The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity…He diffuses a tone and spirit of unity, that blends and (as it were) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and magical power, to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of imagination. This power, first put into action by the will and understanding, and retained under their irremissive, though gentle and unnoticed control reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities: of sameness, with difference; or the general, with the concrete; the idea, with the image; the individual, with the representative; the sense of novelty and freshness, with old and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion, with more than usual order; judgement ever awake and steady self-possession, with enthusiasm and feeling profound and vehement…”103
Each of these polarities gives the reader pause for thought. The experiencing of poetry is opened up, or fanned out, for contemplation. Coleridge even produced one of his most wonderful asides to describe the nature of that pause in the reader’s mind. “Like the motion of the serpent, which the Egyptians made the emblem of intellectual power; or like the path of sound through the air; at every step he pauses and half recedes, and from the retrogressive movement collects the force which again carries him onwards.”104
Through the next eight chapters (15 to 22 as they became) he applies these observations in great detail to specific passages of poetry (a technique for which he invented the term “practical criticism”), running right through the history of English poetry, starting with Shakespeare and Milton, going on with the Metaphysical poets (with some highly original observations on Italian Renaissance poetry), and gradually returning to Wordsworth.
In Chapter 18, he traces the origins of metre to “that spontaneous effort which strives to hold in check the workings of passion”, and compares its effect to “wine during animated conversation”. In another fine aside, he remarks that an inappropriate, jingly metre has a peculiarly jarring impact, “like that of leaping in the dark from the last step of a stair-case, when we had prepared our muscles for a leap of three or four”.105
While attacking Wordsworth’s “insufficient” theories of language and metre, he triumphantly vindicates his poetic practice in the Lyrical Ballads and the Poems in Two Volumes. The poems always have “weight and sanity” of thought. They are “fresh and have the dew upon them”. They have the “sinewy strength and originality of single lines and paragraphs”. There is “perfect truth of nature in his images and descriptions”. And throughout there is “a meditative pathos, a union of deep and subtle thought with sensibility; a sympathy with man as man”.106
In distinguishing so magisterially between Wordsworth’s “defects and beauties”, Coleridge reasserted a critical and moral independence he had not really felt since the disaster of 1810. Once more he was engaged in a dialogue of equals. This released in him some of his finest and most beautiful flights of poetic appreciation. Praising that “perfect truth to nature” which was so central to Wordsworth’s genius, he was now able to draw unencumbered upon their shared memories of the Lakes to evoke that sovereign power:
Like a green field reflected in a calm and perfectly transparent lake, the image is distinguished from the reality only by its greater softness and lustre. Like the moisture of the polish on a pebble, genius neither distorts nor false-colours its objects; but on the contrary brings out many a vein and tint, which escapes the eye of common observation, thus raising to the rank of gems what had often been kicked away by the hurrying foot of the traveller on the dusty high road of custom.107
After some hundred pages, or forty thousand words of this limpid, well-argued and constantly surprising text, Coleridge turned back to his original distinction between Fancy and Imagination. Here he made his highest critical claim for his old friend, towards the end of Chapter 22.
Last, and pre-eminently, I challenge for this poet the gift of IMAGINATION in the highest and strictest sense of the word. In the play of Fancy, Wordsworth, to my feelings, is not always graceful, and sometimes recondite. The likeness is occasionally too strange, or demands too particular a point of view, or is such as appears the creature of predetermined research, rather than spontaneous presentation…But in imaginative power, he stands nearest of all modern writers to Shakespeare and Milton; and yet in a kind perfectly unborrowed and his own. To employ his own words, which are at once an instance and an illustration, he does indeed to all thoughts and to all objects
“…add the gleam,
The light that never was on sea or land,
The consecration, and the poet’s dream.”108
Wordsworth would never receive more intelligent, sustained or ambitious appreciation in his lifetime.
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By the end of July 1815, Coleridge thought the Biographia was finished. He saw it now so clearly as a dialogue with Wordsworth that he even wanted the book and its companion volume Sibylline Leaves set up in a typeface exactly matching that of Wordsworth’s two-volume Poems of 1815.109 The volumes would answer the other, as in the old days of their intimacy.
He was satisfied that he had produced his best and most coherent work for over a decade, asserting at long last his independence as both critic and poet. Yet he was almost alarmed at what he had done. In a revealing letter to Dr Brabant of 29 July, he vaunted his achievement while admitting his fears of Wordsworth’s reaction. Amazingly, he thought that Wordsworth, like some schoolmaster, like Bowyer himself, would be “displeased” as with an inadequate prep.
