Coleridge- Darker Reflections

by Richard Holmes

  Let us consider what we do when we leap. We first resist the gravitating power by an act purely voluntary, and then by another act, voluntary in part, we yield to it in order to light on the spot, which we had previously proposed to ourselves. Now let a man watch his mind while he is composing; or, to take a still more common case, while he is trying to recollect a name; and he will find the process completely analogous. Most of my readers will have observed a small water-insect on the surface of rivulets, which throws a cinque-spotted shadow fringed with prismatic colours on the sunny bottom of the brook; and will have noticed, how the little animal wins its way up against the stream, by alternate pulses of active and passive motion, now resisting the current, and now yielding to it in order to gather strength and a momentary fulcrum for a further propulsion. This is no unapt emblem of the mind’s self-experience in the act of thinking. There are evidently two powers at work, which relatively to each other are active and passive; and this is not possible without an intermediate faculty, which is at once both active and passive. (In philosophical language, we must denominate this intermediate faculty in all its degrees and determinations, the IMAGINATION…)126*

  The psychology of this passage is remarkably modern. It seems to describe the actual process of creative inspiration, without resorting to the traditional idea of a Muse. Instead it proposes a model of the engagement between the conscious forward drive of intellectual effort (“propulsion”), and the drifting backwards into unconscious materials (“yielding to the current”), constantly repeated in a natural diastolic movement like breathing or heartbeat. This is how creativity actually works: a mental (ultimately spiritual) rhythm which arises from the primary physical conditions of the natural world.

  Clearly such a passage is really a poet’s vision, as much as a philosopher’s. It works at several levels of metaphor, besides the logical and explanatory one. A poem is itself a form of leap, of making language momentarily airborne. A poet is himself like the humble water-insect, casting those beautiful “shadows fringed with prismatic colours” (his poems) as he struggles up the stream of self-intuition, “the brook” of his inward thoughts. Even the five-pointed form of his vision, the “cinque-spotted” shadow like a star, has mystical implications and is curiously suggestive of Coleridge’s concept of unity-in-multiplicity. (It also recalls the “image with a glory round its head”, of his Malta poem “Constancy to an Ideal Object”.) With such dense and radiant metaphoric episodes as these, Coleridge began to give Biographia its new dimension.

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  Coleridge had now shown that the “mechanistic” account of the human mind was inadequate. With Chapter 9, he introduced the counter-philosophy of Immanuel Kant, whose Critique of Pure Reason (1787) and Critique of Judgment (1790) “took possession of me as with a giant’s hand. After fifteen years of familiarity with them, I still read these and all his other productions with undiminished delight and increasing admiration.”127 With Kant came his disciples Fichte and Schelling, especially the latter’s Naturphilosophie and his key work The System of Transcendental Idealism (1800). With Schelling, “I first found a genial coincidence with much that I had toiled out for myself, and a powerful assistance in what I had yet to do.”128

  Behind these contemporary German philosophers, with their new view of a creative human mind shaping our perceptions of the universe, Coleridge also aligned an older tradition of Christian mystics who denied a purely passive, mechanistic view of the human spirit. These were the prophets of the Protestant revolution – George Fox, Jakob Boehme, and “the pious and fervid William Law” – who opposed the traditional Aristotelianism of the Church Fathers. Philosophically, this was a daring and unconventional connection to make. But Coleridge, never forgetting his personal struggles, bore witness to the spiritual life and hope with which they had animated his thought in the darkest days.

  In a beautiful, introspective passage (the voice shifting its register towards the solemn intimacy of the King James Bible), he reverted to the imagery of the circuitous journey.

  The feeling of gratitude, which I cherish towards these men, has caused me to digress further than I had foreseen or proposed…For the writings of these mystics acted in no slight degree to prevent my mind from being imprisoned within the outline of any single dogmatic system. They contributed to keep alive the heart in the head; gave me an indistinct, yet stirring and working presentiment, that all the products of the mere reflective faculty partook of DEATH, and were as the rattling twigs and sprays in winter, into which a sap was yet to be propelled from some root to which I had not penetrated, if they were to afford my soul food or shelter. If they were too often a moving cloud of smoke to me by day, yet they were always a pillar of fire throughout the night, during my wanderings through the wilderness of doubt, and enabled me to skirt, without crossing, the sandy deserts of utter unbelief.129

  Years later this image of the long, parched desert journey (the lonely caravan), would resurface in Coleridge’s late poetry and prose; and Hazlitt would use it – with a kind of cruel salutation – to sum up Coleridge’s whole life. For Coleridge it became perhaps the landborne equivalent of the Mariner’s ocean voyage.

