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Obstinate In Resurrection: An Interpretation Of Coleridge'S Envisioning Of Reality

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Obstinate In Resurrection: An Interpretation Of Coleridge'S Envisioning Of Reality

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Content FITZPATRICK, James Joseph, 1925- OBSTINATE IN RESURRECTION: AN INTERPRETATION OF COLERIDGE'S ENVISIONING OF REALITY. University of Southern California, Ph.D., 1971 Language and Literature, general University Microfilms, A M E R C K Company, Ann Arbor, Michigan - COPYRIGHT BY James Joseph Fitzpatrick 1971 im* wumtutnm mm mm mnamnumD exactly as received OBSTINATE IN RESURRECTION An. interpretation of Coleridge's Envisioning of Reality by James Joseph Fitzpatrick A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA in partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (English) August 1971 UNIVERSITY O F SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA THE GRADUATE SCHOOL. UNIVERSITY PARK LOS ANOELES. CALIFO RNIA SO O 07 This dissertation, written by ....Jbm&.JQSEE^.IXTZSJOaiCK................. under the direction of . Dissertation Com mittee, and approved by all its members, has been presented to and accepted by the Graduate School, in partial fulfillment of requirements for the degree of D O C T O R OF P H I L O S O P H Y 'Trieujo / f - Pgfg Sept€OTfeerl971 DISSERTATION COMMITTEE PLEASE NOTE: Some pages have indistinct print. Filmed as received. UNIVERSITY MICROFILMS. The white rose of Eddy-foam, where the stream ran into a scooped or scolloped hollow of the Rock in it's channelt- this Shape, an exact white rose, was for ever overpowered by the Stream rush ing down in upon it, and still obstinate in resurrection it spread up into the Scollop, by fits @ starts, blossoming in a moment into a full Flower. MS Notebook No. 21, Add MSS 475 18, f.56. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE INTRODUCTION.................... I I. POET-PHILOSOPHER...................13 II. PHILOSOPHER...................... 45 III. POET............................. 92 IV. THEOLOGIAN....................... 169 V. COMIC...........................248 VI. EPILOGUE.........................356 BIBLIOGRAPHY..............................386 iii INTRODUCTION Each thing that lives has its moment of self-exposition, and so has each period of each thing, if we remove the disturb ing forces of accident* To do this is the business of ideal art* Samuel T. Coleridge I INTRODUCTION The aim of this essay is to offer a "surview"! of Coleridge's intellectual topography and of his warld- vision. Its procedure is governed by the following points: 1) That there is special value in an interpreta tion that attempts to envisage Coleridge's mind and work in significantly organic structure, even while paying less attention to the chronological details that a strictly developmental approach would demand. To be sure, Coleridge told his nephew that "divisions are in particular instances inadequate, and they destroy the interest which arises from watching the progress, ma- O turity, and even the decay of genius." This was in accordance with his insight into life as a process of becoming, and with his awareness of the human mind, in its states of consciousness and unconsciousness, as a thing of astonishing growth. Man's great philosophical and poetical achievements — human creations that are, in their turn, generative of spiritual values -- bear 2 3 witness to the fecundity of his powers of knowledge. Coleridge appreciated the fact that to examine such works is to behold, more or less according to their calibre, not only their quickening, but the gradual self- appropriation ( what the Germans aptly call a Besinnung ) of their creators. And this revelation of man's intel lectual-poetic creativity is, fortunately, available to an extraordinary degree in Coleridge's own writings, for he was ever analytically attentive to the flux and reflux of his own genius, and even bodied forth these movements in his literary masterpieces. Still, despite his emphasis on the value of the chronological approach to a poet's or a philosopher's works, it is interesting to note that none of the col lections of his poems from 1796 to 1829 presented them in such order. The relevant fact seems to be that Coleridge was very much aware that chronological growth is not the only element to be considered in the wonder of life; that such evolution comes from a vital prin ciple ab intra, and that it develops with antecedent purposiveness, intensively as well as extensively, onto organic wholeness. Therefore, the poet's/philosopher's "inner vision," and the tensed integrity — the Cir cular motion — the snake with its Tail in its Mouth"3 — of not only his individual efforts, but of the entire 4 corpus of his work, should be taken into account. The following pages, then, are intended as a contribution toward such a "surview” of the animating, holistic prin ciples that are reflected in Coleridge's correspondence, note-books, and formal writings. 2) That Coleridge's many and various writings to gether form an organic totality. Thomas McFarland puts it well: Coleridge's thought demands for its assessment a recognition — and it is a recognition not usually accorded -- that his intellectual endeavor consti tutes an organic unity. There is in reality no tripartite division of rhapsodic poet, maundering metaphysician, and pious theologian; the same Col eridge philosophizes, poetizes, and theologizes, and furthermore, the different fields of his in terests are mutually interdependent -- his poetry, both in theory and in practice, is essentially, not accidentally, involved with his philosophy, and his philosophy is reciprocally bound up with his theological interests.** At times Coleridge's writings resemble, as G.N.G. Orsini remarks, "a whirlpool of thoughts, images, and emotions."^ But though they interpenetrate, his philosophical, poetic, and theological efforts are distinguishable; and an anal ysis of each one separately contributes ultimately to a better appreciation of their vital, oceanic union in his mind. Coleridge himself stressed the necessity of such an analytic method of examination, stating that "In order to obtain adequate notions of any truth, we must intellectually separate its distinguishable parts, , . "5 but, he warned, "having so done, we must then restore them in our conceptions of unity, in that they actually co-exist, . . — a work of synthesis that is partic ularly crucial in matters that relate immediately to man himself. No doubt, Coleridge sometimes used ex pressions that implied the dualist error regarding man ( as found, for example, in Plato, Descartes, Jansenism, and forms of Evangelicanism ), especially when he spoke out of desperation : O this crazy tenement, this Body, a ruinous Hovel. . • . My Fetters have eat in/the vital flesh has grown o'er them/the unwilling Gaoler leaves with a scornful Laugh the fruitless Task to perplex'd Chirurgeon;? and with moral rather than epistemological import: 0 young man, who hast seen, felt, @ known the Truth, to whom reality is a phantom, @ virtue and mind the sole actual @ permanent Being, do not degrade the Truth in thee by disputing.8 But these occasions were infrequent and passing. Col eridge consistently viewed man as a single being, with his body the explication of his soul, and his soul the highest actuation of his body: with both giving rise to his full personhood that is identical with neither 6 of these separately: Consciousness, tin i, mind, life, will, body, organ machine, nature, spirit, sin, habit, sense, understanding, reason: here are fourteen words. Have you ever reflectively and quietly asked your** self to return the answer in distinct terms not applicable to any of the other words?” When 1 make a three-fold division in human nature, I am fully aware, that it is a distinction, not a division. . .10 in sum, he held that man is not a "body plus soul," but "the unity, the prothesis"H of which the body and the soul are the two poles. Accordingly, in the present essay the separate studies of Coleridge's philosophical, poetic, and theo logical achievements are undertaken in order to reveal, not only their individual values, but their interre latedness and fundamental integrality -- and, thereby also, the strong calibre and rich magnitude of the mind that they express. 3) That Coleridge's own "surview" of reality was essentially religious, and that, consequently, any at tempt at a "surview" of his mind and work must be like wise. The orientation of the interpretative study in these pages is religious and specifically Christian. It is in line with the beliefs that began to crystallize 7 with increasing clarity in Coleridge's mind after 1805 — even if often articulated, after the manner of the Ancient Mariner, unpredictably and unsettingly. it stakes its claims, not in the application by foresight of his later religious convictions to his earlier se cular writings, but in the fact of his gradual re discovery, in depth and extent, of the Christianity into which he had been incorporated in infancy. A unique expression of Coleridge's idea of re ligion as ( among other things ) a "surview" of reality is contained in his "Allegoric Vision," which dates from as early as August, 1795. He used this "Vision" in different contexts ( for instance, as a preface to his first Theological Lecture, 1798 ) and with different purposes ( among them, his attack on the aiders and abettors of Catholic Emancipation ); but, throughout its adaptations, he maintained his central imaging of religion: We speeded from the Temple with hasty steps, and had now nearly gone round half the valley, when we were addressed by a woman, tall beyond the stature of mortals, and with a something more than human in her countenance and mien, which yet could by mortals be only felt, not conveyed by words or intelligibly distinguished. Deep reflection, ani mated by ardent feelings, was displayed in them: and hope, without its uncertainty, and a something more than all these, which I understood not, but which yet seemed to bland all these into a divine 8 unity of expression. Her garments were white and matronly, and of the simplest texture. We inquired her name. ’My name,* she replied, *is Religion.* The more numerous part of our company, affrighted by the very sound, and sore from recent impostures or sorceries, hurried onwards and examined no farther. A few of us, struck by the manifest opposition of her form and manners to those of the living Idol, whome we had so recently abjured, agreed to follow her, though with cautious circumspection. She led us to an eminence in the midst of the valley, from the top of which we could command the whole plain, and ob serve the relation of the different parts to each other, and of each to the whole, and of all to each. She then gave us an optic glass which assisted with out contradicting our natural vision, and enabled us to see far beyond the limits of the Valley of Life; though our eye even thus assisted permitted us only to behold a light and a glory, but what we could not descry, save only that it was, and that it was most glorious. Herein Coleridge graphically depicts religious vision ( which he increasingly identified with the Christian Revelation as its purest realization ) as that which, not only integrates and enhances all other views of reality, but transcends, while confirming and respecting, their spatio-tempora1 limitations. Now, the present essay is, in effect, an examina tion of Coleridge's thesis as it was realized in his own mind. It is divided into two parts, the first being concerned with Coleridge's three modes of insight, the philosophical, the poetic, and the theological; the second, with his actual vision of reality. Chapter I 9 underscores the communion -- always precariously poised -- between his two natural modes of insight, the philoso phical and the poetic. Chapters II and III look respec tively at Coleridge as a philosopher and as a poet, not ing especially that his methodologies, as well as the central themes of his speculation and imaginative crea tion ( namely, the epistemological problem, and the challenges of philosophic System and poetic 'World1 ), all exhibit a definite impulse to move beyond categories that cramp the activity of the human mind and close it to transcendent reality. Chapter IV looks at Coleridge as theologian. Theology presupposes faith: its mode of insight is distinctive, for it is shaped and directed by divine Revelation. By their very nature, therefore, Coleridge's theological efforts bring to a resolution the profoundest aspirations of his philosophy and poetry; for Christian theology confirms and celebrates, not only ( by the Incarnation belief ) philosophy's and poetry's immediate preoccupation with spatio-temporal reality, but also ( by the Redemption and Trinitarian beliefs ) their radical openness to transcendence. Since, as Col eridge himself taught, the word of God to which theology listens is the word which engages the whole man, judg ing and redeeming him, theology can never be a purely 'theoretical* science, one that is existentially unin volved. In line with this, Coleridge's own theological 10 searchings are considered in Chapter IV as intimately related to his personal make-up and history. Chapters V and VI respectively treat of his actual vision of reality as comic and religious. Chapter V brings together evi dences of the comic in his writings, particularly the imaginative, and stresses the unremitting openness of his literary masterpieces. Chapter VI discusses the existential translation of this openness in Coleridge's religious life, and constitutes the Epilogue to this study. It must be emphasized that Coleridge's eventual choice of Christianity amounted to the acceptance of a way of life, not a preference for a theology; and, moreover, that it is in the context of this life that the philosophic and poetic values of his work are truly enhanced in their rightful autonomy, and not sub sumed and robbed of their singularity, as James D. Boulger maintains. Coleridge was convinced that the Christian religion is ordained to provide mankind's organic unity: one which, by its very nature, will de fend and cultivate human creativity; for, he argued, an organism will be more intense in proportion as it constitutes each particular thing a whole of itself; and yet more, again, in proportion to the number and 11 Interdependence of the parts, which it unites as a whole --13 and the Christian religion is the pre-eminent organism, at once human and divine. Actually, in his unrealized ambition to construct a complete metaphysical System, and to body forth a self-sufficient, all-embracive poetic World, Coleridge confirmed for himself his primary theo logical conclusion; namely, that the only viable *system* or ■worldview* is Christianity, which is infinitely greater than either* and contains both as an organism includes organization and intrinsic impulses. Thus, he bore witness not only to God, but to man. Far more than he himself realized, his vision of reality focused on, and in turn radiated from, the Incarnation of the Word. NOTES INTRODUCTION 12 1. BL, II, 44. 2. TT, 269. 3. N, 1, 609. 4. Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition ( Oxford tyt>y ;, xxxii^viii. 5. Coleridge and German Idealism ( Carbondale and Edwardsville, l9fcy ), 23. 6. BL, II, 6. 7. Ibid. 8. N, II, 3189. 9. I£, 205-6. 10. F, I, I64n. 11. LR, 95. 12. CP, I, 1094-0.095. 13. TL, 388t CHAPTER I POET - PHILOS When I haven*t any blue, Pablo 13 0 P H E R use red. Picasso CHAPTER I The cultural milieu into which Samuel Taylor Coleridge entered during the last decade of the Eighteenth Century was considerably dominated by the Cartesian Cogito. Stressing the basic principles of the dualist philosophical tradition, Descartes had separated man's body from his soul and his soul from his mind, thereby distancing the solitary "thinking substance" from encompassing realities. As Robert Langbaum correctly observes, the romartic quality of mind grew out of this "total crisis of personality."1 Now, this statement is particularly relevant to Col eridge. He inherited enthusiastically the work of bridging the gap between the 'subject* and the 'object,* between human consciousness and Nature, making it one of his central preoccupations, and viewing self and Nature not simply as two *givensl in his consciousness, but two realms to be identified and explored, both individually, and in mutual relationship. Coleridge thus considered the human phenomenon, not merely in terms of man's own inner life ( primordial and paramount reference for such 14 15 study ), but in terms of Nature that encompasses and nurtures him, for he deemed Nature to be, not only some thing to be studied in itself, but to be explored as an analogue of man's own innermost being. Unfortunately, Coleridge contributed not a little to the creation of an image of himself as a visionary who, guilty of an angelism that, vampire-like, drains away bodied humanness, spent his time in dealing with "transcendental moonshine. Ajnd there is no doubt that such lines as these from his early "Greek Ode on Astron omy" ( 1793 ): I may not call thee mortal then, my soul! Immortal longings lift thee to the skies: Love of thy native home inflames thee now, With pious madness wise. Know then thyself! expand thy wings divine! Soon mingled with thy fathers thou shalt shine A star amid the starry throng, A God the Gods among;’ and such lines as those referring to his first son: An utter Visionary! like the Moon among thin clouds, he moves in a circle of Light of his own making « he alone, in a Light of his own -- touch on an orientation in his make-up that, though increasingly disciplined, never quite left him. More over, throughout his writings there are occasional Manichean undertones that receive chilling embodiment In 16 Christabel ( 1797-1301 ): a certain shying away from full, uninhibited acceptance of human corporality. But Leslie Stephen's censoring description of Coleridge as a "drugged cultivator of unreality" and a "narcoticized dreamer,"5 exaggerates to the point of falsification. Coleridge emerges from the totality of his writings ( particularly his more self-revealing jottings and correspondence ) as a man who, in Leigh Hunt's words, was "very fond of earth," exhibiting an unusual "humane plenitude"** — not the "spirit, all head and wings, eternally floating about in etherealities,"7 that Hazlitt claimed him to have been. He was inti mately aware of "the tendency of the mind to run into f i the extreme of spirituality and materialism." He gladdened in feeling against his person the tang of un insulated, sapful reality. His "Seal* Fell" letter to Sara Hutchinson in 1802 — one of the innumerable pieces of his writings that dwell on the out-of-doors — evi dences the rounded hardiness of his lust for life: There is one sort of Gambling, to which 1 am much addicted; @ that not of the least criminal kind for a man who has children @ a Concern. -- It is this. When I find it convenient to descend from a mountain, I am too confident and too indolent to look round about @ Wind about 'till I find a track or other symptom of safety; but I wander on, and where it is first possible to descend, there I go — relying upon fortune For how far down this 17 possibility will continue. So it was yesterday afternoon. I passed down from Broadcrag, skirted the Precipices, ® found myself cut off from a most sublime Crag-summit, that seemed to rival Sea* Fell Man in height, @ to outdo it in fierceness. A Ridge of Hill lay low down, divided this Crag ( called Doe-crag ) and Broad-crag » even as the Hyphen divides the words broad @ crag. I deter mined to go thither; the first place I came to that was not direct Rock, l slipped down, @ went on for a while with tolerable ease -- but now I came ( it was midway down ) to a smooth perpendicular Rock about 7 feet high — this was nothing — 1 put my hands on the Ledge, dropped down/ in a few yards came just such another/ I dropped that too/ @ yet another, seemed not higher — I would not stand for a trifle/ so I dropped that too/ but the stretching of the muscle(s) of ray hands @ arms, @ the jolt of the Fall on my Feet, put my whole Limbs in a Tremble, @ I paused, @ looking down, saw that I had little else to encounter but a succession of these little Precipices — it was in truth a path than in a very bad rain is, no doubt, the channel of a most splendid Waterfall. -- So 1 began to suspect that I ought to go on/ but then unfortunately tho* 1 could with ease drop down a smooth Rock 7 feet high, I could not climb it/so go on I must/ @ on I went/ the next 3 drops were not half a Foot, at least not a foot more than my height/ but every Drop increased the Palsy of my Limbs -- I shook all over, Heaven knows without the least influence of Fear/ @ now I had only two more to drop down/ to return was impossible — but of these two the first was tremendous/ it was twice my own height, @ the Ledge at the bottom was ( so ) exceedingly narrow, that if I dropt down upon it 1 must of necessity have fallen backwards @ of course killed myself. My Limbs were all in a tremble -- 1 lay upon my Back to rest myself, @ was beginning according to my Custom to laugh at myself for a Mad man, when the sight of the Crags above me on each side, @ the impetuous Clouds just over them, post ing so luridly @ so rapidly northward, overawed me/ 1 lay in a state of almost prophetic Trance 9 Delight — Kiaa.ttH ai mid f«*> ♦■K® powers of Reason 9 the Will, which rema Danger can overpower 18 The fact of the matter is that Coleridge was acutely aware that his consciousness necessarily and avidly opened to Nature's world of richly diversified, individuated becoming. He perceived that in the myster ious correlation of the knower and the known in the act of cognition, man's own reality is illuminated in the light of the object known. In giving light, and only then, is his self enlightened. The Mariner, in blessing the water-snakes, is himself blessed. Thus, Coleridge speculated, while the external world, the 'object,' mediates man to himself, the 'subject,' he in turn gives meaning to things: So water and flame, the diamond, the charcoal and the mantling champagne, with its ebullient sparkle, are convoked and fraternised by the theory of the chemist. . • . It is a sense of the principle of connection given by the mind and sanctioned by the correspondency of nature. Precisely because of this vital mutuality between the creative mind and the immediate plural shock of nature's reality, Coleridge's own genius was sometimes a "very focus of all the rays of intellect which are scattered throughout the images of nature,"H Nature's undiluted shapes and rhythms elicited new forms in his conscious ness, and he, in turn, humanized nature with signifi cances, One needs only to read the poem "Frost at 19 Midnight" ( 1798 ) to appreciate Coleridge's exceptional accomplishment in this regard, with its bodying forth in meditative, dialogic silence, of a process of pro found mutual enrichment between man and nature, the one tuned to the other in deep, fruitful harmony. I. Thus, long before his mature insight into the Christian notion of the Word as the "ground and trans- 12 cendent analogue for the phenomenon of creation," Coleridge was convinced that the mind and nature have each a logos structure. For, in the first place, both, despite their terrible disorders, are instinct with in telligibility. Meaningfulness is revealed in the re ciprocal act wherein the mind grasps the world of the non-ego, drawing it into the realm of meaning, and wherein the multiple things of the non-ego universe, each with its own proper form and rhythm, awaken the human consciousness to its infinitely rich potential. Even in their silences -- and, as Coleridge was aware, peculiarly in these silences — the deeps of the human mind call to the deeps of the cosmos. Consequently, to be truly human ( and more urgently, to be a poet ), a person must have his mind and heart "combined, inti mately combined and unified with the great appearances 20 of nature, and not merely held In solution and loose 1 mixture with them, in the shape of formal similes.M,LJ Radically, the reciprocal process between man's con sciousness and the spatio-temporal universe into which he is plunged, involves a mutual growth in the logos structure peculiar to each — with the miracle of man's self-awareness distinguishing the two dimensions of the one process. Now, for Coleridge this dynamism of intelligibil ity in man and in nature is especially manifested in the impulse toward wholeness within both. Nature is never satisfied with being a mere "mass of little things."*-1 * but as he elucidates in his Theory of Life ( 1818 ), it combines ( for example, by way of crystallization ) and grows ( by way of organism ) into wholes; and man himself, as Coleridge knew from agonizing experience, yearns to live "wholly and as a whole man."^~> Writing to John Thelwall in October, 1797, Coleridge revealed his obsession with what the old schoolmen envisaged under the complementary notions of integrity and pro portion/consonance: an obsession that was to preoc cupy him all his life: I can at times feel strongly the beauties, you de scribe,"ihTttuunselves , and for themselves — but more frequently all things appear little -- all the 21 knowledge, that can be acquired, child1a play — the universe itself -- what but an immense heap of little things? — I can contemplate nothing but parts, and parts are all little — ! — My mind feels as if it ached to behold and know something great -- something one and indivisible — and it is only in the faith of this that rocks and waterfalls, mountains or caverns give me the sense of sublimity or majesty? --But in this faith all things counterfeit infinity?16 Coleridge's instinctive "rage for order," as Austin Warren would call it,1^ was all the more intensified and given conscious direction upon his development of insight into the Catholicism of Christianity and into the role of Christ as the recapitulating summit, the kephalaion, of the entire universe. But it was always essentially religious in orientation. "The hunger for unity," comments Walter Jackson Bate," the inability to rest content in the vestibule or the aisles, is, in the broadest sense, a religious feeling, a relig ious need."^® So is the accompanying zeal to accumu late and assimilate scattered truths; and, as Thomas McFarland succinctly indicates, Coleridge's mind was "not excluding, nay-saying out-of-bound, but reticu- 19 lative in pattern." Thus, in the Biographia Liter- aria ( 1817 ) he makes his own the conviction of Leib nitz that "The deeper. • .we penetrate into the ground of things, the more truth we discover in the doctrines 20 of the greater number of philosophical sects" and 22 he explains how, when confronted with convictions that seem fundamentally opposed to his own, he strove to connect empathically with them: . • .it has been my habit, and I may add, the impulse of my nature, to assign the grounds of my belief, rather than the belief itself; and not to express dissent, till I could establish some points of complete sympathy, some ground common to both sides, from which to commence its explanation, L He considered himself ignorant of another writer*s understanding, until he appreciated the reasons for his ignorance. His concern, then, with wholeness in the human mind and in nature, had him following things nout to their remotest ramifications"^ — often in digressions that, as he himself frankly admitted, led him further than he had foreseen or proposed. This latter charac teristic is evident not only in the records of his conversations wherein, to the frequent bewilderment of his listeners, his mind was able to "take wing" exuberantly, but even in his prose writings, whose "fixture" of composition he found oppressive.^ And this same holistic impulse contributed greatly to his "ordinary mishap" of swallowing up his theses in illustrations: 23 I feel too intensely the omnipresence of all in each, platonically speaking; or, psychologically, my brain-fibres, or the spiritual light which abides in the brain-morrow, as visible light ap pears to do in sundry rptten mackerel and other smashy matters, is of too general an affinity with all things, and though it perceives the difference of things, yet it is eternally pursuing the Llke- nesses, or rather, that which is common /Between them_7. Bring me two things that seem tEe very same, and then I am quick enough ^not only_7 to show the difference, even to hair-splitting, but to go on from circle to circle till I break against the shore of my hearer1 s patience, or have my con- centricals dashed to nothing by a snore. 2 l * Facets of this man*s genius were, indeed, facets of his weakness -- and, ruefully, he knew so. The logos structure of the human mind and of nature is manifest, according to Coleridge, not only in their fundamental intelligibility, but in their dialogic nature. For, on the one hand, the things of 25 creation are "a perpetual discourse,” telling man not only of themselves, but of their Creator: sometimes, as it were, in playful rivalry, mocking the human mind with its own metaphor, and "metamorphosing the memory 26 into a lignum vitae escritoire." On the other hand, by his language man not only organizes his own personal experiences, but, in a very profound sense, does the same for the things of nature about him. For words, forming in their very constitution of matter and spirit 2h a mysterious paradigm of man himself, are "living powers by which things of the most importance to mankind are activated, combined and humanized.Without dialogue between man and nature, neither can fully mature. As Coleridge came to realize more deeply in his later years, without 'dialogue* between them neither can grow, ac cording to their respective share of being, in their destined reflection or likeness of the divine Word by whom they are formed and sustained in being. Coleridge, accordingly, was keenly sensitive to the value of language. With Wordsworth, he recognized the existence of even silent poets: "Their*s is the language of the heavens, the power,/The Thought, the image, and the silent joy;/Words are but underagents in 2R their souls." But, again with Wordsworth, he insisted that men ( and, above all, men who are poets ) usually address other men by words -- words that contain a dy namic as well as a dianoetic significance; that re-create as well as communicate: vital, palpable words, alto gether unlike the gaudy "inane p h r a s e o l o g y " ^ that was then so much in vogue. He knew that a word's meaning included , f not only its correspondent object; but like wise all the association it recalls. For language is framed to convey not the object alone, but likewise the 25 character, mood and intentions of the person who is 30 1 representing it." Words give "outness" not only to thoughts, but to persons. Nor are they mere "passive Tools, but organized instruments re-acting on OO the power which inspirits them." He therefore sought out the unalloyed, living words that call forth the in definable secrets of things, and that challenge men to greater heights of spirit. His memorandum, dated De cember 1804, was no idle boast; "Few men, I will be bold to say, put more meaning into their words than 1, or choose them more deliberately and discriminately."33 His prose and poetry, and by all accounts his conversa tions, attest to his constant search for the exact ex pression of his thoughts and feelings in the "tenta tive process"3* * of language. And, aware of the "mist" and "delving difficulty"33 that attended even his most successful efforts, he realized not only the limitations of human words; For words express generalities that can be made s£ clear -- they have neither the play of colors, nor the untranslatable meanings of the eye, nor any one of the thousand indescribable things that form the whole reality of the living fuel -- 33 but also the fecundity of their very indefiniteness: 26 Whether or no the too great definiteness of Terms in any language may not consume too much of the vital and idea-creating force in distinct, clear, full made images and so prevent originality — original thought as distinguished from positive thought.37 He had little use for language composed of "parrot words" that remain "quite satisfied, clear as a pike- JO staff," either because they are the bastardized words C what Heidegger calls gerede ) that are wrung dry of life, and in their unequivocality are only fit for mat ters of functional communication, not for communion, not as a dwellingplace for being; or because they are contained in "skipping, short-winded, asthmatic sen tences , as easy to be understood as impossible to be remembered."^® -- words situated in contexts that do not grow simultaneously with the active mind that utters them: words that have nothing before and nothing behind — a stupid piece of mock-knowledge, having no root for then it would have feelings of dimness from growth, having no buds or twigs, for then it would Wave yearnings and strivings of obscurity from growing. . ,**0 Words are living things, "parts and germinations of the plant"**1 that is the human consciousness. They U2 are not just "arbitrary signs" that the mind picks at random; rather they are, more or less according to their vital authenticity, new creations of the mind's inventiveness, and are even initiative of new thought, indeed, Coleridge suggests, the best language "is de rived from reflection on the acts of the mind itself"^ the profuse splendor of Shakespeare's language, for in stance, "was not drawn from any set fashion, but from the profoundest depth of hie moral being. Well,then, Coleridge goes on, since "all knowledge rests on the coincidence of an object with a subject,"1 ^ and since language is balanced at their point of coincidence fo cusing and furthering their interplay, language, spoken and written, should give expression to the holistic character of the human consciousness ' and of reality beyond the ego: . . .the intercourse of uneducated men is distin guished from the diction of their superiors in knowledge and power by the greater dis junction and separation in the component parts of tnat, what ever it be, which they wish to communicate. There is a want of that prospectiveness of mind, that surview, which enables a man to foresee the whole of what he is to convey, appertaining to one point; and by this means so to subordinate and arrange the different parts according to their relative impor tance, as to convey it at once, and as an organ ized whole.^ Coleridge's monologue*<iominated conversations, no mat ter how irregular and desultory, invariably revealed ( to those still able to follow him ) his initial grasp of the radical whole that he willed to engender and LZ 28 illuminate, not only for his listeners, but for himself* Henry Nelson Coleridge reports how many people com plained that his uncle "seemed to wander; and he seemed then to wander the most, when, in fact, his reslstence to the wandering instinct was greatest, — viz., when the compass and huge circuit, by which his illustrations moved, travelled farthest into remote regions, before they began to revolve. Long before this coming round commenced, most people had lost him, and naturally enough supposed that he had lost himself."**^ The fact is that Coleridge seldom failed to envisage his notions of reality in constantly expanding surviews: a life-long practice that he most perfectly realized in his philosophy and poetry. II. That Samuel Taylor Coleridge was both a philoso pher and a poet -- at least during separate periods of his life — is admitted by most critics; but they widely differ as to the quality of his accomplishment in either. For example, Richard Haven considers his philosophical work to be of "little more than academic or historical interest, remembered and sometimes read not for itself but because its author wrote 'The Rime of the Ancient 29 Mariner* and the Biographia Literaria, or because as the Sage of Highgate he so profoundly influenced the first generation of Victorians."**8 James Baker agrees with T.M. Raysor in regarding him as, at best, "an amateur, though a gifted and inspired one."^ I* A. Richards concedes that "he made too many mistakes of the wrong kind. He mixed with his philosophy too many things which did not belong to it, he let accidental and in essential prejudices too much interfere."50 Rene' Wellek, one of Coleridge's most trenchant critics, writes that "Coleridge's thought cannot claim a high position in the history of philosophy,"51 but he deems him "the intellectual centre of the English Romantic M o v e m e n t ."52 Thomas McFarland holds his philosophy in high esteem, and acclaims him as the "living line be tween religion and philosophy" for his age, just as Dante was for his,53 Miss Cobum suggests that "Col eridge needs a tough-minded, objective, nonallied, nonprofessional philosopher to tolerate and trace his intellectual image, for it is not that of a systematic philosopher."^** All in all, criticism of.iS.T.C's philosophy has matured considerably ( though still not enough ) since Carlyle's taunting description of its array of "logical swim-bladders, transcendental life- 30 preservers55 The general, consensus seems to be that, while Coleridge did not produce a metaphysical system, he philosophized considerably, especially in areas of epistemology and aesthetics; that many of his 1 seminal* ideas are interrelated and of great value; and that, even when derived, they were given original meaning and re levance by his complex genius. Coleridge is universally acclaimed for the 'magic* of his poetry. However, much the same situation obtains here as in criticism of his philosophy, insofar that criticism of his poetry is directed, for the most part, to the small group of his major poems, to the neglect of the many others whose quality is undeniably of the first order, even though not as 'magical* as that of the former. Max Schulz's complaint is valid: To be sure, we now number Coleridge among the great English poets, but primarily on the basis of one poem and two fragments. These three poems give a false picture of his poetic range and idiom. He travelled gregariously from one set of friends to another. He was equally facile in moving among the poetic conventions familiar in his day. ... It is time that we recognise and acclaim. • .the range and creativity of his poetic sensibility.*6 in the most inclusive criticism of Coleridge's poetry to date, Schulz concludes that "his range is wide, from the full orchestration of "Kubla Khan" to the clear, 31 thin resonance, like the notes of a distantly heard oboe, of Glycine's Song.'"^ In similar vein, I. A. Richards maintains that: Coleridge's poetry "succeeds in more modes than most poets Have attempted.Unfortunately, until recently too m u c h of the critics' concern related to the eclipse of his poetic powers, with 'explanations' rang ing from the effect of his study of German transcen- 59 dental philosophy’ ( James Baker ) , to his love-life and his imminent mental break-down ( Geoffrey Yarlott )^°t to the influence of his Christian theologizing ( James D. Boulger Happily, Joseph Appleyard’s contention that a causal, connection cannot be established between the decline of Coleridge's poetic and these factors, 62 finds increasing approval. The fact is that Coler idge's long a n d debilitating illnesses hampered his creativity; t x u . ' t : , even up to the last years of his life, he was still &bl_e — in "Youth and Age" ( 1823-32 ), for example fo draw upon the poetic sensibility and art that had n e v e r quite left him. And, contrary to the opinion that prevailed in the recent past , most of today's Coleridgean critics recognize the compatibility — though tense — of the philosophical, a n d poetic modes of vision in Coleridge's vision of life _ The emphasis of their criticisms shifts, 32 but basically they agree in viewing the man as both a philosopher and a poet. Thus, D. G. James writes that it is ’ ’ the merest prejudice to deplore Coleridge's passage from the writing of poetry to the writing of philosophy," for ultimately both disciplines share in the same aspiration: The imaginative labours of the poet have freedom for their end, the achievement, as far as possible, of patterns of perception which shall supply order and stability; and so it is with the activity of philosophy. That the way of the one is primarily imaginative and the way of the other primarily in tellectual need not obscure the fact that poetry and philosophy alike issue from restlessness of the spirit, 'as of one still struggling in bondage.*63 William Walsh believes that Coleridge "united, as few others have, a poetic power of reconstructing experience in its fullness and uniqueness with a philosophic power of creative speculation," though he views these two impulses toward the highest generality and the densest detail as "crossing and thwarting one another" and 6U remaining often in suspensive tension. Thomas McFar land stresses Coleridge's intellectual integrity: He would not cheat the head for the heart, and on the other hand he would not cheat the heart for the head; he would not abandon poetry for philosophy, nor philosophy for poetry. He would not abandon faith for reason; but he likewise would not abandon reason for faith. He always strove towards 9. sys tematic reconciliation of all his interests 33 In some of his despondencies Coleridge did, in deed, express an incompatibility and divisiveness be tween philosophy and poetry, claiming for example, that he had lost his ’ ’ shaping spirit of Imagination'1 ^that moved among the "flowers and herbs that grow in the Light and Sunshine," and that he had to be content instead with delving "in the unwholesome quick-silver of ab struse Metaphysics."®7 However, his most consistent attitude balanced the two modes of insight in a mutually fructifying tension. In the Biographia Literaria ( 1817 ) he agrees with Aristotle that poetry is "the most intense, weighty and philosophical product of hu man art,"®® and with Plato that philosophy is "poetry of the highest kind."®® Repeatedly in his letters he relates the two modes of knowledge: Metaphysics is a word, that you, my dear Sir], are no great Friend to, but yet you will agree, that a great Poet must be, implicite if not explicite, a profound Metaphysician;70 Believe me, SoutheyI a metaphysical Solution, that does not instantly tell for something in the Heart, is grievously to be suspected!;71 he notes their existence in his own mind: I feel strongly, and I think strongly; but I seldom feel without thinking, or think without f e e l i n g ;72 34 My philosophical opinions are blended with, or de duced from, my feelings;’^ and, despite his occasional worry lest the two should 74 "neutralize each other," leaving him "an inert mass," he did not hesitate to regard himself humorously but earnestly, as a "Gentleman-Poet and Philosopher"^ -- even if sometimes "in a mist."^ He insists that phil osophy and poetry are interdependent, though ( pace McFarland ), within their intimate relationship, based fundamentally on their common origin in the whole man and on the radical oneness of the reality to which they are directed, he also sees them as alternatives; not only because of their different modalities, but, exis- tentially, because of the need or even preference of the poet-philosopher. Thus he writes playfully to John Estlin in 1796: "I would write Odes @ Sonnets Morning @ Evening — @ Metaphysicize at Noon."^ Always in terested in matters of education, he suggests that "a true System of philosophy. , .is best taught in Poetry.’ ^ And insisting that "from Shakespeare to Plato, from the philosophic poet to the poetic philosopher, the transi tion is easy,"^® he expresses hope to see his friend, Wordsworth, eventually acclaimed as "the first @ greatest philosophical Poet."®® 35 Coleridge looked at reality, then, partly through two complementary natural inodes of insight, with both focusing on the same problems/mysteries, but from differ ent angles and with variant methods* In his parable in the concluding section of Aids to Reflection ( 1825 ) he tells of three men who visit and later describe "an oasis or natural garden" in a wilderness.81- The first, who is unable to express himself well, sees the beauties of the place by the light of his lantern: "Deep, vivid, and faithful are the impressions, which the lovely imagery comprised within the scanty circle of light makes and leaves on his memory,But, scared by the terrors of the wilderness, he flees; and "the shadows and imperfect beholdings and vivid fragments of things distinctly seen blend with the past and present shapings of his brain."88 His fancy modifies his sight, and his dreams "transfer their forms to real objects; and these lend a substance and an outness to his dreams."8* * When he tells others of his experiences, they consider him mad* The second man, an "enthusiast," visits the place by moonlight; and the moonshine the imaginative poesy of Nature, spreads its soft shadowy charm over all, conceals distances, and magnifies heights, and modifies relations; and fills up vacuities with its own whiteness, counter feiting substance; and where the dense shadows lie, 36 makes solidity imitate hollowness; and gives to all objects a tender visionary hue and softening.85 The second traveller is far more capable than the first to express his strange experiences. He is the poet — the one ready to undergo agony ( as the Ancient Mariner is ready to tear his own flesh ) in order that his fel- lowmen might see as he sees. And the third and most frequent visitor to the "favored spot," scans its beau ties by "steady daylightand masters its true "pro portions and lineaments." He is the philosopher, who comes to realize that the delightful dream, which the latter tells, is a dream of truth; and that even in the bewildered tale of the former there is truth mingled with dream.®® Now, in his own person Coleridge combined the charac ters of these last two travellers. Their experiences related in his mind, now fusing into union, now dis tancing from each other, but always remaining in in timately poised, precarious communion. This vital tension is probably most pointedly manifest in his literary criticism, whose very nature demands the overt exercise of philosophical tact and poetic sensibility. The excellence of Coleridge's achievement in this field is recognised by most critics. 37 Dissenting comments, such as that of T.M. Raysor's C ", • .as an aesthetician, Coleridge. . .was unfortun ately derivative, mediocre, and, in a subject which re quires system, fragmentary"®^ ), that of F.L. Lucas ( Coleridge’s writings about the imagination are "ob scure and contorted"®® ) and that of F.R. Leavis C Col eridge's "currency as an academic classic is something of a scandal"®^ ), temper and thereby render all the more solid, the praise of such eminent critics as T. S. Eliot, who calls Coleridge the father of modem literary criticism,90 and I. A. Richards, who sees the Biographia Literaria as a "lumberroom of neglected wis dom which contains more hints towards a theory of poetry than all the rest ever written on the s u b j e c t , and who declares that in the range of his reading, in the fertility of his comments upon writiers of every degree of dif ference from himself, in the span of his admira tions and their depth, as well as in the origina tive independence of his perceptions, surpasses all fore-runners, and with due respect to later and better equipped 'library-cormorants,* all suc cessors.’^ In Coleridge's own opinion, a true critic can no more be such without placing himself on some central point, from which he may command the whole, that is, some general rule, which founded in reason, or the faculties conmon to all men, must therefore apply to each. • • ./ButT in the mode of applying 38 it he will estimate genius and judgment according to the felicity with which the imperishable soul of intellect shall have adapted itself to the age, the place, and the existing manner.“3 The excellence of his criticism ( as well as some of its basic weaknesses, as Morse Peckham justifiably argues ^ ) is due in no small part to this grounding of his critical theory in the constitution and activity of the creative mind of not only the poet, but of the reader of his poetry. However, his sensitive response to the literary fact is frequently made the mere illustration of an already conceived generalization, and not its source: an unfortunate imbalancing that mars, for example, his criticism of Hamlet. wherein the Prince is often iden tified as an illustration of Coleridge's abstract no tions about the understanding and the imagination. In sum, his criticism, even his best on Shakespeare and on Wordsworth, contains a certain serious disproportion be tween the literary fact and the critical judgment. As William Walsh succinctly puts it: 'The generalization takes on its own life and begins to breed its own exam ples. Or it begins to drill and bully the unruly in- 95 dividual into an abstract order." In any event, just as the ancient comic Debate contributed to the formation of a vision of reality that preserved the value-content of each party's argument, yet 39 surpassed both, so with Coleridge*s genius for specula tion and for metaphor: both contributed to his "surview" of reality that excelled the combined characteristics of mode and of content that were peculiar to each. As he himself would probably express it, both his philosophical and poetic efforts played irreplaceable roles in the opening of his being, through his co-adunating reason, onto faith*s order of grace. NOTES CHAPTER I 1. The Poetry of Experience ( London, 1957 >, 2. 