My dear Sir, The necessity of extending, what I first intended as a preface, to an Autobiographia literaria, or Sketches of my literary Life & opinions, as far as Poetry and poetical Criticism is concerned, has confined me to my Study from 11 to 4, and from 6 to 10, since I last left you. – I have just finished it, having only the correction of the Mss. to go through. – I have given a full account (raisonné) of the Controversy concerning Wordsworth’s Poems & Theory, in which my name has been so constantly included – I have no doubt, that Wordsworth will be displeased – but I have done my Duty to myself and to the Public…110
He was exhausted with the effort, and so was Morgan with the pressure of the overrun deadline (originally promised for June). However, he added that there was still “One long passage” of metaphysical disquisition, concerning the “generic differences between the faculties of Fancy and Imagination”, which he had largely omitted from the text. He had “extended and elaborated” it purely for his own interest and was sending it to Brabant for his personal perusal. It dealt with the theory of Associationism, and laid “the foundation Stones of the Constructive or Dynamic Philosophy in opposition to the merely mechanical”. It was, as it happened, the very theme – Locke and Hartley, versus Kant and Schelling (or Life versus Death) – that he had mentioned in his letter to Wordsworth back in May, as the proper subject for a philosophic epic.
Of course, it could form no part of the book, which was – surely, certainly, well virtually – finished. Indeed, Coleridge apologized for mentioning it at all. “I am running on as usual” and he would “like a Skater, strike a Stop with my Heel”. He intended to relax, and was taking Hartley to dine with the Marquis of Lansdowne at Bowood. Could Mrs Brabant purchase him, Coleridge, a pair of best black silk stockings and some finest Rappee and Maccabba snuff, so he would be properly equipped for social life again?111
In early August Mary Morgan wrote proudly to the Lambs in London about their industry. “Your old friend Coleridge is very hard at work at the preface to a new Edition which he is just going to publish in the same form as Mr Wordsworth’s – at first the preface was not to exceed five or six pages it has however grown into a work of great importance. I believe Morgan has already written nearly two hundred pages, the title of it is ‘Autobiographia Literaria’ to which are added ‘Sybilline Leaves’, a collection of Poems…”112
Mary Lamb pointedly forwarded this news to Sara Hutchinson. The Lambs now felt perfectly free to make joking men
tion of Coleridge’s amorous susceptibilities, and how they had been transferred to Calne. Mary wrote to Charlotte herself that Asra was so like her, “that every time I see her I quarrel with her in my mind for not being you, Miss Brent”.113 While Charles, in one tipsy summer note to Mary Morgan (“I am not sober, that is I am not over sober”) wrote teasingly: “Wordsworth is going to be Knighted. Miss Sar. Hutchinson is not like Miss B(rent). Miss (B) is a great deal prettier etc. than Miss (H).”114
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The moment that Coleridge felt the Biographia was absolutely finished, he began to have second thoughts. Returning from Bowood he began to think again of the metaphysical “disquisition” he had innocently sent to Dr Brabant. There was also a great deal of personal material, concerning his own philosophic “Autobiographia” between 1797 and 1812, which he had suppressed in writing so concentratedly of Wordsworth.
Did the book have some sort of theoretical hole in its middle? Did his concept of the Imagination need a philosophic and spiritual grounding, as well as a critical one? And should he trace his own “circuitous” journey to these intuitive truths of the “Reason” as revealed by the German philosophers? As he would write: “The term, Philosophy, defines itself as an affectionate seeking after the truth; but Truth is the correlative of Being.”115
By mid-August, Coleridge was again dictating hard to Morgan. The threat of an ever-expanding Biographia – the skate sliding on unstopped – caused astonishment but also growing alarm. Morgan wrote three anxious letters to Gutch’s partner William Hood, trying to reassure him about the slipping deadline. On 10 August he actually sent the first fifty-seven pages of manuscript so the printing could begin (Chapters 1 to 4), adding as confidently as he could: “the rest (full 100 sides) is finished, and not finished – that is, there is a metaphysical part of about 5 or 6 sheets which must be revised or rather rewritten – this I trust will be done in a few days, and the next parcel (coming I think certainly next week) will contain the whole…”
Morgan felt his responsibilities, and tried to adopt a businesslike tone. He promised Hood that no days would be lost. “C. can not work without me – but you need no assurances from me. I am no dreamer, my facts are not ideas you know.”116 Further reassurances were posted out on 14 and 17 August. “Don’t be afraid – you may go boldly on with the printing…depend upon my word: we shall have soon done quite. I am no poet no day-dreamer you know.”117 He recommended an engraving of Allston’s Bristol portrait as a frontispiece.
In fact Coleridge did not “have done” for six weeks, the time of Hartley’s return to Oxford. But during this second intense period of composition he expanded the “5 or 6 sheets” to another 45,000 words, virtually doubling the length of the Biographia. He almost seemed to begin the book again, on a note of intense, inward philosophical speculation. It is a new voice, setting out in a new direction. “There have been men in all ages, who have been impelled as by an instinct to propose their own nature as a problem, and who devote their attempts to its solution.” This became the opening to the middle section, which was to run from Chapters 5 to 13, wonderfully transforming the book and also threatening to wreck it in the process.118
What Coleridge now set out to dictate was a detailed account of a philosophical and spiritual conversion. Over twenty years, he had gradually moved from the materialist views of the British empiricists (notably Locke and David Hartley), to the new “dynamic” German philosophy of Kant and Schelling. The essential change was from a reductive concept of the human mind as a tabula rasa, “a mirror or canvas” which passively registered physical experience. In place of this (or rather, subsuming it) was a transcendental idea of the mind, with its own mysterious and intuitive faculties, which actively shaped experience and had access to spiritual dimensions beyond rational “Understanding”. It was, in effect, a philosophic conversion from a materialist to a religious view of the world.