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  In Chapter 9 Coleridge set out not merely his personal debts to the German philosophers, but the central position of their work in the argument of the expanded Biographia. (He even put a rhyming “burlesque on the Fichtean Egoismus” in a footnote.) He specifically denied philosophical originality, stating that his aim was only to interpret and explain the system to English readers, and to apply it in a new way to poetry. (In fact, neither Kant nor Schelling make any detailed study of imaginative literature, and always treat of Imagination – Einbildungskraft – in most abstract technical terms, as “reproductive, productive, and aesthetic”).130 “God forbid! that I should be suspected of a wish to enter into a rivalry with Schelling for the honours so unequivocally his right, not only as a great and original genius, but as the founder of the PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE, and as the most successful improver of the Dynamic System which, begun by Bruno, was re-introduced (in a more philosophical form, and freed from all impurities and visionary accompaniments) by Kant…To me it will be happiness and honour enough, should I succeed in rendering the system itself intelligible to my countrymen…”131

  Nothing could appear more open than this, and no contemporary reader could mistake it. The Biographia was now being openly grounded in German philosophy, and the whole cast of its technical vocabulary – “objectivizc”, “potence”, “polarity”, “transcendental”, “evolution of self-consciousness”, “armed vision”, “dynamic” – was specifically assembled from Coleridge’s translations of German terminology. Moreover, modern scholars, hypersensitive to Coleridge’s use of German sources, have pointed out that there is no single citation from Kant that is not given a full reference to the relevant work (often with page number); and that all the works that Coleridge used from Schelling are somewhere named in the text.132 Coleridge’s advance towards his own theory of Fancy and Imagination, via the German epistemology, would seem fully and (for its period) even meticulously documented.

  But in reality it is not. At the heart of the philosophical discussion, the problem of plagiarism returns with a vengeance, and threatens to undermine Coleridge’s authority. From Chapter 8 onwards all the technical areas of the text are packed with plagiarisms, in the exact sense of unacknowledged quotations, disguised summaries, silent borrowing and close verbal resemblances. At the end of Chapter 12 one can speak of a tight, almost impenetrable, “mosaic” of citations running continuously for a dozen pages.133 Exactly as with A. W. Schlegel in the later Shakespeare Lectures, Coleridge’s work is transformed into a kind of secret dialogue with his unacknowledged German source.*

  But what is much less clear, paradoxically, is what damage this does to the Biographia as a whole. If it weakens Coleridge’s claims as a professional philosopher, it demonstrates his powers to dramatize and popularize the most intractable ideas, assemb
led from a fantastic range of (what were then) genuinely arcane sources. It also brings a new kind of tension into the autobiographical narrative, in a way that he may well have intended.

  Coleridge’s plagiarisms form a kind of psycho-drama within the heart of the Biographia. He himself deliberately brings up the subject in Chapter 9, and makes a series of most eloquent admissions and defences, laying himself astonishingly open to criticism.

  It would be a mere act of justice to myself, were I to warn my future readers, that an identity of thought, or even similarity of phrase will not be at all times a certain proof that the passage has been borrowed from Schelling, or that the conceptions were originally learnt from him. In this instance, as in the dramatic lectures of Schlegel to which I have before alluded, from the same motive of self-defence, against the charge of plagiarism, many of the most striking resemblances, indeed all the main and fundamental ideas, were born and matured in my mind before I had seen a single page of the German Philosopher…Whether a work is the offspring of a man’s own spirit, and the product of original thinking, will be discovered by those who are its sole legitimate judges, by better tests than the mere reference to dates. For readers in general, let whatever shall be found in this or any future work of mine, that resembles, or coincides with, the doctrines of my German predecessor, though contemporary, be wholly attributed to him…I regard truth as a divine ventriloquist: I care not from whose mouth the sounds are supposed to proceed, if only the words are audible and intelligible.135

  Of course this does not exculpate Coleridge. But it wonderfully dramatizes his dilemma, and in a single winning phrase about truth – “the divine ventriloquist” – it appeals to a court beyond the bench of scholarship and statistical annotation. Plagiarism, in other words, becomes one of the most exciting narrative drives of the Biographia. Like his opium dependency, it threatens to wreck Coleridge entirely – he seems swept towards inevitable disaster. The question becomes whether or not he can break out of the vortex of scholarly theft and dissembling, and find his own voice again. So his autobiographical self-dramatization is fantastically intensified.

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  How far did Coleridge know what he was doing? Did he deliberately draw the reader conspiratorially into the process, leaving clues and begging for understanding? It seems possible. He had written earlier to Dr Brabant a striking account of the psychological progression of people secretly enslaved to some unnamed “vicious Habit”, and the description applies equally to opium addiction and plagiarism. “This, I long ago observed, is the dire Curse of all habitual Immorality, that the impulses wax as the motives wane – like animals caught in the current of a Sea-vortex, (such as the Norwegian Maelstrohm) at first they rejoice in the pleasurable ease with which they are carried onward, with their consent yet without an effort of the will – as they swim, the servant gradually becomes the Tyrant, and finally they are sucked onward against their will…”136

  Such water-images occur at crucial points throughout the Biographia, and metaphors of floating, flooding, flowing and sinking are used to dramatize much of Coleridge’s spiritual and intellectual journey. Like the maelstrom, too, the pace of his plagiarisms increases with each chapter, tightening and thickening, as if he will never break free to give his own promised account of Fancy and Imagination.*

  But with Chapter 10, the famous chapter of personal “digressions”, Coleridge does break free of the vortex by returning to the more personal narrative. Having thrown down the invented term “Esemplastic” – from the Greek eis en plattein, “to shape into one” – as his preliminary definition of the imaginative power, he slides away from technical philosophy. He is soon back at Stowey. “I now devoted myself to poetry and to the study of ethics and psychology; and so profound was my admiration at this time of Hartley’s Essay on Man, that I gave his name to my first born…”137

  The story here meanders back, river-like, in time to 1797, before he had read Kant, or been to Germany, and was still a believer in Associationism. But the effect is gripping, because it transforms the philosophical argument back into a personal adventure of discovery. This was the material that the “dialogue” with Wordsworth had suppressed, and which the summer conversations with his Hartley had perhaps released.