2. Cf. Carlyle, The Life of John Sterling ( London, 1811 ), IX, ST . 3. Translated by Robert Southey, Poetic Works, II, ( London, 1802 ), 170-74. 4. UL, 1, 292: To Thomas Poole, October 14, 1803. 5. Hours in A Library (London, 1867 ), I, 334-35. 6. Cf* Autobiography ( Oxford, 1928 ), p. 342. 7. Political Essays ( London, 1819 ), 122-23. 8. Quoted by John Wheeler in his Diary July 28, 1829. Cf. J. I. Lindsay, "Coleridge and the University of Vermont," Vermont Alumni Weekly, Jan-Feb, 1936. 9. CL, II, 841-42: To Sara Hutchinson, August 6, 1802* 10. F, II, 6. 11. BL, II, 257-58. 12. Cf. J. Boulger, Coleridge as Religious Thinker ( New Haven, 1961 ), me. 13. CL, II, 864-65: To William Sotheby, September 10, HT02 . 14. CL, I, 369: To John Thelwall, October, 1797. 15. N, II, 2026. 16. CL, I, 349: To John Thelwall, October 14, 1797. 17. Rage for Order: Essays in Criticism. University of Chicago tress ( Chicago, 194s ). 18. Coleridge ( New York, 1968), 182. 19. Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition ( Oxford. iyty ), n r . ----------------------- 41 20. BL, I, 169-170. 21. BL, I, 53-54. 22. Introduction to the BL, Complete Worlce, ed. Shedd ( New York, 1854 ). 23. UL, TI, 321: To Alaric Watts, December 3, 1823. 24. N, II, 2372. 25. TT, 429. 26. CL, II, 742-43: To William Gillman, July 8, TT01. 27. AIDS, 116. 28. The Prelude, ed. Carlos Baker ( New York, 1966 ), Vtl," lines- 726-27. 29. Cf. Literary Criticism of William Wordsworth ( Lincoln, 1966 )9 Preface, 18027 48. ---- 30. BL, II, 115-16. 31. N, I, 1387. 32. IS_, 101. 33. AP, 103. 34. N, III, 3947. 35. N, II, 2509, 36. N, II, 3947. 37. N, II, IOj. . . 38. N, II, 2509. 39. Essays in His Own Times. 40. N, II, 2509, 41. CL, 1, 625-26: To William Godwin, September 22, TB00. 42. Ibid., 626. 42 43. BL, II, 51. 44. LR, II, 94. 45. BL, I, 174. 46. BL, II, 44. 47. Preface to the second edition of Table Talk ( London, 1836 ). 48. Patterns of Consciousness ( New Haven, 1969 ), 2. 49. The Sacred River ( Baton Rouge, 1957 ), 271. 50. Coleridge on Imagination ( New York, 1950 ), 10. 51. The English Romantic Poets: A Review of Research, ar; T. M: flays or ( Mew York, 1950 ), 96.-------- 52. Immanuel Kant in England ( Princeton, 1931 ), 139. 53. Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition ( Oxford. i95r y , T 3 ;--------- ----------------------- 54. Cf. Coleridge: A Collection of Critical Essays ( New Jersey, 1967 ), Introduction, L-il. 55. The Life of John Sterling ( London, 1811 ), I, 54. 56. The Poetic Voices of Coleridge ( Detroit, 1963 ), rw: 57. Ibid.. 179. 58. The Portable Coleridge ( New York, 1950 ), 27. 59. The Sacred River ( Baton Rouge, 1957 ), 183. 60. Coleridge and the Abyssinian Maid ( London, 1967 ), zuarr. 61. Coleridge as Religious Thinker ( New Haven, 1861 ), 2I6ff . 62. Coleridge’s Philosophy of Literature ( Cambridge, Mass., Iw>b ), p. 63. The Romantic Comedy: An Essay on English Roman- ticism ( London, lyfes ), . 43 64. Coleridge: The Work and the Relevance ( New York 1967 ), 161-62. 65. Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition ( Oxford. 1969 ), 180-81. 66. £P» I, 366: line 86. BL, I, 9-10. 67. CL, II, 1178: To Daniel Stuart, August 22, 1806, 68. BL, II, 101. 69. BL, II, 11. 70. CL, II, 810: To William Sotheby, July 13, 1802. 71. CL, II, 961: To Robert Southey, August 7, 1803. 72. CL, I, 279: To John Thelwall, December 17, 1796. 73. CL, I, 279: To John Thelwall, December 17, 1796. 74. BL, I, 97-98. 75. CL, I, 614: To Samuel Purkis, July 29, 1800. 76. Ibid., 616. 77. CL, I, 223: To John Eatlin, July 4, 1796. 0 0 • CL, IV, 68 7: To Hugh J. Rose, September 25, 1816 79. F, I, 429. 0 0 o • BL, II, 36. 81. AIDS, 353. 82. AIDS, 354. 83. AIDS, 354. 84. AIDS, 354-55. 85. AIDS, 355. 86. AIDS, 356. 87. SC, I, xiviii. 88. The Decline and Fall of the Romantic Ideal ( New York, 1930, 163. 44 89. "Coleridge in Criticism." in Scrutiny ( 1940 ), IX, 57-69. 90. "The Frontiers of Criticism," in Sewanee Review, LXIV C 1956 ), 527. 91. Principles of Literary Criticism ( London, 1926 ), TWI 92. Coleridge on Imagination ( New York, 1950 ), p. 93. LR, II, 65-66. 94. Ibid. 95. Coleridge: The Work and the Relevance ( New York, 1%T ) , 51. ---------------- CHAPTER II PHILOSOPHER We sail within a vast sphere, ever drifting in uncertainty, driven from end to end. When we think to attach ourselves to any point and to fasten to it, it wavers and leaves us; and if we follow it, it eludes our grasp, slips past us, and vanishes for ever. Nothing stays for us. This is our natural condition, and yet most con trary to our inclination; we bum with desire to find solid ground and an ultimate sure foundation whereon to build a tower reaching to the Infinite. But our whole groundwork cracks, and the earth opens to abysses. Blaise Pascal US CHAPTER II PHILOSOPHER Even from his youth, Coleridge*s philosophical bent was evident in his zest for abstract notions and ratiocination. Though he scorned "old, palsied, and toothless generalities,"^ delighted in musing on "fundamental and general causes -- * causae causarum. He declared "facts of the mind" to be his "darling s t u d i e s , " 3 and insisted on their enormous value, claim ing that "all epoch-forming revolutions of religion and with them the civil, social, and domestic habits of the nations concerned, have coincided with the rise and fall of metaphysical systems."** Writing on matters of logic and learning, he advises his readers to secure them selves from "the delusive notion, that what is not image- 5 able is likewise not conceivable." His stress on man's intellectual abstractive powers indicates the important role that these played in his own life: To emancipate the mind from the despotism of the eye is the first step towards its emancipation from the influences and intrusions of the sense, sensa tions and passions generally. Thus most effectually is the power of abstraction to be called forth, strengthened and familiarized, and it is this power k6 47 of abstraction that chiefly distinguishes the human understanding from that of the higher animals — and in the different decrees in which this power is developed, the superiority of man over man mainly consists.” His generalizing impulse underlay his preference for "an apprehension of the whole of a truth, even where that apprehension is dim and indistinct," to a "partial per ception of the same rashly assumed, as a perception of the whole.His enthusiasm for Davy's experiments owed much to the fact that the scientist had a flair for theoretical principles ( for example, that the principles governing physical phenomena are analogous to principles governing psychological processes ) and had expressed in terest in transcendent or genetic philosophy. Coupled with his abstractive habit of mind was his enthusiasm for rigorous, discursive speculation. "1 can assert, upon my long and intimate knowledge of Coleridge's mind," wrote Henry Nelson Coleridge, "that logic of the most severe was as inalienable from his modes of thinking, as grammar from his language. ... He was always ratio- O cinating in his own mind." Coleridge himself confirmed this fact in a memorandum of 1834: 1 am by the law of my nature a reasoner. A person who should suppose 1 meant by that word, an arguer, would not only not understand me, but would under stand the contrary of my reasoning. I can take no U8 interest whatever in hearing or saying anything merely as a fact -- merely as having happened. It must refer to something within me before 1 can re gard it with any curiosity or care. My mind is al ways energic — I don't mean energetic; I require in everything what, for lack of another ward, I may call propriety, -- that is, a reason, why the thing is at all, and why it is there or then rather than elsewhere or at another time.9 Scorning the aphoristic style of reasoning, "in which thought is heaped upon thought by simple aggregation of words,"*- ® he praised the Schoolmen's use of "the power and force of Greek and Roman connexion,"H Spinoza for his "iron Chain of Logic,and Kant for his "adaman tine chain"!^ of thought. He labored to make his thought "scholastically accurate," * - * * and as tightly reasoned as Kant's, who "invigorated and disciplined"*^ his mind. Though his philosophical writings are at times very eclectic and confusing, there is no doubt that they were mainly guided by the norms that he later set forth in his Treatise on Method ( 1818 ), and restated in the 1818 edition of The Friend. Therein he ambitiously treats of method "as employed in the formation of the understanding, and in the construction of science and literature" — a very "path of Transit"*’ * * to the pos session of knowledge. Noting that method is fundamen tally "a progressive transition from one step in any course to another," he reasons that where method refers 49 to many such transitions in continuity, "it necessarily implies a principle of UNITY WITH PROGRESSION."17 This "subtile, cementing, subterraneous" power of harmony be- tween the transitional steps, must be "an act of the mind itself, and not a spontaneous and uncertain pro* IS duction of circumstances." It may exist in a "clear, distinct, definite form," as that of a circle conceived by an accurate geometrician; or as a mere instinct, "a vague appetency toward something which the Mind inces santly hunts for.,rl^ Coleridge next suggests that the mind, reasoning with such progressive continuity, confronts objects that may be related by either the relation of Law, or by that of Theory. The latter is that of the "Scientific Arts" like Medicine, Chemistry and Physics, and depends on empirical observation that inevitably precedes and de termines the "initiative" that must unify their study and control. Though the connection of this method be that of cause and effect throughout, in the last analysis it is incomplete and fallible, for it depends on empiri cal observation, and all our Thoughts are in the language of the old Logicians Inadequate; i.e., no thought, which I have, of any thing comprizes the whole of that Thing. I have aaistinet Thought of a Rose-Tree; 50 but what countless properties and goings-on of that plant are there, not included in my Thought of it?20 It is obvious that Coleridge was not a little impressed by the universal mathematicism of Descartes, and its different applications by Spinoza and Kant. In the se cond essay of Genial Criticism ( 1814 ) he distinguishes between the method of mathematics and that of the other sciences, marking how in the former the definition creates the concept, whereas in the latter the concept must be at least partly drawn from empirical evidence — and he expresses disappointment with the indistinct notions of this method of analysis. Though he was an amateur of the physical sciences, Coleridge welcomed their findings more as confirmation of philosophical theories, than as scientific truths in their own right. Only in speculation based on the relation of Law did he conceive the possibility of a perfect method. He uses the term 'Law1 "in its highest and original sense, namely that of laying down a rule to which the subjects 21 of the Law must necessarily conform." Thus . . .in whatever science the relation of the parts to each other and to the whole is predetermined by a truth originating in the mind, and not abstracted or generalized from observation of the parts, there we affirm the presence of a law, if we are speaking of the physical sciences, as of Astronomy for 51 instance; or the presence of fundamental ideas, if our discourse be upon those sciences, the truths of which, as truths absolute, not merely have an in dependent origin in the mind, but continue to exist in and for the mind alone. Such, for instance, is Geometry, and such are the ideas of a perfect circle, of asymptote, @c.^2 Now, Coleridge is convinced that the human mind "is capable of viewing some relations of things as necessar ily existent; that is to say, as predetermined by a truth in the Mind itself, pregnant with the consequences of other truths in an indefinite progression"^; and he considers philosophy to be the great human effort to apply the method of Law to all being. However, he ac knowledges that this method . . .in its absolute perfection, is conceivable only of the Supreme Being, whose creative IDEA, not only appoints to each thing its position, and in conse~ quence of that position, gives its qualities, yea, gives it its very existence, as that particular thing.24 For the thoughts of God, being anterior to all creation, are "incomparably more real than all things besides, @ which do all depend on and proceed from them in some 25 sort perhaps as our Thoughts from these things. . ." Coleridge suggests that, paradoxically, the two methods are reconciled and transcended in the divine Mind. But he emphasizes that the method based on the relation of Law must continue to be an ideal which, thcwtgh not 52 realizable by man, should be aspired to as approximately as possible. And in his own metaphysical speculations Coleridge attempts precisely this, though, regrettably, not with the full consistency that the philosophical discipline calls for. I. Not content with simple questions and answers, but seeking always to relate them to larger and more com plex unities, Coleridge made his own aspiration of all contemporary philosophers to construct a vast specula tive System. He was familiar with Cudworth's The True intellectual System of the Universe, and the works of the revered Spinoza, Leibnitz, and Kant. He was attuned to the intellectual climate of his time, with its pro found hunger for universal knowledge, as faithfully dramatized in Goethe's Faust. Southey's complaint that he "plays with systems"^ may be taken as justified, if only it be understood that his 'play* was not a matter of whim, but of sincere and serious consequence. His preoccupation with system was, in fact, one outlet of his "rage for order." 1 f Whatever changes Coleridge's philosophical opinions underwent," comments J. Muirhead, "one thing remained fixed and constant, the guiding star of all his wanderings, namely, the necessity of reaching 53 a view of the world from which it could be grasped as the manifestation of a single principle, and therefore a 27 unity." At first he wondered if the production of a viable metaphysical system were possible: After 1 had successfully studied in the schools of Locke, Berkeley, Leibnitz, and Hartley, and could find in neither of them an abiding place for my reason, I began to ask myself; is a system of phil osophy, as different from mere history and historic classification possible? if possiblej what are its necessary conditions? I was for a while disposed to answer the first question in the negative, and to admit that the sole practicable employment for the human mind was to observe, to collect and to classify. I soon felt that human nature itself fought up against this wilful resignation of intellect; and as soon did I find, that the scheme taken with all its consequences and cleared of all inconsistencies was not less impracticable, than contra-natural.28 Again and again throughout his life he told of his am bition to construct an architechtonic body of philosophy, an unparalleled opus maximum: . • .a work which has employed all my best thoughts @ efforts for the last twelve years and more, and on which I would ground my reputation.29 . • .my Opus Maximum on which I chiefly rely for the proof that I have not lived or laboured in vain.30 Z am now. . .ready to go to the Press, with a work which 1 consider as introductory to a System, tho1 to the public it will appear altogether a Thing by itself.31 As time passed, he varied the number of treatises it 54 would contain; but he never deviated from its overall nature as "a compleat and perfectly original system,"3^ one that would assimilate and harmonize the scattered expressions of truth ( the "divine ventriloquest" )33 in mankind*s innumerable philosophies, and would even excel them. His boast contained not a little presumption: My system, if I may venture to give it so fine a name, is the only attempt I know, ever made to re duce all knowledges into harmony. It opposes no other system, but shows what was true in each; and how that which was true in the particular, in each of them became error, because it was only half the truth. I have endeavoured to unite the insulated fragments of truth, and therewith to frame a per fect mirror. I show to each system that I fully understand and rightfully appreciate what that system means; but then I lift up that system to a higher point of view, from which I enable ic to see its former position, where it was, indeed, but under another light and with different relations; so that the fragment of truth is not only acknowledged, but explained.34 He boasted vainly; at any rate insofar as the completion of an actual philosophical system was concerned. Cur iously, Rene^Wellek does not deny that he "built a com plete building" of ideas, while stressing that it is not a building "in Coleridgean style."33 The truth of the matter is that he did not complete a speculative building1 of any sort, despite his innate impulse to do so, and his declared ambition to realize the univer- salist ideal of his contemporaries. Nor was his 55 neurotic apathy the main reason for his failure, as McFarland points out: • . .he partly overcame the problem of sloth by his mosaic method of composition, and he probably overdramatized his laziness in any event. But even if sloth were the reason for his failure to complete, to what do we attribute the failure of his intellectual soul-mate Leibniz, a titan of intellectual industry?36 The answer is that Coleridge, like Leibnitz, came to realize that reality cannot be enclosed in any meta physical system as such, and he realized it more quickly than did Leibnitz, due, most probably, to the everpresent liberating elan of his poetic imagination. in his Philosophical Lectures ( 1818 ) he states that there are "only two Systems of Philosophy -- ( sibi consistentia ) possible. 1. Spinoza. 2. Kant, i.e. the absolute and the relative, the t w 1 fort* An* and the KNT/yywim Or 1. ontosophical. 2. the anthropological."^ The first begins with affirmation of nature, of the 'It is1; the second begins with the affirmation of the ego, the ’I am.* Evidently, Coler idge applied himself to the study of both types of sys tem ( not just in the works of Spinoza and Kant, but in those of philosophers from classical times till his own day ) with utter dedication — to the extent of becoming, as he humorously announced, an exhausted "purus put us 56 Metapgysicus."38 And there was direction to his study, as determined by the two existentially levered postulates of his thought, the fact of the self and the fact of God, and by the pressing actuality of 1Nature* toward which his poetic sensibility oriented his whole person with extra ordinarily heightened awareness. Now the very purpose of my system is to overthrow pantheism ,to establish the diversity of the Creator from the sum total of his creatures, deduce the personeity{ the 1 Am of God, and in one and the same demonstration to demonstrate the reality and origin- ancy of Moral Evil, and to account for the fact of a fine Nature.39 Coleridge, then, included three programs1 in his pro posed System: 1) "to establish the diversity of the Creator from the sum total of his creatures," and to reason toward the self-subsistent nature of God, thereby disproving the claims of Pantheism; 2) "to demonstrate the reality and originancy of "Moral Evil," and as a necessary accompaniment, to establish the responsibility of the human person; and 3) "to account for the fact of a fine Nature": that is, to disprove the teachings of absolute idealism. What he sought was an "abiding place" for his reason: a System with two fulcrums In the facts of self and God, which would provide radical mean ing for the reality that spanned between these facts in time-space. But the more he planned and still led ( often 57 publicly, in his very writings ), the more convinced he became that the two possible metaphysical systems -- the objective, such as that of Spinoza, and the sub jective, such as the later work of Berkeley and that of Fichte — failed to uphold the distinct realities of God, the human self, and nature. The first, beginning with the flt is1 postulate, finally lumps together these three irreducible realities in a monistic amalgam. The second setting out from the *1 am1 postulate, ends with the pantheistically absolute Self. As will be elucidated further in the present chapter, Coleridge for a while looked to Schelling as the reconciler of the 'It is' and 'I am' metaphysical positions, and the one who would ex tricate philosophical systematization from the monistic/ pantheistic impasse. However, he quickly concluded that Schelling*s System was but the "clothed Skeleton of Spinoza," and essentially pantheistic. Since all philosophical systems of the extremely subjective or objective varieties imply, as Thomas Mc Farland indicates, "a religious perspective, even if foreshortened into agnosticism"***- ( for both ultimately divinize man and humanize God, as higher religion does, but without maintaining the distinction between Creator and creature ) and since, true to character, Coleridge refused to resort to the scepticism of such as Jacobi; 58 It is not surprising that he eventually turned to Christianity as the "abiding place" for his reason. Thus, in 1800: In short, there are but three possible coherent systems — I. That of Self-construction, accord ing to which the Absolute organizes itself into the World==Pantheism. II. That of Self-mechanism, or rather of selfless Formation according to which aboriginal Chaos is everlastingly mechanised into Particulars. . .@ finally Consciousness, result" Atheism. . . . III. That of the Trinity: and this Third is the only possible escape from one or other of the two former.^ Increasingly after the closing week of 1813 when, in a conversionlike experience, a "new world" opened to him in the infinity of his spirit,^ he directed his atten tion to the "Scheme" or "System" of Christianity, of which "Christ is the staple and staple ring”* * * * -- only to realize eventually that the Christian Faith cannot be a System, it being a life; and that whatever systema tization is involved in its vision of reality, it is con tained as the living organism contains organization. Thus, in the last decades of his life he remained convinced that, to satisfy its craving for unity, reason must go beyond system, and even — by divine grace -- beyond its own powers ( though never by way of self-betrayal ) into faith. Religion, he maintained, constitutes the "ulti mate aim of philosophy"**5; and "• . .the Christian Faith 59 . . .IS THE PERFECTION OF HUMAN INTELLIGENCE"1 * 6; and true philosophy, "so far from having a tendency to un settle the principles of faith. . .does itself require them as its premises. . •”1 *^ in effect, Christianity confirms and adds significance to the human mind's in tuitive awareness of its own self-identity, of the ac tuality of external 'Nature,' and of the shadowed pre sence of God. James D. Boulger's conclusion that "Coleridge's 'system' is merely a return, after all, to the goal of M l classical theism, by a road of his own choosing," carries a note of disappointment that fails to recognize the magnitude of the man's accomplishment. For Coler idge 'returned' to Christianity by way of a re-discovery of its significance through a wrestling with the great intellectual issues that taxed the foremost minds of the age in which he lived. He had come to believe that "Religion passes out of the ken of Reason only where the eye of Reason has reached its own Horizon, but he had not disowned the autonomy of reason, nor had he excused it from responsibility. Accordingly, he tried his mental prowess with the speculative challenges that his age in herited, and contributed not a little share to their il lumination. 60 II. This he did particularly in the realm of episte- mology. In fact, his studies and conclusions therein crucially determined his resolution to forego allegiance to either the subjective or objective metaphysical sys tems, and to embrace Christianity. It was only to be ex pected that Coleridge, alert to the quick of the psychic life of his day, should take the contemporary, much de bated, epistemological ’problem* as his own. Besides, his innate habit of self-scrutiny, his emphasis on the singular dignity of the individual person, and his moral ists, all together leaned his sympathy toward the 'I am* perspective of the Idealism-Realism debate. And there was another pressure on his choice of this position: the horror of the universe formulated by Hobbes and Newton and Locke, in which the push and pull of particles of matter in space, "propagating motion like billard balls," 50 made up the only reality. James Baker does not exag gerate in underscoring "how large a percentage of Coler idge's total output and energy as a writer"51 was direc ted to his life-long campaign against this materialistic matter-and-motion theory of the cosmos. Coleridge re mained indefatigably hostile to any scheme "which began by manufacturing mind out of sense and sense out of sen sation and which reduced all form to shape and all shape 61 to impressions from without.The butt of his scorn ful criticism was the mechanical notion of the human mind as f , a lazy L o o k e r - o n " ^ at the world; for, highly conscious of the initiative of his own mind, he re garded this concept of a passive mind as nonsensical and dangerous -- one which, removing man's creative dignity, ultimately "strikes Death"^ to all that dis tinguishes him as man. Actually, his emphasis on human initiative, while essentially correct, neglected the receptive dimension of being that is peculiar to the creature as such, in this regard, while he expressed his apprecia tion of the work of the Medieval Schoolmen, and availed of their teaching on some important matters ( notably, their contributions to 'faculty* psychology, their notion of knowledge by connaturality, their concept of the analogy of being, and that of the principle of in dividuation ), he ignored their full insight into the process of knowledge. Specifically, he agreed with Thomas Aquinas in viewing the act of knowing as an ex traordinarily intimate spiritual uniting of the kncwer and the known. To know is to become another, insofar as it is another, immaterially: aliud in quantum aliud. While remaining themselves, the knowing subject and the known object 'transubstantiate,' as it were, in an 62 amazing immaterial identification* Thus, in the Bio - graphia Literaria Coleridge writes that "During the act of knowledge itself, the objective and subjective are so instantly united, that we cannot determine to which of the two the priority belongs.Of course, he does precisely that -- opting for the subjective. Not that he was unaware of the "dignity of passiveness to worthy activity1 ’ 5® in man, nor that he omitted mentioning the mind's passivity in his treatment ( after Kant ) of the Understanding. But, in his concern to uphold the sup remacy of mind over matter, he failed to give explicit philosophical expression to the role played by the ob ject in the act knowing. For Aquinas,^ the object, which is independent of the mind that knows it, speci fies, measures and governs that mind's act of knowing. The truth of the mind consists in its conformity to the autonomous reality of the object. But having stressed the passivity of the mind in this respect, Aquinas im mediately notes that its very passivity contains init iative. For intellection is an immanent and purely qualitative consummation of the knowing mind, whose vitality comes entirely from within itself. Once sur prised by the object, the mind grasps it and transfers it immaterially within itself, and places it under its own light. In other words, intellection involves a 63 passivity and an activity at once. Man's mind must sub mit to being: only thereby can it grasp within itself the independent object, lifting it from its own exis tence by means of the idea. Insisting on man's creature- hood — radically receiving being, ontologically, psy chologically — Aquinas does not fail to underscore the spontaneous activity of man's mind, and the essential inferiority of its knowledge. But taken in its entirety, Coleridge's thought, as expressed in his writings, weighs more in favor of the 'projective* dimension of the act of knowledge. His earlier poetry, and singularly f , The Aeolian Harp,"5® dwells particularly on the influence of nature on the human spirit; but his later poetry ( cli maxing in "Dejection" stresses rather the primacy of the human mind; and the prejudice of his philoso phical work is clearly toward the subjective also. Thus, though Coleridge was no subjectivist, his personal con cern for the "inner life," intensified and conditioned by the contemporary criss-cross currents of academic controversy, swayed his intellectual preference toward Idealism, and into accepting the Idealist setting of the epistemological problem. In 1797 he wrote his friend Thomas Poole: "1 never regarded my senses in any way as the criteria of my belief — even at that age ( 8 )."60 In 1802 he told his wife: "I seem to exist, as it were, 64 almost wholly within myself, in thoughts rather than in things."*’1 ' In another notebook jotting he admits that, when looking at objects of nature, he seems rather "to be seeking, as it were asking, a symbolical language" for something within himself "that already and forever exists, than observing any thing new. . ."62 j j c was indebted in various degrees to Plato, Plotinus, Mar- silio Ficino, Giordano Bruno, Kant, Schelling and Fichte — all Idealists.***1 His close study of Kant is reflected in a Notebook jotting of 1824: Thing— A supposed Reality existing separately from our minds, and the supposed Correspondent to the im pression, of which it is the supposed cause. Ob ject ==The impression made or left, either that in which we perceive the thing or by which we recall it to our imagination: in the former sense, I term it a Presentation, in the latter, a Representation. A SENSATI0N=-Feeling referring to some Thing and yet not organized into a definite object, nor se parated from the sentient Being -- or abstracted from a Perception, as we abstract matter from form. A Perception==a sensation, organized into an object, and thus projected out of the sentient Being in real or in Ideal Space. A Feeling==an Act of consciousness having itself for its' only object, and not a symbol or representative of any thing else. This I have a sensation of Heat, a Feeling of Life — We feel what is in via.64 Even as late as 1832 he declared that "The pitch of my system is to make the senses out of the mind -- not the 65 mind out of the senses."65 But it is one thing to lean intellectually toward idealism, and another thing to be an idealist, in his repeated statements on the dis tinction between the Aristotelian and the Platonic attitudes to reality, Coleridge always emphasized the psychological differences: what may be described as the variant intellectual sensibilities. And in professing himself an adherent of the Platonic *5011001,* it is evident that he wished to express his own innate ‘pro jective* habit of mind, whose initiative was rendered all the more strong by his re-creative poetic intuition. But to equate his stand with that of Idealism in opposi tion to Realism ( as does I.A. Richards )6^ is to burden Coleridge's thought with a creed that he entertained, but never embraced. Over against mechanistic theories of man and the cosmos, Coleridge defended the organicism, the initiative, and the interiority of the activity of the human mind; but he did not consider it absolutely necessary to envisage these facts within an Idealistic context. Not only in his poetry, which, by its very nature, celebrates the sharp, external presence of things, but in his correspondence and jottings, and even in his philoso phical writings, Coleridge happily acknowledges the 66 existence of Mature1 independent of the human mind know ing it* He insists that his endeavor is to confirm hu manity^ most fundamental assumptions -- of which the recognition of an independent non-ego world is one: What is it that I employ my Metaphysics on? To perplex our clearest notions, @ living moral In stincts? To extinguish the Light of Love @ of Conscience, to put out the Life of Arbitrement -- to make myself @ others* . .Worthless, Soulless? -- No I To expose Folly @ the Legerdemain of those, who have thus abused the blessed Organ of Language, to support all old @ venerable Truths, to support, to kindle, to protect, to make the Reason spread Light over our Feelings, to make our Feelings dif fuse vital Warmth thro' our Reason — these are my Objects — @ these my Subjects.®® He argues that ideas must merge with images, and that images must feed on tangible externality: Thought and reality two distinct corresponding Sounds, of which no man can say positively which is the Voice and which the Echo. 0 the beautiful Fountain or natural Well at Upper Stowey. ... The Images of the weeds which hung down from its sides, appeared as plants growing up, straight and upright, among the water weeds that all grew from the bottom @ so vivid was the Image, that for some moments @ not till after I had disturbed the water, did I perceive that their roots were not neighbours, @ they side-by-aide companions. So « even then I said — so are the happy man's Thoughts and Things — ( in the language of the modern Philosophers, Ideas and Impressions ) — He remarks that wise men use the processes of knowing that are both active and passive — the latter receiving reality from beyond the human mind: 67 They and they only can acquire the philosophic imagination, the sacred power of self-intuition, who within themselves can interpret and under stand the symbol, that the wings of the air-sylph are forming within the skin of the caterpiller. • • • They know and feel, that the potential works in them, even as the actual works on them. . . . XT1 the organs of sense are framed for correspond ing world of spirit: thought the latter organs are not developed in all alike.70 In a letter of 1806 he explicitly notes the reliance of the human mind on external objects; . • .the Thoughts of God. • .are all Ideas, arthe- typal, and anterior to all but himself alone: therefore consummately adequate; and therefore ac cording to our common habits of conception and ex pression incomparably more real than all things be sides , @ which do all depend on and proceed from them in some sort perhaps as our Thoughts from these Things. . .71 There is also his widespread background use of the notion of the analogy -- or, as he called it, the "con- substantial ity" -- of being, as taught by the Schoolmen. "The language is analogous," he writes in Aids to Re flection C 1825 ), "wherever a thing, power, or prin ciple in a higher dignity is expressed by the same thing, power, or principle in a lower but more known form."^ Now, the entire concept of analogy, and the application of this concept, affirm the independent existence of 'Nature,1 and oppose not only Pantheism but all forms of extreme subjectivism, in his Shakespearean criticism 68 while he definitely sympathizes with the character of Hamlet, he nevertheless pinpoints the Prince's weakness in the fact that he is "for ever occupied with the world without#"73 Coleridge's interest in scientific experi ments, not only in the empirical work of English scien tists such as Davy and Hartley, but in that of men on the Continent, such as Steffens, Ritter, and Oken, should not be overlooked here. Even though his interest included, as McFarland indicates, "a certain amount of egotism,"?** and despite his inclination to subsume empirical re search into philosophy ( saluting Hartley, significantly, not as a scientist but as a "deep metaphysician" ),?5 it underscores his conviction, not only in the fact but in the kncwability of a material world independent of the human mind.?*’ Actually, his first enthusiasm for Kant's Critique of Pure Reason arose from his belief that it solved the conflict between empiricism and rationalist philosophy in maintaining that while knowledge of real ity comes from experience, experience itself is governed by a priori functions of the mind. Later he complained that Kant was, unfortunately, a "wretched psychologist ?? because he neglected to map the configurations of the psychic processes according to more detailed empirical observation rather than according to theoretical prin ciples ( no matter how brilliant and laudable ), 69 thereby opening the way to the absolute subjectivism of such men as Fichte. Then, too, in his theological writings, Coleridge emphasized the incarnational di mension of Christianity, declaring that A scheme of the Christian faith, which does not arise out of, and shoot its beams downwards into, the scheme of nature, but stands aloof as an in sulated afterthought must be false or distorted in all its particulars;’® and insisting on both a subjective and a "general his torical" revelation, "by which the whole Church is walled around and kept together ( principium totalitatis et cohaesionis )."79 Apropos of the last point, Boulger aptly comments that, for Coleridge, the "objective pole, the historical doctrine of Christianity, is the given, but its reception by man is according to the mode of recipiency"80 — a concept of the existential accep tance of divine Revelation by man, that echoes the Scho lastic teaching on the manner of human intellection. in sum, while he owns to his personal leanings to ward Idealism, Coleridge recognizes that the only valid philosophical method "results from a balance between the passive impression received from outward things, and the internal activity of the mind in reflecting and general izing"®1; and the entire thrust of his epistemological speculation continues this balancing of mind and ths 70 nonego — however, not simply by way of a balancing of the Idealist and Realist doctrines, but by way of an excelling of both of them. In one of his Notebooks he writes some of the most crucial statements in all his philosophical documents: A position which occurred to me 20 years ago as an objection to Idealism ( as Berkeley’s ) recurs with additional weight to me as often as I think on the subject — Idealism and Materialism are both grounded in the Impossibility of intermutual action between things altogether heterogeneous -- and here again it is assumed by both parties that Perception is but a sort of, or at least an immediate derivative from, Sensation — so that the changes or modifications of the percipient's own Being are exclusively the ob jects of his perception. But is not this gratuitous? Is not sensibility just as mysterious, equally datum. haud intellectum, as percipiency? If I assume, as I have a far better right to do because all men do so naturally, that Percipiency in genere is an at tribute of the Soul, and that Sensation is nothing Object . . • o-±- -La v & c a i . Coleridge is here appealing to the conept of analogy ( that, since all existents share in being, each pro portionately, according to its nature they are thereby radically interrelated ), and to the integrality of the human mind. But more: he is censoring the Idealist - Realist issue as a pseudo-problem. Interestingly, I.A. Richards is intrigued by a like conclusion. In his Coleridge on Imagination he writes: more than modified by the 71 It may be argued that these two opposite-seeming types of outlook ( the idealist and the Realist ) are complementary to one another: that, in the history of thought they have been dependent upon one another so that the death of one would lead by inanition to the death of the other; that as ex piration is only one phase in breathing so the two philosophies in their endless antagonism are a ne cessary conjoint self-critical process.S3 But feeling obliged to make a choice between them, if he is to have some opinion to offer, Richards opts for that of Materialism — which is only one approach to Realism, and that, incidentally, against which Coleridge strongly militated; and from within this position Rich ards proceeds to build on some ideas of the "extreme Idealist.Coleridge also makes a choice between the two epistemological ( and for him, primarily psycho logical ) stands — but only temporarily; and this he does in the Biographia Literaria ( 1817 ) one of the most vulnerable of masterpieces. Prior to its twelfth chapter he holds to "the sacred distinction between 8 5 things and persons," and he marks that, "in the nature of things," proof of the "outward existence of anything" is impossible; that such existence is "assumed by a logical necessity arising from the constitution of the mind itself, by the absence of all motive to doubt it."86 in Chapter XII he expresses scorn for "that compendious 72 philosophy, which talking of mind but thinking of brick and mortar, or other images equally abstracted from body, contrives a theory of spirit by nicknaming mat ter1 ^ — but soon proceeds to make use of what is es sentially such a philosophy, that of Schelling, Coleridge was intrigued by Schelling ( probably first studying his work in depth about 1806 ), princi pally because he appeared to be a defender of Nature and of art, contributing to the new "dynamic philosophy" that had been announced by Kant; and because he promised to reconcile the philosophies that began the postulate fI am* with those that began in the postulate flt is,* By using Fichte*s principle, the law of Identity, he de clared he would argue to "a mutual interpenetration of Realism and idealism,"®® and would even bring together Kant and Spinoza in a single System, As he had program med, in the System des transcendentalen Idealismus he approached reality from the *1 am* position; and in the Naturphilosophie he approached it from that of the 'It is * — but in either instance, beneath trappings of nature and art, his approach was fundamentally that of absolute subjectivism. However, when Coleridge was still in the process of writing the epistemological exposition in Chapters XII and XIII of the Biographla Literaria ( 1817 ), he was not as yet fully aware of the Pantheism 73 that saturated the notions he was culling from Schell- ing's works. As J.R. de J. Jackson comments, in these pages Coleridge "offers his thinking to the public before he has come to the end of it. In the Biographia Liter aria we have neither the relentless Kantian progress which he admired, nor even the indefatigable exhaustive ness of Hartley, but rather a trial run of ideas which he has conceived in their general outlines and not yet articulated in particular details."®9 Writing ( and, of course, talking ) himself toward a conclusion, rather than waiting until it was correctly formulated and thoroughly tested, was Coleridge's usual practice. So too was his discarding of erroneous concepts, once he saw their deception. Already in Chapter VIII of the Biographia. Coleridge accepts Schelling*s Idealistic statement of the epistemological problem: "How the esse assumed as originally distinct from the scire, can ever unit itself with it; how being can transform itself into a knowing. • ."90 in this very same sentence he touches on the awareness of the pseudo character of this problem that has been growing in his mind for some time now. He continues: . .namely, if it can be shown that the vis representative, or the Sentient, is itself a species of being. . ."91 -- that is, since both the knowing 7k Subject and the known Object share in being analogi cally, they are radically relateable: there is no problem1 involved. But instead of elucidating this point, he inmediately presents ( still in the same sen tence! ) the alternative 'solutions1 of the systems of Materialism and Idealism. In the following paragraphs of Chapter VIII he already goes on to anticipate the Idealistic premises of Chapter XII, by dismissing the first alternative as being "utterly unintelligible,"^ thereby leaving but the one *solution,1 and by declaring in passing, simply but categorically, that "Matter has no inward."^ In Chapter XII Coleridge proceeds to think him self Schellingfs metaphysical system. "All knowledge rests on the coincidence of an object with a subject."^ The formula is directly from Schelling, but its import has been traditionally upheld by both Flatonists and Aristotelians, alike, and Coleridge knew it existentially. Consciousness asserts itself with undeniable force and evidence: it is the first and foremost the lived ap prehension of the ego which manifests its spiritual pre sence and its autonomy in the exercise of thinking and willing. And its affirmation is direct: it is not founded on a reasoning process ( contrary to the Carte sian 'Cogito* ), or on the testimony of a third party, 75 or on the content of a representation, but entirely on the presence of the being of the ego and the non-ego. Man, then, is never conscious of himself before he passes over to the act of knowledge: as long as his faculty is in pure potency to know, he cannot have any consciousness of it. It is in his power to lay hold of his faculty to know only in the immanent relation which binds it to the object it is knowing. Now, still allowing his specula tion to be conditioned by the dichotomies of body-soul and mind-body/ external reality, that he and his contem poraries had inherited from Descartes and his successors C some emphasizing the soul, mind, others emphasizing the body/external reality — with both •schools* moving toward irreconcilable extremes ), Coleridge is determined to explain this intimate coalition of subject and object in the act of knowledge. Having already castigated the Materialist epis- temological 'solution* in Chapter VIII, here he sets aside the related *objective* approach to the problem of briding the hypothetical gap between the knowing mind and known thing. This is the method of natural philosophy, which, according to Coleridge, ironically reaches its perfection in the ''perfect spiritualization of all the laws of nature into laws of intuition and intellect."95 in other words, since philosophy is the "science of 76 ultimate truths,"9® the sclentia scicnt iarum, its ideal method C as outlined above on pages 33-38 ) must be that of Law, which inevitably orientates all speculation back to necessary principles. Taking, then, the philosophical stand which be gins with the subjective fact of the mind itself ( with the problem as to how there "supervenes to it a coin cident objective"®? )( Coleridge demands that, after the example of Descartes, the mind be first purified by "an absolute and scientific skepticism," to which it "vol untarily determines itself for the specific purpose of Q O future certainty." With this "voluntary doubt, this self-determined i n d e t e r m i n a t i o n ,"99 he concentrates on two "original and innate prejudices which nature herself has planted in all men"*-®®: the first, "THAT THERE EXIST THINGS WITHOUT US"; and the second, the "I AM." Coleridge is now following Schelling to the letter -- and in the process is not just scientifically doubting the independent knowable spatio-temporal reality of things outside the knowing mind, but is actually criti cising prejudicedly the universally held belief in their existence. For he isolates this belief from the *1 am' conviction from which, as he himself recognized but moments ago, it is exlstentially inseparable: 77 As this on the one hand originates, neither in grounds nor arguments, and yet on the other hand re mains proof against all attempts to remove it by grounds or arguments ( naturam furca expellas tamen usque redibit: ) on the one hand lays claim to IM MEDIATE certainty as a position at once indemon strable and irresistible, and yet on the other hand, inasmuch as it refers to something essentially differ ent from ourselves{ nay even in opposition to our selves, leaves it inconceivable how it could possibly become a part of our immediate consciousness C in other words how that, which ex hypothesi is and con tinues to be extrinsic and alien to our being, should become a modification of our being ); the philosopher therefore compels himself to treat this faith as noth ing more than a prejudice, innate indeed and co natural, but still a p r e j u d i c e . ^-02 Still following Schelling, Coleridge now stakes his po sition in the second belief that is not just a prejudice, since it is of the immediate consciousness itself: the "immediate certainty, equally for the scientific reason of the philosopher as for the common sense of mankind at 1 O'? large," namely, the "I am" affirmation. "It is groundless; but only because it is itself the ground of all other certainty. Coleridge concludes that the first belief "is unconsciously involved in the latter, that it is not only coherent but identical, and one and the same thing with our immediate self-consciousness."