Coleridge- Darker Reflections

by Richard Holmes

  Not only did this involve a philosophic account of Schelling’s definition of the “subjective” and “objective” poles of reality, the “Polar Science”.144 But also – what was not in Schelling, but was vital to Coleridge’s religious views – the demonstration of a personal Creator within this system of ultimate knowledge. Language, especially the language of a poet rooted in “passionate particulars”, almost broke down into meaningless abstraction under this pressure. “We begin with the I KNOW MYSELF, in order to end with the absolute I AM. We proceed from the SELF, in order to lose and find all self in GOD.”145

  Coleridge had gone over this material again and again in the elusive style of his private Notebooks; but to present it for a general readership, to make it popular and accessible, was quite a different level of challenge. “Great indeed are the obstacles which an English metaphysician has to encounter,” he dictated plaintively to Morgan. “Among his most respectable and intelligent judges, there will be many who have devoted their attention exclusively to the concerns and interests of human life, and who bring with them to the perusal of a philosophic system an habitual aversion to all speculation, the utility and application of which are not evident and immediate.”146

  It was now, in evident desperation, that he flung himself back into the vortex of Schelling’s three main publications: the Transcendental Idealism (1800), the Abhandlungen (1796–7), and the collection Philosophische Schriften (1809). From these he assembled a condensed list of ten main propositions or “Theses” in his Notebooks, to sweep him through to the end of Chapter 12.147 It was the failure to acknowledge this composite source which laid him open to the most serious charge of plagiarism in the Biographia. Working flat out (including now an evening stint from 6 to 10 p.m.) he dictated verbatim from these notes (adding his own commentaries) to John Morgan, and perhaps even to Hartley. He must have produced some 14,000 words in about four days.148 He supplied no more than the ghost of a scholarly reference to Schelling’s work, “on a like occasion”.149

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  Composed under this extreme pressure of his deadline (which Morgan felt as much as he), Chapter 12 is nonetheless a formidable and unexpectedly poetic piece of work. He opened it, “a chapter of requests and premonitions”, with a series of appeals to the reader. The material would be difficult, and the reader might want to skip directly to Chapter 13 and the final, promised definition of Imagination or the esemplastic power. He invoked the Pythagorean maxim, “until you understand a writer’s ignorance, presume yourself ignorant of his understanding”.150 He argued that philosophic knowledge, as a technical discipline, was like a retreating range of hills and higher ascents, “hidden by mists and clouds”, which the ordinary reader might never scale, though he could still see the natural beauty and fitness of its conclusions. “On its ridges the common sun is born and departs. From them the stars rise, and touching them they vanish.”151

  Drawing again on a water-image of haunting simplicity, he suggests that the philosopher and the poet are exceptional in their pursuit of knowledge. “But in all ages there have been a few, who measuring and sounding the rivers of the vale at the feet of their furthest inaccessible falls have learned, that the sources must be far higher and far inward…”152 Yet intuitions and glimpses of these higher truths are accessible to all. Coleridge urges his reader to make what is in effect an existential leap of faith. The philosophic connection between Imagination and spiritual powers can be intuited poetically, without technical language, if only the reader will look into their own inner life, and respond to its mysterious potential. Here he turns back to his Notebooks of 1811, and the long, pensive “dialogues” with Jean-Paul Richter.

  They and they only can acquire the philosophic Imagination, the sacred-power of self-intuition, who within themselves can interpret and understand the symbol, that the wings of the air-sylph are forming within the skin of the caterpillar; those only, who feel in their own spirits the same instinct, which impels the chrysalis of the horned fly to leave room in its involcrum for antennae yet to come. They know and feel, that the potential works in them, even as the actual works on them!…They exist in all, and their first appearance discloses itself in the moral being.153

  This combination of natural science and metaphysics is characteristic of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie. Yet the fundamentally religious drive of the argument, its carefully unfolded imagery, its Platonic overtones, are wholly original and Coleridgean. They come from the rivers of the Quantocks and the Lake District, from the natural creatures of his poems and Notebooks, from the long solitary nights of his readings and reflections. All have a homely touch which is unmistakably his. These central passages, these gleams of the transcendent, in many ways embrace the entire argument of the chapter in a single poetic vision of an infinite universe accessible to man. Here, there can be no question of plagiarism.

  At this point Coleridge almost seemed to halt, appending a long and splendidly irrelevant note on philosophic dictionaries. Its interest lies in the fact that he dated it “this morning (16th September 1815)”. This was precisely three days before he despatched the completed manuscript to Gutch.154 So, with his deadline now bearing down on him, Coleridge shut himself in his study with Morgan and dictated recklessly from his Schelling notes until the end of Chapter 12. The two general “Postulates” and ten “Theses” he produced now have little but technical interest. He never later acknowledged that they were plagiarized, but mournfully dismissed them as “unformed and immature…not fully thought out”.155 This much is certainly true, and they have never attracted serious philosophic commentary.

