 January 1812 Coleridge began his great lecture on Hamlet, which became the focus and highlight of the entire series. Crabb Robinson immediately hailed it as “perhaps his very best”, and recognized the deliberately autobiographical theme of introversion and inaction.167

  Coleridge’s strategy was to show that eighteenth-century criticism, both English and German, had fundamentally underestimated the play through an inadequate psychological conception of Hamlet’s character. Instead he proposed a brilliant and subtle reading of Hamlet’s introversion, and argued that this was carefully explored throughout the entire structure of the play, giving it exceptional dramatic unity. Not merely the great soliloquies, but the plotting of the court intrigue, the revenge theme, the use of the ghost, the ambiguities of madness, and Hamlet’s relations with both Ophelia and Gertrude, all served a deliberate and complex dramatic purpose.

  His essential argument was that Shakespeare had consciously transformed the old, crude convention of the Elizabethan Revenge Play – a violent, extroverted and garish form – into a supremely poetic meditation on the inner workings of the imaginative mind and the tragedy of inaction. Shakespeare’s genius had turned an action-drama into a study of moral paralysis. In so doing, he had created an archetypal Romantic hero – Hamlet as Everyman – who also seemed extraordinarily like Coleridge himself. Coleridge would elaborate on this theme in at least half-a-dozen Hamlet lectures over the next two years, and his Notes to the play became fuller than for any other Shakespearean subject.168

  At the time he spoke, Hamlet was not regarded as an outstanding tragedy in the canon, but rather as an “irregular” melodrama with many objectionable and inexplicable scenes. When Coleridge opened by referring to the “general prejudices against Shakespeare” in his handling of the play, he was dismissing a vast body of previous criticism which would have been broadly familiar to his audience.

  Voltaire had given the classical account in his Letters on the English Nation (1727): “Shakespeare is a sublime natural genius, without the least spark of good taste or the slightest understanding of the dramatic rules…Hamlet is a monstrous farce, haphazardly scattered with terrible soliloquies.” Dr Johnson in his famous Notes to the Complete Edition of Shakespeare (1765) had been impressed by the power of the play, but felt it was full of “wanton cruelty” and insufficiently motivated: “Of the feigned madness of Hamlet there appears no adequate cause…” Goethe, in his influential chapter from Wilhelm Meister (1796), had argued that Hamlet was simply a weak man incapable of rising to the demands of historical destiny. “A lovely, pure and most moral nature, without the strength of nerve which forms a Hero, sinks beneath a Burden which it cannot bear…Impossibilities have been required of him.”

  Most significantly of all, Schlegel in his twelfth lecture (which Coleridge had now certainly read), while calling the play in the Kantian style “a tragedy of the reflection-process”, had concentrated on the idea that Hamlet was not merely weak, but morally corrupt. His interpretation was surprisingly hostile. “Hamlet has a natural inclination to devious behaviour. He is a hypocrite towards himself. His far-fetched scruples are often mere pretexts to cover his want of resolution…He loses himself in labyrinths of thought…He has no compassion for others. He takes malicious joy in his schemes.”169

  Coleridge, by contrast, produced an interpretation so sympathetic and penetrating that it has shaped Hamlet criticism ever since (and is still sometimes reprinted in modern editions of the play).170 He began by asking his audience to consider the play from the dramatist’s point of view. “The first question was – What did Shakespeare mean when he drew the character of Hamlet?…What was the point to which Shakespeare directed himself? He meant to portray a person in whose view the external world and all its incidents and objects were comparatively dim…Hamlet beheld external objects in the same way that a man of vivid imagination who shuts his eyes, sees what has previously made an impression on his sight.”

  Coleridge then emphasized the paradoxically action-driven nature of the plot, in a masterly summary of the opening scenes. “Shakespeare places [Hamlet] in the most stimulating circumstances that a human being can be placed in: he is the heir apparent to the throne; his father dies suspiciously; his mother excludes him from the throne by marrying his uncle. This was not enough but
the Ghost of his murdered father is introduced to assure the son that he was put to death by his own brother. What is the result? Endless reasoning and urging – perpetual solicitation of the mind to act, but as constant an escape from action – ceaseless reproaches of himself for his sloth, while the whole energy of his resolution passes away in those reproaches.”