^®^ -- which is practically the same as the statement at the beginning of this discussion, in which he described the coalition of subject and object in the act of knowledge 78 except that now his observation is loaded with Idealistic opposition to Realism. He is obviously aware of this fact, and uncomfortably so. He protests too much that the idealism that he advocates is actually "the truest and most binding realism," the "true and original real- ism"1®® -- the surpassing of the Idealism-^lealism con flict whose possibility he has been conjecturing. Obviously uneasy with the direction of his specu lation, he decides to do what he should have done in the first place; to succinctly restate the successive steps of Schelling*s argument. Deferring, then, the full elucidation of demonstrations and construction of his Dynamic Philosophy till his forthcoming ( but never accomplished > Logosophia, Coleridge sets forth the ar gument a la Schelling in ten brief Theses. These focus on the same essential notions that were set forth in the first attempt, identifying the basic principle of know ledge -- that which "is^, simply because it isand which is "capable of communicating to other positions a certainty, which it has not itself borrowed"; and which can be confirmed a priori and a posteriori -- as the "SUM or I AM."107 But this time, true to his deepseated enthusiasm to go to extremes, Coleridge ac companies Schelling right to the brink of overt 79 Pantheism. It is now, in pin-pointing the crucial ele ments in the German philosopher's teaching, that Coler idge realizes that he has been "taken in" by what was "extremely plausible and alluring at a first acquain- 108 tance," but which proved to be "little more than 109 Behmenism. . .reduced at last to a mere Pantheism." In treating of the 'objective' approach to the episte- mological problem, he had already found it necessary to follow Schelling*s highly questionable claim that The theory of natural philosophy would then be com pleted, when all nature was demonstrated to be iden tical in essence with that, which in its highest known power exists in man as intelligence and self- consciousness with the high-sounding appeal to divine revelation: . . .when the heavens and the earth shall declare not only the power of their Maker, but the glory and the presence of their God, even as he appeared to the great Prophet during the vision of the mount in the skirts of his divinity. HO Now, in the sixth Thesis, while repeating Schelling's doctrine of the absolute self-consciousness: In other words, it is a subject which becomes a subject by the act of constructing itself objec tively to itself; but which never is an object ex cept for itself and only so far as by the very same 80 act it becomes a subject. It may be described, therefore, as a perpetual self-duplication of one and the same power into object and subject, which pre-suppose each other, and can exist only as antithesis -- Coleridge becomes suddenly certain of the Pantheism in what he writes; and he immediately adds a theistic scholium: If a man be asked how he knows that he is? he can only answer, sum quia sum. But if ( the absolute ness of this certainty having been admitted ) he be again asked, how he, the individual person, came to be, then in relation to the ground of his existence, not to the ground of his knowledge of that existence, he might reply, sum quia beus est, or still more philosophically sum quia in beo sum. But if we elevate our conception to the absolute self, the great eternal 1 AM. then the principle of being, and of knowledge, of idea, and of reality; the ground of existence, and the ground of the know ledge of existence, are absolutely identical, Sum quia sum, I am, because I affirm myself to be;~T~~ affirm myself to be, because I am.lH His speculation has definitively moved, as it were, into a new gear. In Thesis IX he looks forward to a philoso phy that passes into religion, "and religion become in- 112 elusive of philosophy." Reaffirming the two facts -- that of self and that of God — around and between which his consciousness moves, he declares that 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.HS 81 And in Thesis X he sets himself the program "to construct by a series of intuitions the progressive schemes, that must follow from such a power ( the intelligence ) with such forces ( its ‘centrifugal1 tendency to 'objectize itself, and its ‘centripetal* tendency to know itself in the object ), till I arrive at the fulness of the human 114 intelligence." In a very real sense, Coleridge's epistemological exercise in the Biographia Literaria confirmed henceforth his belief in the Christian Faith as the guarantor for man, of not only his own inalien able dignity and the truth of God's existence, but of the fact of the world of spatio-temporal externality. Coleridge's insight into the pseudo character of the Realism-Idealism problem deserves more attention. Even though, in Coleridge's thought, it is oriented toward, not just theology, but the life of religion, its philosophical value is considerable. The gist of all Coleridge's epistemological writing is to show "true Idealism necessarily perfecting itself in Realism, @ Realism refining itself into Idealism.And, as such, as Boulger points out, it "points toward the epis- temology of Scholasticism and 'moderate realism, *"H6 or, more correctly perhaps, toward the Realism of such Twentieth-century 'transcendental Thomlsts" as Bernard 82 J.F. Lonergan and Emerich Coreth,^7 Be that as it may, the crucial fact is that, for Coleridge, neither Ideal ism nor Realism is capable of complete self-justifica- tion; each one must rely on the other to make a properly intelligible statement of its own position. That being exists and that the universe is real, is a basic datum which no idealist doctrine has succeeded in effectively questioning. If Berkeley, in his criticism of the no tions of matter and substance, reduces the world to a series of ideas, so that, in the words of his formula, esse est percipe, then the world of ideas itself, as he conceives it, possesses the full objectivity and reality which naive realism attributes to the data of sense- perception. Actually, if idealism be true, the mind — or, more precisely, Mind — must account for all things, and, in effect, it must make an illogical compact with a 'realism1 of the most implausible kind — one inferior even to the crude realism which, in dispensing with theory altogether, at least confines itself ( however inadequate its explanations ) to establishing data that can in no way be denied: namely, that being is, and that mind is not the only reality, that there are things of which it must take account. The deepest and most genuine sense of philoso phical Realism, as Coleridge came to see it, consists in 63 admitting that there are things which do not exist by virtue of the human mind, and that it is the latter*s task to raise them to its own level by giving them mean ing and value. What he had in mind was an Idealism which is likewise a Realism, and a Realism which is at the same time an Idealism; and better still, a view of knowledge that still on the philosophical plane transcends both of these positions. As with the Medieval Schoolmen, the universe appeared to Coleridge as a prodigiously varied expression of the divine creative thought; and the very knowledge by which man gradually takes possession of it, can consist only in re-encountering in things the ideas from which they proceed, and which in some manner they express. Thus conceived, the universe is a world of ideas; so much so that it can be said that in the world as it offers itself to man's perception, mind is appre hensible by mind. Plato, according to St. Augustine, understood this perfectly, but without also understanding, through lack of the Christian revelation, that the ideas by which the world was made and which impart to all things their meaning, subsist in the divine Word, "by whom all things are made" --a Christian notion of which Coleridge was particularly fond. in this view, then, an object is, in the first place, a significance or an essence; and it is 8k intelligible only on this account. And it acquires existential status only by the human thought that elicits this such significance. Subject and object thus define together the situation of consciousness; which is such that its subjectivity cannot establish its own existence without introducing a world of things, which in turn can not exist -- that is, having meaning and value -- apart from the subject which thinks them. Accordingly, Real ism and Idealism imply one another and cannot be separa ted or brought forward as rival 'absolutes1 without at the same time abolishing both the reality of conscious ness as subjectivity and that of the world as objec tivity. At bottom, this is what was signified by the Schoolmen's doctrine of the active intellect, the role of which was "to bring the intelligible into act." With out thought the universe waits, as it were, to be bora — which is why Adam, according to Genesis ( 11, 19-20 ), was given by God the responsibility of naming both ani mals and things: that is, to accord them meaning, and thus to confer upon them the actuality of being. Real ism and idealism, therefore, so far from being mutually exclusive, imply one another. As Coleridge increasingly realized, their union ( and thereby the surpassing of their combined tenets ) articulates the profoundest 85 metaphysical truth about man — that he has been created by God in order .himself to become a creator. For it is man who makes the cosmos, in the strict sense of the term as signifying order, unity, and harmony; and this he does singularly and preeminently by means of his word-creation called poetry. NOTES CHAPTER II 86 1. N, I, 326. 2. CL, I, 397: To George Coleridge, March 10, 1798. 3. CL, I, 156: To John Thelwall, November 19, 1796. also: BL, CH 1, 1.9 ). 4. AIDS, 428• 5. Coleridge on Logic and Learning ( New Haven, 1929 ), 17FI 6. Ibid., 126-27. 7. F, I, 98. 8. The Collected Writing^ of Thomas De Quincey. ed. DavTcT Masson ( London, Layz ), II, 152-3. 9. TT, 1834. 10. PL, 290. 11. PL, 290. 12. CL, IV, 548: To 13. BL, I, 145. 14. N, II, 15. BL, I, 99. 16. F, I, 457. 17. TM, 2. 18. TM, 2. 19. TM, 6. 20. CL, II, 1195: To Thomas Clarkson, October 13, 1806. 21. TM, L. 22. F, I, 459. 87 23. TM, 4. 24. F, I, 458-59. 25. CL, II, 1195: To Thomas Clarkson, October 13, 1906. 26. Quoted by J. D. Campbell, Samuel Taylor Coleridge ( London, 1894 ), 165. 27. Coleridge as Philosopher ( New York, 1930 ), 60, 28. BL, I, 93. 29. CL, IV, 589: To John May, September 27, 1815. 30. Coleridge on Logic and Learning, ed. Alice D. Snyder ? New Haven, 192 9 ), L53. 31. CL, II, 947: To William Godwin, June 4, 1803. 32. CLj IV, 736: To Francis Wrangham, June 5, 1817. 33. IS,, 53. 34. TT, 138: September 12, 1831. 35. Immanuel Kant in England ( Princeton, 1931 ), 36. Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition ( Oxford, 1969 >,144. --- --------- 37. PL, 53. 38. CL, II, 676: To Thomas Poole, February 13, 1801. 39. Notebook, 35f, 25v. 40. BL, I, 93. 41. Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition ( Oxford, 1969 ) , 55. --- ---------- 42. cf. Marginal note, p. 23 of Vol. II of the Law Edition. 43. CL, III, 463-64: To Mrs. J. J. Morgan, December 19, ITL 3. 44. CW, V, 88. 88 45. Cf. CL, III, 533: To Daniel Stuart, September 12, 1814” 46. AIDS, 113: CL, III, 155. 47. L, IV, 848: To W. H. Coleridge, April 1, 1818. Ct. also ISj 386, 48. Coleridge as Religious Thinker ( New Haven, 1961 ), T7W, 49. BL, II, 2l8, Cf. LR, 565. 50. BL, I, 65ff. 51. IS, 25. 52. Coleridge on Logic and Learning, ed. A. D. Snyder C hew Haven, 1929 ), 130. 53. CL, II, 709: To Thomas Poole, October 16, 1797. 54. CL, II, 649: To William Wordsworth, 55. BL, I, 255. 56. N, I, 1717. 57. Cf. Etienne Eilson, The Christian Philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Translated by E. K. Snook ( Mew Yorfe, I9?6" 77 102-144. 58. CP, I, 100. 59. CP, I, 362. 60. CL, I, 16: To Thomas Poole, October 16, 1797. 61. CL, II, 881: To Mrs. S. T, Coleridge, November 13, 1502. 62. AP, 115. 63. Cf. especially G. N. G. Orsini, Coleridge and German Idealism ( Carbondale and Edwardsv11le, 1969 ) . ----- 64. N, 25ff, 118v-119. 65. TT, 173. 89 66. CL, II, 264-66: To J. Gooden, January 14, 1820. 67. Coleridge on Imagination ( Bloomington, 1965 ), 19. 68. N, I, 1623. 69. N, I, 2557. 70. BL, I, 167. 71. CL, II, 1195; To Thomas Clarkson, October 13, IS~06. 72. AIDS. 235. 73. SC, II, 154-55. 74. Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition ( Oxford. 1969 >,323. 75. CL. II, 768: To Robert Southey, October 21, 1801. 76. Cf. J. R. de J. Jackson, Method and Imagination in Coleridgefs Criticism (London, 1969) , 4Zff. 77. N, I, 1717. 78. LR, 113. 79. NOED. I, 218. 80. Cf. IS_, 79. 81. Cf. J. R. de J. Jackson, Method and Imagination in Coleridges Criticism, 69fFI 82. N, 27, ff. 35v-36. 83. Coleridge on imagination ( Bloomington, 1965 ), TT 84. Ibid., 19. 85. BL, I, 137. 86. Ibid., I, 133. 87. Ibid., I, 163. 88. Werke ( Stuttgart and Augaburg, 1856-61 ), VII, 350. 89. Method and imagination in Coleridge*s Criticism C London, 1!K>9 ), 73. 90. BL, I, 89. 91. Ibid., 1. 90. 92. Ibid., I. 90-91. 93. Ibid., I. 90. 94. Ibid., I. 174. 95. Ibid., I, 175. 96. Ibid., It 163. 97. Ibid., I. 176-77. 98. Ibid., If 177. 99. Ibid., If 177. 100. Ibid., It 177. 101. Ibid., It 177. 102. Ibid., I. 177-78. 103. Ibid., It 178. 1 0 1 * . Ibid., I, 178. 105. Ibid., It 178. 106. Ibid., If 179. 107. Ibid., 343. 108. CL, IV , 883: To C. A. Tulk, November 24, 1818, 109. Ibid. 110. BL, I, 176. 111. BL, I, 183. 112. Ibid., I. 186. 113. Ibid., If 186. 91 lli*. Ibid., I, 188. 115. CL, IV, 576-75: To William Wordsworth, May 30, 1815 * 116. Coleridge as Religious Thinker ( New Haven, 1961 ), 117. Cf. Bernard J. F. Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding ( London: Longman’s Green, 1937 ); and Enrich Corith, Metaphysics ( New York: Herder and Herder, 1968 ). CHAPTER III POET No one can leap over his own shadow, but poets leap over death. S. T. Coleridge 92 CHAPTER III Coleridge's turning in the Biographia Literaria from philosophical speculation on the act of knowledge C Chapter XII ) to study of the imagination and its poetic creativity ( Chapter XIII and the chapters on Wordsworth's poetry ), amounted to not quite the "helter- skelter leap" and "philosophical rout" that McFarland claims it to have been.^ It was abrupt; but, then, this was in keeping with Coleridge's habit of thought. Ac tually, Coleridge's decision, clinched by his sudden full insight into the pantheistic ramifications of the ideas he was culling from Schelling's writings, was to ap proach the primordial experience of the act of knowing, not as a problem to be solved, but as an incommensurable fact ( what Gabriel Marcel would call a 'mystery* ) to be manifested. In doing this, Coleridge was returning to what had mostly preoccupied him in the composition of his poetry: the fact of knowing mind and known object meeting in a meaningful relationship that engenders even awareness of the presence of God. Actually, he was more intimately familiar with the poetic mode of knowledge than with the metaphysical, for, 93 94 by its very nature, poetry is given birth, as Nietsche expresses it, from within the deepest reaches of the poet's person; and Coleridge had already written his poetic masterpieces. The essential characteristics of Coleridge's philosophical turn of mind were counter poised in tense complintentarines by his opposite psychic tendencies; these were given singular intensity by the heightening process of his poetic experience. William Walsh's conclusion that his mind was not bizarre or distorted, but in a profound way, fully and generously human — sane as well as brilliant, central as well as extreme .-2 is quite justified. Indeed, it may be reasonably argued that Coleridge's very neuroticism contributed to the plenitude of sanity that constituted his genius. I. He had extraordinary instinct for the individual concrete things around him. His powers of perception would not just wait for things, but would gather them; would "gluttonize"^ on them. He would respond to the contingent detailed fact with 95 the ear of a wild Arab listening to the silent Desert, the eye of a North American Indian tracing the footsteps of an Enemy upon the Leaves that strew the Forest -- ; the Touch of a Blind Man feeling the face of a darling Child.^ His whole being would thus reply to the impact of things; sometimes egotistically, assimilating them into the unity of his own self ( and with their intentional or imagina tive presences confirming and developing his personal unity ); sometimes chameleon-like, entering empathically into their peculiar autonomous existences, in the effort to experience empirically their roles in the universe. Of course, these two forms of Coleridge's imaginative response to reality were, though distinct, never separate: they always interpenetrated, with now the one, and now the other, predominant, in either case his imaginative response arose from within an unusually strong self- consciousness, and, typically Romantic, worked toward a greater intensification and extension of the poet's self hood. In effect, Coleridge was intimately aware of how the 'I am' feeds on the external tangible 'It is.' His 'egotistical' form of imagination has never been disputed: His poetry and Notebook jottings are re plete with instances of his urge to draw non-ego reality into his own identity — the more obvious illustration of his conviction that man is a being who is constructed 96 from the inside outward. However, as critics such as Robert Langbaum and Patricia Ball insist, the chameleon feature of polarity in Coleridge's imagination was deep and active ( especially during the years 1797-1802, in his association with Wordsworth ), and must be consid ered in any balanced evaluation of his poetry.** John Keats' opinion notwithstanding, Coleridge was alert to and appreciated and exercized his own 'negative capa bility'. For instance, he comments that the recollec tion that Shakespeare had planted a particular tree is an intrusion that prevents him from wholly losing him self "in the flexures of tis branches and intertwining of its roots— indicating that such empathic self- projection into things was a practice of his. Writing on a piece from Jacob Boehme's Aurora, he notes, with evident familiarity: Imagine a Poet watching a Tree in a storm of Wind, unconsciously imitating its motions with his body, and then transferring to the Tree those sensations and emotions that accompanied his own gestures; and then you may understand Behmen, and his mode of de scribing acts of Nature by antedating the passions, of which yet those acts may be perhaps, the nascent state and fluxional quantities.6 Such interchange between man and nature involves the chameleon-like imaginative activity: a reciprocal pro cess of experience. A more explicit example is the 97 following: One travels along with the lines of a mountain. Years ago I wanted to make Wordsworth sensible of this* How fine is Keswick valel Would I repose, my soul likes and is quiet upon the broad valei Would it act? It darts up into the mountain-top like a Kite, and like a chamois-goat runs along the ridge --or like a body that makes sport on - the road of running along a wall or narrow fence I But no matter which imaginative form predominated in a particular happening of Coleridge's imaginative insight, two characteristics prevailed: its basic per ception was holistic, and its imaging was suffused with feeling or emotion. Long before he read Kant's rejection of epistemological atomism and his insistence that all sensations are found in clusters, in "senuous manifolds," 8 Coleridge had publicly proclaimed similarly. Against Hume he had maintained that isolated sensations just do not exist. One's perception focuses illuminatingly on a particular point, but: "is not every one at the same moment conscious that there co-exist a thousand others in a darker shade, or less light ... /and according ly^ the pretended single sensation is it anything more than the Light-point in every picture of nature or of a good painter ^7_7^ Thus, in the compass of a few hurried lines, he would picture things with sensitive accuracy and 'gestalt' wholeness: 98 Child picking the Leaf as it was arranging it's Mother's hairs better. . .10 Distance removing all sense of motion or sound painted the waterfalls on the distant crags — H As many curves as a Stranger makes climbing up a craggy Hill, pathless. . .12 The sails flapped unquietly, as if restless for the breeze, with convulsive Snatches for air, like dying fish.13 Mother listening for the sound of a still-born child — blind Arab list'nlng in the wilderness.1^ The first day on which the whole ground was covered with Snow ~~ looked like a Sunday.13 The extraordinary integrality of these jottings is achieved, not simply by their patterns of related images, but by the feelings and emotions that suffuse them. Coleridge's observations such as the one which claims that images, however aptly beautiful, "do not of themselves characterize the poet," but must be "modified by a predominant passion,"3 - * * and his recognition of Wordsworth's poetic genius as being in great part due to his ability to unite "deep feeling with profound thought,"3 - 7 did not come from mere a priori speculation, but from Coleridge's awareness of his own practice. Feelings, emotions, and the excitability of the human mind, always intrigued him. Observation of his own inner self had convinced him that every sensation in volves "a blending @ unifying of the sensations that 99 inhere in the manifold goings on of the Life of the whole man,"^-® and that very frequently a train of ideas is almost entirely governed by a state of emotion which, "like a steady fire attracts constantly the air which constantly feeds it."^® He would go so far as to ad vance that "Ideas never recall Ideas* • • . The Breeze. . .that runs thro1 them. . .is. • .the state of Feel- ingt'20. an4 that "feelings have more influence on human activation than the reason has, especially those feel ings which lead to active benevolence or philanthropy. And Coleridge was able to express in words this suffusion and transformation of external reality by the quick of human feelings and emotions; and to do so with consummate insight and artistry. As Humphry House writes, he possessed the "power of attuning moods of emotion to landscape and movements of weather; of using the shapes and shifts and colours of nature as symbols of emotional and mental states— a sensibility and artistry that links Coleridge with the Renaissance pastoral and sonnet poets. Apart from his poetry, his genius for picturing things with sensitive accuracy and informing his delinea tion with allied emotional atmosphere is particularly evident in his longer jottings: 100 The thin scattered eLeeds rain-clouds were scudding along the Sky, above them with a visible interspace the crescent Moon hung, and partook not of the motion — her own hazy Light Light fill’d up the concave, as if it had been painted @ the colors had run.23 On S’ Herbert’s Island I saw a large Spider with most beautiful legs floating in the air on his Back by a single thread which he was spinning out, and still as he spun, heaving in the air, as if the air beneath were a pavement esastic to his Strokes/ — from the Top of a very high Tree he had spun his Line, at length reached the Bottom, tied his Thread round a piece of Grass, / re-scended, to spin/a net to hang as a fisherman's Sea net hangs in the Sun @ Wind, to dry. ^ Mist as from volcano — Waterfall rolled after long looking at like a segment of a Wheel — the rock gleaming thro* it -~ Amid the roar a noise as of innumerable grasshoppers or of spinning wheels.25 What a wonderful City Edinburgh is! What alternation of Height and Depth! -- a city looked at in the pol ished back of a Brobidgnag Spoon, held lengthways — so enormously stretched-up are the Houses! When I first looked down upon it, as the Coach drove in on the higher street, 1 cannot express what I felt -- such a section of wasp’s nest, striking you with a sort of bastard sublimity from the enormity and in finity of its littleness — the infinity swelling out the mind, the enormity striking it with wonder. I think I have seen an old Plate of Monserrat, that struck me with the same feeling — and I am sure I have seen huge Quarries of Lime or Free-Stone, in which the Shafts or Strata have stood perpendicu larly instead of horizontally, with the same high Thin Slices, and corresponding Interstincesl26 The river is full, and Lodore is full, and silver- fillets come out of clouds and glitter in every ravine of all the mountains; and the hail lies like snow, upon their tops, and their impetuous gusts from Borrowdale snatched the water up high, and con tinually at the bottom of the lake it is not dis tinguishable from snow slanting before the wind — 101 and under this seeming snowdrift the sunshine gleams, and over all the nether half of the lake it is bright and dazzle a cauldron of melted silver boil- IHgTZT The stripped, palpable details of such jottings are 2ft gathered together into wholes by the deep nlove @ joy"'60 of Coleridge toward the things he senses — the inter penetration of his reflective mind and feelings with the observed scene that he achieves most perfectly, not only in 'wholes' of individual parts of poems, as, for example, in "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison" ( 1797 ): The roaring dell, o*er wooded, narrow, deep, And only speckled by the midday sun; Where its slim trunk the ash from rock to rock Flings arching like a bridge; — that branchless ash, Unsuss'd and damp, whose few poor yellow leaves Ne'er tramble in the gale, yet tremble still, Fann'd by the water-fall! • . . and in "Frost at Midnight" ( 1798 ): . . .or the redbreast sit and sing Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch Smokes in the sun-thaw. . . — 30 but, above all, in the poetic 'worlds' of his success ful poems. For, each of these poems takes, as Coleridge himself perceived with original insight, the external 102 world and the poet's experience of it at their point of intersection. It is a bodying forth of their inter penetration and union, and, as such, it is a unique 'world.* Through the instrumentality of its structure of meaning and sound and meter it 'seduces* its reader/ hearer into an intimate comnuning with the new lived reality, that its physical make-up attempts to objec- tivize. Indeed, its complex orchestral unity of parts — what Maritain calls its 'poetic space'55 — itself forms an organic 'world* of its own, filled with concurrences, pressures, tensions, and silences. Take, for example, the short poems, "Sonnet: To the River Otter" (? 1793 ), "To Nature" (? 1820 ), and "Work Without Hope" ( 1825 ), and "Coeli Enarrant" ( ? 1830 ): SONNET: TO THE RIVER OTTER Dear native Brookt wild Streamlet of the West2 How many various-fated years have past, What happy and what mournful hours, since last I skimm'd the smooth thin stone along thy breast, Numbering its light leaps! yet so deep imprest Sink the sweet scenes of childhood, that mine eyes 1 never shut amid the sunny ray, But straight with all their tints thy waters rise, The crossing plank, thy marge with willows grey, And bedded sand that vein'd with various dyes Gleam'd through thy bright transparence! On my way, Visions of Childhood! oft have ye beguil'd Lone manhood's cares, yet waking fondest sighs: Ah! that once more I were a careless Child131 103 TO NATURE It may indeed be phantasy, when 1 Essay to draw from all created things Deep, heartfelt, inward joy that closely clings; And trace in leaves and flowers that round me lie Lessons of love and earnest piety. So let it be; and if the wide world rings in mock of this belief, it brings Not fear, nor grief, nor vain perplexity. So will I build my altar in the fields, And the blue sky my fretted dome shall be, And the sweet fragrance that the wild flower yields Shall be the incense 1 will yield to Thee, Thee only God! and thou shalt not despise Even me, the priest of this poor s a c r i f i c e , 32 WORK WITHOUT HOPE All Nature seems at work. Slugs leave their lair -- The bees are stirring — birds are on the wing And winter slumbering in the open air, Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring! And I the while, the sole unbusy thing, Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing. Yet well I ken the banks where amaranths blow, Have traced the fount whence streams of nectar flow. Bloom, o ye amaranths! bloom for whom ye may, For me ye bloom not! Glide, rich streams, away! With lips unbrightened, wreathless brow, I stroll; And would you learn the spells that drowse my soul? Work without Hope draws nectar in a sieve, And Hope without an object cannot live.33 GOELI ENARRANT The stars that wont to start, as on a chace, Mid twinkling insult on Heaven's darken'd face. Like a conven'd conspiracy of spies Wink at each other with confiding eyes! Turn from the portent — all is blank on high. No constellations alphabet the sky; 104 The Heavens one large Black Letter only shew, And as a child beneath its roaster's blow Shrills out at once its task and its affright — The groaning world now learns to read aright. And with its Voice of Voices cries out, 0J34 All four poems have as their essential theme the poet's relationship with nature; yet each is informed by a dif ferent emotion that shapes its very structure of sound and meter. As Coleridge points out in a marginal note in a copy of Selden's Table Talk, the "vital pas sion" of a poem may be considered as "the practical 35 cement of logic": it gives it unity and purpose. Thus, in "Sonnet: To the River Otter" its expression of nos talgic "joyance" is bodied forth in the unfogged images, the buoyant rhythm, and the structural tautness of its lines: What happy and what mournful hours, since last 1 skimn'd the smooth thin stone along thy breast. Numbering its Light leaps 1^6 mine eyes 1 never shut amid the sunny ray, But straight with all their tints they waters rise, Thy crossing plank, thy marge with willows grey, And bedded sand that vein'd with various dyes Gleam'd through they bright transparence237 Here the radical connaturality of the human mind and external reality 1s given felt actualization; even though its 'world' of communing man and nature is recollected in tranquility, it is experienced as actual, 105 immediate and concrete* On the other hand, prayerful humility opens the perspectives of the sonnet, "To Natureon to larger earth-and-heaven inclusiveness* The poet's honest acceptance of his creaturehood is re flected not only in the poem's simple images of fields of leaves and flowers, an altar, and the "fretted dome"^® of a blue sky, but in the forthright simplicity of his poem's words and structure. His strong deter mination, rooted in his humility, is expressed not only in his emphatic claim that others' scorn brings him "Not fear, nor grief, nor vain perplexity," but in his trust that he will be able to draw "inward joy" and "Lessons of love and earnest piety" from created things, and in his boldness to offer his "poor sacrifice" to God, con fident of its acceptance.in effect, the 'world* of this poem is that of an Amen — at once unpretentious and utterly catholic, reconciling mankind with nature, and all creation with its Creator* Coleridge's personal achievement in this little poem is best recognised when it is set beside such ambitious efforts as "Religious Mu8ings" and "The Destiny of Nations." Notwithstanding their high ambitions, their vision is limited and clouded by the "swell and glitter both of thought and diction"but that of "To Nature" is clear, Integral, and open* Besides, with its rich assonance and subdued 106 interplay of liquid sounds and of sibilants, this modest poem sings, whereas the other two declaim. Its very reality amounts to a celebration of the "poor sacrifice" that it hopefully dares to announce. But "Work without Hope" presents a completely 1 world* ( of man-nature inter relationship ) to either that of "To the River Otter" or that of "To Nature," both of which have much in common. The poet sees the animated beauty of nature; and he sees it, not in grand abstraction, but in its immediate, small individuality. His poetic intuition is in readiness to create. As a matter of fact, he is already imaginatively creating, as witness these two near-perfect lines: And Winter slumbering in the open air, Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring I * * * - But the poet falters. His poetic intuition lacks the sustained strength and wealth of emotion without which the diaphanous reality that he sees cannot be carried into his subjectivity. His failure of imagination is essentially psychic-emotional, one experienced by all poets. ( Wordsworth was not a little correct in re lating Coleridge's inability to write more and greater poetry to his unhappiness ).^ The last eight lines of the poem are notably contrived, with the final couplet heavily moralistic. In effect, "Work without Hope" is an aborted poem; an unfinished, misshapen 107 sterile •world.* Not so the poem t , Coeli Ennarent." Stephen Prickett disagrees with J. D. Boulger's re ligion-weighted explanation that "the image of the darkened sky divides the 'groaning world* of sin and i i * ? physical evil from God" — an interpretation that accords with Boulger's partly true, but much exaggerated inference that "Coleridge was not at home emotionally in the abstract world of spiritual Christianity into aii which he had thought himself." Prickett's insight into the poem's significance is worth quoting: The stars are surely visible and twinkling -- but their twinkling is an 'insult' to the dark sky. They are, Coleridge seems to be suggesting, se cretive and hostil, alienated both from their set ting and from man, the beholder^ they wink only at each other. Coleridge's complaint is, in fact, the familiar one from Dejection: 'I see, not feel how beautiful they are.* The unifying power of Imagination that links Coleridge to the created world is suspended, leaving him imprisoned within himself, and only capable of projection — without response. It is not that there are no stars in the sky, but there are no constellations. He can not 'read' the stars in the sky as a meaningful pattern; he can only project the woe of his own isolation, and see them as isolated hostile entities.^5 in other words, "Coeli Ennarent" expresses a poetic experience in which the very connaturality of poet and nature seems to be suspended. But the poet in agony and the "groaning world" are, in fact, united: both plumb the harrowing terror of their shared alienation from 108 Heaven. Besides, the poet does read the "blank on high," even though it be but the profoundly symbolic "one large Black Letter. "Coeli Ennarent" then, is not, like "Work Without Hope," essentially about Coleridge's fail- ure of imagination, as Prickett goes on to suggest, but a powerfully imaginative presentation of the world of man and nature closed to Heaven: the world of the void that twentieth-century man has come to know so intimately. With its two extraordinary images, that of the stars as they, Like a conven'd conspiracy of spies ._ Wink at each other with confiding eyesJ 1 and that of creation crying out its terror "as a child beneath its master's blow/Shrills out at once its task l l Q and its affright-- and with both images supported by a cold language and a heavy rhythm — this poem is a little triumph of creative imagination. In any event, all four poems present uniquely different 'worlds'; each one with its own vision, structure, sound, rhythm: its own distinct integrality. The fact is that Coleridge was unsatisfied with mere totalities of felt imagery. The same "rage for order" that had him aspiring to construct intellectually a reticulative philosophical system, also pressed him 109 into attempting to create imaginative Worlds* out of different experiences of reality and by way of differ ent poetic techniques. This, in fact, is the signifi cance of his endeavor to shadow forth the ’supernatural,1 and of his brilliant experimentation with poetic tech nique. Thus, he sought not only a generalized, reasoned order, but a densely individuated, passioned order: that of the poem. He staunchly held, not only that a poem, with definable features, exists independent of its maker and its readers ( as emphasized again recently by W.K. Wimsatt^® ), but that , What the Globe is, to Geography, miniaturing in order to manifest the Truth, such is a Poem to the Image of God, which we were created with, and which still seeks that unity or Revelation of the One in and by the Many, which reminds it, that tho* in order to be an individual Being it must go forth from God, yet as the receding from him is to proceed towards Nothingness and Privation, it turn back toward him in Man images God, especially in his dynamically structured consciousness, which reflects the divine archetype of all creative processes. In turn the poem, with its vital systolic interchange between imagination and being, be tween image and thing, manifests man's creative psycho logical ppocesses. Coleridge was aware of this fact in his own most intimate experience. 110 As a poet ( and as Stephen Prickett claims, "Coleridge was never anything but a poet — even when he was being unsuccessful as one"^ ), he was exper- ientially aware of the import of knowledge through •connaturality1. On occasion he mentions it explicitly, as, for example, in his references to Pythagoras in his philosophical Lectures: . . .the very powers which in men reflect and con template, are in essence the same as those powers which in nature produce the objects contemplated. This position did indeed appear to be deducible from that of the Ionic school, I mean that of Thales, that there is no action but from like on like, that no substance or being essentially dis similar could possibly be made sensible of each other's existence or in any way act thereon. This involves an essential 1 know not how I can avoid using a pedantic word — HOMOGENIETY and conatur- ality -- a sameness of the concipient and the con- ceptum, of the idea and the law corresponding to the idea;52 and in his discussion of goodness and beauty in the Biographia Literaria: The good consists in congruity of a thing with the laws of reason and the nature of the will, and its fitness to determine the latter to actualize the former, and it is always discursive. The BEAUTIFUL arises from the perceived harmony of an object, whether of sight or sound, with the inborn and con stitutive rules of the judgment and imagination: and it is always intuitive. As light to the eye, even such is beauty to the mind, which cannot but have complacency in whatever is perceived as pre- configured to its living faculties. Hence the . . • Greeks called a beautiful object KATvV, quasi i.e., calling on the soul, which receives it Ill 53 instantly, and welcomes it as something conatural. Coleridge evidently availed of Aristotelian, Plotinian, and Scholastic speculation on the nature of knowledge through conaturality: it helped him to formulate in the precise terms of a respectable philosophical tradi tion what he already knew existentially. Jacques Maritain, whose Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry shows some influence from Coleridge, defines poetic knowledge as An obscure knowledge through inclination -- bom in the preconscious of the spirit -- in which the world is known in and through the subjectivity, grasped both together and inseparably by means of an emotion become intentional and intuitive. Such knowledge is utterly different from what we ordinarily call knowledge, it is more experience than knowledge. The Subjectivity* is the spiritually subs istent inte grating center of the human person, the emanating focus of all its activity in knowledge and love: the most radically alive source of totality in the person's make up. Now, in poetic experience a given emotion carries the poet's experience of some external existent(s) into the preconscious depths of the subjectivity, piercing fecundatively the alert receptivity of these depths. There results an intercommunion between the inner being of the poet and the inner being of the other existent(s); 112 and this intercommunion is radically lightsome. It re veals to the awakened poet ( awakened/inspired by the given emotion ) the reality of the fIt is1 and the reality of fI am* in one intuition that is non-conceptual and non-rational, but rather creatively experiential -- essen tially oriented to expression in a poem. In the act of reflection man grasps himself objectively, even while polarizing himself as the 1 subject' over against the external, independently existing 'object1. In poetic intuition, however, the poet experiences himself in the plenitude of his subjectivity, in the very process of grasping things in their resonance in his own being. Long before he attempted his speculative study of the imagination in the Biographia Literaria. Coler idge was aware, from personal event, that in poetic in tuition, the "highest activity of the mind," wherein "all the powers are in a state of equilibrium, and equally energetic,"^6 the singular individualities of the 'I am1 and the 'It is' are most intensely illumina ted and revealed as independently subsistent, yet pro foundly interrelated. His persistent emphasis on the pre-eminence and initiative of the fI am' was, like his anti-Hartleyianism, due mainly to the coupling of his experience of the heightening of self-consciousness in 113 poetic intuition with his profound moral sense. At the same time he knew existentially that this unique dis covery of self is inseparable from the simultaneous divining of the singular separate ’otherness* of the world of the non-ego — a singular separateness that is known, paradoxically, in the most intimately intern alized communion of the *1 am* and the ’It is,1 and which is given added confirmation in the actual poem with which the poetic intuition is eventually termin ated by the poet. Northrop Frye errs in asserting that the "meta phorical structure of romantic poetry tends to move inside and downward instead of outside and upward."57 Its movement develops inward-downward, inward-upward, and outside-upward, outside-downward. Its innovation was its stress on the inward movement, but it did not neglect the counterpointing outside movement. Undoubt edly, there was always the danger of the increase in consciousness — for Romantics the very aim of poetry — being accompanied by an increase in selfconsciousness: by a scrutiny of self that neglects the looking at the other-than-self. Such self-analysis is alien to and destructive of poetic experience, which, since it is so authentically human, demands that a man die to self so that he might live. But, then, every attempt at the 114 composition of a poem involves the risk of the poet's art being unfaithful to his poetic experience* Not a few of Coleridge's efforts at poetry are marred by an overindulgence in self-consciousness; notably such 'confession poems' as "The Picture” ( 1802 ), "The Pains of Sleep" ( 1803 ), "The Blossoming of the Solitary Date-Tree" ( 1805 ), wherein, as Max Schulz comments, the poet has become "a prober of abscesses irritating his mind and heart. . ,"58 — unlike the 'conversation* poems wherein "Coleridge's thought in scribes a huge parabola, swinging outward and away from himself to embrace the living world before curving back again unto himself. . ."59 But it seems reasonable to infer from the quantity and the relative success of his 'conversation* poems, that they best express, not only his characteristic mode of utterance, but his character istic epistemologican stand. Thus, in both "The Eolian Harp" ( 1795 ), and "This Lime-Tree Bower, my Prison" ( 1797 ), he presents himself as possessor of a con sciousness in the act of productively imaginative in tuition: not of a reflex consciousness, as Patricia Ball suggests,60 but of a creatively experiencing con sciousness that immediately knows Itself in actu exercitu, in the living act In which it realizes at once the deepest reality of the self and of the other 115 than-self• By its very nature a poem must unfold grad ually in space and in time; but in the integration of form and content in "The Eolian Harp,"®*- with its balanced movement between sensations and emotions that are tethered to external actuality ( "pensive Sara," "mine arm," "our cot," "simplest Lute," "clasping case ment," "midway slope of yonder hill," "my limbs" ), and the free musings of the mind, Coleridge essayed to body forth a particular integral ‘moment1 of poetic exper ience; one quickened by a meditative, peaceful emotion. Twice the poet's subjectivity rises beyond exultancy at the communion of self and things into an ecstasy that approaches Pantheism: 02 the one Life within us and abroad, Which meets all motion and becomes its soul, A light in sound, a sound'like power in light, £ Rhythm in all thought, and joyance every where. . . f And what if all of animate nature Be but organic Harps diversely fram'd, That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze, At once the Soul of each, and God of all? — 63 and both times it is quickly brought back to tangible things by his "Love" and her "more serious eye." This is a faithful imaging of the human mind's urge in poetic experience to see new relations between things, to destroy all boundaries between itself and things, and 116 to conjure up a living universe -- one in which matter is either an appearance of spirit, or spirit is an extension of matter, or both are variations of a third reality. Significantly, the two movements of the poet's mind toward pantheism are introduced by intimations as to their essential falsehood. The "desultory breeze" tempts the lover to "repeat the wrong. "6** The "de licious surges" of the lute's music is "Such a soft floating witchery of sound/As twilight Elfins make, when they at eve/Voyage on gentle gales from Fairy- Land."65 The poet, while abandoning himself to "tran quil muse upon tranquillity," has "flitting phantasies" traverse his "indolent and passive brain.But he re sists the temptation to succumb to pantheistic dreaming. However, the poem's final balancing of "These shapings of the unregenerate mind" with the peace-accompanying "this Cot, and thee, hearthonour*d MaidIlacks strength and credibility; primarily because it is not sufficiently passioned: in its content and in its re lationship of idea with fact, the poem's final stanza is wanting in the struggle without which poetry cannot survive. But taken in its entirety, "The Eolian Harp" articulates uniquely and explicitly Coleridge's appre ciative awareness of the collision and coalescence of the 'I am* and the 'It is* in human knowledge -- es pecially in the knowledge through connaturality of 117 poetic experience. Cg The poem, "The Lime Tree Bower my Prison, ,,uo is more successful in representing this fact. Herein Coleridge is not content with imaging forth his own con sciousness in the act of poetic intuition, but dupli cates its awareness by entering empathically into the experiencing consciousness of his friends, and by con centrating its severalty in the individuality of his friend, Charles Lamb. By representing a 'pure* dupli cation of sensibility -- by disembodying the conscious ness of his friend and making it only a perception and a feeling of certain images, and by leaving that con sciousness "unfixed and wavering" between these images, "attaching itself permanently to none"**® -- Coleridge actualizes an extraordinary bodying forth of the crea tive imagination in act. For in the foment1 of the poetic experience which he tries to incarnate in this poem, Coleridge not only achieves new self-realization, as indicated by the delight that comes sudden on his heart — his whole being -- and by his blessing of the rook in such wise that it becomes a thing of beauty; but he senses acutely the tangible externality of the things of nature, as indicated by the fusion of image and sound in astonishingly rich individuated concreteness: 118 They, mean while, Friends, whom I never more may meet again, On springy heath, along the hill-top edge, Wander in gladness( and wind down perchance, To that still roaring dell, of which I told; The roaring dell, o'erwooded, narrow, deep, And only speckled by the mid-day sun; Where its slim trunk the ash from rock to rock Flings arching like a bridge; -- that branchless ash, Unsunn*d and damp, whose few poor yellow leaves Nefer tremble in the gale, yet tremble still, Fann'd by the water-fa112 and there my friends Behold the dark green file of long lank weeds, That all at once ( a most fantastic sight! ) Still nod and drip beneath the dripping edge Of the blue c l a y - s t o n e .70 Pale beneath the blaze Hung the transparent foliage; and I watch*d Some broad and sunny leaf, and lovTd to see The shadow of the leaf and stem above Dappling its sunshine! And that walnut-tree Was richly ting'd, and a deep radiance lay Full on the ancient ivy, which usurps Those fronting elms, and now, with blackest mass Makes their dark branches gleam a lighter hue Through the late twilight; and though now the bat Wheels silent by, and not a swallow twitters, Yet still the solitary humble-bee Sings in the bean-flower!71 Now, one remarkable feature of these two delineations of nature is that, whereas the first is presented as immed iately originating in the minds of others, and the second appears immediately in the mind of the poet himself, both are equally sharp and dense, with the crisply edged quali ty of the images given a rich texture by a deft use of sibilants and liquids* the "slim trunk" of the "branch less ash"72; the "dark green file of long lank weeds’ ’ ^3; 119 the trembling "few poor yellow leaves"?