  He hurried on to Chapter 13, “On the Imagination, or esemplastic power”. For a few paragraphs he seemed to be embroiling himself more and more deeply with Schelling’s problem of “constructing” nothing less than the entire universe on polar principles. This did not promise a rapid conclusion. “The transcendental philosopher says: grant me a nature having two contrary forces, the one of which tends to expand infinitely…”156 No doubt Morgan, as he took down these ominous words, would gladly have reached for Occam’s razor.

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  But it was Coleridge who made the cut. Abruptly, he found a startling way out of all his spiralling difficulties. He had just, he announced, received a “very judicious” letter from a friend, urging him to suspend his tortuous metaphysical chapters. Why not give a simple aphoristic description of his philosophical distinction between Fancy and Imagination, and leave the rest for a later book? This Coleridge had decided to do – in two paragraphs.

  The letter – probably inspired by his exchanges with Dr Brabant – was of course a pure fiction. Coleridge later said he wrote it himself with inspired desperation, “Without taking my pen off the paper except to dip it in the inkstand.”157 He inserted it boldly into the manuscript, with instructions to print in italics. It was also another invented voice and it bears an intriguing relation to his future Preface to “Kubla Khan”.

  Both are explanations of his failure to complete a literary work, which have the paradoxical effect of making the remaining “fragment” more fascinating and richly suggestive. In the letter the “friend” describes the experience of reading Coleridge’s metaphysical arguments as like being “left alone, in one of our largest Gothic cathedrals in a gusty moonlight night of autumn. ‘Now in glimmer, and now in gloom’; often in palpable darkness not without a chilly sensation of terror; then suddenly emerging into broad yet visionary lights with coloured shadows of fantastic shapes…”158

  Coleridge, said the friend agreeably, had done “too much, and yet not enough”. The argument was either so elliptical, or so compressed, that what remained was “like the fragments of the winding steps of an old ruined tower”. The philosophical “disquisition” was valuable as history, but further “speculations on the esemplastic power would be utterly unintelligible”. He would be like the celebrated idealist Bishop Berkeley, who announced an essay on “Tar-Water”, beginning with Tar and ending with the Trinity…
He concluded, pleasantly, that knowing Coleridge as he did, there was “a small portion of pig-nature” in his literary character, and that as far as actually finishing a book was concerned, he must be “pulled back from the boat in order to make him enter it”. In all the circumstances, this was a peculiarly fitting marine analogy.159

  So with this extravagant, provoking, and curiously humorous gesture (as if he were mocking himself from the shadows of his own creation), Coleridge completed, or escaped from, the Biographia at the end of September 1815. The manuscript was placed on the evening mail coach to Gutch in Bristol on Tuesday, 19 September, and Coleridge took in the Sibylline Leaves by hand the following Friday.160

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  Yet Coleridge left behind, at the end of Chapter 13, the most famous critical fragment of his career. It became in many ways the prose equivalent of “Kubla Khan”. Its 199 words – clear, compact, Delphic – were destined to generate as much discussion, as much source-hunting, as much praise and controversy, as the poem. It summed up seven chapters of argument, and defined for the English-speaking world the Romantic concept of creativity. It did indeed distinguish between Fancy and Imagination. And more than that, it formed the vital bridge between the two halves of the Biographia, so bringing the philosophical principle to bear on the critical practice.

  The IMAGINATION then I consider either as primary or secondary. The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.

  FANCY, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites. The Fancy is indeed no other than a mode of Memory emancipated from the order of time and space; and blended with, and modified by that empirical phenomenon of the will, which we express by the word CHOICE. But equally with the ordinary memory it must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association.161

  That the concepts of Fancy and Imagination had such a long history, both in German and English philosophy, makes this precision and brevity all the more remarkable. Coleridge’s memorable definition combines the quality of an algebraic formula and a witch’s spell or incantation. It is simultaneously cold and logical, and hot and mystical. Elements of the English tradition of empirical psychology mingle with German concepts of polar energies, and purely scientific notions of chemical and electrical reactions. There is also a religious affirmation that Imagination is “a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation”. If all this draws on the common intellectual currency of European discussion at the turn of the century, and the notion of some form of active–passive dialectic or polarity in the human mind, it also does something that no previous writer had achieved.

  Coleridge made such ideas familiar, indeed famous, for the ordinary reader. Moreover he wrote about them as a practising poet, and he brought them to life as part of his own intellectual and spiritual journey. For him the escape from the passive world-view of Associationism was a necessary step on the path to spiritual redemption. “All the products of the mere reflective faculty partook of DEATH…” To be trapped in an empirical, materialist view of the world meant that his own fate was sealed (especially as an opium addict), without creative choice, moral will, or degrees of freedom. But to believe in an active, transforming world of the imagination, and to believe this was an unquenchable “power” and energy in Nature, part of man’s divine inheritance, promised salvation. It is for this reason that Coleridge’s theory of the Imagination goes far beyond traditional epistemology. It was a poet’s view of how the world really was, and ultimately a religious affirmation of freedom and hope.*

  What was most original in Coleridge’s account of the Imagination, throughout the Biographia, was the vivid and personal way in which he described its workings in his own mind. To this extent, Coleridge did not write like a traditional philosopher at all, but closer to a modern existential viewpoint, in which the actual experience of moral choice and the creative act are invoked as formative events. The philosophical term “Fancy” in fact represents his rejection of the passive mind-set of Associationism, which is connected for him with submission, addiction and death, while “Imagination”, the active and unifying power, is connected with joy and freedom. In the moment of creativity, the two become reconciled in the poet’s mind, and animate him with images from the deeps of memory and longing.