  The voice again becomes limpid and intimate, with the biblical and visionary note intensified. “I retired to a cottage in Somersetshire at the foot of Quantock, and devoted my thoughts and studies to the foundations of religion and morals. Here I found myself all afloat. Doubts rushed in; broke upon me ‘from the fountains of the great deep’, and fell ‘from the windows of heaven’. The fontal truths of natural religion and the books of Revelation alike contributed to the flood; and it was long ere my ark touched on Ararat, and rested.”138

  The chapter runs freely on over the next decade, diversified with accounts of his journalistic adventures with the Watchman and The Friend, his trips to Germany and Italy, his lecturing and playwriting. There is a strong political thread, with a defence of his attitude to Jacobinism and the French Revolution.

  The “circuitous path” of this fine chapter is the widest and longest in the Biographia, and the term “esemplastic” does not reappear until the opening of Chapter 13. Yet the idea of the Imagination as the emerging power in Coleridge’s life is kept constantly in play. It is most memorably dramatized in the comic account of the government agent, “Spy Nozy”, who mistakes the Quantock poets discussing philosophy in the woods and coombes for political subversives planning a seaborne invasion of French Jacobins up the rivers of Somerset in 1797. “At first he fancied, that we were aware of our danger; for he often heard me talk of one Spy Nozy, which he was inclined to interpret of himself, and a remarkable feature belonging to him; but he was speedily convinced that it was the name of a man who made a book [Spinoza] and lived long ago.”139

  This lighthearted tale leads, with typical skill, to Coleridge’s lyrical and moving description of the epic philosophic poem “The Brook”, the real subject of their supposedly subversive ramblings. “Such a subject I conceived myself to have found in a stream, traced from its source in the hills among the yellow-red moss and conical glass-shaped tufts of bent, to the first break of fall, where its drops become audible, and it begins to form a channel…thence to the sheepfold…the lonely cottage…the hamlet…the market-town, the manufacturies, and the seaport.”140

  The water imagery here suggests, in context, a deep connection with the flowing thematic of the entire Biographia and its meandering journey. It also recalls the unwritten philosophic epic of Coleridge’s May 1815 letter to Wordsworth, and perhaps signals the recovery of “Kubla Khan”, that miniature epic of a “sacred river” originally written at this time. With these subtle connections and fluid echoes, Coleridge brought the Biographia back to life in his own familiar voice. But time was pressing relentlessly now, and he still had not reached his philosophic destination.

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  On 17 September, 1815, urged on by a frantic Morgan, he wrote directly to John Gutch about the cause of the slipped deadline. He apologized for his “accursed Letterophobia”, and admitted he had been “constantly deluding” himself since August about being nearly finished with the book. On 10 August, when Morgan’s “extreme anxiety and depression of Spirits” had led him to post off the first part of the manuscript, “the whole was written, excepting the philosophical Part which I at that time meant to comprize in a few Pages”. But in the intervening weeks the expansion of this small section had radically changed the size, nature and general interest of the Biographia.

  “This has now become not only a sizeable Proportion of the whole, not only the most interesting portion to a certain class, but with the exception of four or five Pages of which due warning is given, the most entertaining to the general Reader, from the variety both of information and of personal Anecdotes.” He now thought the Biographia would prove more important than his collected poems, and was the “Pioneer to the great Work on the Logos, Divine and Human, on which
I have set my Heart…”141 He was now dashing to the conclusion, which he expected in less than a week.

  He had left himself desperately little time. It is clear from Coleridge’s letter to Gutch that he had only just finished Chapter 10 (“personal Anecdotes”) by early September. But Coleridge still had to expound his term “esemplastic”, and draw his own philosophic definition of Imagination and Fancy clear of Kant and Schelling. Without this his literary critique and appreciation of Wordsworth (Chapters 14 to 22) would have no epistemological foundation or “resting place”, and the bridge between the two parts of the Biographia would be fatally incomplete.

  It is evident from Chapter 11 (the “affectionate exhortation” to young authors, in which he mentions that money and necessity are “narcotics” rather than “stimulants” to a work of genius) that Coleridge was struggling and prevaricating.142 The material was more intractable than anything he had previously attempted. The highly technical matter involved the Kantian notion of “intuitive forms” (time, space, causality) as subjective modes of human perception, in opposition to the unknowable reality of the “noumenal” world, things in themselves and in their essence. He had, as he put it, to distinguish between the temporary “I am” of the human Mind, and the eternal “It is” of Nature, and define the “intermediary” power of Imagination which reconciled them.143