**; the "dripping edge/of the blue clay-stone"^; the "broad and sunny leaf" with the "Shadow of the leaf and stem above/Dap- pling its sunshine!"?®; the bat wheeling "silent by," and the "solitary bumble-bee" singing in the bean- flower.?? In effect, by so distancing the immediate happening of these sensations, Coleridge underscores, not only the externality of the things that stimulate them, but the creativity of the poet's own mind that shapes and colors them; a creativity that can unite the ego tistical and chameleon forms of imagination in the 'making1 of another consciousness. As in "The Eolian Harp," the tendency of the poetic experience toward pantheism is presented; but here it is introduced, not by the yielding of the poet's imagination to "flitting phantasies," but by its entering empathically into the imaginations of his friends. At this point there is a movement of the mind away from the firm definition of specific sensation. The vision of things is expansive C "Beneath the wide wide Heaven — "?® ), drawn in large, general strokes ( "The many-steepled tract magnificent/ Of hilly fields and meadows, and the sea. . . ), tentative ( "With some fair bark, perhaps. . , ) , and moves into a light-in-sound ( "• . .whose sails light up/ The slip of smooth clear blue betwixt two Isles/of purple 120 shadow?"8^ - ). Untethered to pressing actuality, even that experienced through the immediate awareness of his friends consciousness, the poet's imagination focuses briefly and musingly on the "gentle-hearted Charles."8^ Abruptly the poet's whole being opens ecstatically to a transfiguration of the wide, colorful landscape that he imagined but a few moments ago -- and it does so, not only through his own immediate contemplation: Ah? slowly sink Behind the western ridge, thou glorious Sun? Shine in the slant beams of the sinking orb, Ye purple heath-flower si richlier bum, ye clouds! Live in the yellow light, ye distant groves! And kindle, thou blue Ocean! --83 but also, indirectly as it were, by way of his sympa thetic identification with his friend: So my friend Struck with deep joy may stand, as I have stood, Silent with swimming sense; yea, gazing round On the wide landscape, gaze till all doth seem Less gross than bodily; and of such hues As veil the Almighty Spirit, when yet he makes Spirits perceive his p r e s e n c e .84 Here the poet savors Pantheism. But right away he turns to the palpable immediacy of "this bower,/This little limetree bower,"85 which, though irradiated by different degrees of light, maintains its wealth of senuous in dividual existents. The repetition of "this bower," but with the added details of identification, "little" and 121 "lime-tree," poignantly expresses the poet's gratitude for the humble "plots" and "wastes" of the spatio-temporal world. Despite its dalliance with the heady ever-dilating glory of Pantheism, "This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison," like "The Eolian Harp," but with far more emphasis, af firms the distinct, separate existence of both the '1 am' and the 'It is' — as well as the existence of a Divinity, even though this Divinity is pantheistically intimated C and not additionally affirmed theistically in 'public* address, such as in the latter poem ). Accordingly, I. A. Richards is quite correct in maintaining that Coleridge, like Wordsworth, seems to alternate be tween the projective and realist views of the poetic experience, emphasizing now one and now the other, because on the level of normal poetic ex perience and production the two doctrines are not in opposition to one another.87 For, at the heart of Coleridge's poetry there is a movement that contains and transcends the 'projective' and the 'realist' attitudes. It is discernable within single poems, as in the two quoted above. It is also evident between different poems, in their contrasting rhythms of approach to reality. For example, 122 "Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement" ( 1795 ) moves from felt awareness of the mountain side on which the poet stands C "The bare bleak moun tain speckled thin with sheep. . . . And river, now with bushy rocks o'er-brow'd,/Now winding bright and D O full, with naked banks" ) to a more dim and un bounded awareness of distant coasts and "cloud-like hills" and "shoreless Ocean"®®; and suddenly the two Q Q awarenesses — of the individuated, concrete Here, and 91 the fluid, universal there -- merge in a great to- 09 tality: "It seem'd like Omnipresence!Alterna tively, "Fears in Solitude" moves ( heavily, through much moralizing and conventional rhetoric ) from the 93 "shadowy main" here. to the fields and village and 9U cottage there. The poem's movement originates in "A green and silent spot, amid the hills, a small and silent dell!"®** that is suffused with gentle light — an imaging of the depths of the subjectivity ( what Maritain describes as "a place of peace and repose"^ ) that are pierced by emotion. Its thrust is inter rupted by lengthy, turgid "bodings" that not only "well- nigh"®^ weary the poet, but prevent the full opening of the poem's 'epiphany' by larding it with smothering weight. Notwithstanding, the movement contains au thentic intuition into the "Religious meanings in the 123 forms of NSturei,"®8 and of the very presence of "the God in nature.It survives its sententious ex pression and surfaces again in the last stanza, with its final affirmation of love. Thus, long before his attempt at formal philoso phical study of the imagination in Chapter Thirteen of Biographia Literaria, Coleridge was fully aware of the need to do in poetry what he had just definitively de cided in philosophy: to move into an epistemological position that moves beyond the Idealist/projective and Realist/objective confines, while embracing both. And this awareness was not a matter of mere speculation: he had experienced it, lived it. II. As outlined above, Coleridge's epistemological insight in poetry had its origin in the mode of the knowledge-through-cormaturality of his poetic exper iences. Now, the orientation of such experiences to ward ontological transcendence ( expressed by Coleridge, in his poetry, sometimes pantheistically, sometimes theistically, but always with some affirmation of love ) necessarily involves not only what Albert Gerard de scribes as 124 fundamentally the intuition of a cosmic unity: the intuition that the universe is not an unin telligible chaos nor a well-regulated mechanism, but a living organism, imbued throughout with an idea which endows it with its unity, its life, and its harmony --100 but also the urge to make imaginatively such a cosmic unity -- in fact, to create a vast, all-encompassing poetic 1universe*. Poetic experience is radically directed to the creation of a work of art; and, as such, it is paradoxically at once creatively free and open to all being, and yet motivzted toward the making of a specific product. It would contain the universal in the individual, the universe in a poem.*-®*- Coler idge knew this. Already in 1796 he wrote in The Watch man that man "is urged to develop the powers of the creator, and by new combinations of those powers to 102 imitate his creativeness.” It was through his actual making of poems that he came to realize more and more that it is precisely as a poet that man is pre-eminently a creator. Coleridge*s insight here was, of course, not original, Greek classicism had entertained it, and Christianity had given it added significance. For ex ample, writing on Dante in 1481, Christoforo Landino combined ideas from Plato's Ion and Phaedrus with Judaic - Christian teachings from Genesis. He noted that the 125 Greeks intended the word 'poet' to signify one who created in a manner half-way between the full creation out of nothing that is peculiar to God, and the making that men do when they work in art. "It is for this rea son," he continued, "that although the feigning of the poet is not entirely out of nothing, it nevertheless de parts from making and comes very near to creating. And God is the supreme poet, and the world is his p o e m . "^3 Sir Philip Sidney and George Puttehnam likewise wrote of the poet as a 'maker,' but they did not elucidate, in his Advice to an Author ( 1710 ), the Earl of Shaftes bury commented on the true poet who can describe both man and manners, and give to an action its just body and proportions. • .Such a man is indeed a second Maker; a just Prometheus under Jove. Like that Sovereign artist or universal plas tic nature, he forms a whole, coherent and propor tioned in itself, with due subjection and subordinacy of the constituent parts. . This particular passage had extraordinary influence in Germany, stimulating such men as Lessing, Herder, and the two Schlegels to further speculation on the theme of the poet-creator• Alert to this vital perspective of literary tradition, Coleridge made creation as M.H. Abrams correctly indicates, "a central and thoroughly functional metaphor" in all his work — not the least 126 105 in his theory of human imagination* As already emphasized in these pages, one of Coleridge’s primary endeavors was to establish the splendid initiative of man against mechanistic and pan theistic theories. Boggled down in the course he took in the Biographia Literaria regarding the initiative of manfs intellectual/rational faculties, he quickly turned to a consideration of the human imagination: the "rest- less faculty"*-®® that he deemed to be "the distinguish ing characteristic of man as a progressive being, and which, like religion, has for object "the perfec ting, and the pointing out to us, the indefinite improve ment of our nature."*-®® In some of his earlier state ments Coleridge did not distinguish between the imagina tion and fancy. For instance, in 1796 he wrote that Thelwall’s poetic efforts lacked "the light of fancy"*-®® and that Southey did not possess "opulence of imagina tion, loft-paced Harmony, or that toil of thinking, which is necessary in order to plan a Whole."*-*-® But he dis tinguished between genius and talent in a notebook entry of 1800,*-*-*- and again in a letter of 180fl: As to myself, all my poetic Genius, if ever I really possessed any Genius, and it was not rather a more general aptitude of talent, and quickness in imi tation, is gone.*-*-* 127 in 1802 he also wrote of the "modifying. and co-adun- ating Faculty" in correspondence,^- ^ and of the "shap ing spirit of imagination" in his poem "Dejection."H** in a letter of 1804 he referred to the imagination as the t f modifying Power," which, in the "highest sense of the word," is a "dim Analogue of Creation, not all that we can believe but all that we can conceive of creation."H5 And then in the Biographia Literaria C 1817 ), he set forth his famous definitions of the imagination and the Fancy: The IMAGINATIONf then, I consider either as pri mary, 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 fi nite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary Imagination I con sider 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 differ ing only in degree, and in the mode of its opera tion. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in or der to re-create; or where this process is ren dered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essen tially vital, even as all objects ( a£ 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 emanci pated from the order of time and space; while it is blended with, and modified by that empirical phenomenon of the will, which we express by the word CHOICE. But equally with the ordinary memory the Fancy must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association.11° 128 Much ink has been spilt in the interpretation of these definitions. Suffice it here to emphasize their crucial import apropos of the human initiative involved in the process of creative imagination. Thomas McFar land astutely notes that "the later definitions place the *1 am1 more firmly in control of the imagination than when that faculty had also to bear the burden of Hobbes’ equation of imagination and Fancy."117 By al lowing fancy to discharge one necessary function of the imaging faculty — re-present external reality by ag gregation and memory — Coleridge was able to empha size the free activity of the imagination. More: he was able to direct his criticism of materialistic as- sociationism within a limited section of man’s imaging power. Critics differ as to whether Coleridge held imagination and fancy to be two different faculties or simply two modes of the one imaging power; and, again, they differ widely about his differentiation within the imagination between the ’primary* and the ’secondary* imagination(s)-11® The opinion here is that Coleridge considered the imagination and the fancy to be two distinct and very different modes of the one imaging faculty, and ( against Schelling ) the ’primary* and the ’secondary' imagination(s) to be two degrees of the 129 one imaginative power, with the former that which is active in ordinary perception, and the latter that which is involved in creative imaginative intuition and production. To be sure, Coleridge always criti cized the ambiguous use of 'imagination* and 'fancy1 n Q as synonomous terms. But he also insisted on the integrality of the human make-up: "When I make a three fold division in human nature, I am fully aware, that it is a distinction, not a division."120 Accordingly, to preserve a radical organic simplicity within and be tween these definitions, would be most in keeping with Coleridge's fundamental convictions. Moreover William Walsh's comment on Coleridge's distinction between imag ination and fancy is well worth bearing in mind: It is preferable, I think to conceive of this and similar distinctions as summaries and distillations of his experience and not -- as Coleridge on occas ion was apt to think of them himself -- as fixed ... principles capable of generating their own image. ^ In any event, the central issue here is that Coleridge regarded man's ability to create imaginatively as being singularly analogous to the creativeness of God. The fact that in later years he wished to delete his ex- 122 pression of this notion in the Biographia shows, not his disavowal of the notion itself, but rather his 130 dissatisfaction with the exaggerated form it received from Schelling — the form he followed in Chapter XIII of the Biographia until when, suddenly realizing that he was moving into pantheism as he had done in his Shelling-inspired philosophical speculation, he abruptly terminated his just-begun formal study of the human imagination in itself. But Coleridge again defended the primary role of human initiative in the poetic process in his writ ings on poetic method — and, para passu, he expressed therein once more his urge to transcend existing mu tually opposed theories. M.H. Abrams rightly complains that this last aspect of Coleridge's poetic method has been overlooked, and points to his statements referring to Wordsworth in one of his letters to Southey in 1602: I rather suspect that somewhere or other there is a radical difference in our theoretical opinions respecting poetry; this I shall endeavour to go to the bottom of, and acting the arbitrator between the old school and the new school, hope to lay down some plain and perspecuous, though not superficial canons of criticism respecting poetry.3 - 23 Comments Abrams: The "canons of criticism" which Coleridge promised to lay down, it seems plain, were conceived in accordance with his ruling principle of method, that truth lies in the reconciliation of opposing doctrinal systems, and were intended to save the 131 valid elements in both the traditional and the in- novative theories of poetry and poetic diction. The former poetic theory was represented by such as James Beattie's essay On Poetry and Music as They Affect the Mind ( 1776 )f with its insistence that "to Poetic Language, whose end is to please by imitating nature. Figures must be not only ornamental, but necessary.*'125 The latter was singularly represented by Wordsworth's Preface to the Lyrical Ballads ( 1800 ) — "half a child" of Coleridge's own brain^^^ — with its central claim that "poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings"*-^; a spontaneity, remarks Abrams, which, "although it may follow upon prior thought and practice, and may be an attribute of *emotion recollected in tran quillity, is not compatible with the artful manipulation of words to the deliberate end of effecting the reader." 128 Coleridge's most succinct presentation of poetic method is contained in his Treatise on Method, which he wrote in 1818. "Those who tread the enchanted ground of POETRY," he complains, "oftentimes do not even suspect 129 there is such a thing as METHOD to guide their steps." Accordingly, he deelares: 132 Let it not after this be said that Poetry and under the word Poetry we will now take leave to include all the works of the higher imagination, whether operating by measured sound, or by the harmonies of form and colour, or by words, the more immediate and universal representatives of Thought -- is not strictly Methodical; nay, does not owe its whole charm, and all its beauty, and all its power, to the Philosophical Principles of Method,130 As with the philosophic method, so with the poetic: it consists essentially in the interplay of Subject1 and •object,* of man and nature — with the former governing the process. Thus, poetic method, Coleridge suggests, "is founded on the very Philosophy which has furnished us with the Principles already laid down"*-^; that is, with the principles of method based on the relation of Law ( progression of necessary consequences unified by the initiative derived from the interior of the intellect ), and those based on the relation of Theory ( the progression unified by the initiative drawn from the observation of nature ). in the divine Mind both of these methods are reconciled and transcended. Analogously, in the poet they are likewise reconciled. Between the two methods lies that of the fine arts; and the degree of presence of the one or the other in a work of art determines its kind and value. ^2 poetry thus requires the method of Theory because "the effect and position of the parts is always more or less influenced 133 by the knowledge and experience of their previous quali- 133 ties. • ; that isf the Fine Arts belong to the outward world, for they all operate by the images of sight and sound, and other sensible impressions; and without a delicate tact for these, no man was, or could be, either a Musician or a Poet; nor could he attain to excel lence in any one of these Arts. • .134 But though Poetry must use the materials of nature, it is not ultimately determined by them. It also requires the method based on the relation of Law, that is, on the initiative originating within the depth of the poet himself: • .in all, that truly merits the name of poetry in its most comprehensive sense, there is a necessary predominance of the Ideas ( i.e., of that which originates in the artist himself ) and a com parative indifference of the materials."135 ^ must always be a poor and unsuccessful cultivator of the Arts if he is not impelled first by a mighty inward power, a feeling quod dequeo monstrare. et sentio tantum; nor can he make great advances in his Jtrt, if, in the cause of progress, the obscure impulse does not gradually become a bright, and clear, and living Ideal"136 Therefore, poetry combines and transcends the two methods; such that, paradoxically, Aristotle demands of the Poet "an involution of the universal in the individ ual a concentration on the "individual form, in L3if 138 which truth is clothed." in fact, Coleridge states in his essay, "On Poesy and Art," art itself might be defined as of a middle quality between a thought and a thing, or. . .the union and reconciliation of that which is nature with that which is exclusively human* It is the figured language of thought.^39 Thus the characters of Shakespeare's plays were drawn from "observation, the child of meditation, insofar that the observation of the external world of persons and things and events is necessary in order to confirm ( not to create ) ideas. As with philosophy, so also with poetry: it is the human interiority and not nature that is the true source of knowledge: It is comparatively easy for a man to go about the world, as if with a pocket-book in his hand, care fully noting down what he sees and hears: by prac tice he acquires considerable facility in represen ting what he has observed, himself frequently un conscious of its worth, or its bearings. This is entirely different from the observation of a mind, which, having formed a theory and a system upon its own nature, remarks all things that are examples of its truth, confirming it in that truth, and, above all, enabling it to convey the truths of philosophy, as mere effects derived from. what we may call, the outward watchings of life. The characters of Shakespeare are "ideal Realities, for, Coleridge believed, Shakespeare "studied mankind in the idea of the human race; and followed out that Idea into all its varieties, by a Method which never failed 135 143 to guide his steps aright." And he learnt of univer sal mankind, not just by observation of his fellowmen, but with "the inward eye of meditation upon his own 144 nature." Metaphysically considered, Shakespeare shaped his characters out of the nature within; but we cannot safely say, out of his own nature, as an individual person. NoI this latter is itself but a nature naturata, an effect, a pro duct, not a power. It was Shakespeare's prerogative to have the universal which is potentially in each particular, opened out to him in the homo generalis, not as the abstraction of observation from a variety of men, but as the substance capable of endless modi fications, of which his own personal existence was but one, and to use this one as the eye that beheld the other, and as the tongue that could convey the discovery • 1W Psychologically considered, Shakespeare was a child of nature, but it was of human nature and of the most important of human nature. In the meanest characters, it was still Shakespeare; it was not the mere Nurse in Romeo and Juliet, or the Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing, but it was this great and mighty being changing himself into the Nurse or the blundering Constable. ... We might compare it to Proteus who now flowed, a river; now raged, a fire; now roared, a lion --he assumed all changes, but still in the stream, in the fire, in the beast, it was not only the resemblance, but it was the divinity that appeared in it, and assumed the character. Of course, Coleridge did not fail to emphasize the importance of nature and passion and the uncon sciousness in the making of poetry. , r Unless a poet's 136 "Heart @ intellect. • .be combined, intimately combined . i i.7 @ unified with the great appearances in Nature," he ceases to be an authentic poet. Thus the "necessary pre dominance of Ideas" in Shakespeare" did not make him "regardless of the actual existence" around him.^**^ Not only did he glory in the palpable forms and colors of nature, but he tuned his spirit to the very rhythm of its inner workings. As for passion; Coleridge always maintained that feeling/emotion inclusive of truth was an essential element in poetry; one so vital to the or ganic structure of a poem that, without it, a poem can not exist; It has been before observed that images, however beautiful, though faithfully copied from nature, and as accurately represented in words, do not of themselves characterize the poet. They become proofs of original genius only as far as they are modified by a predominant passion; or associated, thoughts or images awakened by that passion. . ,149 Passion not only initiates poetic experience, but it colors and integrates and even humanizes the images evoked by this experience. Again, though Coleridge, in his hostility to Associationism, overstressed the mechanical aspects of the unconsciousness, he was cer tainly not unaware of its profoundly organic nature and its crucial role in the poetic process. For 137 instance, he referred to "a middle state of mind more strictly appropriate to the imagination than any other, when it is, as it were, hovering between images»150. and he noted that this peculiar mental state cannot be commanded, only induced. He maintained that r , there is in genius itself an unconscious activity; nay, that is the genius of the man of genius."*-51 He even stressed the relation of dreams ( in some of which even "the dullest Wight becomes a S h a k e s p e a r e "^52 ) to poetry. "The truth is," he wrote to Daniel Stuart in 1816, "that Images and Thoughts possess a power in and of themselves, independent of that act of the Judge** ment or Understanding by which we affirm or deny the existence of a reality correspondent to them. Such is the ordinary state of the mind in Dreams"^**^ -- and, he suggested, this mental condition is not foreign to the composition of poetry. He also upheld that in dreams the suspension of the will is accompanied by suspension of the mind1s comparing power," and that 'Vithout the comparing power any act of Judgement, whether affirmation or denial, is impossible"*- ^**; so that one cannot believe or disbelieve in the actuality of a dream while dreaming. Likewise in dramatic illusion: "Add to this a voluntary Lending of the Will to this 138 suspension of one of it's own operations ( i.e., that of comparison @ consequent decision concerning the reality of any senuous impression ) and you have the true Theory of Stage Illusion"^'*'* -- and the notion of ’ ^negative faith” peculiar to poetry. However, while establishing that all these non- willed elements obtain in the poetic process f Coleridge never failed to identify the making of a poem as essen tially a deliberate human act. Of his many definitions of poetry or of the poem or of the poet, the most re presentative for all is that set forth in the fourteenth chapter of the Biographia Literaria — the one which Richard H. Fogle describes as ”a compendium of Coler idge's poetic theory”*''^; The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other, according to their relative worth and dignity. 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 imagina tion. This power, first put in action by the will and understanding, and retained under their irremissive, though gentle and unnoticed, con- troul ( laxis effertur habenis ) reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities: of sameness, with differ ence; of the general, with the concrete; the idea, with the image; the individual, with the representative; the sense of novelty and fresh ness, with old and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion, with more than usual order; judgement ever awake and steady self-possession. 139 with enthusiasm, and feeling profound or vehement; and while it blends and harmonizes the natural and the artificial, still subordinates art to nature; the manner to the matter; and our admiration of the poet to our sympathy with the poetry.157 Here, as more or less in his other related definitions, Coleridge stresses the voluntary element in the poetic process. While it is a work of the "whole man," it is directed by the "gentle and unnoticed" control of his volition and judgment. With all his magnification of the imagination ( directed especially against Descartes and Hobbes ), Coleridge still subordinates it to the will and understanding, in accordance with the Platonic- Aristotelian tradition upheld by Kant. The poet must be in control of his art. To the extent that he is not 158 ( as with Shakespeare in his earlier works ), his creative power and his intellectual energy conflict and mutually dissipate each other. He must regulate his style by principles of grammer, logic, and psychology that have been "rendered instinctive by habit"! otherwise he is no poet, "but a silly or presumptious upsurper of the name!"^^ At the same time, however, Coleridge emphasizes that poetry is not just a mechanical art, and that the rules of imagination "are themselves the very powers of growth and production"161- that the very life of poetry is not something that may be 140 rationally constructed by the poet, but something that he must intuit; indeed, that he must live, Poeta 1_62 nasitur non fit. Thus, in his elucidation of the "specific symptoms of poetic power," Coleridge declares that the sense of musical delight, with the power of producing it, is a gift of imagination; and this together with the power of reducing multitude into unity of effect, and modifying a series of thoughts by some one predominant thought or feeling, may be cultivated and improved, but can never be learned.163 His own art illustrates his statements. Elizabeth Schneider has brilliantly pointed out in her well-known essay on "Kubla Khan" the elaborate artistic devices of hidden correspondences in the poem's freedom of rhyme, its "innumerable linkings of sound," and the overall "maziness of the design" in its form*’ ®**’ — all of which are hardly noticable in the total beauty of the unique creation that it is. But this 'recon ciliation1 of deliberate artistry and genius is more or less evident in all his imaginative works. Take, for instance, his minor poem, the "Hunting Song" from Zapolya ( 1815 ): Up, upt ye dames, and lasses gayl To the meadows trip away. 'Tis you must tend the flocks this mom, And scare the small birds from the com. Not a aoul at home may stay: For the shepherds must go li*l With lance and bow To hunt the wolf in the woods to-day. Leave the hearth and leave the house To the cricket and the mouse: Find grannam out a sunny seat, With babe and lambkin at her feet. Not a soul at home may stay: For the shepherds must go With lance and bow ... To hunt the wolf in the woods to-day. Like his other four lyrics from the plays, the "Hunting Song" is deceptively simple, in the Biographia Liter- aria Coleridge explained that the different elements of a poem "are formed into metre artificially, by a vol untary act, with the design and for the purpose of blending delight with emotion. • and Wordsworth bears witness to Coleridge's "inconceivable" time and labor spent in applying his theory in p r a c t i c e . ^ 7 The "Hunting Song" is, without doubt, an example of such practice. Despite its brevity and apparent lack of sophistication, one may list the following among its metrical devices. The brisk urgency of the spondee "Up, up!" sets the mood of the first stanza, and con trasts with the long, open sound of "Leave" that in troduces, and in the same line re-emphasizes, the themes of indefiniteness and rest in the second stanza. The contrasting moods of the two stanzas are imaged in the wide perspectives of ''meadows" and "away" in the first, 142 over against the small, intimate worlds of the cricket and the mouse mentioned in the second; and they are rein forced musically by the variation on the iambics in each stanza, with the first rich in open distinct sounds, and the second softened by whispered h's and s’s. Moreover, the "To" in the second line of the first stanza has a verbal character, whereas the same word in the second line of the second stanza is merely a preposition. Again, the alarm signified by "scare" is accentuated by the hard *R* in the word itself and in two other words of the same line; and the rising accents of "small" and "birds" sup port the image of the birds frightened into flight. On the other hand, the quiet world of the second stanza is 'sounded* by the three tip-toeing unaccented syllables "grannam out a," and by the spread-out unaccented syllables "lambkin at her feet." The refrain is particularly interesting. The lingering sound of the three long syllables "home may stay" of the first line, is suddenly interrupted by the chute-like strong-sounding anapest, "For the shepherds," in the second line. The weak words , f With," "and," "To," and "the" in lines three and four allow full force to the words "Lance," "bow," "hunt," and "wolf." The anapest "in the woods," in the fourth line, supports 143 the scene of the shepherds making their way among the trees. The short refrain brims with muscular life. 168 Coleridge's "deliberate and formal poetry" in the "Hunting Song" is evident. However, it is also clear that his metrical 'devices' are not enough to account for the concentrated beauty of this poem, with its remarkable evocation of man's active and con templative life, after the manner of the Renaissance lyricists. From his own experience Coleridge was well aware that artistry was not enough to produce the unique organism that is a poem. With his underscoring of both the deliberate and the spontaneous elements in the poetic process — and with his special emphasis on the former — it is under standable why he took exception to Wordsworth's ( and, in part, his own ) Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, wherein passion is presented as the defining quality for poetry in general. In the Biographia Coleridge disagrees specifically with the preface's argument that 1) poetry's proper diction should be taken from the language of men in real life; 2) that the language of rustics is purer because they hourly communicate with the best of natural objects; 3) that there is no essential difference between the language of prose and poetry. However, M.H. Abrams points out, by Wordsworth "natural," instead of being construed as an imitation of speech "suitable to the speaker and the occasion," is given a genetic and psycho logical significance, and either parallels or co incides with his other prime criteria, "spontaneous," "genuine" ( as in his phrase "the genuine language of passion" ) and ( somewhat later ) "sincere." The equivalence between the "natural" language of the poet and the prose language "really spoken by men" is a genetic equivalence, in that both originate instinctively, under the impulse of actual feeling. in other words, the fundamental issue here centres, not immediately on questions of the disposition and adjust ment of words, but on the creative activity ( primarily deliberate or spontaneous ? ) of the imagination in the poetic process. Coleridge was in full agreement with Wordsworth in his protest against the contemporary "pre- established codes of decision"^® that were stifling real word-communion, and with his experimentation with a new simplicity of language in the Lyrical Ballads. In re belling against the prevailing neo-classic code of pro priety — whereby one formed by conforming — they had both confronted three choices: to return to past tra dition, to attempt to create a new one, or to speak to their fellowmen with a new "nakedness of relation"^1 '-- the more sophisticated choice; for the simplicity that they sought was altogether different from the spurious cult of simplicity then fashionable: it demanded a 1U5 new intimacy and sincerity behind and within the very organization of poems. Wordsworth had already achieved such simplicity in many of his ’lyrical ballads,4 notably in those that are less recondite, but in which the metre is more elaborate than is usual in ballads, such as "The Idiot Boy"; and in those in which the lyrical element predominates, such as "The Thorn." Coleridge himself had already achieved a like simplicity in "The Ancient Mariner" and his ballad fragments, and C though with stronger density of matter and form ) in his conversation poems. Both men — particularly Col eridge — had experimented in metre; and despite Words worth’s contention that metre is but "adventitious to 172 composition," his actual poems proved the contrary, confirming Coleridge’s argument First, that, as the elements of metre owe their existence to a state or increased excitement, so the metre itself should be accompanied by the natural language of excitement. Secondly, that as these elements are formed into metre artificially, by a voluntary act, with the design and for the pur- pose of blending delight with emotion, so the traces of present volition should throughout the metrical language be proportionally discernible.172 Coleridge could announce with expansiveness of one who is sure he has won in a debate: 146 # . .1 reflect with delight, how little a mere theory, though of his own workmanship, interferes with the processes of genuine imagination in a man of true poetic genius, who possesses, as Hr. Wordsworth, if ever a man did, most assuredly dges posses, "THE VISION OF THE FACULTY DIVINE."173 For the organic forms of Wordsworth1s poems exhibit a combination of fresh spontaneity with disciplined habit and consummate control. The fact is that, apart from a number of colloquial expressions, some onomatopoeic and others of "honest vulgarity," the language of the Lyrical Ballads is a pure vocabulary of concrete words, "neither more nor less simple," notes Magorie L. Greenbie, "than the language of the majority of poems in the Ox ford Book of English Verse."17£f While avcsfedly deter mined to imitate, as far as possible, the speech of un learned people, Wordsworth in practice used a vocabu lary that was largely common to the speech of both the peasant and the scholar: one from which over-colloquial as well as pedantic elements were eliminated. Inter estingly, he used colloquialisms in poems that are chiefly narrative and where he speaks in his own person C such as in "Goody Blake and Harry Gill" ), far more often than in poems in which the emotional and lyrical elements predominate ( such as in "The Thorn" and 'The Last of the Flock" ): which seems to indicate that 147 Wordsworth was not only increasingly convinced of the existence of a permanent body of English wards -- the names of common things and universal passions -- but that emotion actually purifies and universalizes the words of human utterance. For example, in "The Mad Mother," with all its intense blending of love and de rangement, there are no importations from so-called vul gar speech. Thus, the language of Wordsworth's rustics became, not the external mark of a single class of so- 175 ciety, but the "universal language of the heart." However, M.H. Abrams rightly emphasizes the poet's chief concern was not with the single words or the grammatical order of prose discourse, but with figurative de partures from literal discourse. Wordsworth's main intention was to show that such deviations are justifiable in verse only when they have the same psychological causes that they have in the "artless" speech of everyday. Those who have sought to confound Wordsworth's argument by de monstrating that in his own poetry he uses a larger vocabulary and a different syntactic or- donnance than a peasant does, have largely missed the point.1 - 76 Coleridge himself did just that to some degree, com plaining of "prolixity, repetition and an eddying in stead of a progression of thought"1 " 77 in many of his friend's lyrical ballads, even though he too was aware that the language syntax of peasants id distinguished 148 by "the greater disjunction and separation of its com ponent parts" -- that it lacks " s u r v i e w , " 1 ^ Actually, in his endeavor to illustrate "the manner in which our feelings and ideas are associated in a state of excite ment,"1^ Wordsworth was interested in various psycho logical processes as they are expressed in language syn tax* For example, the effect of emotion on syntax is manifested in the effort of the peasant's mind to relate subject to predicate. Preoccupied with the subject, and tending to lose sight of the predicate, the uncultivated, excited mind has to begin again with the pronoun repre senting the subtantive, and thereby advance quickly to the verb: Shame on me, Sir! this lustv lamb, He makes my tears to flow.iSO The babe 1 carry on my arm, He saves for me my precious soul.J-81 Closely related to this type of syntax is that wherein the substantive stands alone, and the pronominal subject and its predicate follow by way of an explanation of the emotion involved: And then the wind! in faith, it was A wind full ten times over.1®2 149 Sometimes the peasant mind is more preoccupied with the predicate* in an attempt to strengthen the relation be tween the subject and predicate, the former is redupli cated: Not higher than a two years * child, It stands erect, this aged thorn.183 Interest in the predicate may temporarily hide the sub ject, and, again, reduplication occurs: Alas! 1 should have had him still, My Johnny, till my dying day.1®4 J-Vequently the mind in which feeling triumphs over thought is unable to fuse the primary elements of a sentence into an organic whole, and the units are placed side by side: Her eyes are wild, her head is bare. The sun had burnt her coal-black hair; Her eyebrows have a rusty stain, And she came far from over the main. She has a baby on her arm.183 And, again, such a mind, instead of using sophisticated subordinate clauses and modifying phrases, parenthe tically inserts details into the midst of other state ments: 150 Tis now some two and twenty years, Since she ( her name is Martha Ray ) Gave with a maiden's true good-will Her company to Stephen Hill.186 Wordsworth also noticed the peasant's disposition to make each idea a separate assertion: In Johnny's left-hand you may see The green bough's motionless and dead; and his loose employment of a connecting word to refer to an idea not explicitly expressed: She talked and sung the woods among. And rt was in the English tongue.1*8 Clearly, considerable sophistication lay behind Wordsworth's most simple lyrical-ballads. Coleridge's salute to his friend as "the only man who has effected a compleat and constant synthesis of Thought @ Feeling and combined them with Poetic Forms, with the music of 189 pleasurable passion and imagination. • is enor mously exaggerated in its sole identification of Wordsworth; but the rest of it carries truth. In effect, Wordsworth and his poetry provided Coleridge with the most graphic contemporary confirmation of his claim that the poet is to his poem as the creator — even analo gously, the divine Creator — is to his creation; for he 151 makes it knowingly and with profound love. But while Wordsworth happily embodied Coleridge1s idea of the poet as a creator sui generis, he failed to realize Coleridge's other ambition for him: the compo sition of the greatest philosophic poem.^® For, just as Coleridge aspired to the building of a speculative System, so he also looked forward to the creation of an intuited, artistically contrived poetic Universe: one that would surpass even the creations of Dante and Homer, insofar that, instead of being radically incomplete and open as these are, vis-a-vis Platonism, Aristotelian- ism, and Scholasticism, it would be completely self- sufficient, after the manner of the great nineteenth century philosophical systems, J. B. Beer puts it well: in the end. he was not content with a poetry based purely on individual experience: he looked, on the contrary, for an all-embracing vision which should encompass all things in heaven and earth, reconcil ing the truths of science with those of religion, He envisaged this interpretation in three dimensions: the plane of relationship between the individual and his fellow human beings, the plane of relationship between man and nature, and the plane of relationship between man and the spiritual order. The pattern which he wrought would be valid in all three dimen sions.I’1 Coleridge himself had not been able to create such a poem. As will be shown further in Chapter IV, all his greatest poems are either radically open or incomplete, 152 and none of them -- not even "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" -- has the ,God,s plenty1 of even Chaucer's Canterbury Tales; let alone the vast rich myths of Homer and Dante. Accordingly, he turned to his friend, Wordsworth, confident ( after the triumphant achievement of "The Prelude" ) that he would create a definitive work with the "Colors, Music, imaginative Life, and Passion of Poetry; but the matter and arrangement of Philosophy."187 no doubts "that the Totality of a System was not only capable of being harmonized with, but even calculated to aid, the unity. . .of a Poem."192 But "The Recluse" was a tremendous disappointment. Not only did it fail to present "Facts elevated into Theory — Theory into Laws -- @ Laws into living @ intelligent 1 go Powers" ; it fell a very great deal short of the quality of poetry that Wordsworth had achieved and sus tained in "The Prelude." Henceforth Coleridge contented himself with his own original intuition, which, no matter how he tried to ignore it, had emerged again and again in his imaginative creations -- namely, the insight that reality cannot be contained, not only philosophically but poetically. Thus, in describing the "moderns” in his Shakespearean Lectures of 1818, Coleridge was, in fact, expressing his own personal "tendency to the in finite, so that he found rest in that which presented no 153 end, and derived satisfaction from that which was in distinct."^^ His great poem, "Dejection: An Ode," may be taken as the climax of Coleridge's growing awareness that a truly poetic counterpart of a philosophic System is im possible. It is not, as some interpretations would have it, essentially a lament over the actual decline of his "shaping spirit of Imagination" — any more than is "The Circus Animal's Desertion," in the case of William Butler Yeats.Granted, both poems move from within despair: Yeats' temptation to regard his "enchanged islands, al legorical dreams" as "Vain gaity, vain battle, vain re pose, /Themes of the embittered heart. . . and Col eridge's sense of a "smothering weight"1^ within his breast, that hinders him from sending his soul abroad in new creativity, and, instead, leaves him with A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear, A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief, Which finds no natural outlet, no relief, In word, or sigh, or tear1’® Notwithstanding --or rather, precisely because of — the stripped spiritual night that both poets experience, they are stimulated to imaginative creation: Yeats even to the boding forth of a resolution to lie down for a new beginning *Vhere all the ladders start,/ In 154 the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart"^^9. an<i c0ier_ idge to the spuming of his debilitating * Viper thoughts," and to the utterance of his greatest celebration of 200 poetic creativity. Coleridge's "Dejection" is, on one level, a cry of triumph for the achievement of his crea tive intuition in his personal experience and in his art: over the interior "strong music" that enables and urges ( not causes ) him to create: This light, this glory, this fair luminous mist, This beautiful and beauty-making power. Joy, virtuous LadyI Joy that ne*er was given, Save to the pure, and in their purest hour, Life, and Life's effluence, cloud at once and shower, Joy, Lady! is the spirit and the power, Which Wedding Nature to us gives in dower A new Earth and new Heaven, Undreamt of by the sensual and the proud — Joy is the sweet voice{ Joy the luminous cloud -- We in ourselves rejoice! And thence flows all that charms or ear or sight, All melodies the echoes of that voice, All colours a suffusion from that light.201 Dorthy Emmet rightly comments that "Joyance," creative joy, for Coleridge is not just an equipoise of the in tellectual and emotional faculties." It is that and it is more. It is a state "in which it is possible to bless and be blessed— one of a singular interpenetration of humility and love whereby man is able to enter into rapport with creation around him, so that he can see C as it were, like God ) "into the life of things." Coleridge stressed that: 155 To have a genius is to Live in the universal, to know no self but that which is reflected not only from the faces of all around us, our fellow crea tures, but reflected from all flowers, the trees, the beasts, yea from the very surface of the ( waters and the ) sands of the desert. A man of genius finds a reflex of himself, were it only in the mystery of being.203 In other words, the creative power of the mind depends fundamentally on that , , Joy, , which dares to love crea tively as God loves, but which never fails to remember with humility its own creaturehood. Thus, as Stephen Prickett points out, in ’ ’ Dejection" Coleridge juxtaposes "joy" C with its connotation of man sharing in the joy of his Creator, whose attribute it is ) and "glory" ( with its connotation of boastfulness and isolation ). Notes Prickett: The O.E.D. shows that as late as the time of Chaucer there was no direct translation into English of the Church Latin ’gloria* -- the prime meaning of *glory* being still 'boastfulness.' As a result 'bliss' and 'joy' were used for a long time to describe the spir itual glory of Heaven. Later, the two words 'glory' and 'joy' became almost interchangeable in this con text. . . . The association in Coleridge's own mind is clear.20^ Prickett also indicates Coleridge's awareness of the Weslean practice of identifying "joy" as the "divine concomitant of creativity."