  But this paralysis of the will cannot be dismissed as moral corruption, or a mere dreamy failure to grasp the realities around him. “This, too, not from cowardice, for he is made one of the bravest of his time; – not from want of forethought or quickness of apprehension, for he sees through the very souls of all who surround him. But merely from that aversion to action which prevails among such as have – as it were – a world within themselves.”171

  Coleridge pressed on to analyse the great dramatic confrontations of the play, as perfect theatrical expressions of this psychological theme. The Ghost is produced not once, but three times, each apparition being dramatically unexpected, but so as to generate a terrifying “accrescence of objectivity” for the audience. At the same time, belief in the Ghost reveals “a fearful subjectivity” in Hamlet. “The front of the mind, the whole consciousness of the speaker, is filled by the solemn apparition.”172

  When in the bedroom scene with Gertrude (Act III, scene 4), the Queen cannot see the Ghost, Shakespeare has moved the apparition into Hamlet’s own psyche, telling him what he already unconsciously suspects. Gertrude is an adulteress, but she may also be a murderess. “Was Gertrude, or was she not, conscious of the fratricide?”173 At the same time, Hamlet’s earlier refusal to question Gertrude prepares us for the hysterical outbursts of this scene. As Coleridge put it in one of the most inspired of all his asides – which could be said to anticipate all Freud – “Suppression prepares for Overflow.”174

  Coleridge was equally penetrating on Hamlet’s madness, which Johnson had found so inexplicable, and Schlegel viewed as purely manipulative and cruel. The revenge play had a long tradition of mad scenes, but also of feigned madness, used to produce grotesque comic-horror exchanges in which the audience could confidently share in the secret duplicity of the protagonist. For Coleridge, Shakespeare deliberately challenges this confident certainty, and thereby transforms the whole convention.

  The ambiguity between acting and truly feeling, between “seeming” and actually “being”, animates Hamlet’s entire character. When the Player King weeps for Hecuba, Hamlet “breaks out into a delirium of rage against himself” – which may itself be partly an act.175 When Hamlet feigns madness in front of Ophelia – who will actually go mad as a result – he himself may be closer to insanity than he (or we the audience) realize. His “antic disposition” may itself be genuinely unbalanced. “Terror is closely connected to the ludicrous. The latter is the common mode by which the mind tries to emancipate itself from Terror…Add to this, that Hamlet’s wildness is but half-false. O! that subtle trick to pretend the acting, when we are very near being what we act. And this explanation is the same with Ophelia’s vivid images of Hamlet’s desperation in love: nigh akin to, and productive of, temporary mania.”176

  The skill with which Shakespeare elaborates and enters into this shifting “world within” of Hamlet’s character creates an interior life – a Coleridgean life – of hypnotic power and complexity. He has “perfect knowledge of his own character”, yet he “still yields to the same retiring from all reality” and is incapable of “carrying into effect his most obvious duty”. So we believe in Hamlet precisely because we cannot be certain of him. He “mirrors” our own doubts about the nature of reality.177

  Coleridge insisted that far from being weak, Hamlet has an imaginative power that makes him stronger than anyone else in the play, and one of Shakespeare’s greatest creations. He becomes a kind of Everyman, whose soliloquies – on suicide, revenge, betrayal, world-weariness, destiny and death – are of “universal interest”. They produce “a communion with the heart, that belongs to, or ought to belong, to all mankind”.178

  At the same time, his great soliloquies are those of a poet. “How [Hamlet’s] character develops itself in these speeches…The aversion to externals, the betrayed habit of brooding over the world within him, and the prodigality of beautiful words. They are, as it were, the half-embodying of his thoughts, that give them an Outness, a reality sui generis. Yet they retain their correspondence and shadowy approach to the images and movements within.”179

  Coleridge’s identification of himself with Hamlet gave this whole lecture a particular resonance, and would deepen in all his subsequent treatments of the play. He made Hamlet a Romantic and contemporary figure to his audience, but he did not hesitate to place him within a frame of unflinching ethical judgement. His summary was clear and monumental. “In Hamlet I conceive [Shakespeare] to have wished to exemplify the moral necessity of a due balance between our attention to outward objects and our meditation on inward thoughts – a due balance between the real and the imaginary world. In Hamlet this balance does not exist…Hence great, enormous, intellectual activity, and a consequent proportionate aversion to real action, with all its symptoms and accompanying qualities.”180