Coleridge also wanted to use this “dynamic” view of the human mind to provide a genuinely philosophical basis for his central distinction between Fancy and Imagination.*
Hitherto, in the dialogue with Wordsworth, the argument had merely been presented as literary criticism. Now, with young men like his son in mind, he wanted to return to metaphysical first principles. If the mind was merely a mirror, then Fancy and Imagination were really the same thing, a form of passively “associating” ideas and images, not truly creative.119 But if the mind was active and shaping, “esemplastic” as he called it, they were fundamentally different in their operation.120 Fancy remained “mechanical”, but Imagination was a genuine spiritual power of creativity. They were, in the language of the German Naturphilosophie ‘polarities’ of the consciousness.
Coleridge embarked on this immensely difficult territory with what was certainly a profound religious impulse. It can be ultimately related to his escape from spiritual despair in the crisis of his opium addiction. He needed to affirm that the human spirit was not mechanically determined (as the empiricists implied) and passive in the face of external reality or Nature. Man was not controlled by “phantom Purposes”, and his Being was not “contradiction”. Instead the creative powers of the human imagination were active and free. They expressed “the free-will, our only absolute self”.121 Nor were they merely “transcendental” in the technical Kantian sense, but also shared or reflected a divine power: they were transcendent powers reaching to infinity. The imagination, metaphysically considered, was a proof of the liberty of the human spirit. He was, in short, attempting a “sketch” of his long-dreamed Logosophia, a staircase from secular to divine epistemology.
In this new version, the Biographia became a hugely – and perhaps impossibly – ambitious book. It was now to include a compact history of Western philosophy in eight chapters, or little more than 100 pages. It would also involve, as part of his philosophical odyssey, an enormous expansion of his personal history, especially in the years between Stowey and Greta Hall. Indeed Chapter 10 – the chapter of “digressions and anecdotes” – became the longest, liveliest, and most openly tragi-comic in the whole book. It was here that he came closest to a public avowal of his opium addiction, and what it had cost him.
By what I have effected, am I to be judged by my fellow men; what I could have done, is a question for my own conscience. On my own account I may perhaps have had a sufficient reason to lament my deficiency in self-control, and the neglect of concentrating my powers to the realization of some permanent work. But to verse rather than prose, if to either, belongs the voice of mourning for
“Keen pangs of love awakening as a babe
Turbulent, with an outcry in the heart;
And fears self-will’d that shunned the eye of hope,
And hope that scarce would know itself from fear;
Sense of past youth, and manhood come in vain,
And genius given and knowledge won in vain…”122
The citation was, of course, from his poem to Wordsworth; the one he had promised not to publish. But the Biographia in its new form was driving him to ever greater levels of self-exposure; and he remarked at this time that he was haunted by the “constant craving” to attend his own post-mortem: “if I could but be present while my Viscera were laid open!”123
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The philosophical section of the book became the new Chapters 5 to 13. Coleridge now insisted that there must indeed be chapters, and dismissed the idea that the two volumes of prose and poetry had to be printed like Wordsworth’s: “I care nothing, provided only the Volumes be a handsome Octavo, in clear Type…I think [his] too open and naked for a Book.”124
What he dictated, at increasing speed, was a characteristic mixture of logic and digression. Chapters 5 to 8 contained a highly compact history and critique of Associationist philosophy (“traced from Aristotle to Hartley”), and an outright attack on the passive and mechanistic view of human creativity. Within the technical discussion, Coleridge constantly rose to passages of vivid and highly accessible popularization. Here i
s his attack on the determinism of the Associationists:
The inventor of the watch, if this doctrine be true, did not in reality invent it; he only looked on, while the blind causes, the only true artists, were unfolding themselves. So it must have been too with my friend Allston, when he sketched his picture of the dead man revived by the bones of the prophet Elijah. So it must have been with Mr Southey and Lord Byron, when the one fancied himself composing his ‘Roderick’ and the other his ‘Childe Harold’. The same must hold good of all systems of philosophy; of all arts, governments, wars by sea and land; in short, all things that ever have been or that ever will be produced…We only fancy, that we act from rational resolves, or prudent motives, or from impulses of anger, love, or generosity…The existence of an infinite spirit, of an intelligent and holy will, must, on this system be mere articulated motions of the air.125
We can still recognize this as an attack on the philosophy that became modern Behaviourism, and the neo-Darwinism of “the blind watchmaker”.
In place of the mechanical psychology of Associationism, Coleridge begins to feel his way to a far more subtle picture of the creative mind at work. Here he writes with all the authority of a poet, and finds vivid ways to describe the actual process of sustained mental concentration, “the mind’s self-experience in the act of thinking”. One of the most memorable occurs in Chapter 7. Coleridge, by using his own observation from physics and botany, makes this whole experience peculiarly alive and accessible. The active–passive movements of the human mind (in the special case of composing poetry, but also in any act of particular concentration) reflects a dynamic “process” which can be seen all around us in nature.
Coleridge- Darker Reflections Page 47