^05 For Coleridge, then, the "enmity with joy"206 ( also Wordsworth's concern ) lies in proud envy and unwillingness to commune with 156 others and with nature; The moment you perceive the slightest spirit of envy in a man, be assured that he either has no genius or that his genius is dormant at that mo ment, for all genius exists in a participation of a common spirit.207 Now, System-building may be viewed as a projec tion -- and a very crucial one -- of this "enmity with joy." For there is no doubt that, despite his measure of ambivalence in his attitude ( as shown above in Chapters I and II ) to his philosophical studies in relation to his poetic efforts, Coleridge did not see them as radically opposed to "Joy." He conceived of "Joy" as Gerald Manly Hopkins later conceived of "the 208 fine delight that fathers thought," for poetry is created by the "whole man" -- including his intellectual faculties. Coleridge's notion of poetic creativity is essentially in accord with that of Jacques Maritain, who emphasizes that, since man's intellectual and vo litional powers form the apex of his being; and since the more perfect powers of the human soul emanate before the lesser, and, in this ontological procession, one power/faculty proceeds from the essence of the soul through the medium or instrumentality of the other which emanates before hand, then poetic experience involves 209 a profound intellectual actuation. Yet in "Dejection" 157 Coleridge speaks castigatingly of the "abstruse re search" that tended to steal from his nature "all the natural man," May not this "abstruse research" be seen as his long endeavor to speculatively and imag inatively contain reality in a systematized philoso phic-poetic Universe? -- in effect, not to be content with continuing a mutually enriching dialogue with real ity ( engaging in what Pricket aptly describes as "a razor-edged balance of projection and receptivity"210 )t but to aspire, by way of the usurping intellect, to com prehend and even capture reality? Such an interpreta tion must remain, of course, open speculation. But, while according with Coleridge's insight into "Joy," it helps account partly for his recoil from not only the defeatism of his abject despair, but from the "dark dream"2H of reality as projected by manipulating meta physical-imaginative Schemes/Systema/Universes• And more: it intimates why Coleridge humbly turns in stanza VII from the great poetry, "perfect in tragld sounds!," with its mighty tales of terrible cataclysms, to tales "of less afright,/And tempered with delight. • — from the ambition to compose a vast, comprehensive poem ( after the manner of the Divine Comedy or Paradise Lost, but according to the achematization of nineteenth century 158 System-building ) to less pretentious ideals. Rather than attempt to present, so to speak, the universal as such, he would remain content with presenting the in dividual through which the universal may be apprehended. And that he realized this ideal to a remarkable degree, cannot be denied. NOTES 159 CHAPTER III 1* Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition ( Oxford, 1969 ) , 156.------ ---------------- 2. Coleridge: The Work and the Relevance ( New York, 1967 ), 5 0 , ------------------ 3. CL, I, 160: To Thomas Poole, October 7, 1795, 4. CL, II, 810: To William Sotheby, July 13, 1802, 5. Cf, Robert Langbaum, The Poetry of Experience ( London, 1957 ); and Patricia Ball, The Central Self: A Study in Romantic and Victorian Imagina tion ( London, 19bB y. 6. Cf. also N, I, 523. 7. AP, 60. 8. N, 2, 2370; AIDS, 346. 9. N, II, 2370. 10. N, I, 657. 11. N, I, 534. 12. N, I, 691. 13. N, II, 2084. 14. N, I, 1244. 15. N, I, 847. 16. BL, 177. 17. Ibid., 59. 18. N, I, 979. 19. Cf* Humphry House, Coleridge ( London, 1953 ), 147. 20. CL, II, 961: To Robert Southey, August 7, 1803. 160 21. Cf. Paul A. Laley, "Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Political and Religious Development: 1795-1810" C Harvard, 1966 ), 27-8. 22. Coleridge: The Clark Lectures 1951-52 ( London, 1953 ), U.------- ---------------- 23. N, I, 875. 24. N, I, 1598. 25. N, I, 1529. 26. CL, II, 988: To Robert Southey, September 13, 1803. 27. CL, II, 8 71: To William Sotheby, September 27, 1802. 28. Cf. Dorothy M. Emmet, "Coleridge on the Growth of the Mind," in Coleridge: A Collection of Critical Essays ( New Jersey, 1967 ), 173ff. 29. CP, I, 179-78. 30. Ibid., 242. 31. Ibid., 48. 32. Ibid., 429. 33. Ibid.. 447. 34. Ibid.. 486. 35. Cf. MC, 277. 36. CP, I, 48: lines 3-5. 37. Ibid., 48: lines 6-11. 38. Ibid., 429: lines 9-10. 39. Ibid., 429: lines 11-14. 40. Ibid., 447: lines 3-4. 41. Ibid. 42. cf. De Selincourt. Wordsworthians and Other Studies C Oxford, 1947 ), 63TZ 43. Coleridge and Wordsworth: The Poetry of Growth C Cambridge, 1970 >, 177-78.------- ----------- 161 44. Cf. Coleridge as Religious Thinker ( New Haven, 1961 ), 196-219.— ----------- 45. Coleridge and Wordsworth, 178. 46. CP, I, 486: line 7. 47. Ibid., 486: lines 3-4. 48. Ibid., 486: lines 8-9. 49. Hateful Contraries: Studies in Literature and Criticism { Lexington, Kentucky, 1965 ), 219. 50. CL, II, 128: To Joseph Cottle, March 7, 1815. 51. Coleridge and Wordsworth: The Poetry of Growth ( Cambridge, 1970 7,' “T9^---------- ---------- 52. PL, 114. 53. BL, II, 243. 54. The Range of Reason ( New York, 1952 ), 26. 55. Ibid., 259. 56. The Poetic Voices of Coleridge ( Detroit, 1963 ), T9T; 57. "The Drunken Boat: The Revolutionary Element in Romanticism," in Romanticism Reconsidered: Se- lected Papers from the English Institute, ed. M. Frye ( New Vorf ; T963 T, 3-TS:-------- 58. The Poetic Voices of Coleridge ( Detroit, 1963 ), T5T. 59. Ibid. 60. The Central Self: A Study in Romantic and Vic torian Imagination ( London, 1968 ), 87. 61. CP, I, 100-102. 62. Ibid., 101: lines 26-29. 63. Ibid., 102* lines 44-48. 64. Ibid., 101* lines 16-17. 65. Ibid.. 101: lines 20-22. 162 66. Ibid., 101-2: lines 40-41. 67. Ibid., 102: lines 55, 64. 68. Ibid., 178-181. 69. SC, II, 103 * 70. Ibid., 179: lines 5-20. 71. Ibid., 180: lines 47-59. 72. Ibid., 179: line 12. 73. Ibid., 179: line 17. 74. Ibid., 179: line 14. 75. Ibid., 179: lines 19-20. 76. Ibid., ISO: lines 49-51. 77. Ibid., 181: lines 58-59. 78. Ibid., 179: line 21. 79. Ibid., 179: lines 22-23. 80. Ibid., 179: line 24. 81. Ibid., 179: lines 24-26. 82. Ibid., 179: line 28. 83. Ibid., 179-180: lines 32-37. 84. Ibid., 180: lines 37-43. 85, Ibid., 180: lines 45-46. 86. Ibid., 181: lines 61-62. 87. Cf. Coleridge on Imagination ( Bloomington. 1965 ) 141-163. 88. CP, I, 107: lines 30-33. 89. Ibid., 107; line 37. 90. Ibid., 107: line 29. 91. Ibid., 107: line 36. 163 92. Ibid., 107: line 38. 93. Ibid., 263: line 215. 94. Ibid., 263: lines 222-226. 95. Ibid., 256: lines 1-2. 96. Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry ( Cleveland and Mew York ), 177.------------- 97. CP, I, 263 98. Ibid., 257 99. Ibid., 262 line 211. line 23. line 188. 100. "On the Logic of Romanticism," in Essays in Criti cism C New York, 1957 >, VII, 265. 101. ibid. 102. W, 101. 103. Opere Di Danie Alighieri; Col Comente di Cristo- foro Landini ( Vlnegia' , lUflfr ) , "273‘ . ----------- 104. Characteristics, ed. J. M. Roberston ( London. 1900 >, I, 135-36. 105. The Mirror and the Lamp ( New York, 1953 ), 282. 106. W, 100. 107. MC, 195. 108. SC, II, 111. 109. CL, I, 221: To John Thelwall, June 22, 1776. 110. CL, I, 293-4: To John Thelwall, December 31, 1796, 111. N, I, 669. 112. CL, II, 631: To Robert Southey, July 29, 1802. 113. CL, II, 866: To William Sotheby, September 10, 1802. 114. CP, I, 366. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126.; 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 164 CL, II, 1034: To Josiah Wedgwood, January 5, 1798. BL, I, 202. Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition ( Oxford, 1969 ),3U8. Cf. J. A. Appleyard, Coleridge1 s Phij-osgphy of Literature ( Cambridge, Mass7, 1965 ), 204ff. Marginal note on flyleaf of Maass's Versuch wber die Binbildiingakraft. F, I , 164n. Coleridge: The Work and the Relevance ( New York, 1967 V, 71. ----------------- Sara Coleridge in a note to her edition of the Biographia Literaria ( London, 1847 ), I, 297. CL, II, 830: To Robert Southey, Julyu2 7f 1802, , T Wordsworth and Coleridge," in English Institute Essays, 1952, ed. Alan S. Donnes ( New York. 1965 ), 185. Essays: On Poetry and Music as They Affect the Mind ( London, 1779 ). 234.------------------- CL, II, 830: To Robert Southey, July 29, 1802. Literary Criticism of William Wordsworth, ed. Paul M. fcall ( Lincoln: tthiversity of Nebraska Press, 1966 ), 2ff. Wordsworth and Coleridge on Diction and Figures (Mew York, 1965 ), 171-72.-------------- ---- TM, 25. TM. 35-36. TM, 25. TM, 5. F, III, 163-4. TM, 62-63. 165 135. F, III, 164. 136. BL, II, 41n. 137. Ibid. 138. "Coleridge and the Victorians," in The English Mind C Cambridge, 1964 ), 181. 139. AIDS, 363. 140. SC, II, 98. 141. Ibid., II, 98. 142. Ibid., II, 125. 143. TM, 27. 144. SC, II, 102, 145. MC, 43-44. 146. SC, II, 53-54. 147. CL, II, 864: To William Sotheby, September 10, IB~02. 148. TM, 38. 149, BL, II, 16. 150. SC, II, 103. 151. BL, II, 258. 152. CL, IV, 641: To Daniel Stuart, May 13, 1816. 153. F, I, 247. 154. Ibid., f>41. 155. Ibid., 642. 156. The Idea of Coleridge's Criticism ( Berkeley and Los Angeles, l^t>2 ), 60-&1. 157. BL, II, 12. 158. SC, 11, 58-66. 166 159. BL, II, 64. 160. BL, II, 63-64. 161. BL, II, 65. 162. BL, II, 14. 163. Ibid. 164. Coleridge, Opium and "Kubla Khan" ( Chicago. 1953 )\ *— ------------------------ 165. CP, I, 427. 166. BL, II, 50-51. 167. Reported by Christopher Wordsworth in Memoirs of William Wordsworth ( London, 1851 ), 11", 506. 168. CL, III, 434: To Robert Southey, February 9, 1513. 169. "Wordsworth and Coleridge," in English Institute Essays, 1952 ( New York, 1962 ), ed. Alan S. Donner, 1^7. 170. Advertisement to the Lyrical Ballads ( London, 1798 ), 10. 171. John F. Daraby, The Simple Wordsworth ( London, 1960 ), 33. 172. BL, II, 66. 173. BL, II, 59-60. 174. Wordsworth’s Theory of Poetic Diction, Russell and RussellT Mew York, T 966 >,"155:------ 175. Cf. Marjorie L. Greenbie, Wordsworth’s Theory of Poetic Diction ( New York, 1966 ), 139. 176. The Mirror and the Lamp ( New York, 1958 ), 103. 177. BL, II, 44. 178. Ibid., II, 410. 179. Preface to the Literary Criticism of William Wordsworth ( Lincoln, 1966 ), 40. 180. 181. 182. 183. 18 185. 186. 187. 188. 189. 190. 191. 192. 193. 194. 195. 196. 197. 198. 199. 200. 201. 167 The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, 5 vols. ( Oxford: Clarendon, 1940-49 ), "The Last of the Flock," 43} lines 17-18. I b i d . Ibid., "The Thorn," 246, lines 179-80. Ibid., I, 240, lines 5-6. Ibid., "The Idiot Boy," I, 74, lines 245-46. Ibid.. "The Mad Mother, " iv,47-4& lines 1-5. Ibid., "The Thom," I, 74, lines 115-18. Ibid., "The Idiot Boy," I, 70, lines 88-89. I b i d ., "The Mad Mother,"IVl 47-48 , lines 9-10. CL, II, 1034: To Richard Sharp, January 15, 1804. BL, II, 36. Coleridge the Visionary ( London, 1959 ), 139-40. CL, IV, 574: To William Wordsworth, May 30, 1815. Ibid., 575. SL, 192-3. Selected Poems and Two Plays of William Butler Yeats, ed. M. L. Rosenthal ( New York, l^fez ), 184-85. Ibid., lines 11-13. CP, I, 365, line 41. CP, I, 364, lines 21-24. Selected Poems and Two Plays of William Butler Yeats, ed. M. L. Rosenthal ( New York, 1962 ), 185." Cf. Stephen prickett, Coleridge and Wordsworth: The Poetry of Growth ( London7 1&7Q ), ^5-119. CP, I, 365, lines 62-75. 168 202. "Coleridge on the Growth of the Mind," Bulletin of the John Reynolds Library ( 1952 ), JXXXIV, 4. 203. PL, 179. 204. Coleridge and Wordsworth: The Poetry of Growth ( Cambridge, 1970' V/ lOrlT.------------------ 205. Ibid., 103. 206. William Wordsworth, "Intimations Ode," Poetical Works ( Oxford, 1952 ), p. 207. PL, 179. 208. Cf. PL, 168; CL, I, 115. 209. CP, I, 367, line 90. 210. Coleridge and Wordsworth: The Poetry of Growth ( Cambridge, 1970 >, p. -------------------- 211. CP, I, 367, line 99. 212. CP, I, 367, line 1084, 118-19. CHAPTER IV THEOLOGIAN Unless Christianity be viewed and felt in a high and comprehensive way, how large a portion of our intellectual and moral nature does it leave without object and action! S. T. Coleridge 169 CHAPTER IV In his Perspectives on I9th and. 20th Century Protestant Theology Paul Tillich fails to mention Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Butf then, he also omits Frederick Dennise Maurice, who is generally recognized, at least by British critics, as the 19th century Eng lish theologican who exercised the most pervasive and persistent influence on English Protestant religious thought. And it was Maurice who declared that his gen eration had learned from Coleridge to apply to theo logy the principles that "the highest truths are those which lie beyond the limits of experienceand that "the essential principles of the Reason are those which cannot be proved by syllogisms." As Bernard Reardon demonstrates, there is no denying that Coleridge*s theological speculation was not always in direct line with traditional Anglican theology; but neither can it be gainsaid that Coleridge prepared orthodox Anglican theology for the mid-19th-century attacks of scientific agnosticism and biblical *higher criticism. * Basil 170 171 Willey's claim — that "the debt of modern theology to Coleridge is very considerable"** -- is no exaggeration, but a considered and fair estimate, even on the basis of the still incomplete study of his theological writings to date. Now, it is not without deeply personal signifi cance that Coleridge, as Wiley notes,5 insisted on firmer foundations of the specific religious experience." He was, inevitably, enormously influenced by contemporary theological issues ( for example, Hume's criticism of foundations of religious belief, Christian rationalism, bibliolatry and fundamentalism ), and not a few of his ideas were shaped and directed by these issues. But his fundamental theological principles and orientations were rooted in his own personal experience — not simply as projections of his psychic-emotional nature, as Feurbach and Freud would infer, but as ontological exigencies of his most personal being. The fact is that his philoso phical and poetic efforts, though they posited and even refracted religious truth, did not, and could not, probe deeply enough into its meaning as Coleridge wished with an earnestness that was almost an obsession. For Col eridge envisioned not only a corporeal existential, by which he achieves physical orientation to his biological 172 environment; a social existential, by which he achieves human perfection to the extent that he opens himself in his unique spiritual individuality ot an interpersonal communion of mind and heart with his fellow man; but also a transcendent, religious existential, whereby in his very metaphysical constitution man is a spiritual openness to the infinite; and, furthermore, a super natural existential by which he becomes explicitly Christ- oriented and gratuitiously destined for immediate per sonal communion with the triune God in the saving grace of the Incarnate Word. In his theological studies Col eridge searched deeper into these last two existential dimensions of human personhood; and, for him, these studies were no mere objective investigations, but were profoundly intimate questions into his own nature and destiny. And as frequently happens in human behaviour, Coleridge*s religious thrust was partially expressed through characteristics of his make-up that were, to say the least, other than average. I. For, by all accounts, Coleridge was a very neur otic human being. He suffered from a deeply-rooted mal formation of which his widely publicized lethargy was 173 but a symptom: A sense of weakness, a haunting sense that 1 was an herbacious plant, as large as a large tree, with a trunk of the same girth, and branches as large and shadowing, but with pith within the trunk, not heart of wood -- that 1 had power not strength, an involun tary poster, that I had no real genius, no real depth. This on my honor is as fair a statement of my habi tual haunting, as 1 could give before the tribunal of heaven. The "hollowness"^ that Dorothy Wordsworth surmised from his behavior was far more pervasive in his make-up than she realized; nor was it simply the result of drug ad diction or of emotional hurt, in his analysis of ano ther's illness, Coleridge succinctly described his own: a numbing taedium vitae, such that in his "diseased mo ments" ( occurring with varying frequency throughout his life ) he experienced an extinction of interior light, and the forms of life moved before him "cold, colourless o and unsubstantial." Bewildered he would ask: ". • • wherefore am I not happy! why for years have I not en joyed one pure sincere pleasure! -- one full Joy! -- one genuine Delight, that rings sharp to the Beat of the Finger!"®; and time after time he would tell his poetic and intellectual inspiration to wait: Carmen reliquum in futurum temgua relegsturn. To-morrow I and To-morrow T and To-morrow! 10 17k Alert to Coleridge’s disposition to self-pity and to the histrionic, one is nonetheless forced to recognize the burden of the despairful passivity of spirit that plagued him down the years: • . .Composition is no voluntary business: the very nec£jiisity of doing it robs me of the power of doing it. You know, how hateful all Money-thoughts are to me! @ how habitually I keep them at arm’s length.1* This is Oct. 19. 1803. Wed. Morn, tomorrow my Birth Day, 31 years of age! — 0 me! my very heart dies! — This year has been one painful Drearn/I have done nothing! 5"” for God’s sake, let me whip @ spur, so that Christmas may not pass without some thing hav ing been done/. . . I seem to grow weaker @ weaker in my moral feelings, and every thing, that forcibly awakes me to Person and Contingency, strikes fear into me, alienation from the.Spirit of Hope, obscure withdrawings out of Life." Die, my Soul, die! — Suicide — rather than this, the worst state of Degradation! ... I work hard, I do the duties of common Life from morn to night but verily -- I raise my limbs, 'like lifeless Tools' . . ,15 Articulated mostly during the most wretched period of his life ( about 1806-12 ) these quotes give expression to a spiritual malaise that was presnnt, at least in undercurrent, throughout his whole existence. Noteworthy is his remark that his "sole sensuality was not to be in pain! " I - * * — as though he himself knew existentially 175 the frightful "crepuscular half-being"^ subsistence that he envisions in his poem Limbo ( 1817 ). Yet, paradoxically ( and probably the fundamen tal paradox in this enigmatic man ), this was an "in- 18 dolence of energies." As Walsh aptly sums it up, Coleridge's mind persistently manifested an overenthus iasm, a sort of "thyroid c o n d i t i o n . " ^ Apropos of his own consciousness, he referred to "the heat, bustle and overflowing of a mind too vehemently pushed on from with in to be regardful of the objects upon which it was mov i n g " ^ . an "over-activity of thought" which made it more pleasant for him to continue acquiring than to re duce what he had acquired to regular form. Inevitably, then, he would always describe the human mind as a "continuous activity -- it possesses not only the ini tiative, but direction; energy and flow -- not just a succession of stances adopted in face of external stimu- 21 lii." But he wondered about the furious impatience of his own mind: "I do not know whether this be an idio syncrasy, a peculiar disease, of my particular memory — but so it is with me -- my thoughts crowd each other to death"22. a "wild activity of thought" that necessarily influenced his "imagination, feelings, and impulses of motion," so that his whole person was "filled with waves, 176 as It were| that roll and stumble, one this way, and one 23 that way, like things that have no common master." However, as he himself repeatedly emphasized, intelli gence as such "involves the notion of order.and, with all its wild profusion, Coleridge’s brilliant mind functioned meaningfully and with form. From within its whorl emerged design. Thus, De Quineey declared that it possessed a "logic the most severe."25 Matthew Arnold remarked on its untiring effort to "get at and to lay bare the real truth of his matter at hand."26 Indeed, his burning mental concentration — the ’eye* of the tornado — was such that he could musingly conceive the possibility of killing himself "by perseverance in the 27 thought." And this amazing mental fixedness acted by way of a 'Vibratory yet progressive motion," like the back-and-forth swing of the scythe, or the winning re sisting -yielding propulsion of a water insect up-stream, or the patterned rhythm of the monologue-dominated con- 28 versation in which he so avidly indulged. But just as his conversation had ( as he was well aware ) an inbuilt treachery, in that it constantly strayed into asides that multiplied like the offspring of the Surinam toad "sprouting out of back, side, and belly,so too did his mental enthusiasm prove to 177 be of mixed blessing. "There is an eagerness in your Nature," Mary Evans warned him," which is ever hurrying 30 you into the sad Extreme." And his daughter, Sara, recognised this same trait: a discontent unless he pur sued a subject that he had commenced "in every direction to the farthest bounds of thought. "31- There is an un warranted and distorting emphasis in Marshall Suther's treatment of the Fanst-like hunger for supreme knowledge in Coleridge's extremism.32 But that it contained some narcissistic dimension can hardly be doubted. It is discernible, for instance, in his half-jesting remark to a friend that he would like "to know metaphysically, what the spirit of God is"33; and in what Walsh con cludes to be an abnormal disposition to go on knowing when he should be simply experiencing, as during his "experiments" with his senses in 1801 at Kenswick, and in his study, with clinical distancing and pleasurable curiosity, of his own excruciating pain: Whether 1 exaggerate illness or no, remains to be proved; but this 1 will venture to say for myself, that there is scarcely a Woman in the Island that can endure pain more quietly than I — the' the Present is scarcely an Instance -- for I have had such valuable Lights thrown upon me, with regard to the exceedingly interesting @ obscure subject of Pain, in consequence of this incident, that I am quite in spirits about it, 0! how I watched myself while the Lancet was at my Leg! — Vivat Metaphysic!; 178 then, again, in his frequently expressed ambitions: he would write a book that would "supercede all the Books of Metaphysics hitherto written/and all the books of Morals too"^; he would "solve the process of life and 37 consciousness. • ." ; the litany of his would-be un paralleled achievements is long, very long. But John Keats*s observation that Coleridge was incapable of remaining content with haIf-knowledge need not be completely derogatory. His insatiable mental appetite had him searching after truth with a magnifi cent daring that contained not a little incredulity and not a little humility. He was a doubting Thomas who had to touch and see — above all, by his "inner sense" — before he would believe; but he loved truth "even for itself," and did so 'Vith an indescribable awe" and great OQ earnestness. He complained of Erasmus Darwin because, without sufficient exploration of reality, "all at once he makes up his mind, on such important subjects, as whether we be the outcasts of a blind idiot oalled Nature, or the children of an all*wise and infinitely good God"39; an4 he was disappointed in Thelwall because he was "deficient in that patience of mind, which can look intensely and frequently at the same subject"^: Thel wall did not doubt enough. He himself, however, would 179 go "chasing down metaphysical game"^ in the most un likely places, right up to the brink of the abyss of scepticism. He would follow the "pillar of fire" of U2 mysticism. He would climb "that tall smooth tree" of pure mathematics, "climbing by pure adhesive strength of arms and thighs, still slipping down, still renewing my ascent."**3 He was always anxious to see Nature's "endless variety in Identity, " * * * * even through the eyes of a fly or the "blunt eye of a Brobdignag*"^5 His wanderlust after extremes had him plumbing within and down into "the lowest depth that the light of our con sciousness can visit even with a doubtful glimmering,"^ and probing with meticulous, sensitive curiosity the twilight realm of modes of being that are indescribable other than by symbols. And it had him go, with the 'wander' of dialectic and reflection and the 'wonder* of intuition and contemplation, throughout the horizons of reality, whose centuries-long Christening process he more and more apprehended and appreciated. For, despite its diversions ( that invariably exacted revenge >, the central thrust of his extremism was, in essence, the on tological movement of his being toward the actualization and unification of his personal existence, with this very movement given extraordinary self-consciousness. "I should be happier — at all events a more useful — man," iso he once confided, "if my mind were otherwise constituted. But so it is: and even with regard to Christianity it self, like certain plants, I creep toward the light, even though it draw me away from the more nourishing warmth."^ He could not, nor would he, escape his gra vitation toward infinite personal transcendence: the eros ephesis and unrest spoken of by Plotinus and Augus tine. His human-Christian awareness of himself as a creature in via, and the ever-journeying nature of his consciousness, mutually urged, deepened, and heightened each other. And this configuration of Coleridge's psyche was given objective correlative, not only in the elab orated symbol of his work, both philosophic and poetic, but in his poignant homelessness during the greater part of his life; at times My soul is sad, that I have roamed through life Still most a stranger, most withnaked heart At my own home and birth-place.^® To the innermost depths of his being, he was always a traveller, uprooted; a very non-conforming Abraham setting out into strange distances. Jacques Maritain writes that A blinding moment it is when extremes of sin and virtue brush sides with each other and mingle, each in that confusion proceeding towards its appointed 181 place, the weak one to the presumption in which it will be swallowed up, the strong one to the virtue in which it will grow stronger. **9 The creative and destructive possibilities inherent in Coleridge's psychic structure and activity were, of course, not in themselves either virtuous or sinful. But seen in the total context of his life, and in the use and misuse he made of them, the "blinding moment" of their interplay is unmistakable: a moment of ligtit and darkness, of joy and dread, that constituted his pitched existence. Coleridge's consciousness, then, may be en visaged radically as a complex religious search after truth/goodness/beauty. Examined further, it is found to develop between two poles, that of the fact of self, and that of the fact of God. Edward Young considered Coleridge to be a "man of violent prejudices"^®; and so he was. Though few, they were strong; such as those against the French and aginst Roman Catholicism. But he also held to stances which were, for him, above rea soning ( though supremely reasonable ), and loaded with emotion. These were directions of his selfhood that were ingrained into the existential stuff of his nature, and, as such, were beyond dispute. He always regarded the barest of all 'bare facts' 182 to be that of one's own self-consciousness* Though learning from Descartes, he disagreed with his syl logistic form of the Cogito; I affirm, that I am. If a reason were required of me, ... I could only answer -- I am because I am — sum quia sun. For *1 am,* in the first per son, implies self1 -consciousness. The only reason I can assign for my being conscious of myself is that I am a self-conscious Being.53- This fact is obtrusive, self-assertive. The fundamental quality of conscious experience is that it reveals being to itself, and itself to itself, as being already there. And this unquestionable fact is that which rules every human attempt to find meaning: the fact that opens out from man's awareness of finitude and spans all knowledge, even onto his triumphant intimation of immortality as the "inevitable Rebounce of the I Am."52 The disclosure of his deepest reality to himself, in his primordial in tuition of being, reveals to man some inkling of his own mystery and splendor: that though he be contingent by nature, the spring of his self-consciousness transcends contingency. "Never let it be forgotton," Coleridge wrote in The Friend, ( 1809 - 10 ), "that every human being bears in himself that indelible something which be longs equally to whole species as well as that particular modification of it which individualizes him.It was his profound insight into the unique mystery of each 183 human person that motivated his outrage at the idolators of ancestry worship ( those who presumed that a divinely pre-established harmony had boorly souls bom Boors, and calm, lofty souls "to enter into the foetuses of future 5k Serence Highnesses" ); and at the self-styled genteel rich who condoned slavery provided "the dunghill be not before their parlour window.He was not one to spec ulate in a vacuum. The human spirit is the "first and lowest" of "that class of Being. • .which is endowed with a reflex consciousness of its own continuousness,and it has the duty and the right to develop this gift; for the more self-conscious it becomes, the more self-pos sessed and human does it grow: the more it is enabled to transcend spaced time. A being of such destiny may never be treated as an object, as a thing absolutely bounded• Now, there were three perspectives of the primor dial intuition of self that were of particular concern to Coleridge. The first was its inferiority. "The state and growth of reflex consciousness," he wrote, ". . .is not conceivable without the action of kindred souls on each other, i.e., the modification of each by each, and of each by the whole,nor ( in less degree ) is it conceivable without stimulation from the external world of things. But he held that all true and living 184 knowledge proceeds essentially from within man's "inner sense." The human mind assimilates from without, and desperately needs this assimilation in order to survive; but its vital principle of growth comes from within. Human inferiority is actually "the problem, the solution of which cannot too variously be recorded, too manifoldly 58 be illustrated." And to the aloneness of this infer iority Coleridge was sensitively tuned, both valuing and dreading it in his own experience. He was convinced that "the greater @ perhaps nobler certainly all the subtler parts of one's nature must be solitary -- Man exists herein to himself @ to God alone/ — Yea, in how much only to God — how much lies below his own Conscious - eg ness." He greatly appreciated times and places of re treat wherein his 'inscape' might be enriched. This is revealed especially in his poetry, in which he repeatedly refers to the Indispensable creative seclusion that is available within softness of form and light and sound; in "The Eolian Harp" ( 1795 ); . . .most soothing sweet it is To sit beside our Cot, our Cot o'er grown With white-flower*d Jasmin, and the broad-leav'd Myrtle. ( Meet emblems they of innocence and LoveI ) And watch the clouds, that late were rich with light, Slow saddening round, and mark the star of eve Serenely brilliant ( such should Wisdom be ) 185 Shine opposite! How exquisite the scents Snatch'd from yon bean-fieId! and the world so hush'd! The stilly murmur of the distant Sea Tells us of silence;60 in "This Lime-tree Bower my Prison" ( 1797 ): A delight Comes sudden on my heart, and I am glad As I myself were there! Nor in this bower, Much that has sooth'd me. Pale beneath the blaze Hung the transparent foliage; and 1 watch'd Some broad and sunny leaf, and lov'd to see The shadows of the leaf and stem above Dappling its sunshine! And that walnut-tree Was richly ting'd, and a deep radiance lay Pull on the ancient ivy, which usurps Those fronting elms, and now, with blackest mass Makes their dark branches gleam a lighter hue Through the late twilight; and now the bat Wheels silent by, and not a swallow twitters, Yet still the solitary bumble-bee Sings in the bean-flower;®1 in "To a Young Friend on His Proposing to Domesticate with the Author" ( 1796 ): A mount, not wearisom and bare and steep, But a green mountain variously up-piled, Where o'er the jutting rocks soft mosses creep, Of colour'd lichens with slow oozing weep; Where cypress and the darker yew start wild; And, 'mid the summer torrent's gentle dash Dance brighten'd the red clusters of the ash; Beneath whose boughs, by those still bounds beguil'd Calm Pensiveness might muse herself to sleep. . In "Pears in Solitude" ( 1798 ): A green and silent spot, amid the hills, A small and silent dell! O'er stiller place 186 No singing sky-lark ever poised himself. The hills are heathy, save that swelling slope, Which hath a gay and goreous covering on, All golden with the never-bloomless furze, Which now blooms most profusely; but the dell, Bathed by the mist, is fresh and delicate As vernal corn-field, or the unripe flax, When, through its half-transparent stalks, at eve.^ The level sunshine glimmers with green light* . • in some lines, that sometimes achieve an excellence of unveiled immediacy of perception and of modulation of words, Coleridge returned frequently to the imaging of a retreat where external nature, and even its variety of silences, conspired to enhance his profoundest being. The richly hushed, gently-lit "bower” embodied the quick ening stasis of his poetic experience. "I must be alone, if either my imagination or Heart are to be excited or enrichedThe authentic genius, Coleridge believed, must be a solitary. Already in his youth he had been aware of the irreplaceable need of the contemplative life in his human/Christian development: of what is tradi tionally called the 'interior life*: I feel it more and more; all is vanity that does not lead to quietness and unity of heart, and to the silent awful idealess watching of that living spirit, and of the Life which passeth all understanding.65 Without cultivation of the inner space of his spirit, the individual's selfhood, human, Christened, shrinks and cracks. Well he knew this. 18 7 However, Coleridge also knew, learning through searing anguish, that a solitude that is not in spiri tual communion with God and man becomes a hell: that his singular interiority can fast become an unbearable loneliness. He dreaded becoming gradually "a soulless fixed Star, receiving no rays of influence into my Be ing, a Solitude which I so tremble at, that I cannot attribute it even to the Divine Nature."^ He complained that from his twenty-second year he had made his way through a world that, spider-like, spun its imprisoning boundaries narrower and narrower.^ He owned himself to be "no self-subsisting Mind"; remarkably gregarious, he longed for the "sympathy of human faces."®® And that he often experienced his distinctiveness as a terrifying "wretchedness of division," a "substantial misery foot- thick"^ ( in no small measure his own fault ) is over whelmingly evident, in his many cries of desolation ( not unmixed with self-pity and inflation of sentiment, but redeemingly self-critical and revelatory of great agony ), he equates the loss of his friends with a di mini shment of his own personality. As Miss Coburn points out, in his use of the mirror metaphor, especially in his later poetry, he images himself not only as severed from others, but from his own inmost identity:^ the nega- tivizing process that he envisions as completed in the 188 Satan of his poem Ne Plus Ultra ( 1818 ). This ambivalent consciousness of his inferiority as an assimilative creative aloneness, and as a choking sterile loneliness, was rendered all the more convuluted by a second perspective in his awareness of self — his extraordinary sense of the mystery of human freedom, to whose terrible magnificence his imagination bore powerful witness. Man can make decisions: he is a moral being, with conscience the 'eye* of his freedom. Coleridge,s early moral training ( within the organisation of the Established Church, but with decided Evangelistic, even puritanical, leanings ) never left him. He always main tained as an irrefutable postulate that the act of be coming alert to one's conscience is "the commencement of experience"7!• that conscience is what basically disting uishes man from beast: This then is the distinction of moral philosophy. . • . I assume a something, the proof of which no man can give to another, yet every man may find for him self. If any man asset that he can not find it, I am bound to disbelieve him. ... If. . .he will not find it, he excommunicates himself. He forfeits his personal rights, and becomes a thing. . . .7Z This is the corner-stone of my system, ethical, meta physical, and theological — the priority, namely both in dignity and order of generation, of the Con science to the Consciousness In Man -- No I without a Thou, no Thou without a Law from Him, to whom I and Thou stand in the same relation. Distinct 189 self-knowledge begins with the Sense of Duty to our neighbor; and Duty felt to, and claimed from, my Equal supposes and implies the Right of a Third, superior to both because imposing it on both.'3 All his work reveals a marked moral gravitation. His emphasis on the primacy of the practical reason was no slavish following of the 'as if1 position of Enmanuel Kant ( that "wretched psychologist" ).7i+ Rather, he considered it the very sunmit of human personhood, the point wherein man receives divine grace and communes with his Maker, and through which his being is enlarged and elevated; and he grounded his opinion primarily on his own self-examination. He declared religion itself to be "both the cornerstone and key-stone of morality,"75 with its origin essentially moral and its truths prac tical. In point of fact, Coleridge held to the notion of imputed righteousness because, "rightly and scriptur- ally interpreted," it safeguards and gives meaning to morality7* * ; and he delayed in embracing the Trinitarian belief because for some time he deemed it of "no prac tical or moral bearing."77 Typically, in his criticism of Oxlee's Origin of Arianism Disclosed, he asked: "Surely it is not presuming too much of a Clergyman of the Church of England to expect that he would measure the importance of a theological tenet by its bearings on our moral and spiritual duties?"78 in short, he remained 19o stubbornly convinced that ’ ’ Morality ( including the personal being, the 1 am, as its subject ) is itself a mystery, and the ground and suppositum of all other Mysteries, relatively to Man."^® And if at times his pronounced moral stance veered toward a strident moral- ism, giving it a ”Moses-face looking forward in frown and menace, frightening the harlot will into a holy abortion of sins conceived but not yet born, perchance not yet quickened. . * f*»80 presented, for the most part, an exceptional stamina and integrity. It contin ued to be the close, steady light in an existence that was frequently a gloom. But while Coleridge was deeply sensitive to free dom as man's most radical claim to splendor, he was also aware of its possible terror. His moral bent was accom panied by what may be regarded as the third perspective to his self-awareness — a haunting apprehension of guilt. He felt himself to be a "sinful and most miser- 81 able man/Vilder'd and dark." That he was, in fact, culpable of seriously dishonorable conduct on several occasions during his lifetime cannot be gainsaid. Many alleviating circumstances notwithstanding, his treatment of his wife and children was substantially inexcusable. He himself was horrified at the violent death-wish that 191 he directed against the woman whom he married. And while it must be acknowledged that he was affectionate to his children ( sometimes extravagantly, to the point of self- 82 indulgence ), practically he neglected them. Yarlott*s contention, opposing Whalley's, that Coleridge was unable to finish Christabel because it was weighted with too much personal significance, particularly regarding his dealings with his children, carries sad truth.®® His righteous defense of his infatuation for Sara Hutchinson was downright hypocritical. There was also his disloy alty to friends, his dissipation of genius, his succumb ing to despair, even to the verge of suicide: to what Chesterton aptly described as "the refusal to take an interest in existence; the refusal to take the oath of loyalty to life," the "spiritual would-be destruction of the universe"®** — a measure so utterly at variance with the stubborn resilience of even his "life-in-death." And he was aware of and repelled by his own self-decep tions: Thought becomes a thing when it acts at once on your more ( ?conscious/consciousness ) i.e. ( conscience/ conscientiousness > therefore I dread to tell my whole @ true case it seems to make a substantial reality/l want it to remain a thought in which I may be deceived ( Twholly ).®5 192 Certainly, Coleridge knew, with palpable closeness, the 86 "unutterable dying away* • ./This sickness of the heart" that dogged his dramatic character, Osorio. To his cre dit, and fortunately, he confronted this "unfathomable hell within"®^ of a guilty conscience: I dare affirm that few men have ever felt or re gretted their own infirmities more deeply than myself — they have in truth preyed too deeply on my mind, and the hauntings of regret have injured me more than the things to be r e g r e t t e d .88 For years the anguish of my spirit has been inde scribable, the sense of my danger staring, but the conscience of my guilt worse, far tar worse than all! I have prayed with drops of agony on my Brow, trembling not only before the justice of my Maker, but even before the Mercy of my Redeemer. "I gave thee so many Talents. What hast thou done with them?"89 As to what people in general think about me, my mind and spirit: are too awefully occupied with the concerns of another Tribunal, before which 1 stand momently, to be much affected by it one way or other.90 Again, one must be mindful of the sense of the histri onic that so imbued Coleridge's character, and of the self-laceration to which the agitated conscience is fre quently prone. But that he was considerably guilt- stricken in his mature years, and, for that matter, that a feeling of spiritual unworthiness attended even his earlier years, must be duly recognised. He seems to have been always aware of the contagion of evil that he 193 remarkably projected in the knitted forms and sounds of Christabel. Accordingly, one is puzzled by Douglas Bush's definition of a romantic as "a person who does not believe in the fall of man,"^ and by H. N. Fair child's contention that the romantic God "exists for the purpose not of transforming a weak and sinful creature into a being worthy of salvation, but of authenticating the natural goodness of man and lending divine sanction to his expansive impulses."^ Coleridge ( whom these critics assuredly hold to be a foremost romantic ) was harrowingly alert to the presence of evil in his own being; and facile optimism about the innocence and self- perfectability of natural man was completely foreign to his vision of reality. But Coleridge could never meditate "too often, too deeply, or too devotedly," not only on the "indi viduality of the responsible creature," but on the "per- soneity of God, and his personality in the Word."93 Whereas the mystery of the human ego constituted one pole of the span of his search into reality, the mystery of the Divinity constituted the other. From his ear liest youth he had been "habituated to the Vast. As he noted in 1815 he could imagine how a superior in telligence would see the whole universe as one plain: 194 — "the distance between planet and planet only the pores that exist in any grain of sand -- and the dis tances between system and system no greater than the distance between one grain and the adjacent grain. And he experienced the intuition, at once prephiloso- phic and suffused with emotion, of a presence that trans cends all contingent being — a presence of which the im mense cosmic spaces are but an image. With the passing of years, Coleridge came to realize more and more that the primary object of the mind is God: as the eye is ordained to see light, man's mind apprehends the hidden presence of the Wholly Other — or, as Nicholas of Cusa put it, the non-aliud, the non-other, the absolute per sonal Reality above all contingency. And in external nature and in his own selfhood he found continuing, ever- developing confirmation of his primordial natural in tuition: The wonderful works of God in the sensible world are a perpetual discourse, reminding me of His existence, and shadowing out to me His perfection.* Are we not struck with admiration at beholding the cope of heaven imaged in a dew-drop? The least of the animalculae to which that drop would be an ocean, contains in itself an infinite problem of which God omnipresent is the only solution.97 We begin with the 1 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.95 195 In looking at objects of Nature while I am thinking, as at yonder moon dim-glimmering thro1 the dewy windowpane, I seem rather to be seeing, as it were asking, a symbolical language for something within me that already and forever exists, than observing anything new. Even when that latter is the case, yet still I have always an obscure feeling as if that new phaenomenon were the dim Awaking of a for- gotton or hidden Truth of my inner Nature/it is still interesting as a Word, a Symbol! It is oyos , the Creator and the Evolver! The attempt to solve the problem of Existence, Order, and Harmony otherwise than by an Eternal Mind — or to explain the Universe of fine and dependent Beings without assuming Will and intelligence as its ground, and antecedent principle, is too revolting to common sense, too discrepant from our habits of thinking, feeling, and acting, offers too gross an outrage on the very instinct of humanity and to all the prin ciples from which the very constitution of the human mind we take for granted as the ground-work of all other Beliefs, to require refutation. . .100 It bears repeating that Coleridge's apprehension of God was highly personal in mode, for it was elicited from within a consciousness that looked into reality, not only by way of conceptual insight and reasoning, but poetically, through the mode of connaturality: that is, he awakened to his own subjectivity and to the presence C dark, but unmistakably real ) of God in one and the same illumination. However, this is not to deny the sincerity of his remarks about atheism: Not one man in a thousand has either strenght of mind or goodness of heart to be an atheist. I 196 repeat it. Not one man in a thousand has goodness of heart or strength of mind to be an atheist. And, were l not a Christian. • .1 should be an atheist, with Spinoza. ... This, it is true, is negative atheism; and this is, next to Christianity, the purest spirit of humanity.101 I should have laughed at his ( Shelley*s ) Atheism. I could have sympathized with him and shown him that 1 did so. 1 could have shown him that 1 had once been in the same state myself — 102 remarks that are echoes in the words of the possessed Stavrogin in Dostoevsky's novel: The complete atheist, whatever you say, stands high up the ladder^ on the rung below that which leads to perfect faith. . .but the indifferent man has no faith whatsoever except '.perhaps craven f e a r . 