  Crabb Robinson was moved by the whole performance, and wrote in confidence to Catherine Clarkson about it. “Last night he concluded his fine development of the Prince of Denmark by an eloquent statement of the moral of the play. ‘Action,’ he said, ‘is the great end of all – No intellect however grand is valuable if it draw us from action & lead us to think & think till the time of action is passed by, and we can do nothing.’ Somebody said to me, this is a Satire on himself; No, said I, it is an Elegy. A great many of his remarks on Hamlet were capable of a like application.”181 To the end of his life, Coleridge would mildly claim, “I have a smack of Hamlet myself, if I may say so.”182

  15

  The series continued until the end of January, but few records have remained of the last five lectures, which moved on from Shakespeare to Milton. They were evidently lively and confident, and the Rifleman newspaper reported a spectacular discussion of “the Sublime” in Lecture 16. Coleridge contrasted Milton’s poetical conception of God’s creation of the universe with Erasmus Darwin’s astronomical one. In so doing Coleridge gave an impressive account of what is now the Big Bang theory, but objected to it – in one of his splendid asides – on aesthetic grounds. It was one of his earliest comments on evolution, a subject which would occupy much of his later thinking.

  Erasmus Darwin had “imagined the creation of the universe to have taken place in a moment, by the explosion of a mass of matter in the womb or centre of space. In one and the same instant of time, suns and planets shot into Systems in every direction, and filled and spangled the illimitable void! [Coleridge] asserted this to be an intolerable degradation – referring, as it were, all the beauty and harmony of nature to something like the bursting of a barrel of gunpowder!”183

  The lectures concluded with a number of such firework-displays on poetry, cosmology and the character of Satan, the last (No. 17) on 27 January 1812. “They ended with éclat,” wrote Crabb Robinson on leaving Fleet Street, with satisfaction and some relief. “The room was crowded; and the lecture had several passages more than brilliant; they were luminous. And the light gave conscious pleasure to every person who knew that he could…see the glory.”184

  SEVEN

  PHANTOM PURPOSES

  1

  Coleridge was elated with his success. This year, 1812 – the year that Napoleon invaded Russia – would surely be the year of his resurgence. Ideas for essays, books and even a play began to march about his head. The London firm of Gale and Curtis proposed to republish The Friend in book form. Three influential patrons – Sir George Beaumont, Sir Thomas Bernard of the Royal Institution, and the wealthy littérateur William Sotheby (with whom he had corresponded about poetry in the Keswick days) – suggested a new set of lectures to be held in May at Willis’s Rooms, an ultrafashionable Mayfair address. The Great Lecture Room there – used
by the Society of Dilettantes – could hold an audience of 500 people. Perhaps also he would submit a drama to Drury Lane.

  In his euphoria, Coleridge’s lecture topics expanded to the horizon. Perhaps a complete tour of European literature – “Dante, Ariosto, Don Quixote, Calderón, Shakespeare, Milton, and Klopstock” – two lectures each; or maybe a grand historical sweep of moral subjects and the conditions of contemporary life – “the causes of domestic Happiness and Unhappiness – the influence of Christianity on Christendom independent of theological differences, & considered merely as part of the History of Mankind…on Education…”1

  He wrote breezily to Mrs Coleridge, saying his literary plans would certainly please her. “They will enable me not only to pay off all Keswick Debts in a few months, but to remit you £200 a year regularly.”2 He also told the Morgans that they could now afford a more central and smarter address, which they quickly found just north of Oxford Street at No. 71 Berners Street. It was a fine, newly built brick house that they could rent for £60 a year, which he considered “very cheap, as houses go” for the district.3 He would finally have his own suite of rooms, and space for his books and clothes which he now intended bringing down from Keswick, after a lapse of eighteen months. At last he would be settled in his new life, and ready to take on the world again.

  But first, of course, he must undertake a rapid sortie to the north, to see his children, arrange his affairs and manuscripts (there were unused sheets of The Friend at Kendal), and receive some sort of explanation from Wordsworth. Speed was of the essence, and he told Morgan he planned merely to stay a fortnight, and would certainly be back in time to move into the new house in April, when he would supply £50 as his part of the deposit.4