  This is, convincingly, the product of an original vision, not a borrowed philosophy, born of much thought and suffering and reflection. When he completed the original manuscript in September, Coleridge closed it with an oracular passage (in what became Chapter 24), which insisted on the religious basis of his vision, far beyond any such affirmation in Kant or Schelling. The Imagination was, fundamentally, the faculty that communicated with divine creative power in the universe. Through it, man could bear witness to knowledge beyond the limits of discursive Reason. The image that he chose, of the stars seen at night, linked back not only to the experience of the Mariner, but as far back as he could remember, to the star-gazing he had once shared with his father in the fields of childhood at Ottery St Mary. Now, as a father himself, he had tried to show

  that Religion passes out of the ken of Reason only where the eye of Reason has reached its own Horizon; and that Faith is then but its continuation: even as the Day softens away into the sweet Twilight, and Twilight, hushed and breathless, steals into the Darkness. It is Night, sacred Night! the upraised Eye views only the starry Heaven which manifests itself alone: and the outward Beholding is fixed on the sparks twinkling in the aweful depth, though Suns of other Worlds, only to preserve the Soul steady and collected in its pure Act of inward Adoration to the great I AM, and to the filial WORD that re-affirmeth it from Eternity to Eternity, whose choral Echo is the Universe.162

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  With both manuscripts finally off his hands by the September deadline, there was every prospect of speedy publication in the winter of 1815. Coleridge at last felt he had put together two books that, whatever their shortcomings, he could finally take pride in. With the Morgans’ help, he had fought his way back from the utter despair of the previous year. In prose and in verse, he had achieved a poet’s testament, a proof that his life was not quite worthless.

  Briefly, he was swept by a quiet sense of happiness, of things coming back under control. He invited Gutch over to Calne, promising to “row him about” the beautiful lake at Bowood and conduct him around the paintings at Corsham, while they discussed publication details. He also asked Gutch to bring the symbolic tortoiseshell snuffbox, which he had left in Bristol until his work was done, and he had truly earned it back. Not forgetting Hartley, he discreetly negotiated £10 to send his son back to Oxford with some money in his pocket and a small share of his father’s good fortune. Only when Hartley was gone was it borne in on him that he was penniless.163

  On 7 October Coleridge wrote soberly to Daniel Stuart announcing the two volumes as the unexpected fruit of his long retreat at Calne – “all corrected & finished to the best of my power – For the last 4 months I have never worked less than six hours every day”. Now at last he felt able to plan ahead again: a new play for Drury Lane, a new edition of The Friend, and of course the Logosophia “for which I have been collecting the materials for the last 15 years almost incessantly”.

  He claimed his health was good, “better than I have known it for the last 12 years”. It was now only his finances which seemed incurable – “what can I do if I am to starve while working?…Would to God, I had been bred a Shoemaker!” At this s
tage in his career, he could not face a return to daily journalism, especially as he considered all the papers, including the Courier, “so entirely devoted to the Government”. He had tried offering translations to Murray, “but all in vain”. He could not expect any more money from Gutch, his advances already standing at £107.5s.6d. He must find new patrons, “otherwise, I must sink”.164

  Now at last he played his only trump card. In a fever of anxiety, he resumed his correspondence with Byron. Three long letters went out in October, outlining his publishing plans, and wildly promising a tragedy for Drury Lane by Christmas. Coleridge could not know that Byron’s own affairs – gathering debts, a broken marriage, tempestuous scandals – were suddenly crowding round him that autumn. Yet miraculously the reply came, prompt and enthusiastic.

  Byron would indeed recommend the new books in London, he would “negotiate with the Trade” and (as a representative of Drury Lane) he would anxiously await the play – “it is a field in which there are none living to contend against you and in which I would take pride and pleasure in seeing you compared with the dead. I say this not disinterestedly, but as a Committeeman.”

  He added some stirring praise of “Christabel”, extracts of which he had heard Walter Scott reciting from memory the previous spring. The poem was “the wildest and finest I ever heard in that kind of composition…I mention this, not for the sake of boring you with compliments, but as a prelude to the hope that this poem is or is to be in the volumes you are now about to publish. I do not know that even ‘Love’ or the ‘Ancient Mariner’ are so impressive – and to me there are few things in our tongue beyond these two productions.”165