1 0 3 For the mind's grasp of reality involves a radical dia lectic englobing being and non-being. Just as the be lief of the individual Christian moves in existential overhang toward unbelief, so too, man's primordial in tuition of the presence of God contains within its dy namism the confrontation of nothingness; and this "shock of non-being," as Tillich describes it,^** contains the possibility for the human mind to be lured toward the tragic stance of stoical atheism. Coleridge considered God to be a correlative of knowledge; for it is the dynamic immanence in man's mind of the plenitude of being, prior to the actual knowledge of an object, that 197 makes possible the union between knower and known -- the sole basis on which an external thing can be at tained in an interior act; and in the ultimate anal ysis, this vital orientation towards union with the limitless establishes the creative presence of God within the cognitive process. In every act of human cognition — in the process of illuminating the object ( whereby manTs own inner enlightening takes place ) -- God’s being is immanent, non-conceptually. But, Coleridge realized, human consciousness is also radically aware of the problematic in human existence — of not only the self-consciousness whereby man can judge being and possibly give it meaning, but of the meaninglessness that is intrinsic to man’s contingent nature: of the drag of non-being within his inmost reality. The for lorn cry of the Ancient Mariner: Alone, alone, all, all alone Alone on a wide wide sea! And never a saint took pity on My soul in agony. I looked to heaven, and tried to pray; But or ever a prayer had guaht, A wicked whisper came, and made My heart as dry as dust — 105 L98 is the cry of the finite creature who is conscious of his isolated finitude -- the cry given further terrible significance in the Christ's groan "which confessed that God was forsaken of God." The felt insight of these lines intimates that Coleridge himself experienced, to some degree, the frightening presence-in-absence of his Creator. "Love's Apparition and Evanishment," written late in Coleridge's life ( with its final draft pub lished in 1834 ), shows that he experienced such despair aid. desolation even during the relative calm of his final years. Among the most poignant lines that Coleridge ever wrote are those that tell of his dream wherein he beheld Hope: Drest as a bridesmaid, but all pale and cold. With roseless cheek, all pale and cold and dim — kissed by her younger sister, Love; but with a kiss that proved to be "a chilling breath'' that Woke just enough of life in death To make Hope die anew.106 Moreover, because of the peculiarly heightened structural dynamism of his consciousness, with its con ceptual impulse to rational systematization, and its poetical movement to union with all that is not self, 199 Coleridge was drawn intellectually and — more pro nouncedly -- emotionally toward pantheism. Indeed, his whole career, as Thomas McFarland observes, flirted with what he admitted to be his "pet system," the "here tical Brat" that he caressed in private "under the name of the Zoodynamic Method -- or the Doctrine of Life."10? Numerous jottings in his notebooks reveal his pantheistic leaning. For example, he recorded how at Malta, while gazing enraptured into the Mediterranian sky, he "felt in how innocent a feeling Sabeism might have begun"10®; and he told Sara Hutchinson how the sight of a waterfall — "the wheels, that circumvolve in it — the leaping up @ plunging forward of that infinity of Pearls @ Glass Bulbs -- the continual change of the Matter, the per petual Sameness of the Form" -- was for him "an awful image @ shadow of God @ the World, with the infinite and the finite united in the one awesome wholeness."109 But, not surprisingly, it is in his poetry « specifically his earlier poems — that his attraction to pantheism is most vividly expressed; for creative intuition, as Mari- tain puts it, involves "an obscure revelation both of the subjectivity of the poet and of some flash of reality coming together out of sleep in a single awakening,"110 a knowledge by union, distinct in essence from mystical experience, but analogous to it in its existentiality and 200 manner of union. Thus, he wrote in "Religious Musings" C 1794-96 ): There is one Mind, one omnipresent Mind, Omnific. His most holy name is Love. 'Tis the sublime of man, Our noontide Majesty, to know ourselves Parts and proportions of one wondrous whole! This fraternises man, this constitutes Our charities and bearings. But 'tis God Diffused through all, that doth make all one wholep11 in "The Eolian Harp" ( 1795 ): And what if all of animated nature Be but organic Harps diversely fram'd, That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze, At once the soul of each, and God of a l l ? ; 11* and in "This Lime-tree Bower my Prison" ( 1797 ): So my friend Struck with deep joy may stand, as I have stood, Silent with swimming sense; yea, gazing round On the wide landscape, gaze till all doth seem Less gross .than bodily; and of such hues As veil the Almighty spirit, when yet he makes Spirits perceive his presence.H3 Coleridge envisaged nature as "the art of God"!!1 * that every season converted him from "some unloving Heresy."^ But, gluttonized by its beauty, by its "omneity in unity,"ll6 he was tempted to see the "All" of creation as not only a manifestation but an interior modification of God. He declared that he would make a pilgrimage 201 even into the burning sands of Arabia to find one who could explain to him that "there can be oneness, there being infinite Perceptions — yet there must be a one- ness not an intense Union but an Absolute Unity. Of course, bound up with this aspiration was the ten dency peculiar to the poet -- to experience all things, not just piecemeal and from afar by way of discursive knowledge, but in felt immediacy by participation in their very being that is analogical with his own. But, though Coleridge frankly recounted the times when he was "intoxicated with the vernal fragrance and effluvia from the flowers and first-fruits of Pan- 118 theism," he was ever alert to "its bitter root" — 11 a to the "Skeleton unfleshed, bare Bones and Eye-holesJ beneath its heady seduction. He would always revere the noble Spinoza, and would venture with him — but only as far as the edge of atheism; then he would retreat to the position of orthodox Theism ( as he does in Chapter XII of the Biographia Literaria )f all the more entrenched in its sanity; even if with a nostalgia for the forbidden dream. It was luxurious to wish ( tongue-in-cheek to ThelwalL ) to "float about along an infinite ocean cradled 120 in the flower of a Lotos" ; but Its price, in the form of the denial of God*s unique transcendence and man's 202 personhood, was madness. In forthright terms he acknow ledged that the individual person's ultimate union with God is "no mystic annihilation of individuality, no fanciful breathing of the Bottle and blending the con tained water with the ocean in which it had been float- ing."^21. Thus Albert S. Gerard rightly complains that Too little attention is usually paid to the note of diffidence, or at least of cautious tentativeness, that often creeps into the utterances of the roman tics when they tried to formulate the essence of their experience and the nature of the oneness they experience. This prudent attitude toward any kind of speculation that might smack of pantheism is a frequent feature of Coleridge's poetry in those early years — 1** those years when the pantheistic temptation was most in tense for him and frequent. Though man be divinized, he remains man; and God, even when He gives himself to man in gratuitous, intimate self-communication, remains God. Within these two limits — with God, J.R. de j. 123 Jackson suggests, as it were the circumference of the circle, and man its centre — Coleridge gave free play to his mind's activity: these constants assuring him of what he himself ( though not the majority of his contem poraries ) knew to be the "freedom of the children of God." These were two braces he would allow no one to condun. 203 Since the crucial thrust and vital ’axioms1 of Coleridge’s consciousness were profoundly religious in nature, and since religion embraces the whole man, then these fundamental orientations should have interpene trated his entire personality and behavior. Their pre sence is more or less discernible in all his personal aspirations, in his relationships with others, in his socio-political projects, in his intellectual and poe tical efforts. His insistence that man is above all a religious animal was no abstract piece of speculation, but was rooted in his ineluctable vocation to relate all that is finite and immanent, to the infinite and transcendent: to relate, for instance, even the drop- 124 pings of a flying hawk, or the black-round inkspots 125 in the decaying leaf of a sycamore, to the One Who is All-Absolute. But his innate transcendental orien tations were given explicit < though, thereby, not ne cessarily more deep ) religious expression in his move ment from Socianism to Trinitarianism. Faithful to his spiritual wanderlust, he would commit himself to a phi losophical creed ( with its religious implications ) until he found it not viable -- livable, that is, by the norms set by the fact of the existence of a personal, immanent-yet-transcendent God, and by the sui generis value of the individual human creature; then he would 201* pass to another. This is not to say that his denial of different beliefs was absolutely final, amounting to a complete discarding of its tenets. Robert Barth*-23 rightly insists on the radical continuity between his various philosophical and his two religious Conversions’; and on the necessity, given Coleridge’s nature, of his passing through these different phases of belief, all the while preserving and transfiguring their values. "He would follow an advance," G.N.G. Orsini comments, "with a pause and possibly a retreat, before making another advance which would take him beyond his start ing point.Such development was in accordance with his intransigent conviction that the "great maxim of legislation, intellectual or political, is Subordinate, not Exclude. Nature in her ascent leaves nothing be hind, but at each step subordinates and glorifies: — mass, crystal, organ, sensation, sentience, reflection." *-25 it is the nature of all living things — and belief is a living thing -- to strive to ascend, and to ascend in their very striving. Growing, and sprouting, Coler idge's Christian faith was most certainly a thing alive. And, notwithstanding its aberrations to right and left, it definitely ascended toward the Reality who transcends all contingent being, with the ’anatomy’ of this spiritual 205 ascent containing three developments, distinct but interrelated. II. The first of these developments took place within his oscillation between emotionalism and rationalism. To begin with, his highly emotional temperament demanded not merely light but warmth, as he wrote in 1802: ”0 for some sun to unite heat @ LightI" The authentic Creed would have to be not only divine, but the fulfill ment of the whole man, *heart1 as well as mind, indi viduality as well as sociality. Accordingly, ColeridgeTs assessment of the various religious creeds was, deapite his scorn for the pietistic school of Schleiermacher, considerably subjective. He would have no part of the late 18th century Hutchinsonians, the anti-intellectual l 2 6 "dotage of a few weak-minded individuals" ; but he was convinced that "deep Thinking is attainable only by a man of deep Feeling"12^; that "the heart, the moral na ture," was the "beginning and the end," and "truth, knowledge, and insight were comprehended as its ex - pansion"128; that the heart is the "living sensorium" of faith, and that the "strongest argument for Xtianity" is that "it fits the human heart."129 Protesting against 206 those who denied the fact of mystery, he ridiculed their disbelief in anything they could not comprehend. He acknowledged publicly his indebtedness to such men as George Fox, Jacob Boehme and William Law who kept alive his "heart in the head," thereby giving him an "indis tinct, yet stirring and working presentment, that all the products of the mere reflective faculty partook of DEATH.Yet, he also declared that, whilst they were "a pillar of fire" during his nights of doubting, and helped him skirt the desert of utter disbelief, they were "too often a moving cloud of smoke" in his days of certainty.131 He complained how some mystics allowed themselves to be fired by idiosyncracies, allowing the "twilight Glimpses of awful Truths misapprehended by the unequal intellect" to be incongruously mixed with the shapings of their own fancy.^2 though he de clared that 'toothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm,"^33 an<j that "in the genuine enthusiasm of morals, religion, patriotism, this enlargement and ele vation of the soul above its mere self attest the pre sence, and accompany the intuition of ultimate prin ciples alone,"3 - 3* * he denounced "Spiritual Operations, and pretences to the Gifts of the Spirit, with the whole train of New Lights, Raptures, Experiences, and the 135 like." He conceded and stressed that man's heart, 207 and not just his rational faculty, must feed on truth in order that he be fully human -- but never to the extent of cancelling out his intellectual balance. intriguingly, with its high emotionality Coler idge^ character combined a marked logical bent. And his ambivalent attitude toward the role of emotion and mysticism in the search into truth was repeated in his stand on matters rationalistic and philosophical — with additional import, for now the question included the fact of divine revelation. He envisaged Christianity as the pre-eminent philosophy, with the science of theology the source of "unity and circulating sap of life" for all other disciplines.3 - 36 He argued that "without meta physics there can be no light of faith."3 - 37 Already schooled in the theological speculation of rationalistic bent by Cambridge Neo-Platonists, his interests passed to the controversial writings of his immediate contem poraries. In his six Bristol lectures of 1795, for example, he drew material not only from Joseph Butler*s anti-Deist probability1 treatise, The Analogy of Re ligion Natural and Revealed to the Constitution and Course of Nature ( 1736 ), but from the recent Treatise on the Evidences of Christianity by Archdeacon Paley; from Observations on Man. Hia Frame. His Duty, and His Expectations, by David Hartley — with its interpretation 208 by Joseph Priestley; and from the best-seller of the 1790*s, The Enquiry concerning political Justice and Its influence on General Virtue and Happiness. by William Godwin. Such heterogeneous elements as indicated by these works -- optimistic and necessitarian hypotheses, Bacon ian progressivism, Socianism, social utopianism, utili tarianism, and political anarchism -- all proclaimed, more or less, the doctrine upholding unimpaired reason as the principle of authority; and for a period Col eridge embraced this rationalism. Graham Hough*s ob servation that the aim of Coleridge*s writing is to show that all the central doctrines of Christianity, all the sacra ments and traditional devotional observances are deducible. with the aid of revelation, frojp the constitution of the human mind itself --13® is more fully applicable to his early efforts in theo logical study, when, in the manner of such Unitarians as James Martineau, he dismissed the need of supernatural revelation, and relied on the religion of the human spirit. The turgid pretentiousness of his prophetic poems, Religious Musinga and The Destiny of Nations. was, unwittingly, a faithful imaging of the speciousness of the sort of Christianity that he then embraced. But ( as his harsh, whipping-boy denunciation of the man would indicate ) Coleridge was alerted to the 209 surreptitious falsehood of the Christian Rationalists by Godwin's forthright practical atheism. Beneath the pseudo-Christian frameworks of their teachings, he began to discern what McFarland succintly calls a t t Spinosism manque", in 1825 he wrote: . . .1 more than fear the prevailing taste for book of natural theology, phaysico-theology, demonstra tions of God from Nature, and the like. "Evidences of Christianity" I am weary of the word. Make a man feel the want of it; rouse him, if you can, to the self-knowledge of his need of it; and you may safely trust to its own evidence, -- remembering only the express declaration of Christ himself; No man cometh to me, unless the Father leadeth him. 139---------- 1 ------------------- While some Scottish theologicans were reducing Christian mysteries to the level of common sense, these Ration alists were explaining them away: with their moribund rationalization they even presumed to dissect the God who revealed himself in warm, intimate I-thou relation ship. Coleridge's instinct for vital Christian truth — the habitus given him in Baptism -- had not been de stroyed. Si comprehendis non est Deus, Augustine warned. As do Heidegger and Karl Barth in this century, Coleridge asked: Does not Christianity put man in a new relation ship which leaves far behind the services of a meta physical knowledge of God? The philosophical search leads only to the apprehension of a pauperized Being of Beings; 210 whereas the Judaic-Christian revelation pressed a loving God to man's heart with astounding familiarity. Besides, how can man presume to reach beatific fulfillment without divine grace? — the claim that Coleridge himself, daz zled by Hartley and Priestly, put forward in his poem, Religious Musings: And gazing, trembling, patiently ascend Treading beneath their feet all visible things As steps, that upward to their Father's throne Lead gradual -- else nor glorified nor loved.1W) He was soon contending against Godwin's "pedantry of Atheism,Priestly's "reduction of the Creator to a 1U2 "mere anima mundi," Hartley's shallow, quasi- scientific Christian apologetic, and, with special ani mosity, William Paley's reliance on mere external evi dences for Christianity and his separation of ethics from religion. With typical exaggeration, he was now convinced that the first great apostasy within Christ ianity began when the "divine Humanities of the Gospel gave way tc speculative systems. . .and became a Science of Shadows under the name of Theology.Oxlee, Davidson, Irving, as well as the participants in the Bampton and the Boyle Lectures -- all were seen by Col eridge as promoters of an overblown, decadent theology; puny opponents of the arch-skeptic Hume. As he must 211 have surely expected, they received his Aids to Reflec- tion in late 1825 with damning silence. Undeterred, Coleridge continued in his endeavor, not only to achieve a balance of emotionalism and ra tionalism, but to relate human effort to divine revela tion; a pursuit that eventually culminated in his notions of reason and faith. Throughout his religious searching, Coleridge, always the vigilant self-analyst, remained attentive to the deeper significances of his fermentive psychic oscillation between the emotional/mystical and the ab stractive/philosophical approaches to reality. Already he was aware that a certain embrace of all the elements of man's existence prevailed on the level of his uncon sciousness: the darker power, deeper, mightier, and more universal than the conscious intellect of He knew that this power is present, to some indefinable degree, even in man's conscious activity, just as some involuntariness obtains in a deliberate leap; and, as borne out in his own grim nightmares, that it was a force to which man may well become the victim. As James Baker has shown in his book, The Sacred R i v e r Coleridge 212 shied away from coming to full terms philosophically and aesthetically with the fact of the unconscious, primarily because of his unwarranted identification of its notion with Hartlean Associationism. But J. R. de J. Jackson's contention is also correct: that the un conscious "was for Coleridge a region of the mind, half sensed, half-understood, for which he had profound re spect as a repository of fundamental if largely in accessible power."1**® Artistically, he was able to embody this strange animated unity in the poised, fluid brilliance of Kubla Khan: proving that, on his conscious level, man is able to create a dynamic unity of images by his synthesizing, "secondary" imagination — the fa culty or state of consciousness that "sees all things in one, il piu nell uno."^ But Coleridge realized that man cannot live simply by images, no matter how recreative of his person they may be. Using insights and termin ology not only from Kant, but from the Platonic-Aristot elian tradition, he took man's understanding to be the faculty of knowing whereby he survives instinctively, and with common sense and scientific know-how, and with prudential ethics, in his spaced-time condition: the Faculty of the Soul which apprehends and retains the mere notices of Experience, as for instance that such an object has a triangular figure, that it is 213 of such and such a magnitude, of such and such a color, and consistency, with the anticipation of meeting the same under the same circumstances* • the conception of the senuous, the faculty by which we generalize and arrange the phenomena of perception; that faculty, the functions of which contain the rules and constitute the possibility of outward ex perience . 1**“ Of itself, the understanding produces "depthless ab stractions of fleeting phenomena, the shadows of sail ing vapors, the colorless repetitions of rainbows. * . . notions, linked arguments, reference to particular facts and calculations of prudence"^^; but once im pregnated by the imagination ( "the completing power which unites clearness with depth, the plenitude of the sense with the comprehensibility of the understand- ing"^-'**- ), then it becomes "intuitive, and a living 152 power." But even then, its concepts are limited, bound tightly to earth. And man, if he is to be fully human, demands ideas: insights into the suprasenuous quiddities of mundane things and events, and into trans cendent reality; and all such notices, as are characterized by UNIVER SALITY and NECESSITY, as that every Triangle must in all places and at all times have its two sides greater than its third and which are evidently not the effect of Experience, but the condition of all Experience, @ that Indeed without which Exper ience itself would be inconceivable, we may call reason.153 21U It is by his reason that man's existence escapes meaning lessness and whereby he apprehends C butf of course, never fully comprehends ) the heights and depths of being. Its ideas constitute the very stuff of his immortal des tiny, such that at their annunciation his soul "awakes and starts up, as an exile in a far distant land at the unexpected sounds of his native language."154 without ideas man would be trapped in the ephemeral. According to Alice Snyder, Coleridge, in using this 'faculty* psychology, "belied his own conception of the organic unity of living processes."155 This is not so. He ridiculed the "exquisite absurdity involved in the very notion of splitting the intellectual facul ties, and subdividing the business of thought, almost as curiously as that of a pin factory.He underscored the fact that these distinctions of faculties were not divisions; that "in every act of mind the man unites the properties of sense, understanding and reason"^^; that in order to act and become an item of consciousness at all, his reason "must clothe itself in the substance of 1 S f l individual understanding and specific inclinations." In actual fact, reason came more and more for Coleridge to involve the workings of man's other spiritual 'facul ties'. In 1816 he wrote that reason 215 without being either the sense, the understanding, or the imagination, contains all three within itself, even as the mind contains its thoughts, and is pre sent in and through them all; or as the expression pervades the different features of an intelligent countenance By 1825 he had introduced the roles of the will and con science into his notion of reason: Hence arises a distinction in reason itself, derived from the different mode of applying it, and from the objects to which it is directed: accordingly as we consider one and the same gift, now as the ground of formal principles, and now as the origin of ideas. Contemplated distinctively in reference to formal C or abstract ) truth, it is the Speculative Reason; but in reference to formal ( or moral ) truth, as the foundation of ideas and the 2-i£ht of conscience, we name it the practical Reason. And he went still further, practically identifying rea son with faith, the "total act" that engages the whole man: Whenever by self-subjection to this universal light, the will of the individual, the particular will, has become a will of reason, the man is regenerate: and the reason is then the spirit of the regenerated man, whereby the person is capable of a quickening inter communion with the Divine Spirit. And herein consists the mystery of Redemption, that this has been ren dered possible for us.1-61 Thus penetrated by the "religious spirit,t r reason's uni versal truths are contracted into individual duties. Otherwise, one is left with either useless abstractions 216 162 or the "pedlary" of superstitions. Coleridge argued that contemporary rationalist theology erred initially in using only the understanding in its venture after truth. Inevitably its conclusions were closed to full validity. Its architects were each the type of deluded man that Swift had laughed to scorn: And hef whose fortunes and dispositions have placed him in a convenient station to enjoy the fruits of this noble art; he that can with Epicurus content his ideas with the films and images that fly off upon his senses from the superficies of thingsj such a man truly wise, creams off nature, leaving the sour and the dregs for philosophy and reason to lap up. This is the sublime and refined point of felicity, called, the possession of being well de ceived; the serence peaceful state of being among knaves.5 Their vision of reality was fragmented, static: a sort of picture-world that Coleridge saw epitomized in alle gory: It is among the miseries of the present age that it recognises no medium between literal and metaphor ical. Faith is either to be buried in the dead letter, or its name and honours usurped by a counter feit product of the mechanical understanding which in the blindness of self-complacency confounds sym bols with allegories. Now an allegory is but a trans lation of abstract notions into a picture-language, which is itself nothing but an abstraction from ob jects of the senses; the principle being more worth less even than its phantom proxy, both alike unsub stantial, and the former shapeless to booth. ... empty echoes which the fancy arbitrarily associates with apparitions of matter, less beautiful, but not 217 less shadowy than the sloping orchard or hill side pasture-field seen in the transparent lake below. The authentic envisioning of reality can be radically attained only by reason ( consummated in faith ), and it is most adequately expressed only by symbols — not by mere "parrot” words, with their dimensionless "mock-knewledge," but by language that is the vital enfleshment of symbol.1* * 5 Just as man’s spirit is ful filled when it is incarnated in his body, which it "informs" and which is different from it, so man's suprasensuous ideas acquire existential depth only when they are 'uttered* in the spirit-body reality of the symbol, which is characterized by a translucence of the special in the individual, or of the general in the espec ial, or of the universal in the general. Above all by the translucence of the eternal THROUGH AND IN THE TEMPORAL. It always partakes of their reality which it renders intelligible; and while it enunciates the whole, abides Itself as a liv ing part in that unity, of which it is the repre sentative. 16® Whereas allegory ( typifying the knowledge of the so- called Christian Rationalists and the like ) is a thing of flatness and superficiality, and true in a very mini mal, bounded extent, the symbol ( expressive of fully human/Christian knowledge ) is at once anchored in the 218 actual immediate and concrete, and open to transcendence. That is, its multi-perspective nature takes into account not only the composition of man's person, but the range of being into which he is plunged. Precisely because of the "consubstantiality" of all being, as perceived by the Schoolmen, the mediatory power of the imagination can perform the delicate metamorphis whereby the trans cendental dark illumination of ideas ( dark because of manfs limited, earth-bound nature ) may be "suggested and awakened" in the lightsome tangibility of symbol. It is in religion, Coleridge maintained, and singularly and centrally in the Christian religion, that eternal verities are given open embodiment in the poetry of symbols, and thereby are rendered available to be made event in the lives of the faithful — lives that will be eventually transfigured by the glorified Christ, who is, in fact, the splendid Symbol in whom the Father 'utters* himself in human accessibility. In effect, religion involves the divinizing incamat ion-sacrifice- ascension-transformation process, of which the symbol as such is the exciting integrative symbol. Relying only on the understanding which employing it's mole Eyes in an impossible calcula tion of Consequences perverts and mutilates its own Being, untenanting tbft function which it is incapable of occupying,1 - 6' 219 out-and-out rationalists must content themselves with dull| piece-meal trivialities. And Coleridge would have none of such. Actually, there were times when he was satisfied with what he later deemed absurdities -- as evident, for example, in what may be considered the second de velopment within the 'anatomy' of his spiritual ascent. This was his advance toward his recognition of Christ as God-Man and his Redeemer: an advance that may be viewed as evolving particularly from round the 'self* parameter of his consciousness. For Coleridge's awareness of the singular value of the human individual and his related strong moral sense, were both aroused by his introduction to new acquaintances and studies at Cambridge, 1791 -9**; par ticularly by revolutionary liberalism as expounded by William Godwin and as translated into action by William FTend, a fellow at Jesus College whom Coleridge came to admire intensely; and by the Associationism of David Hartley ( simplified and demythologized by Joseph Priestly ) which 'explained' the triumphant evolution of mankind from a state of primitive physico-neurol vi brations and , f vibratiuncles," onto increasing complexity and refinement of responses and eventual sainthood and beatitude. His new socially oriented enthusiasm was no 220 passing whim as the anonymous commentator in the Bristol Observer testified: This Cantab, is well versed in Greek and in Latin, indeed is a superior scholar to most of his years; that love of his species, that detestation of human butchery and legalised murder called War, are worthy traits in his character. He has delivered many lec tures here, one of which ( on the slave trade ), is a proof of detestation in which he holds that in famous traffic. . . . Undaunted by the forms of popular prejudice, unswayed by magisterial influ ence, he spoke in public what none had the courage in this City to do before -- he told men they have Rights — 168 Democracy, egalitarianism, optimism: with their estab lishment, Coleridge was persuaded, mankind would be transformed; and to attain them, men must first be en lightened. His publication of The Watchman was founded on the tenet that "In the strictest sense of the word, Knowledge is Power. Not that he believed in the innate goodness of man, as did Godwin, but in his per- fectability. "Wherever Men can be vicious," he wrote, "some will be."^° The leading idea of the "pantiso- cratic" project that he planned with Southey and some friends, was "to make men necessarily virtuous by re moving all Motive to Evil — all possible Temptations." He was deliberately ignoring his felt perception of the fact of Original Sin. But not for long. The mysterious presence of evil from within man's own nature was grimly brought home to him by the aftermath of the French Revolution. By July 1797 he was writing to Estlin: . . .1 am wearied with politics, even to soreness. -- 1 never knew a passion for politics exist for a long time without swallowing up, or absolutely ex cluding, a passion for Religion — . Perhaps I am wrong; but so I think,172 In his poem, France: An Ode ( 1797 ), he expressed his disillusionment in the ideals preached by those whome he had regarded as "Coadjutors of God." The obscene absurdity of Godwin's notion of good coming out of evil, was now being revealed horribly in France: The Sensual and the Dark rebel in vain, Slaves by their own compulsion! In mad game They burst their manacles and wear the name Of Freedom, graven on a heavier c h a i n ! 1-73 He would, in fact, continue his interest in socio-politics it would be the concern of a considerable share of his writings. But henceforth he would insist on the moral accountability of the individual person and on the irre placeable role played by religion in the formation of such responsibility. It were absurd to suppose that the individuals should be under a law of moral obligation and yet that a million of the same individuals acting collectively or through representatives should be exempt from all law, for morality is no accident of human nature, 222 but its essential characteristic. • • .none but a madman will imagine that the essential qualities of anything can be altered by its becoming part of an aggregate; that a grain of corn, for instance, shall cease to contain flour, as soon as it is part of a peck or bushel.174 "You ask me," he wrote his clerical brother George," what the friend of universal Equality should do -- I answer you -- 'Talk not of Politics — Preach the 175 Gospel!*" Being a form of moral activity, politics must be rooted, not only in the actuality of historical conditions, but in the actuality of man's nature, fallen and in need of a Redeemer. Thus Coleridge re-discovered that Original Sin and the work of Redemption by Christ are the "two great moments" of the Christian religion and, indeed, of man kind's history. in 1825 he wrote: the Idea of the Redemption of the World must needs form the best central Reservoir for all our know ledge, physical or personal. Every fact must find it's place as a component point in some one or other of the converging Radii. As early as 1805-6 Coleridge confessed his faith in Christ, and in the Confessio Fidei of 1810 he gave it admirable expression: 223 I receive with full and grateful faith the assurance of revelation, that the Word, which is for all eternity with God, and is God, assumed our human nature in order to redeem me and all mankind from this our connate corruption. My reason convinces me, that no other mode of redemption is conceivable, and, as did Socrates, would have yearned after the Redeemer, though it would not dare expect so wonderful an act of divine love, except only as an effort of my mind to conceive the utmost of the infinite greatness of that love.i?7 That Coleridge found Christ a stumbling block cannot be overlooked -- Nor should his difficulty be accounted for only by the effort required of him to 'reconcile' the event of the incarnation with the transcendent nature of the Divinity. There was also, as Boulger notes with qualification, his "emotional susceptibilities to puri- 17 f i tanism or evangelical Protestantism, and the strain of Manicheanism in these persuasions. Robert Barth is, without doubt, correct in his claim that the "sign of 179 the incarnation is everywhere in Coleridge" ; and Boulger exaggerates when he stresses Coleridge's "ten- 180 dency to minimize the human nature of Christ." But, by all indications, it seems most probable that, as Miss Cobum suggests, he approached Christ more through meta ls 1 physical rather than historical persuasion. ° As al ready underscored, this does not rule out the prayerful- ness of his return to Christ; but it indicates how Coler idge viewed the God-Man primarily through the perspective 22b of his Divinity; as the Word who, from within the bosom of the Trinity, 'descended* and took unto himself a human nature, rather than as the Man, the prototokos, whom we see and hear and touch in human event, and whom we find to be the Son of God. While distinguished from such theologians as Erskine in his emphasis on the objective ( Biblical and traditional ) aspect of Christianity, he examined it within a larger, philosophical context. To Coleridge, Christ was above all the Logos of the ineffable Trinity. Somehow, he did not approach near enough to the flesh of Christ, as even did his younger contemporary, Soren Kierkegaard. And this imbalance in his Christological belief contributed largely to his rarefied view of the Church. In On the Constitution of the Church and the State C 1 8 3 0 ), his last work published during his life time, Coleridge outlined his ideas on the Church. He divides it into the National and the Christian, and again the latter into the visible and the invisible, complain ing that As many and fearful mischiefs have ensued from the confusion of the Christian with the national Church, so have many and grevious practical errors, and much un-Christian intolerance, arisen from confounding the outward and visible Church of Christ, with the spiritual and invisible Church, known only to the Father of all Spirits.^®* 225 In outlining his idea of the National Church, Coleridge, as Charles R. Sanders comments, was obviously motivated by both "an ardent love of the church and a vigorous 183 nationalism." Anticipating Mathew Arnold's cultural ideals, he defines the "clerisy" as "an order of men chosen in and of the realm, and constituting an estate of that realm," and comprising not only religious leaders and theologians, but "the learned of all denominations, the sages and professors of the law and jurisprudence, of medicine and physiology, of music, of military and civil architecture, of the physical sciences. . .in short, of the so-called liberal arts and sciences, the possession and application of which constitute the civi- LRU lization of a country." Within the clerisy the theo- logicans take precedence because of the pre-eminence of their science. The aim of this National Church is to develop the "treasures of civilization," and to "diffuse through the whole community and to every native entitled to its laws and rights that quantity and quality of know ledge which was indispensable both for the understanding of these rights, and for the performance of the duties correspondent."^8^ Questions about the Church and State refer only to the National Church. Both the State and the Church are distinct entities, but, for the good of mankind, they must mutually co-operate as far as 226 1 fi fi necessary "without interference or commixture." Proceeding to the Church of Christ, the Christian Church proper, Coleridge remarks that it is Ma blessed accident, a providential boon, a grace of God. It was, 107 most awfully, a GOD-SEND." His four "distinctions or peculiar and essential marks" of the visible Church of Christ are as follows: 1) It is not a kingdom of this world, but the "sustaining, correcting, befriend ing opposite of the World; the compensating counter force to the inherent and inevitable evils and defects of the State."188 2) It "asks nothing for her members as Christians, which they are not already entitled to demand as citizens and subjects."^®® 3) It is an in stitution "consisting of visible and public conmuni- 190 ties." 4) It is characterized by the "absence of any visible head or sovereign, and by the nonexistence, nay the utter preclusion, of any local or personal centre of unity, of any single source of universal power."*-91 ( It must be emphasized, however, that Coleridge was well aware of the necessity for authority. Thus, in the Aids to Reflection. 1825, he declares that "a Christianity without a Church exercising spiritual authority Is vanity and delusion."*-®^ He underscores the authority of local bishops, who derive their authority from Christ and 227 "acknowledge no other superior than the same Christ."^93 In his concept of ecclesiastical authority as but one of the many Christian charisms, which is meaningful only as part of a larger whole, and which is essentially a voca tion of service, Coleridge anticipated many central no tions in twentieth century Christian theology ). The visible Christian Church is also universal, "neither Anglican, Gallican, nor Roman, neither Latin nor Greek.Actually, Coleridge emphasizes, with re markable intimation of Orthodox theology, wherever the marks of the Christian Church are found, there is the one Universal Christian Church present, because "through the presence of the only Head and Sovereign, entire in each and one in all, the Church Universal is spiritually per fect in every true Church."*-^ Writing specifically against the passing of the Catholic Emancipation Bill of 1829, Coleridge not only directed the burden of these 'marks' against the Roman Church, but added two anti-papal "absolute disqualifica tions" for any office as trustee or functionary of the true Church: "Allegiance to a foreign power, or an ac knowledgement of any visible head of the Church but our sovereign Lord the King; and compulsory celibacy in connection with, and dependence on, a foreign and extra- national head."^^ Not surprisingly, he deemed the 226 Church of England to be the pre-eminent embodiment of the visible Christian Church. Of the invisible Christian Church Coleridge wrote little. He simply insisted that it is the spiritual counterpart of the visible Christian Church, and that its 1 07 members are known to God alone: notions that are strikingly similar to recent theological speculation about the nature of the Church and the status of the 1QO * anonymous Chr is tian There is no denying that Coleridgefs 'ecclesio- logy1 has merits, not only in its tentative probing of the meaning of ecclesiastical authority and the very nature of the Church, but in its forthright criticism of the abuses of the Church Establishment. However, On the Constitution of Church and State reveals in Coleridge a deep impatience with the actual human — and, in con sequence, a decided Manichean trait vis-a-vis the human ness of the Church. Perceptively, Crabb Robinson com plained that Coleridge, in his ambition to trace the 'idea* of a National Church, did not "stay to enquire whether the actual church be according to the idea"*- ®®; and the anonymous reviewer of the Eclectic Review ( July, 1831 ), censured his "splentic Prejudice" directed against even the necessary, though peccable, institu tions of the Church.^®® 229 On the Constitution of Church and State points to another facet of Coleridge*s personality: his urge to systematize. It is not enough to say with Charles R. Sanders that The most distinctive feature of his thinking here was his belief in the reality of ideal institutions, which were embodied, always imperfectly of course, in the historic forms of church and state at various times; and which gave life to these forms to the de gree that the embodiment was perfect. All progress of the church and state could be reckoned, therefore, in terms of how far the existing forms of any time approximated the i d e a l .201 The fact of the matter is that Coleridge was intent on re-creating architectonically the Christian Church. No doubt, his basic intention was to reform the Church; but, in a very real sense, the Constitution embodies in out line his way of viewing Christianity as a System. Thus, a note-book jotting written in connection with the writ ing of the Constitution stresses his endeavor to present 202 a structure of "Principles." He could easily have made his own, Paul Tillich*s confession in the first volume of his Systematic Theology: It has always been impossible for me to think theologically in any other way than a systematic way. The smallest problem, if taken seriously and radically, drove me to all other problems and to the anticipation of a whole in which they could find their solution;203 230 and he would have responded enthusiastically to Tillich's challenge: Since the breakdown of the great systhesis between Christianity and the modern mind as attempted by Schleiermachery Hegel, and the nineteenth-century liberalism, an attitude of weariness has grasped the minds of people who are unable to accept one or the other alternative ( rejection of faith or of philosophy ). They are too disappointed to try another synthesis after so many have failed. But there is no choice for us* We must try again £ for, in effect, this was the challenge that faced him in his own day. However, unlike Tillich, Coleridge quickly came to realize that the construction of a theological system, patterned after the 'grand style' of the nine teenth century idealist systems, is impossible; for the simple, ineluctable fact that the central reality of theology, namely, Divine Revelation, refuses to be man ipulated by strictly logical methodology ( as the Summa 205 of Thomas Aquinas happily conforms )• But the fail ure of Coleridge's theological system-building was not without value. For, in the first place, it helped him to realize more clearly that Christianity is not just a Scheme or System, but, essentially, a life that is given man to be lived* And, then, its 'idea' of the Christian society, with all its presumption and faults, contained enough germinative richness to influence not only John F. D. Maurice, Thomas Arnold, William Gladstone, and 231 John Stuart Mill in their studies of the Church and State, but, in the twentieth century, such diverse efforts as T.S. Eliot*s The Idea of a Christian Society, and the very recent A plan of Union drawn up by the inter-denomina tional Consultation on Church Union.20* * His gradual re-discovery and recognition of the Trinity of Divine Persons -- evolving from round the 'God* parameter of his consciousness -- may be taken as the third development within the *anatomy* of Coleridge*s spiritual ascent. Its progress is best pinpointed in his letters and notes. In 1794 he wrote to his friend Southey that he was "a Unitarian Christian."207 In 1796 he confided to Charles Lloyd that he "might have a sit uation as a Unitarian minister," admitting that "the Voice within puts a firm and unwavering negative."20® In 1797 he told John Thelwall* "I have neither money or influence — @ I suppose, that at last I must become a Unitarian minister as a less evil than starvation."20^ Finally, in 1798 he declared to josiah Wedgwood: I have conversed long, @ seriously, @ dispassion ately with infidels of great Talents @ Information -- @ most assuredly, my faith in Christianity C Unitarian ) has been confirmed rather than stag gered. In teaching it therefore, at present, whether I act beneficently or no, I shall certainly act benevolently. . . .it will be necessary for me, in order tony continuance as an Unitarian 232 Minister, to believe that Jesus Christ was the Messia — all other points 1 may play off my intellect ad libitum.*10 A bequest from Wedgwood had him put aside his intention of becoming a cleric. In 1804-6 he wrote to his brother George that he had read carefully the New Testament and was convinced that "the Socinian @ Arian Hypotheses are 211 utterly untenable; but what to put in their place?" His criticism of Unitarianism grew sharper. "I have re ceived great @ various Instruction from it," he wrote Southey about a treatise by Middleton," . ... As to Socinian Textualism, there it lies in shakes and shatters." 2* - 2 And in 1810 he told Thomas Poole that "Socinianism has not a pin's point to ground itself upon: and that No Trinity, no God — is a matter of natural Religion as well as of Christianity, of profound Philosophy no less than of Faith. "2^ His words to Joseph Cottle in 1814 were decisive: You ask me my views of the Trinity. I accept the doctrine, not as deduced from human reason, in its grovelling capacity for comprehending spiritual things, but as the clear revelation of Scripture. But perhaps it may be said, the Socinians do not admit this doctrine as being taught in the bible. I know enough of their shifts and quibbles, with their dexterity at explaining away all they dislike, ( and that is not a little > but though beguiled once by them, 1 happily, for my own peace of mind, escaped from their sophistries, and now, hesitate not affirm, that Socinians would lose all character for honesty, if they were to explain their neighbour's 233 will with the same latitude of interpretation, which they do the Scriptures.21h He did not deny Unitarians to be Christians, but so denied their belief Unitarianism. In fact, as De Quincey con firms, though "once convinced of its error," he abjured this creed with "not a moment's hesitation," it had cost him a painful effort."215 Years later, in 1832, he re iterated his position: I make the great difference between ans and isms. I should deal insincerely with you, if I said that I thought Unitarianism was Christianity. No; as I believe and have faith in the doctrine it is not the truth in Jesus Christ; but God forbid that I should doubt that you, and many other Unitarians, as you call yourselves, are, in a practical sense, very good Christians. We do not win heaven by logic.216 But considerable logic did, in fact, enter into Coleridge's personal approach to the Trinity. Just as the fact of the existence of God may be assumed ( not proven rationally ), while its assumption is confirmed by external nature and the human consciousness, so the notion of the Trinity may be deduced abstractively, though its actuality must be most divinely revealed: The Trinity of persons in the Unity of the £b1 c7 God would have been a necessary idea of my specu lative reason, deduced from the necessary postulate of an intelligent creator. . . . But this would only have been a speculative idea, like those of circles and other mathematical figures to which we 234 are not authorized by the practical reason to attribute r e a l i t y,217 By way of the doctrine of analogy as practiced by the Schoolmen, and after the manner of the English Neo- Platonists, Coleridge hypothesized God’ as the absolute, self-determining, all-comprehending consciousness: more specifically < as contemporary German philosophers would have it ) the "absolute Will. • .essentially causative of reality and therefore in origine causative of its own reality, the essential causativeness, however, abid- 2 1 _ B ing undiminished and undiminishable." And since the perfection of will indicates the self-realization that is called personhood, then ( while man must always re main humbly mindful of the incomprehensibility of God ) personhood must be analogically included in the notion of God's reality. God must be conceived as "a personal being, having the causa sui or ground and principle of its being in its own inexhaustible causative might."219 But personhood is other directed: The causativeness hath not ceased, and what shall the product be? All power and all reality are al ready present. ... What then remains to be com municated? It must in some high sense be other and yet it must be a Self. For there is not other than Self. ... We must. • .proceed as if we sub stantiated Alterity itself. ... The alterity must have some distinctive from the original absolute identity or how could it be contemplated as other, and yet this distinctive must be such as not to contradict the other co-essential term. It must 235 220 remain in some sense the Self, though another Self. And, as traditional theology speculates analogically, the second Self, or Alterity, may be considered as the Word who is the "adequate expression of the paternal per- soneity": God's co —eternal idea of himself. . .is the ade quate idea, and. . .if it be not real it cannot express the reality and therefore is not adequate. To be the adequate idea of the Father it must be first substantial as the Father, and consubstan- tial or of the same substance with the Father.221 Now the relationship between the first Self ( the Ipsiety, the Divine Mind, the Father ) and the second Self ( the Alterity, the Word, the Son > must be conceived as re ciprocal, "an eternal proceeding from the Father to the Son and from the Son to the Father. . .the primary, ab- 222 solute, co-eternal intercirculation of Deity" ; and this unutterable act, in which the Father and the Son are One, is the Spirit: that which proceedeth from the Father to the Son, and that which is returned from the Son to the Father, and which in this circulation constitutes the eternal unity in the eternal alterity and dis tinction, the life of Deity in actu purissime.223 This Spirit is the Spirit of Love. Thus one is able to conceive of the divine "Idem, the Alter and the Copula 236 224 by which both are one and the Copula one with them,'1 Convinced, like Chesterton, that It is not good for God to be alone, Coleridge dared to assert that man can arrive speculatively at the notion of a God who is Love, at once absolute individuality and absolute community. But for the infallible affirmation of the existence of God, he turned to divine Revelation. Henceforth he held, with typical extremism, that "there is, there can be, no medium, between the Catholic Faith of Trinal Unity, and Atheism disguised in the self-contradicting term, Pantheism. NOTES CHAPTER IV 237 1. Perspectives on L9th and 20th Century Protestant Theology ( New York, 1967 ). 2. Cf. Nineteenth Century Studiesf Basil Willey (London, 1949 ), T2T -------- 3. Religious Thought in the Nineteenth Century ( Cam bridge, 196 6 IT------ ------------------ 4. Nineteenth Century Studies, 32. 5. Ibid., 32. 6. IS, 40: To Robert Southey, August 1, 1803. 7. Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth ( London, 1935-9' )7 365-66:----------- ----------- 8. CL, II, 928: To Samuel Purkis, February 17, 1803. 9. TT, 275. 10. N, I, 1577. 11. CL, IV, 552: To Joseph Cottle, March 10, 1815. 12. CL, II, 889: To Mrs. S. T. Coleridge, December 4, Tff’ 02. 13. TT, 56. 14. Letter to The Wordsworths, April 4, 1804: CL, II, lrs-fe.----------------- ” 15. N, II, 2557. 16. N, II, 2368. 17. CP, I, 430} line 14. 18. AIDS, 259-60. 19. Coleridge: The Work and the Relevance ( New York, l967 ), 32. 20.. F, I, 959. 238 21. CL, II, 1176. 22. Cf. UL, I, 264: To Robert Southey, August 1, 1803. 23. CL, II, 916: To Thomas Wedgwood, January 14, 1803. 24. N, I, 1598. 25. The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quineey. ed. David Masson ( London, 187?-5, II, 152-53. 26. Essays in Criticism: First Series ( London, 1939). 274-75. 27. N, I, 2117. 28. CL, II, 696-97: To Josiah Wedgwood, February, 1801. 29. Cf. AP, 87-88. 30. Quoted in Coleridge’s Letter to Robert Southey, October 21, 1794: CL. I, 112. 31. Memoir and Letters of Sarah Coleridge, ed. Edith Coleridge ( london, 1873 ), I, 193. 32. The Dark Night of Samuel Taylor Coleridge ( New York, 1960 T, 150-195.---------------- 33. CL, II, 1193: To Thomas Clarkson, October 13, 1806. 34. CL, I, 348-49: To Thomas Poole, March 16, 1801. CF. also N, 2838 ( April-May, 1806 ). 35. OL, II, 772: To Thomas Poole, October 31, 1801. 36. CL, II, 671: To Humphry Davy, Debruary 3, 1801. 37. CL, I, 348-49: To Thomas Poole, March 16, 1801. 38. IS., 39. 39. L, I, 277. 40. L, I, 339. 41. CL, II, 713: To William Godwin, March 25, 1801. 42. BL, I, 98. 43. CL, II, 713-14: To William Godwin, March 25, 1801. 239 44. Notebook, 21, MSS 47518, 56f. 45. Ibid. 46. IS., 30-31. 47. IS., 39. 48. "To the Rev. George Coleridge," lines 38-42: CP, I, 174-75. 49. Art and Scholasticism; and the Frontiers of Poetry 'T T T ew gorier life ), ITT . ----------- 50. A Memoir of Charles Mayne Young ( London, 1871 ), I, 170. 51. MS Logic, British Museum, Vol. I, Egerton 2825, facing p. 37. 52. Notebook, 25, 27vf. 53. BL, II, 243. 54. IS, 317. 55. Ibid., 319. 56. N, I, 1554. 57. L, II, 1197. 58. IS, 25. 59. N, I, 1554 ( 21.274 ). 60. CP, I, 2-12. 61. CP, I, 43-59. 62. CP, I, 1-9. 63. CP, I, 1-11. 64. N, I, 1610. 65. UL, I, 285: Letter to George Coleridge, 1803. 66. Allsop*s Recollections ( London, 1822 ), 462-63. 67. An experimental version of Coleridge's poem, , r Limbo" C CP, I, 429 ), went as follows: 240 67. (continued) The world her spidery threads on all sides spun, Side anew’ring Side with narrow interspece. • • 68. L, I, 35; CL, I, 349-50. 69. L, I, 435, Cf. John Jones, The Egotistical Sublime T London, 1954 ), 26. 70. Cf. , r Reflections in a Coleridge Mirror,” in From Sensibility to Romanticism, ed. F. W. Hilles and H. Bloom (New York, 1965 ), 433 ff. 71. LR, 559. 72. AIDS, 93. 73. Notebook, 26 ( as printed in Boulger, 227. Appen dix I, 227 ). 74. N, I, 1710. 75. AIDS, 206-7. 76. AIDS, 105. 77. CBLC, I, 136-37. 78. LR, 461. 79. AIDS, 287. 80. LR, 280. 81. CP, I, 107. 82. Cf. Geoffrey Yarlott, Coleridge and the Abyssinian Maid ( London, 1967 ), 169ft. 83. Coleridge and the Abyssinian Maid ( London, 1967 ), ism . ----~— 1 ------- 84. Orthodoxy, ”The Bodly Head,” ( London, 1908 ), 133. 85. N, 2, 3045. 86. CP. II, 838, lines 126-27. 87. CP, I, 890, line 46. 241 88. ULt IIt 57: To John J. Morgan, October 15, 1811. 89. Ibid., II, 107: To Joseph Cottle, April 26, 1814. 90. Ibid., II, 424: To William Sotheby, November 9, 18 i d S. 91. Mythology and the Romantic Tradition in English Poetry (Cambridge, >4ass., 1937 ), 155. 92. Religious Trends in English Poetry ( New York, 1969 ), Vol. Ill, 208. 93. LR, 269. 94. CL. I, 354: To Thomas Poole, October 16, 1797, 95. TT: Oraniana, 415. 96. Confessio Fidei, November 3, 1816: Corollary I, in TT, 429. 97. AIDS, 450. 98. BL, I, 186. 99. N, I, 2546. 100. Notebook, 26, 27vf. 101. TT, 313. 102. To J. H. Frere, 1830. 103. The Possessed, ed. Ernest J. Simmons ( New York, 1961' 5T704. 104. Cf.Ttie Courage to Be ( New Haven, 1954 ), 190ff, 105. "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," lines 232-35, 244-47; CP, I, 196-97. 106. CP, I, lines 19-20, 27-28. 107. CL, IV, 956: To the Editor of Blackwood^ Magazine. October, 1919?. 108. N, II, 2453. 109. CL, II, 853-54: To Sara Hutchinson, August 25, 1802. 242 110. The Range of Reason ( New York, 1956 ), 26. HI. CP, I, 105-6, 107-131. 112. CP, I, 44-48. 113. CP, I, 37-43. 114. BL, II, 257-58. 115. N, I, 1302. 116. N, II, 2346. 117. N, I, 556, 5.51. 118. L, IV, 548. 119. L, IV, 548. 120. CL, 1, 350: To John Thelwall, October 14, 1797. 121. N, 36, 65f. 122. English Romantic Poetry ( Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1958 ),-7R-45.-------- 123. Method and Imagination in Coleridge's Criticism ( London"!" 196 9) " , ”75 -75". ------------------- 124. Notebook 3, 3401. 125. N, I, 1589. 126. J. Robert Barth, Coleridge and Christian Doctrine C Cambridge, Mass., l96v ) , 6. 127. G.N.G. Orsini, Coleridge and German Idealism ( Carbondale and. Edwarasville, 1969 ), I t 95, 128. LR, 326. 129. IS, 600. 130. CL, II, 709: To Thomas Poole, March 23, 1801. 131. IS, 397. 132. N, I, 1123. 133. BL, I, 144. 243 134- I, 98. 135. AIDS. 349. 136. SM, 433. 137. First Lay Sermon. CW, I, 318. 138. Ibid. 139. Ibid. 140. Cf. J. Robert Barth, Coleridge and Christian Doctrine ( Cambridge, Mass., 1969 ), 99ff. 141. "Coleridge and the Victorians," in The English Mind C Cambridge, 1964 ), 181. 142. AIDS, 363. 143. CP, I, lines 50-53, 144. N, I, 55. 145. Cf. CL, I, 192-93: To John Edwards, March 20, 1796. 146. AIDS. 226. 147. BL, II, 93. 148. The Sacred River ( Baton Rouge, 1957 ), 217ff. 149. Cf. Method and Imagination in Coleridge's Criticism ( Hew York. 1970 ), 87.---- --- 150. TT, June 23, 1834. 151. CL, II, 1198: To Thomas Clarkson, October 13, 1806. 152. F, II, 145. 153. AIDS, 318. 154. SM. Appendix B, 460-61. 155. Ibid. 156. CL, lit 1198: To Thomas Clarkson, October 13, 1806. CF. also Appendix B to The Statesman's Manual and Aids to Reflection. 157. SM, 434. 244 158. Alice D. Snyder, Coleridge on Logic and Learning ( New Haven, 19*9 ), 15. ----- * 159. Essays on His Own Times, ed. Sara Coleridge ( Lon don, 1850 5 , 1. 1S8.--- 160. F, II, 16 4n. 161. F, I, 186. 162. SM, 461. 163. AIDS, 241-42. 164. AIDS, 241-42. 165. SM, 457-58. 166. Guliver»B Travels and Other Writings. ed. Louis A. Landu ( Cambridge, Mass., I960 ), 333. 167. SM, 322. 168. BL, I, 100; Notebook 2 9, ff. 57-62. 169. SM: 437-38. 170. CL, III, 146: To Sir George Beaumont, December 14?, 1808. 3.71. ibid. 172. Cf. John Coleridge, Coleridge, Critic of Society C Oxford, 1959 ), 32^33: ----------- 173. Cf. F, I, CH. XIII. 174. CL, I, 114: To Robert Southey, October 21, 1794. 175. L, I, 338: To John Estlin, July, 1797. 176. CP, I, 243, lines 85-88. 177. F, II, 13. 178. CL. I, 126: To George Coleridge, November 6, 1794. 179. UL. II, 358: To Edward Coleridge, July, 1825. 180. I*, 16-17. 2W LSI. Coleridge as Religious Thinker ( New Haven. 1961 ), 195 -g?r ---------------- 182. Coleridge and Christian Doctrine ( Cambridge. Mass. , T96T1, 1& ' ( T . ------------- 183. Coleridge as Religious Thinker. 181. 184. N, II, 2445n. 185. CCSi CW,' VI, 107. 186. Coleridge and the Broad Church Movement ( Durham. 1942 T, 54. 187. CCS. 53-54. 188. Ibid., 52. 189. Ibid., 52. 190. Ibid., 59-60. 191. Ibid.. 98. 192. Ibid., 98. 193. Ibid.. 99. 194. Ibid., 100. 195. AIDS, 295n. 196 * CCS. 101. 197. Ibid., 104. 198. Ibid., 105. 199. Ibid., 96. 200. Cf. J. Robert Barth, Coleridge and Christian Doctrine C Cambridge, Mass., 1969 J, 16^-68. 201. Cf. Karl Rahner, Nature and Grace. Leed and Ward C New York, 1966 }, 202. Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and Writers ( London, 1871 ), T, S00. 246 203* Cf. J. B. de J. Jackson, Coleridge; The Critical Heritage ( New York, 1970 ), p. 204. Coleridge and the Broad Church Movement ( Durham, 1942 ),84. 205. Entry dated February 23, 1829* Cf. J. R. de J. Jackson, Coleridge, The Critical Heritage ( New York, 1970 V, 578-^9.--- ----------- 206. Cf. Systematic Theology, 3 Vols. ( Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1951-63 ), I, 59. 207. Ibid., 60. 208. Cf. Etienne H. Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, Translated by L. K. Shook ( foew York: kandom House, 1956 ). 209. A Plan of Union for the Church of Christ Uniting. Consultation on Church Union ( New Jersey. 1970 ). 210. CL, I, 147; To Robert Southey, December 29, 1794. 211. CL, I, 255: To Charles Lloyd, Sr., November 14, 1796. 212. CL, I, 349: To John Thelwall, October, 1797. 213. CL, I, 366; To Josiah Wedgwood, January 5, 1798. 214. CL, II, 807: To George Coleridge, July 1, 1802. 215. CL, III, 69-70: To Robert Southey, February 13, 1808. 216. CL, III, 283-84: To Thomas Poole, January 28, 1810. 217. CL, III, 480; To Joseph Cottle, April, 1814. 218. De Ouincey, Collected Writings C Edinburgh. 1889-90). II, 156.--- -------------- 219. TT, 431. 220. LR, 17. 221. MS, B3, 242f. 222. MS, Bs, 243-44f. 247 223. MS, B3, 242-246ff . 224. MS, B3, 263-64ff. 225. MS, B3, 267-68ff. 226. MS, B3, 276/260vff• 227. MS, B3, 277/259vff. 228. LR, 406. CHAPTER COMIC I pray That I, all foliage gone, May shoot into my joy. William Butler Yeats 246 CHAPTER V In his article, "The Ideology of Romanticism," Alex Comfort correctly states that "romanticism has always been aware of the tragic aspects of human life"; but he errs considerably in claiming that "the essence of romanticism is the acceptance of a sense of tragedy." * ■ Presuming that one could talk of the 'essence* of roman ticism ( and this is a highly debatable matter ), one would do best to opt for Morse Peckham's contention that it consists in the metaphor of organicisms as the root- 9 metaphor of the universe. Be that as it may, one would still have to insist that the Romantic vision of reality is far more inclusive than that of tragedy. It certainly includes insight into the tragic — but the tragic as conceived in relation to the Christian belief in mankind's original sin, and not that as conceived in Greek classi cism. As Cyril Connolly puts it: "Romanticism is a state of mind which has been suggested to humanity by Christian morality, and which is tragic when not sup ported by Christian belief, for it is then the idea of Eden and the Fall, without Paradise to round it off."** Coleridge's envisioning of mankind and the universe bears 2<»9 250 this out* That the stuff of comic art originated in religious ritual, is plentifully documented and apprec iated* What is not sufficiently recognised is that, con versely, man often comes to the religious through the comic. Now, in a very real sense it may be said that Coleridge re-discovered Christianity through his searches into the comic vision. I. From many angles Coleridge was shaped to the pur pose of tragedy. He experienced profound spiritual iso lation, suffered great agony, confronted guilt, sensed evil with exceptional sensitivity, and repeatedly sur vived one crisis only to enter another the more soul- stripping. pari passu, his vision of reality was forged in what Dostoevsky described as the "great furnace of doubt." And, given to self-dramatization, he liked to wear the purple mantle of the tragedian. Of course, far too often his utterances were banal, melodramatic, whining, strident, not at all expressive of the mountain- top splendor that one associates with the tragic: . • .but O dear Poole1 the attacks on my stomach, @ the nephritic pains in my back which almost alter nated with the stomach fits — they were terrible 1 — the Disgust, the Loathing, that followed these 251 Fits @ no doubt in part too the use of the Brandy @ Laudanum which they rendered necessary — this Disgust, Despondency @ utter Prostration of Strength, . .4 Why was I made for Love and Love denied to me?^ Such was the direful state of my mind that ( I tell it you with horror ) the razors( penknife, and every possible instrument of Suicide it was found neces sary to remove from ray room!** There are two things essentially different, which yet it has been my Lot thro* all ray Life — at least for 5 and 20 years out of 40 — to confound. The first is, to be beloved by a person: the second, a person's being highly pleased with being loved and admired by me. . . • one human being, entirely loving me ( this, of course, must have been a Woman ) would not only have satisfied all ray Hopes, but would have rendered me happy and grateful, even tho* I had no friend on earth, herself excepted. • • . I have loved so as I should feel no shame to describe to an Angel, and as my experience makes me suspect — to an Angel alone would be intel ligible.7 but such deliveries alternated with many others ( quoted plentifully throughout the previous chapters ) whose deep sincerity and nobleness greatly out-weighed the former's peevish exhibitionism. All things considered, including the intermittent grotesqueries, Coleridge was among the most tragic figures in literary history. He was clearly a man whose "fine excess" was both his virtue and his fault. As Thomas McFarland puts it, "Coleridge's failure cannot be separated from his sue - cess."** In classical texms, the hubris that flawed his character was constitutive of his human triumph. As the 252 great tragic characters were indefatigable questioners of reality -- Job: "What is man?"; Oedipus: l f What defilement?"; Lear: "Is man no more than this?" -- so was S.T.C.; for with his uncompromising will to truth he spent himself to plumb the limits of his amazing mental powers, even to the point of experiencing what Kierkegaard termed the "despair of possibility": the cracking open of any tendency to the delusion of being infinite. And it is evident that, out of the purging chaos of his toiled years, he achieved ( the 'improvisi- tore* role of his later career notwithstanding ) a rich, unifying acceptance of the human condition; an almost legendary status to which even Carlyle, with his too- much protesting, bore witness. In effect, Coleridge was not unlike the baffling Prince of Elsinore, whom divided critics hold to be, at once, both an egomaniac and a man of consummate humanness. As a matter of fact, Coleridge, with mixed pride and humility, did like to consider himself similar to Hamlet, the Shakespeare manque. "I have a smack of Hamlet myself, if I may say so,"® he once remarked; and his friend, Henry Crabb Robinson, referring to Coler- idge's portrait of the melancholic Dane, commented that he doubted 253 whether he did not design that an application should be made to himself, and whether he is not well con tent to meet the censure his own remarks convey, for tion of those talents apparen- Coleridge's criticism of Hamlet centers especially on what he considered to be the dramatization of the Reason/ Imagination-Understanding/Fancy/Sense conflict. In the Prince he saw imaged his own practical inability ( one that he greatly exaggerated ) to balance interior medi tation with attention to the external world: Shakespeare wished to impress upon us the truth, that action is the chief end of existence. ... In Hamlet I conceive him to have wished to exem plify the moral necessity of a due balance be tween our attention to outward objects and our meditation on inward thought -- a due balance be tween the real and the imaginary world. In Hamlet, who remains "for ever occupied with the world within him,"1 - 2 Shakespeare "intended to portray a person, in whose view the external world, and all its incidents and objects, were comparatively dim, and no interest in themselves, and which began to interest only, 13 when they were reflected in the mirror of his mind." This unhealthy mental imbalance Coleridge saw in his own consciousness: "• . .endless reasoning and hesitating -- constant urging and solicitation of the mind to act, and as constant an escape from action; ceaseless reproa ches of himself for sloth and negligence, while the whole 254 energy of his resolution evaporates in these re proaches" — with consequent "exhaustion of bodily feeling from perpetual exertion of mind,"*'** and the mind's oppression by a harrowing taedium vitae. How ever, as already noted in the last chapters, Coleridge*s writings reflect an exceptionally accomplished equilib rium of psychic inwardly-outwardly directed activities. His self-identification with Hamlet was grounded on more issues than the predominantly eptistemological. In his excellent essay, "The World of Hamlet," Maynard Mack argues that the play's microcosm is one of over-powering mystery that "reverberates with ques tions, anguished, meditative, alarmed."*-5 it actually images the same kind of universe, instinct with mystery, throughout which Coleridge indefatigably searched. Mack holds that the dramatic confrontation of this world by Hamlet is singularly concentrated in the fraveyard scene. Herein the Prince accepts his condition of being a man, with human limitation, and plunged in profound encom passing reality into which evil encroaches. At this point in the play, Hamlet displays the "deportment of a man who has been 'illuminated in the tragic sense": 255 The point is not that Hamlet has suddenly become religious; he has been religious all through the play. The point is that he has now learned{ and accepted, the boundaries in which human action, human judgment, are enclosed. But the crucial point here is precisely this last: the fact that Hamlet with magnificent poise, accepts the con ditions of a human existence that is essentially closed to a transcendent Providence. To be sure, Hamlet is alert to the existence of a Divinity that shapes man's destiny — but not to One who is mercifully and redemp- tively concerned with human persons in immediate con crete event, as is the God of The Tempest. It is para- mountly at this juncture of self-identification with the tragic Prince that Coleridge parts company. Germane to this consideration is McFarland's application of Karl Jasper's notion of 'shipwreck* ( Scheitern ) to Coleridge's life and work, with the reminder that "it has become for our own time the mark of the truly authentic life."^ The existentialist philosopher maintains that empirical being is being-in- a-situation. The vast majority of situations that a man finds himself in are commonplace; but there are some that engage him at a level of experience wherein they penetrate his entire way of life, especially such 'boundary situations' as suffering, death, and guilt; 256 for these 'providentially1 jar him into awareness of something beyond his being-in-a-sitnation, and save him from being domesticated to mediocrity. However, these finite events ( 1ciphers* ) that symbolically suggest an order of transcendence, may remain silent, in his condition of 'shipwreck* man receives his most compelling call from Transcendence. Facing it authen tically, never surrendering to defeat even while aware that he can never be the victor, the crisis of 'ship wreck* can be his finest hour* For it is then that Transcendence calls most intensely to him in finitude and temporality -- the Transcendence without which, Jaspers insists, man cannot achieve the dignity of the tragic. McFarland justifiably refers to the existential 18 'ship-wreck* in Coleridge's life: to the failures that persistently dogged him to the brink of despair, as ex pressed, for example, in the fragment, "De Profundis Clamavi" ( 1806 ): Come, come, thou bleak December Wind, And blow the dry Leaves from the Tree. Flash, like a Love-thought, thro* me, Death, And take a Life that wearies me.19 But, again, it is upon the interpretation of Transcen dence that Coleridge parts company with Jaspers. For 257 even though there is an intimation of grace ( "Where I am completely myself, 1 am no longer only myself" ) in the existentialist's writings, it remains only that. Jasper never rises to the recognition of a personal Transcendent who creates in man the need for transcen dence. Man must heroicly relate himself to Being in hopefulness, in a philosophic, even prayerful, faith. Being, however, remains impersonal and radically mean ingless. Beyond his noncapitulation to the void of spaced time, man must encounter a yet deeper void in death. Nor may a God be called upon to intrude into man's freedom; nor may a Christ be called whose incar nation would destroy transcendence and threaten man's authenticity. But Coleridge's belief opened in personal "fidelity" to the Triune God, and to the Word-made-Flesh among men in historical contingency. There is no doubt whatsoever that he experienced existential ’shipwreck'; and that W.H. Auden's debatable concept of 'Christian' tragedy as "the tragedy of possibility,"^® may be ap plied to him many times over, in the measure that it carries some truth. However, the fact remains ( and Col eridge himself recognised it as fact ) that his 'ship wreck' took place within a cosmos that is open to a pro vidential transcendence which is centered in infinite 258 Love; that his human powers, though limited, were essen tially open, not closed; and that he could do all things, even -- and peculiarly, as Kierkegaard frequently real ized -- out of failure, in and by and with the Redeemer who strengthened and would be able to transfigure him. The fact of the matter is that the least touch of a theo logy that offers the tragic hero a compensating heaven is fatal to his tragic character.”2* - Indeed, Coleridge be lieved not only in the existence of a "compensating Hea ven" that was attainable in the afterlife, but in one that was even now radically present in quotidian existence, into which the transcendental dynamism of divine grace erupt with the stubbornness that is God. But to apprehend The point of intersection of the timeless With time, is an occupation for the saint — wrote Eliot in "The Dry Salvages.1,22 Coleridge would not have agreed. Though no saint, the workings of grace were part, and a very prominent part of his preoccupations. Nor was his awareness of providential transcendence restrictable to the "ideal enclave" of a paradisaical myth, as John Armstrong lamely suggests.23 His belief would burst asunder any confining aesthetic categories. The fact is that its openness was not determinable by the logic of cause and effect, nor by qualitative or quantitive modes of calculation. And thereby he was disqualifled from the 259 company of the splendidly tragic: the great characters who, without transcendent help, strain resolutely to the extremes of human ability; whose lives bum with flame of hard., awesomely pure light. Coleridge lived, as Hopkins would put it, at "the highest pitch of stress" -- but from within a life-attitude that, despite the praiseworthy 2k efforts of such critics as Una Ellis-Fermor, remains in compatible with the tragic vision of reality. Although he walked the stations of the tragic, his glance looked beyond horizons of the tragic; far beyond; and, as Kierkegaard puts it, one does not weep for an Abraham. II. Coleridge's ultimate refusal ( and, more crucially, his inability ) to see tragically from within his own "inner sense," may be illustrated by his attempts at the writing of drama: Act I of The Fall of Robespierre ( 1794 ); Remorse, a Tragedy ( 1813 ), a revised version of Osorio ( 1797 ); and Zapolya ( 1815 ). As dramas, their artistic merit is disappointing; but their value as re flections, if ruffled and muddied, of Coleridge's vision of life, is definite. That Coleridge was gifted with 'negative capability' is readily clear from the body of his work. He himself was aware of its need within his make-up: 260 The first lesson, that innocent Childhood affords me, is — that it is an instinct of my Nature to pegs out of myself, and to exist in the form of others.2* My nature requires another Nature for its support, @ repose only in another from the necessary indigence of its B e i n g .26 He rejoiced in Shakespeare who "darts himself forth, and passes into all forms of human character and passion. . . . becomes all things, yet forever remaining himself" — as he also revered ( though in lesser degree ) the great Mil ton who "attracts all forms and things to himself, into the unity of his own ideal."22 For, viewing the human per son as essentially a self-consciousness that expands by way of perceptive love, he instinctively recognized the chameleon and egotistical modes of this 'serving,' and the corresponding processes of man's creative imagination Patricia Ball rightly maintains that the Romantic poet is exerting the 'self-conscious Imagination' whether he adopts the egotistical or the chameleon approach. . . . Whether they write dramatically or directly of themselves, what is sought by all these poets is their own identity, the realization of which will provide a basis for their ultimately evaluative purposes. . . . Recognition of the variant possibilities of creative power, its dif ferent modes of operation, is integral to the Ro mantic concept of the poetical character. . .28 Her insistence on the chameleon dimension of Coleridge's pivotally experiencing mind, is amply confirmed by his writings. As already indicated in Chapter III, it is pe culiarly evident in his 'conversational poems wherein he 261 duplicates his sensibility. Taking on the roles of mono logue speaker and listener ( himself or a friend ) he pre sents himself in creative possession of either his own re flex consciousness or the consciousness of another person. But the chameleon dimension of his imagination is also ap parent in his attempts at dramatic composition. The con siderable failure of these pieces was not due to any lack of the 'negative capability' as such, but ( apart from his obvious amateurism in dramatic technique ) to his in grained alienation from the very genre of drama that he undertook: the tragic. In The Fall of Robespierre Coleridge claimed to have tried "to detail, in an interesting form the fall of a man, whose great bad actions have cast a disastrous lustre on his name."2^ In the brevity of the one Act that he composed, with its "indiscriminate use of elaborate and swelling language and imagery,"30 his endeavor to envision the tragic is extravagantly exposed. The tyrant's soul is Sudden in action, fertile in resource, And rising in awful 'mid impending ruins; In splendor gloomy, as the midnight meteor, That fearless thwarts the elemental war.31 And St. Just's description of Robespierre is a heroicly bloated imaging of Coleridge's own condition: He is one Who flies from silent solitary anguish, 262 Seeking forgetful peace amid the jar Of elements. The howl of maniac uproar Lulls to sad sleep the memory of himself, A calm is fatal to him -- then he feels The dire upboilings of the storm within him. A tiger mad with inward woundsi’2 With unexpected sententiousness Humphry House claims Coleridge to have been "a genuine sinner. . .an important /stc7 sinner"*^; but it is clear that in 179^ Coleridge considered the so-called "Incorruptable" to be just that. However, in his short contribution to this play ( which W. L. Renwick dismisses as "a hurried catchpenny half-way between Drury Lane and Fleet Street1 '^ ), Coleridge's effort at the tragic collapses in ludricous pretension. Robespierre's swagger is simply not of the stuff that rises to splendid self-consummation Myself! the steel-strong Rectitude of soul And Poverty sublime 'mid circling virtues! The giant Victories my counsels form'd Shall stalk around me with sun-glittering plumes, Bidding the darts of calumny fall pointless. Unwittingly, this sort of heavy-footed posturing amounts to a sorry parody of the tragic. Remorse proved to be Coleridge's most sustained ef fort in dramatic tragedy. Herein his concern was again with the action development ( in the Aristotelian sense ) of great guilt in a man of brooding pride: In these strange dread events Just Heaven instructs us with an awful voice, 263 That Conscience rules us e'en against our choice. Our inward Monitress to guide or warn If listened to; but if repelled with scorn At length as dire Remorse, she reappears, Works in our guilty hopes, and selfish fears! Still bids, Remember! and still cries, Too i&te! And while she scares us, goads us to our fate.3® Remorse is as the heart in which it grows, If that be gentle, it drops balmy dews Of true repentace; but if proud and gloomy, It is a poison-tree, that pierced to the inmost Weeps only tears of poison!37 Throughout his plays Coleridge is guilty of the overt mor alizing that he properly censured in the works of other men. But in Remorse, despite its considerable failure, he achieved a certain authentic roundness of character in his creation of Don Ordonio, notably so in his meetings with his Father, Act III, Scene 2; with his brother, Act II, Scene 2; and with Isidore, Act II, Scene 1, and Act IV, Scene 1. It is obvious that Coleridge exerted himself to envision Ordonio, for whom the "everfrowning Present" re mains the image of his guilty past, within the world of the tragic88; that is, within a Fate-governed universe of in scrutable decrees: 0 this unutterable dying away--here— This sickness of the heart! What if I went And liv'd in a hollow tomb, and fed on weeds? Aye! that's the road to heaven! O fool! fool! fool What have I done but that which nature destined Or the blind elements stirred up within me? If good were meant, why were we made these beings? And if not meant — 39 261 * Clearly, Ordonio was the objective correlative of much in Coleridge's own person and experience. The pro tagonist's resolution, "I shall not fail to find it,"**® expressed the 'extremism' that urged his creator to the brink of things: the Swiftian sanity "that strips the out ward rind of things," even to their "dust and rottenness within."1 * * - And many of Ordonio's utterances echo Coler idge's own personal remarks in letters and notebooks, al most to the letter: I was benumbed, and staggered up and down Through darkness without light -- dark -- dark — dark! My flesh crept chill, my limbs felt manacled As had a snake coil'd round t h e m !* + 2 He walked alone, And phantom thoughts unsought-for troubled him. Something within would still be shadowing out All possibilities; and with these shadows His mind held dalliance.^3 0 horror! not a thousand years in heaven Could recompose this miserable heart, Or make it capable of one bringt joy!^ There, where Ordonio likewise would fain lie! In the sleep-compelling earth, in unpierc'd darkness! For while we live An inward day that never, never sets, Glares round the soul, and mocks the closing e y e l i d s ! ^ Let the eternal justice Prepare my punishment in the obscure world — I will not bear to live — to live -- 0 agony! And be myself along my own sore torment !^ Even Coleridge's self-identification with Hamlet is reflec ted in several of Ordonio*s declamations: 265 Love! love! and then we hate! and what? and wherefore? What? if one reptile sting another reptile? Where is the crime? The goodly face of nature Hath one disfeaturing stain the less upon it. Are we not all predestined transiency, And cold dishonour?** 7 Say I had laid a body in the sun! Well! in a month there swarm forth from the corse A thousand, nay, ten thousand sentient beings In place of that one man. — Say, 1 had kill'd him! Yet who shall tell me, that each one and all Of these ten thousand lives is not as happy. As that one life, which being push'd aside, Made room for these unnumbered --^ Why should I hate thee? this same world of ours, 'Tis but a pool amid a storm of rain, And we the air-bladders that course up and down, And joust and tilt in merry tournament; And when one bubble runs foul of another, The weaker needs must break.**9 But in Remorse Coleridge is forcing his art. He has Or donio canonize himself into the society of the quintessen- tially human: All men seemed mad to him! Nature had made him for some other planet, And pressed his soul into a human shape By accident or malice. In this world He found no fit companion — 50 thereby, ironically, disqualifying him from that very com pany; for here Ordonio, unlike Oedipus in his apotheosis, ignores the lowly foot, pous, the reminder of his human identity. Instead of living the tragic vision, Ordonio mimics it with a souring protest whose hollowness is 266 revealed in the pathos of his dying words, and in the con trived blessing of the last scene. Zapolya, patterned "in humble imitation" of Shake speare's Winter1 s Tale^l, was an unsuccessful attempt to follow on the measure of success achieved in Remorse. Once again ( notwithstanding the incongruous subtitle, "A Christmas Tale" ) Coleridge tried to envision a uni verse governed by an impersonal Fate. The two young pro tagonists, Efoerick and Bethlen, both know themselves as destined by the heavens: The changeful planet, now in her decay, Dips down at midnight, to be seen no more, With her shall sink the enemies of Emerick, Cursed by the last look of the waning moon: And my bright destiny, with sharpened horns, Shall greet me fearless in the new-born c r e s c e n t . 52 'Ask not, my son,' said she, 'our names or think. The shadow of the eclipse is passing off The full orb of thy destiny! Already The victor Crescent glitters forth and sheds O'er the yet lingering haze a phantom light. Thou canst not hasten it! Leave then to Heaven The work of Heaven: and with a silent spirit 5- Sympathize with the powers that work in silence!' As Lord Chesterfield and Hegel would demand, the cosmic world of Zapolya is "bigger than life," heroic. However, as with Remorse, there is also too much puerile human attitudinizing. Raab Kiuprili's declamation in the Prelude, Scene 1, mingles echoes of Shakespeare's Coriolanus and Timon of Athens in rising bambast: 267 Yet bear with me awhile! Have I for this Bled for your safety, conquered for your honour? Was it for this, Illyrians! that I forded Your thaw-swoln torrents, when the shouldering ice Fought with the foe, and stained its jagged points With gore from wounds I felt not? Did the blast Beat on this body, frost-and-famine-numbed, Till my hard flesh distinguished not itself From the insensate mail, its fellow warrior? And have I brought home with me Victory, And with her, hand in hand, firm-footed Peace, Her countenance twice lighted up with glory, As if I had charmed a goddess down from Heaven?3^1 In like manner Emerick, the usurper, is made in the heroic For ever 'midst this crash of horns and clarions He mounts his steed, which proudly rears on-end While he looks round at ease, and scans the crowd, Vain of his stately form and horsemanship.55 Nor is the young hero, Bethlen, to be out •'worded in "high heroic fancy"; even by the braggart Laska: I am s ton&, o un^ • Also in this play numerous phrases from Coleridge's per sonal jottings resound, like the following: 0 that I were diffused among the waters That pierce into the secret depths of earth, And find their way in darkness! Would that I Could spread myself upon the homeless winds!58 mold: And it shall be my birth-right!3^ 0 let me then inherit danger, Strike! See, I do not shrink 0, at how dear a price have I been loved And no love could return!3“ 268 Yet a child's image doth indeed pursue me Shrivelled with toil and penury.®® Or would this chillness tell me, that there is Guilt too enormous to be duly punished, Save by increase of guilt?®1 In Zapolya Coleridge was once more concerned with imitat ing in dramatic action the progress of great guilt; but now, not only in the individual, but as it corrupts the human community. Mystery is contagious, but then, so also is folly. Bvil, which is essentially a treachery against Heaven, against mankind, and against one's own conscience, the "soul's essence," consumes canabalis- tically even itself: Mark how the scorpion, falsehood, Coils round its own perplexity, and fixes Its sting in its own head!62 In the chaos of the play's last scene the protag onists reveal themselves as having merely "played the hero at a cautious distance"*’ ' * — the distance between true dramatic imitation and mere counterfeit. Though in volved in a moral purpose that is absent from the Byronic heroes, Coleridge's heroes lack the identity of these for mer. For that matter, they have little of the composite ancestry ( Prometheus, Milton's Satan, Goethe's and Rous seau's sentimental heroes, Ann Radcliffe's and Horace Wal pole's hero-villains, Scott's Marmion and Friedrich von 269 Schiller's Karl Moor ) that Peter Thorslev has traced in Byron's characters.**** But more crucially, they do not have the vital spark with which their creator can give them autonomous aesthetic life. Byron's heroes live ( more or less, and most of them, admittedly, less; but they live ) by his genuine satiric intuition of human existence. More over, Coleridge's mouthed question from within Zapolya: "Can Hell work miracles to mock Heaven's justice?,"*^ is not the agonized cry that reverberates throughout authen tic tragedy: it is purely oratorical. Behind the play's artistry, which is immature and awkward, there is no real poetic experience of the tragic: aesthetically it is dis honest, and inevitably falls starkly apart. Coleridge would have done well to have recognised, as did Goethe, that his deepest sensibility was not tuned to the tragic vision of life. Raab Kiuprili’s words in Part II, Act II, Scene 2 — "Hope draws towards itself/The flame with which it kindles" * * * * -- explode open the entire work onto perspec tives that simply cannot be straitened within the taut, terrifyingly beautiful frontiers of tragedy. III. The fecund boundlessness of Coleridge's genius was such that it was not satisfied with just cabbages and kings and gods. Of course, these too were welcomed, and magnani mously; even those aspects of their nature that the tragic 270 vision deems irrelevant and debasing: What a beautiful thing urine is, in a Pot, brown yel low, transpicuous, the Image diamond shaped of the Candle in it; especially as it now appeared, 1 have emptied the Snuffers into it, @ the Snuff floating about, @ painting all-shaped Shadows on the Bottom.67 A dunghill at a distance sometimes smells like musk, and a dead dog like elder-flowers. -- Black-round Ink-spots from S to 18 in the decaying Leaf of the Sycamore.69 Coleridge had a passion for the wholeness of things, in tensively as well as extensively: a passion, Yarlott suggests with not a little credibility, that was origin ally motivated by awareness of his own desperate need of vital integralness.^ But, as already elucidated in Chapter IV, Coleridge's prodigious appetite for existence, though delighting in the taste of the finite, opened hungrily to the Triune God; and not merely by way of know ledge, even that according to the mode of connaturality, but by way of intimate interpersonal relationship that says "Thou" to the divine Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Coleridge, then, would "gluttonize* 1 himself not only with the multi-faceted beauty of nature, but with water worms and putrescent matter and the scum of the boiled mixture of water, glner, sugar and lemons; and with gibbets and madhouses and maniacs and demons, "A Ruffian flesh'd in murthersCato, Nimrod, Thor, an idiot 271 whose whole amusement consisted in looking at, and talking to a clock — which he supposed to be alive -- off — and he went away to seek it -- was absent nine days -- at last, they found /Kimf, almost famished in a field -- He asked wKere it was buried — for he was sure it was dead -- /he was brought home and the clock in its place -- his joy — etc. He used to put Dart of ever thing, he liked, into the clock case — a vast teeming chaos of things and men and spirits, but also, and within and beyond and above all, the self- communicating Trinity of divine Persons. And as John Livingston Lowes perceived on the aesthetic level, this seeming "vast, diffused, and amor phous nebula" of beings and the Being transcendent to them, was 'transubstantiated* by the poet-philosopher's creative consciousness onto an organic "structure of exquisitely 73 balanced and coordinated unity." For, having been "made in God's Image, and that too, in the sublimest sense, the Image of the Creatorit is creative, in a derived sense, by its modes of knowledge, speculative and poetic: it possesses ( and is possessed by ) an immanence of divine action that urges it to the fullness of its autonomy. Col eridge realized that he knew things in terms of his own existence, and that he knew himself more intimately through knowing them; and that this astounding interchange was pos sible because of a constant connaturality between himself and the multiplicity of being in the full flood of exter nality; 272 In other words, idea and law are the subjective and objective poles of the same magnet, that is of the same living and energising reason. What an idea is in the subject, that is, in the mind, is a law in the object, that is, in nature.75 For in order to direct the view aright, it behooves that the beholder should have made himself congenerous and similar to the object beheld. Never could the eye have beheld the sun, had not its own essence been soli- form.’® With the Medieval Schoolmen Coleridge held that the human consciousness is in a sense everything: anima est quo- damnodo omnia; and that is so because, lilce all other things, it realizes the value of being in the measure of its individual nature. Unlike creatures, God is his own being, and the source of the whole ontological order. But every creature participates in being, and participates, each individual one, according to a particular mode or 'quiddity.1 And all together make up a whole; an order of participation that binds all created beings together with out exception, and relates them to their Creator; and, at the same time, an order of proportionality ( or 'analogy' ) wherein each possesses being according to the proportion which belongs to its peculiar nature. Of this whole order, God is the supreme Analogue. Within it, every being is not only brimming with its own singular reality, but is able to share in wider communities of reference: ever existent has, at once, meaning in its own right and meaning that transcends its immediate actuality. This being so, 273 William F. Lynch maintains that man's ideas/intuitions of things "should invade each other's boundaries, constantly, perpetually, in some way from morning to night, being mu tually interpenetrating, the one nourishing the other, each as it were creating the other."77 And this, precisely, is what happened in Coleridge's consciousness, as described graphically by Walsh: The most various kinds of human experience leap their boundaries, approach, touch and penetrate. No doubt we should expect such range from "a library cormorant" who loved chemistry and poetry, metaphysics and facts of the mind, and who also aspired to be a farmer and horticulturist. But the range of material makes the compelling, unifying power all the more striking. Politics and psychology, chemistry and theology, lit erary criticism and pathology, drug-taking and climb ing, social analysis and journalism, education and semantics -- these are only some of the categories which, under an irrestible mental initiative, are "convoked and fraternised." They unfold into one another, separate, melt again, apply the principles and criteria of one to another, and live like elements under so great a pressure that they are all the time transforming themselves into new and fascinating cry stals* The variety is endless but the urge toward the unity matches it. It is as though Coleridge, having mastered the plurality of knowledge, having developed the special, separate senses necessary to appreciate blossom, leaves, bark and branches, found everything leading back to a more solid and unques tionable unity. . .78 But this world of Coleridge's consciousness, with its omni present direction and thrust toward wholeness, its lique faction of boundaries, its mutual transformation of diverse modes of experience, and its dense suffusion of emotion — this world is not that imaged in Hamlet, but rather the 27** one that is bodied forth in the rich cumulative imagery of The Tempest; the one among all of Shakespeare's plays which, Coleridge happily discerned, "addresses itself en tirely" to the imaginative faculty.^ For one of the most salient characteristics of Pros- pero's island is its astounding contrasts. It is simul taneously immediate and far, familiar and strange, northern and semi-tropical, solid and naturalistic as well as fluid and chimerical; . . .full of noises, Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not,®0 and of dreadful din. In spite of their drenching, the clothing of the shipwrecked people is "fresher than be fore,"®^ Ferdinand is not sure whether the sweet music comes from the air or from the earth.®^ Gonzalo sees the island's grass as green, Antonio sees it as tawny.The 8 4 "quality of the climate" enervates some, enlivens others. And all the island's proliferating contrasts are concen trated, as it were, in the two enigmatic beings, Ariel and Caliban: the "airy spirit,"®5 tricksy, mercurial, who, like the poet's eye in A Midsummer Night's Dream, moves "from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven," with the speed of light,and the "debosh'd fish,"87 semi-devil, heavy as earth, horrible, pathetic, a "thing of darkness,®® 275 who suffers the lusts and terrors of the flesh. Coleridge was convinced that such apparently mut- ually-annihilative contrasts constitute the very meaning and process of all existence: Every power in nature and in spirit must evolve an opposite as the sole means and condition of its mani festation: and all opposition is a tendency to re union. . . . The identity of thesis and anti-thesis is the substance of all being. His conviction moved within a tradition that spanned the centuries -- from Heraclitus who insisted on the fact of the One and the Many in the essential stuff of reality, to William Blake who declared that without contraries there cannot be any progression. It had been especially nour ished by such writers as Giordano Bruno C + 1600 ) who stated that in Ja and Nein all beings consist, that "with out contrasts there is neither life nor manifestation. Without contrast, without another, there is only internal QO immobility, stillness and repose, in which nothing can be distinguished. . and by such as John Scotus Erigena ( + 895 ) who, anxious for the reconciliation of the op posites inherent in reality, conceived them as being re conciled ultimately in God who is "the similarity of the similar, the dissimilarity of the dissimilar, the oppo sition of opposites, and the contrariety of contraries."®3 - Throughout his life Coleridge felt 276 the necessity of reconciling the restlessness of an everworking Fancy with an intense craving after a resting-place for my Thoughts in some principle that was derived from experience, but of which all other knowledge should be but so many repetitions under various limitations, even as circles, squares, tri angles, etc., etc., are but so many positions of space;*2 and in the idea ( with the significance that Coleridge gave this term ) of the "reconciliation of opposites" he believed he found this principle. It was not just the "convenient phrase"^3 that Miss Schneider describes it C before proceeding to apply it admirably with contradict ing extent and depth of reference ), but a profound insight into all ontological being, including, and especially, the reality of the Church in which the Divine and the human touch and share in amazing encounter: Revealed Religion ( and I know of no religion not revealed ) is in its highest contemplation the unity, that is, the identity or co-inherence, of Subjective and Objective. It is in itself, and irrelatively, at once inward Life and Truth, and outward Fact and Luminary. But as all Power manifests itself in the harmony of correspondent Opposites, each supposing and supporting the Other, — so has Religion its ob jective, or historical and ecclesiastical pole, and its subjective, or spiritual and individual pole.9^ Religion necessarily, as to its main and proper doc trines consists of ideas, that is, spiritual truths that can only be spiritually discerned, and to the expression of which words are necessarily inadequate, and must be used by accomodation. Hence the absolute indispensability of a Christian life, with its con flicts and inward experiences which alone can make a man to answer to an opponent, who charges one doctrine as contradictory to another, -- "Yes! It is a con tradiction In terms; but nevertheless so it is, and both are true, nay, parts of the same truth.” 277 Now this /onr previous demonstration/ is the Idea of Prayer; and in Prayer alone can the reality of the Idea be found, ... But these are contradictions in terms, — These are impossible conditions! It is Prayer in fact that alone enables the Christian to reply — Contradiction in terms, I grant you: never theless so it is! were it not a contradiction in terms, it would not be an Idea -- not a living Truth of the whole Spiritual Man, a Ray from the convergence of the Will and the Reason. . The gist of the matter is that the analogical en visioning of reality, even though, in its emphasis on actuality and meaning, it is implicitly Christian ( "For," William Lynch points out, "it tends to create the two basic attitudes of the Christian, that of the martyr in the name of the historic actuality of the Christian mys teries, and that of the lover of meanings, who does not hesitate to relate these actualities to the whole uni verse"^ ), does not communicate enough the luxuriant density of being, and is thereby not sufficiently Christ ian. For, Coleridge never tired insisting, to be Christian is to be whole with a wholeness that is dynamically open to transcendence, even to personal self-communicating Transcendence. Reality, then, is veined not only with the analogical dimension, but with the paradoxical. Between finite beings and the absolute, self-subsistent Being, there exist contradictory attributes: contingency and necessity, composition and simplicity, mutability and im mutability, existence in time and not in time, in space and not in space; yet in the God-Man all are focused and 278 reconciled: in him the great extremes meet. And because of the divine Word's penetration into mankind's condition, the paradoxical that was already intrinsic to the opposites of created being ( and which were articulated in classical drama, not only in the comic but, limitedly, even in the 98 tragic, as Lucien Goldman contends ) was infinitely in tensified. More: by his self-revelation God has enabled man to see himself and his world partly and, as it were, obliquely, through the "perspective from infinity."^ Henceforth the tragic hero, who by vocation holds that the great extremes of human existence cannot be mediated and that he must confront them in either/or choice, pales as never hitherto before the outrageous heroism of the man of Faith. It was Oren Kierkegaard, and not Coleridge, who wrote the more explicitly and lengthily about Christian faith as the tremendous source of paradox; notably in his "dialectical lyric," Fear and Trembling*-^, first pub lished in October of 1843, nine years after Coleridge's death. The Danish genius argued that, unless man be em powered by divine grace to look from the infinite dis tances of faith, and thus see by way of the startling 'category' of paradox, he cannot know his destiny, nor can he liberate himself from the irreconcilables in the crises of his existential condition. And, with Abraham his guide, 279 Kierkegaard celebrated paradox in philosophical-theological writing that defies imitation. But Coleridge's works are instinct, if not overtly thematic, with paradox. For ex ample, several of his poems attempt to present an equilib rium of contraries in imagery, structure and sound. Nor is this surprising, considering the fact that he viewed man's consciousness as having been made in the image of the divine Creator; that the poetic imagination is dis tinctively a "dim analogue of creation," revealing itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or dis cordant qualities: of. . .idea with the image; the individual with the representatives; . . .a more than usual state of emotion, with more than usual order; judgment ever awake and steady self-possession, with enthusiasm and feeling profound or vehement. . . ;101 and that the peculiar product of this 'secondary' imagina tion, the poem, is a veritable heterocosm that bodies forth the creative principle that underlies all existence: the generative tension of antithetic forces opening transcend- ently onto their synthesis in a new whole, Thus, in Gly cine's song from Zapolya^-Q^ Coleridge achieves a remarkably beautiful fusion of the substantial and the transparent ( the ray of light is, at once, a "shaft" and a "sunny mist" ); and of the mutable and the immutable ( the bird of "gold" and "amethyst" is poised in the same eternity wherein Keat's Crecian urn dwells untouched by change, yet it sings boldly of disillusionment, decay, departure ). 280 And he realizes the "reconciliation of opposites/ 1 not only in the poem's united form, but, deeper still, by way of its wedding of sense with sound and meter. As Max Sxhulz in dicates in The Poetic Voices of Coleridge. t h e long vowels in the rhyming words "adieu-true" and "delay-stay- May-away-today" of the third stanza, their echo in other words such as "prove" and "dew," and their elaboration in the strain "he-dreams-sweetie," all together combine to evolve an organic structure of sound that develops in musical pattern the poem's central theme; and, simultan eously, metrical details such as the unvarying accents of "they make no delay" and "will not stay" in reference to the fading flowers and the evaporating dew-drops, per sistently confirm the inexorability of change in the human condition. But, then, the absurdity of the dynamism to ward the infinite within man's essentially contingent nature, is made meaningful paradox in the poignant tri umph of the poem's lasting newness. And the same meta morphosis occurs in "Hymn before Sunrise" ( 1802 )10** — not simply a 'creation' but a re-creation; what Baudelaire and Joyce came to recognise as a sort of baptism. The basic imagery of the poem is antithetical. There are the opposites of light and darkness ( e.g., "morning-star," "troops of stars," "keen full moon," "rainbows," "rising sun," and "dark, substantial, black/An ebon mass," 281 "sunless pillars," "precipitous, black, ragged rocks," "night" ); the opposites of the animate and inanimate ( e.g., "dilating Soul," "secret ecstasy," "wild torrents fiercely glad," "invulnerable life," "living flowers," "wild goats sporting round the eagle's nest," and "dark and icy caverns," "motionless torrents," "eternal frost," "sky-pointing peaks" ); and the opposites of sound and silence ( e.g., "Hymn," "unceasing thunder," "mighty voice," "shout of nations," "sing ye meadow-streams with gladsome voice!," "soft and soul-like sounds," "fill the hills with praise," "thousand voices," and "silent sea of pines," "calm home," "the silence came," "the silent sky" ). And the groups of antitheses mutually interlock: Torrents, methinks, that heard a mighty voice And stopped at once amid their maddest plunge! Motionless torrents! silent cataracts!;105 for the poet, seeing emphathically into "the life of things," intuits the fertile discordance that is inherent in nature -- specifically, the struggle being fought around Mont Blanc as it emerges slowly from deathly night. Now begins what Robert Langbaum has succinctly described as "the process of experience or self-objectification, for the poet projects himself into the reality of the mountain's "awful Form" that it blends with his thought and very life. According as it triumphantly climbs, heaven-pointing, into day, it uplifts in its encompassing 282 presence, not only the richly variegated world about it, but the poet's own spirit. He expands in self-realiza tion; and reciprocally he gives articulation to the uncon sciously hymnal upward thrust of this "dread ambassador from Earth to Heaven." In effect, the warring opposites in the constitutive elements of reality are reconciled in the cosmic God-gravitation to which man -- nature's priest, as Coleridge declares in his poem "To Nature" ( 1820 )107 -- lends nostalgic utterance, in the actual poem itself, it is the poet’s "synthetic and magical power" of "secon dary" imagination that provides that certain "tone and spirit of unity, that blends, and, so to speak, fuses, each into each"^-®® of the poem's conflicting elements. As God's Spirit moves throughout the void, and, in moving — that is, in loving -- creates, and brings order out of chaos, so the poet relates to his poem by way of his gen erative, reconciling presence, thereby actualizing para- digmatically in himself one dimension of mankind's voca tion -- its duty/privilege to give names ( meaning, de velopment, celebration ) to the things of the universe, 1 DQ as announced in Genes is. In "Kubla Khan" ( 1798 ) this reconciling power of man-the-poet ( by which he not only reveals, but engenders paradox ) is bodied forth in the actual working of its Prosperoic magic. The poetic in tuition's "shadowy half being. . .just on the vestibule of consciousness" --in what Maritain refers to as the "pre-conceptual life" of the mind, the "preconscious night of the spirit, near the center of the soul"H® -- is here in captured in the ecstasy of its utter freedom: the sing ular outlasting gift of man's original paradaisal liberty. And like prospero's island, it is essentially the shadow ing forth, in what Coleridge himself called "half-verbal, half-visual metaphors,of a transforming process, a kairos, a moment of grace; and, as such it is necessarily incomplete with, to Coleridge's glory, a miraculous beauty Just as the island, enchanting and fearful, effects more integralness in and among the shipwrecked persons, so the poet's musical, dreadful presence evokes the delicately poised integration, and thereby transformation of exis tential reality's clashing opposites; "caverns measure less to man's and "walls and towers. . .girdled round"; "gardens bright with sinuous rills,/Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree," and "a lifeless ocean"; "A sunny pleasure-dome," and "caves of ice"; "vaulted like rebound ing hail," "dancing rocks," and "slanted down," "sank in tumult"; "Ancestral voices prophesying war," and "he on honey-dew hath fed,/And drunk the milk of Paradise." Un like Kierkegaard, Coleridge did not treat explicitly of paradox, but, as is plentifully evident from the above, he was excitedly alert to its ubiquitous presence in the human spatio-temporal condition. 284 Nor was his insight into the paradoxical displayed solely in literary guise. A facet of his character that has been almost totally neglected by biographers was his robust sense of humor and quickness to hearty laughter. James Gillman wrote in his Life that there was "one part of Coleridge's character not to be passed by, although so overlaid by his genius as rarely to be noticed, namely, his love of humor and of wit, of which he possessed so 112 large a share." And Gillman's claim is confirmed throughout Coleridge's correspondence and notebooks. In a letter to Southey, December 1794, he joked pointedly about materialism -- even though at the time he was an advertised materialist of the Hartley-Priestley variety: I am compleat Necessitarian -- and understand the subject as well almost as Hartley himself — but I go farther than Hartley and believe the corporeality of thought -- namely, that it is a motion Boyer thrashed Favell most cruelly the day before yester day — I sent him the following Note of consolation. 'I condole with you on the unpleasant motions, to which a certain uncouth Automoton has been mechanized; and am anxious to know the motives, that impinged on it's optic or auditory nerves, so as to be communi cated in such rude vibrations through the medullary substance of It's Brain, thence rolling their stomy Surges into the capillaments of it's Tongue, and the muscles of it's arm. The diseased Violence of It's thinking corporealities will, depend upon it, cure itself by exhaustion --in the mean time, I trust that you have not been assimilated in degradation by losing the atarxy of your Temper, and that the Ne cessity which dignified you by a Sentience of the Pain, has not lowered you the accession of Anger or Resent ment .If 3 285 He was able to laugh wryly at himself in his illnesses. He confided to a friend that he is doing "very poorly; not to say ill. My face monstrously swoln; my recondite Eye sits quaintly behind the fleshhill; and looks as little as a Tomtit *s. Replying to a Mr. Welles who offered him a "Nectar" for the gout, Coleridge promised that should it cure him, he would dedicate a new sect in his honor: . . .then, joining party with Thomas Taylor, the Pagan ( for whom I have already a sneaking affection on ac count of his devout Love of Greek ) to re-introduce the Heathen Mythology, to detect in your person another descent @ metamorphosis of the God of the Sun, to erect a Temple to you, as Phoebe Sanatori; @ if you have a Wife, to have her deified, by act of parliament, under the name of the Nymph, Panacea. But probably it would not be agreeable to you to be taken up, like the Ti betan Delha Llama, and to be imprisoned during life for a God.iIS Even his relationships with the two Saras in his life proved, on occasion, to be worthy of humor; and in the Spring of 1808 he asked a friend to cut a seal for him with the punning inscription, "Che sara, sara."^^ But it was especially his life in the literary world that spurred him to laughter whose timbre ranged from the rueful to the ri bald. He laughed at his own posturing as the "Bard" of Nether Stowey, appointing Thomas Ward his t r Penmaker to my immortal Bardship" in a document "Given from Apollo's Temple in the odoriferous Limegrove — alias Street — in what olympiad our inspiration knows not, but of the usurp ing Christian aera 1799 -- Oct 8."^^ "As to Nightingales," 286 he told a friend at Cambridge,1 1 -- they are almost as numerous with us and as incessant in song as Frogs with you. Ah ( I groaned forth a few nights ago, when qualmy and titchy from the effects of an Asperint ) Ah! PHI limel! ill do thy strains accord with those of CALomel!"1 - 18 To Godwin he wrote: "I left Wordsworth on the ^th of this month. If I cannot procure a suitable house at Stowey I returned to Cumberland and settle at Keswick, in a house of such prospect, that if according to you and Hume, im pressions and ideas constitute our being, I shall have a tendency to become a god, so sublime and beautiful will be 119 the series of my visual existence." A letter to Andrew Bell recounted his experiences while lecturing at Fetter Lane among the place's renowned port and sausages, reveal- 1 20 ing a keen sense of the incongruous ; and a notebook jotting, in which he saw himself as a "moulting Peacock with only two of his long tail-feathers remaining, @ those sadly in tatters," bounces beyond the pathetic in the hu man incongruity when he gamely persisted further to see himself, still the "moulting peacock," but stubbornly "proudly as ever spreading out his ruined fan in the Sun 121 @ Breeze" ( 1796 ). In a comment on some lines in his goitrous t r The Destiny of Nations" ( 1796 ) he deflated his own pretensions: "These are very fine Lines, tho1 I say it, that should not; but hang me, if I know or ever did 122 know the meaning of them, tho* my own composition." 28 7 123 Searching through Coleridge's notebooks, Lowes cannot help but delight at the "piquant juxtapositions" of their entries: at, for example, the 'high seriousness' of 'The 124 Origin of £vil, an Epic Poem," rubbing elbows with the ballad-sounding "Some hundred years ago, when the Devil was a little boy and my grandmother had teeth in her head 125 126 and an admission to an appetite for beans. Charles Baudelaire astutely suggested that laughter, which is peculiarly human, expresses a double, or contra dictory, felt response to reality: "that is to say, it is at once a token of an infinite grandeur and an infi nite misery -- the latter in relation to the absolute Being of whom man has an inkling, the former in relation to the beasts. It is from the perpetual collision of these two 127 infinites that laughter is struck." in other words, the humorous insight ( that irresistably crests in laugh ter ) is radically an insight into the paradoxical. Ul timately it is grounded in the awareness of the discrep ancy between finite man and his measureless needs for in finite Truth/Love/Beauty: an awareness that is incredibly expanded and heightened by the divine revelation that tells of the significance of mankind's Fall and of its re constituted destiny in the triune life of the Divinity. And of such 'double-eyed' awareness Coleridge had an ever- increasing plenty. 286 But Coleridge did something else apropos of the para doxical nature of the human condition-destiny that Kierke gaard, the "tremendous little Dane," did not: he wrote ex tensively and in detail about its quality of life. Faithful to his poetic intuition, Coleridge worked artistically to give body in image and sound, not only to the dialectic structure of paradox, but to its framework*s organicity. What Miss Schneider interprets to be "the very spirit of 'oscillation* itself"^2® in the maziness of "Kubla Khan's" total pattern, is, in fact, the systolic rhythm that is peculiar to life. Her astute observations in support of her position -- in creating this effect, form and matter are intri cately woven. The irregular and inexact rhymes and the varied lengths of the lines play some part. More important is the musical effect in which a smooth, rather swift movement is emphasized by the relation of grammatical structure to line and rhyme, yet is impeded and thrown back upon itself even from the be ginning by the inclosed line units. Like the Mariner's ship at the Equator, the verse moves "backwards and forwards half her length," or like tides rocking in a basin. ... in this forward-flowing movement coun terpointed against a stationary-oscillating one, form and meaning are almost indistinghishable. . . . The whole poem oscillates between giving and taking away -- are fundamentally far more applicable to the rhythm of bur geoning life than to mechanical movement of oscillation -- even to its 'Very spirit." T. S. Eliot noted a strangely 289 static quality in "Kubla Khan," and rightly so.^ But it is expressive not of a lack of activity; but of its pleni tude. According to the poet's felt intuition of the poetic experience itseif, just before its incamative 'descent' in art, "Kubla Khan" images a radical,vital incompleteness that burgeons. Coleridge wrote that beauty involves not a cornspiration of component but of constituent Parts, not of parts put to each other, but of distinct but indivisible parts growing out of a common Antecedent Unity, or productive Life @ Will;*31 and in the kaleidoscopic ferment of "Kubla Khan" he dared to symbolize the 'boiling point* of poetic experience, wherein the imaginative creative process begins with a vital unification of images. The fact is that Coleridge was one of the small 'pockets' of insight into the meaning of life that ante dated Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species in 1859. Always sensitive to the quick of the psychic development of his age, he enthusiastically assimilated the basic ex pressions of organicity as set forth by the exponents of Naturphilosophie in Germany; especially by Scheiling and Schlegel who not only confirmed concepts of such favor ites of Coleridge as Plotinus, Giordano Bruno, and Ralph Cudworth, but, more importantly, coincided with the felt convictions of his own consciousness: 290 for they had been mine, formed, @ full formed in mind, before I had ever heard of these Writers. . . because ( I am proud perhaps but ) 1 seem to know, that much ot the matter remains my own, and that the Soul is mine. As Richard Haven reiteratingly stresses, Coleridge's de dicated task was to best articulate the soundings of his own personal experience -- and the felt organic nature of reality was one of them. Like William Blake before him, he came to scorn the mechanists arter an initial short lived flirtation with them: who deem themselves most free When they within this gross and visible sphere Chain down the winged thought, scoffing ascent, Proud in their meanness: and themselves they cheat With noisy emptiness ot learned phrase, Their subtle fluids, impacts, essences, Selfworking tools, uncaused effects, and all Those blind Omniscients, those Almighty Slaves. . • ; and he anathematized its "stink worse than feather or assa- foetida" in the works of Locke, Hume and Hobbes.And, as did Blake in his satirical and apocalyptic imagings of the state of Ulro, Coleridge equated mechanism with death: The leading differences between the mechanic and vital philosophy may all be drawn from one point: namely, that the former, demanding for every mode and act of existence reai or possible visibility, knows only of distance and nearness, composition C or rather juxtaposition ) and decomposition, in short the relations of unproductive particles to each other; so that in every instance the result is the exact sum of the component qualities, as is arith metical addition. This is the philosophy of death, and only of a dead nature can it hold good. In life, 291 much more in spirit, and in a living and spiritual philosophy, the two component counter-powers actually interpenetrate each other, and generate a higher third, including both the former, ita tamen ut sit alia et major. I” Polarity is intrinsic to all reality; but in the reconcil iation of opposites ( that is, in paradox ) consists life; or, by way of ontological priority, the presence of life is revealed in the transcending equilibrium of opposites: Life. . .we consider as the copula, or the unity of thesis and antithesis, position and counterposition, -- Life itself being the positive of both; as on the other hand, the two counterparts are the necessary conditions of the manifestations of Life. . . . Thus, in the identity of the two counter-powers, Life sub sists; in their strife it consists: and in their re conciliation it at once dies and is born again into a new form, either falling back into the life of the whole^ gr starting anew in the process of individua- 1Resurrection,' then, is of the very purposiveness and rhythm of life, in the language of the Medieval Schoolmen, organic "Unity+Omnity == Totality, "^37 and the generated vital Totality is not simply the sum of the first two, though it includes them, but something marvellously new. Still using terminology from Scholasticism, but giving it different nuances of meaning, Coleridge defined life as "the principle of individuation," and the link that com bines Unity and Omnity, "and acts throughout both," as the "tendency to individuation"; and he argued that if 292 life, in general, be defined via ab intra, cujus proprium est coadunare plura in rem unicam, quantum est res unica; the unity will be more Intense in proportion as it constitutes each particular thing a whole of itself; and yet more, again, in propor tion to the number and interdependence of the parts, which it unites as a whole. But a whole composed, ab intra, of different parts, so far interdependent that each is reciprocally means and end, is an indi vidual, and the individuality is most intense where the greatest dependence of the parts on the whole is combined with the greatest dependence ot the whole on its parts.^*^ Thus, the highest degree of life involves the most intense individuality. Robert Barth is correct in noting similarities be tween Coleridge's organic vision of the universe and that of Theilhard de Chardin.Even considered within the respective contexts of their times, Theilhard's is the more developed, original and daring. Both had a profound dis taste for whatever sort of static and closed system, and sought to apprehend reality in its immanent meaning, inner cohesion, and totality. They envisaged the cosmos, not as a machine in which a variety of preconstituted and mutually independent entities have been conjoined artificially, but as a creation of gigantic dimensions, building itself up organically as a cohesive whole, and impelled by an inner dynamic and energy toward its completion. Phenomenologi- cally, the priest-scientist envisaged the emergence of the earliest life in the universe as a critical phase-mutation in the womb of matter; and conceived the subsequent 293 "fanning-out*’ of life as opening onto a second discontin uity in the continuity of evolution: the "Hominization" of life: The being who is the object of his own reflection, in consequence of that very doubling back upon him self, becomes in a flash able to raise himself into a new sphere, in reality, another world is born. Abstraction, logic, reasoned choice and inventions, mathematics, art, calculation of space and time, anxieties and dreams of love -- all these activities of inner life are nothing else than the effervescence j^the newly-formed centre as it explodes onto itself. in like manner, Coleridge wrote in his Theory of Life ( 1818 ) that "the whole actual life of Nature originates in the existence, and consists in the perpetual reconcil iation of the self-contradiction of p o l a r i t y " ^ - ^ ; that, within this expanding-contracting process of evolution, Nature's "tranquil deposition of crystals prepared, as it liiii were, the fulcrum of her after-efforts" ; and that "from this, her first, and in part irrevocable, self-contradiction we find, in each ensuing production, more and more tendency to independent existence. . .first of vegetable and then of animal life."*-^ Coleridge envisages then what Richard Fogle*’ * * ’ * ’ takes to be the second major gap ( after the space between inorganic and organic nature > in his theory of life; the culmination of Nature's tendency to individ uation in man, the last work, in which Nature did not assist as 294 handmaid under the eye of her sovereign Master, who made Man in his own image, by superadding self- consciousness with self-government, and breathed into him a living soul. . . . -- he is the revelation of Nature! . . . .Nor does the form of polarity, which has accompanied the law of individuation up to its whole ascent, desert it here. At the height, so the depth. Both Coleridge and Theilhard realized that the only pleni- • tude of life/peace is in the Trinity of Divine Persons," the most perfect community of the most intense individu ality, toward Whom the converging cosmic evolution moves, through Christ the God-Man, as to its goal. Coleridge wrote that mankind is "destined to move and grow towards that divine humanity which we have learnt to contemplate as the final cause of all creation, and the centre in 148 which all its lines converge." Theilhard de Chardin elaborated on this concept: As early as St. Paul and St. John we read that to create, to fulfill and to purify the world is, for God, to unify it by uniting it organically to Him self. How does He unify it? By partially immersing Himself in things, by becoming an "element," and then, from this vantage point at the heart of matter, assum ing the control and leadership of what we now call evolution. Christ, the universal principle of vitali- zation because bom as a man among men, put Himself in a position ( maintained ever since ) to subdue, to purify, to direct, and to superanimate the general ascent of consciousness into which He inserted Him self. By a perrenial act of communion and sublimation, He aggregates to Himself the total psychism of the earth. And when he has gathered everything together and transformed everything, He will close in upon Himself and His conquests, thereby rejoining, in a final gesture, the divine focus He has never really left. Then as St. Paul tells us, God shall be all in 295 all. This is indeed a superior form of "pantheism” without trace of the poison of adulteration or anni hilation: the expectation of perfect unity, steeped in which each element will reach its consummation at the same time as the universe. The universe fulfill ing itself in a synthesis of centers in perfect con formity with the laws of union. God, the Center of center, in that final vision Christian dogma finds its culmination. Cosmogenesis eventuating through biogenesis in a 'noogen- esis'; and the biogenesis to be consumated in a Christo- genesis; the whole of history ascending toward its full ness in the Parousia of the glorified God-Man: the terms are different, but the vision of the universe outlined herein is essentially that cherished by Coleridge: one of unremitting becoming that advances, intensively and ex pansively, onto its own transcendence, by, with, and in Christ. Coleridge exercized his genetic habit of mind in his treatment of subjects as diverse as literary criticism and politics; and not only by way of their actual themes C for instance, the plant-like evolution of a work of art; the social growth of the 'body politic* ), but by way of the very structuring and texture of his presentations. Thomas McFarland's description of "the dynamic polarity of his thought as consisting in an attraction-repulsion of *1 am* and 'it is* consequences -- a systole and diastole of his intellect, as it were* ' 150 — is amply illustrated in the twelfth and thirteenth chapters of the Biographia 296 Literaria. However, it is peculiarly in his poems that Coleridge expresses his profound sense of life; for example, in "Lines written in the Album at Elbingerode" ( 1799 ) , when envisioning the very surface of the landscape in dense movement f he describes Woods crowding upon woods, hills over hills, A surging scene, and only limited By the blue distance;151 and in those remarkable pieces of "poetry of experience" in "Lines at Shurton Bars" ( 1795 ) in which he marks the glow-worm Move with 'green radiance* through the grass, An emerald of light;1'2 and recalls When mountain surges bellowing deep With an uncouth monster-leap Plung'd foaming on the s h o r e . But his 'conversational* type of poem ( which, be cause of its disciplined informality, and its circular, spiraled pattern of emotion and thought, Max Schulz deems to be Coleridge's most characteristic and "perhaps most mature" voice3 " 5* * ) most successfully bodies forth the di lation-contract ion rhythm of the living organism. "The Eolian Harp" ( 1795 )155 is a case in point. It manifests not only a movement of ascent and expansion, 297 but within this very movement -- and, as it were, the vital principle of its action — another movement of the systole- diastole rhythm* The poem's overall movement is one of prayer, which ( the cynicism of some critics notwithstand ing ) rises by a "Faith that inly feels" to union with God. It is true that the poet's expression of humility carries not a little taint of obsequiousness, a manner alien to authentic humility; which lack of spiritual in tegrity explains the essential failure of the poem. But it remains that the inmost thrust of "The Eolian Harp" is not self-centered, but open and God-oriented; and to a God who, though "incomprehensible," is tangibly recognised in the facts of healing and peace. In any event, commenting on "The Eolian Harp" in his book English Romantic Poetry. Albert S. Gerard notes that the poem is characterized by a widening and ascending movement which carries the poet from nature to God: from sen sory perception to fanciful reverie, and thence, through intellectual speculation, to an assertion of his religious faith. But within this general frame work, we can observe a heart-beat rhythm of systole and diastole, of contraction and expansion, in which the poet's attention is wandering to and fro between his concrete immediate experience and the wide, many- faceted world of the non-self; from the self to the forms of nature apprehended in the panoramic percep tion, from the self to the poetic Fairy-Land created by Fancy; from the self to an intellectual vision of cosmic unity, from the self to humble contemplation of G o d . 156 From the presence of the poet and his wife the poem grad ually opens onto a cosmic perspective: from the clouds, 298 and the "star of eve," "yon bean-field," to the "world so hush'd," to "the distant Sea"; then, moving transitionally through the sound of silence to "that simplest Lute," its vision contracts to this single, immediately near, concrete object — but only to expand again in all-inclusive imagina tive musings of a joyful transformed world. Then, quickly, advancing transitionally through the daydreaming realm of "slumbering" to the image of the poet outstretched, with "many a thought uncall'd and undetain'd,/And many idle flitting phantasies," on "the midway slope/of yonder hill," the poem's vision ( and thereby the poem itself > contracts. But in the musings of the poet's "indolent and passive brain" the poem's vision again widens panoramically onto the vast sweep of "animated nature" as it is upheld by its Creator who is the "Soul" of its manifold richness. And once more it contracts, the poet's awareness of God turning transitionally back to the reproof of Sara's "more serious eye"; but only to expand again, this time onto the trans cendence of Faith, in effect, the very organicity of this poem gives symbolic expression to the life, not only of Coleridge's consciousness, but to that of creation as a whole, of which the human mind, made in the image of the divine Word, is analogically archetypal. The systole-diastole rhythm is evident in several of Coleridge's poems, most successfully in "Frost at Midnight" 299 ( 1798 in which the poet's self-consciousness expands alternatively into the present of his cottage-life, into the past of his boyhood in school, and into the future of his son's life in the countryside, and after each 'pro jection1 contracts vitally to its own identity, but to an identity which is increasingly enriched humanly after each 'projection1; and in "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison," ( 1797 )158 wherein the poet's self-consciousness moves back and forth from its own perceptions and reflections into those of his friends, especially that of "gentlehearted" Charles Lamb, with the whole poem significantly opening from the prison-like confines of the lime-tree bower onto an affirmation of life. Nor was Coleridge satisfied with bodying forth only the movement of life that is peculiar to the activity of the heart and lung. He was also aware of the strange now- beautiful, now-terrifying, life of the unconsciousness and its dreams: "a region of the mind," as J. R. de J. Jackson observes, "for which he had profound respect as a repository of fundamental if largely inaccessible power." in 1795 he read Andrew Baxter's An Enquiry into the Nature of the Human Soul; Wherein the immateriality of the soul is evinced from the Principles of Reason and Phi losophy. which contains many striking observations on dreams; but Coleridge was profoundly aware of their manner of activity from his own experience: 300 The truth is that Images and Thoughts possess a power in and of themselves, independent of that act of the Judgement or Understanding by which we affirm or deny the existence of a reality correspondent to them. Such is the ordinary state of the mind in Dreams.160 There are few Day-dreams that I dare allow myself at any time. ... So akin to Reason is reality, that what I could with exulting innocence, I can not always imagine with perfect innocence/for Reason and Reality can stop and stand still, /s±cT new influxes from without counteracting the Impulses from within, and poising the Though. But Fancy and Sleep stream on. . .I61; and he attempted to shadow forth this fantastic dimension of the human mind's life in such poems as "A Day-Dream"!^ ( 1802 ), with its sudden shifts from day to "dark warm night" and from "Fount, tree and shed" to "one quiet room" where dancing shadows "now they slumber, moveless all!/ and now they molt to one deep shade!" His efforts to cap ture, not only the imagery but the feel of the "shadows heaving" and the "floating presence" of sub-conscious or unconscious experience, were more successful in "The Day Dream"1^ ( 1801-2 ), with such highly effective artistry as the fluid-like enjambment of the second verse into the third, and its extension right through into the fourth line: All o'er my lips a soft and breeze-like feeling — I know not what -- but had the same been stealing Upon a sleeping mother's lips, I guess It would have made the loving mother dream 301 That she was softly bending down to kiss Her babe, . . . and In the abrupt Intrusion of an "elfish laugh" from waking reality, that jolts the dozing poet into an awake - fulness torn between laughter and tears, with the latter winning, in "The Garden of Boccacio"^^ ( 1828 ) Coler idge gives incarnation, in density of imagery and sound, to a dreamt "Rich, ornate, populous" new world "tost/Of wonder." "Emerging from a mist; or like a stream/of music. . . the world-picture that steals upon his "inward sight" is of ^o earthly sheen," but nevertheless one of exceeding "joyaunce" and gallantry: Fair cities, gallant mansions, castles old, And forests, where beside his leafy hold The sullen boar hath heard the distant horn, And whets his tusks against the gnarled thorn; Palladian palace with its toried halls; Fountains, where Love lies listening to their falls; Gardens, where flings the bridge its airy span, And Nature makes her happy home with man; Where many a gorgeous flower is duly fed With its own rills, on its own spangled bed, And wreathes the marble urn, or leans its head, A mimic mourner, that with veil withdrawn Weeps liquid gems, the presents of the dawn; -- OD But, now, all this dream-world created by Coleridge's "so potent art" is essentially like that of Shakespeare's The Tempest, with its peculiar mixture of animated sensuous detail and delicate fantasy. As G. Wilson Knight points out, "in no play of Shakespeare do such natural objects stand out with so rounded a clarity."*^ 302 I prithee, let me bring thee where crabs grow; And 1 with my long nails will dig thee pig-nuts; Show thee a jay's nest, and instruct thee how To snare the nimble marmoset. I'll bring thee To slustering filberts, and sometimes I'll get thee Young scamels from the rock. Wilt thou go with me? Ceres, most bounteous lady, they rich leas Of wheat, rye, barley, vetches, oats and pease; Thy turfy mountains, where live nibbling sheep, And. flat meads thatched with stover, them to keep. Thy banks with pioned and twilled brims. Which spongy April at they hest betrims, To make cold nymphs chast crowns; and thy broom - groves, Whose shadow the dismissed bachelor loves, Being lass-lorn; thy poll-clipped vineyeard; And they sea-marge, sterile and rocky-hard, Where thou thyself dost air. . .loo A feeling of intense closeness to real, growing earth is concentrated again and again in rich cumulative imagery. Yet Prosper's "lush and lusty" island is interpenetrated by a dimension of being, "subtle, tender and delicate" that transcends its earthiness, so that even the thick exuberance of its flora and fauna is strangely distanced. By saturating his play in music ( traditionally regarded as the only thing left of Paradise ) Shakespeare evokes an atmosphere that is, at once, vitally concrete, and dream like. And Coleridge does likewise in, for instance, his 1 A f t unpredictable "Christabel." As an integral 'fragment' it is admittedly a failure; primarily because of its faulty organization and uncertainty of vision. Nevertheless, the Victorians' praise of Coleridge as a consummate metrist is 303 confirmed by the virtuosity and sophistication here dis played in his use of the deceptively simple rhythmical line C counting the accents rather than the syllables ). He achieves an atmosphere of music whereby he is able "to force together/Thoughts so all unlike each other. . . tt f 170 balancing intimation of the praeternatural with the sense of concrete reality. For example, he counterpoises the atmosphere of cold mystery evoked by Geraldine's presence: The night is chill; the forest bare; Is it the wind that moaneth bleak? There is not wind enough in the air To move away the ringlet curl From the lovely lady's cheek with the fresh animation of a small thing of earth: There is not wind enough to twirl The one red leaf, the last of its clan, That dances as often as dance it can, Hanging so light, and hanging so high, On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky;1' and over against the firm impregnability of the fortress: The gate that was ironed within and without, ™ Where an army in battle array had marched out. . . -- he sets the fluid deviousness of Geraldine: The lady sank, belike through pain, And Christable with might and main Lifted her up, a weary weitht, Over the threshold of the gate: Then the lady rose again, And moved, as she were not in pain.17^ 30k Even with the scope of four short lines, Coleridge's music 'forces' together images of tangible reality and of vague mystery: Amid the jagged shadows Of mossy leafless boughs, Kneeling in the moonlight, To make her gentle vows. . . 75 Herein musical wizardry ( particularly compact elaboration of assonance ) brings about remarkable linkings through moving harmonious sounds: the hardness of 'jagged' with the softness of 'shadows'; the sterility of 'mossy leaf less' with the strong promise of 'boughs'; the purposeful action of 'kneeling' with the vague quietness of 'moon light'; and the delicacy of 'gentle* with the fortitude of 'vows.' In effect, "Christabel" not only tells of meta morphosis ( particularly the inexplicably evil change that befalls the innocent Christabel, but its very music brings about a metamorphosis, coupling common-sense, ballad-like reality with fanciful horror, and thereby engendering a peculiarly new and beautiful ( even though imperfect and incomplete ) 'world.' Thus, "Christabel," even as a frag ment of a poem, contains the thrust that its mere formal content would not allow. This point calls attention to another and especially crucial similarity between The Tempest and Coleridge's poetic vision: the fact that both envision a radical 305 metamorphosis that is hopeful. Prospero's island is a place/state where man 'doth suffer a sea-change/into some thing rich and strange"*-^; where the individual person, who is not yet "his own" and is unable to fully claim "1 am I,"^^ journeys into a providential heightening of reality that purifies and transfigures his being into a wholeness. The most typical of Coleridge's poems, the so-called 'conversational; also body forth such a meta morphosis. Referring to them, G. M. Harper writes about the "pleasing device" of the "return" of the poet's self- 178 consciousness to its starting-point ; and Albert Gerard rightly adds that this 'return' contains a transformation 179 of the poet's mind/soul ; for, having looked into the terrible beauty of reality -- so graphically imaged in the Brocken-spectre of his poem, "Constancy to an Ideal Object" ( 1826 — he has been made simultaneously a sadder and more joyful man: he has been made more human. So "The Nightingale" ( 1798 ) not only amounts to the "sub stantiation of the idea that 'in nature there is nothing melancholy,' as Max Schulz indicates,but it is also a bodying forth of the humanization of the poet himself through his actual creation of the poem. From a state of listlessness that is reflected in surrounding nature — No cloud, no relique of the sunken day Distinghishes the West, no long thin slip ... of sullen light, no obscure trembling hues — 306 the poet1s being gradually opens to Mthe influxes/Of shapes and sounds and shifting elements. . . particularly to "the merry Nightingale/That crowds, and hurries, and pre- cipitates/with fast thick warble his delicious notes." Soon his personhood achieves an extraordinary plenitude of being — this time reflected in his memory of "a grove/ Of large extent"; that is, a grove whose richness is given even added wealth by the poet's own imagination: This grove is wild with tangling underwood, And the trim walks are broken up, and grass, Thin grass and king-cups grow within the paths. But never elsewhere in one place I knew So many nightingales; and far and near, In wood and thicket, over the wide grove, They answer and provoke each other's song. With skirmish and capricious passagings, And murmurs musical and swift jug jug, And one low piping sound more sweet than all -- Stirring the air with such a harmony. That should you close your eyes, you might almost Forget it was not day! On moonlight bushes, Whose dewy leaflets are but half-disclosed. You may perchance behold them on the twigs, Their bright eyes, their eyes both bright and full, Glistening, while many a glgw-worm in the shade Lights up her love-torch. And the poet's ecstasy -- his very pitch of experiencing — is refracted in the brilliant image of the gentle maid watching Many a nightingale perch giddily On blossomy twig still swinging from the breeze, And to that motion tune his wanton song Like tipsy Joy that reels with tossing head.3 - 8^ 307 To be sure, there is no denying that despair is pro minently featured in a number of Coleridge’s poems. Dorothy M* Emmet perceptively suggests that Coleridge could have agreed with Wittgenstein that MThe World of the happy is quite another than that of the unhappy." He may even go further: the actual empirical world we experience differs as we exper ience it through one underlying state of mind rather than another. Now, it is common knowledge that Coleridge suffered agonis ingly from illness, drug addiction, and that frequently, as he confides in "The Fains of sleep" ( 1803 ), the "un fathomable fell within" welled up from within his uncon sciousness into terrifying dreams: But yester-night I prayed alound in anguish and in agony, Up-starting from the fiendish crowd Of shapes and thoughts that tortured me; A lurid light, a trampling throng. Sense of intolerable wrong. . .1°® Moreover, it is well known that he was bitterly humiliated and disappointed in his marital life and in his romance with Sara Hutchinson, in 1825 he composed one of his most skeptical songs on human love, Though veiled in spires of myrtle -wreath, Love is a sword which cuts its sheath, And through the clefts itself has made, We spy the flashes of the blade! But through the clefts itself has made We likewise see Love’s flashing blade, 308 By rust consumed, or snapt in twain; And only hilt and stump r e m a i n . Even as late as 1833 he declared in "Love's Apparition and Evanishment" that There is not resurrection for the Love That, nursed in tenderest care, yet fades away In the chill'd heart by gradual self-decay.1®® Consequently, one cannot be reasonably surprised ( though, of course, one cannot but be touched deeply ) to hear Col eridge occasionally express his harrowing despair -- not only by way of what Jacques Maritain calls a poem's "ex plicit intelligible sense,as in "Psyche" ( 1808 ), wherein Coleridge views mankind with utter deriliction: Ours is the reptile's lot, much toil, much blame, Manifold motions making little speed, And to deform and kill the things whereon we feed — but in what Maritain terms the very "music of the words. For in "Limbo" ( 1817 ) and in "Ne Plus Ultra" ( 1817 ) the very sounds evoke a felt idea of the void and terror of despair: in the former's grim awkward imaging of the dead who shrink in as Moles ( Nature's mute monks, live mandrakes of the ground ) Creep back from Light — then listen for its sound; — See but to dread, and dread they know not why The natural alien of their negative eye — 1*1 309 and in the latter*s disjointed, enigmatic description of the "one permitted opposite of God" who is "Condensed black ness and abysmal storm/Compacted to one sceptre/Arms the 192 Grasp enorm — However, notwithstanding the perspective of fearful defeat in Coleridge's vision of human existence, it is the perspective of hopeful possibility that is most prominent in its compass. This fact is most evident in the theologi cal insights ( in correspondence as well as in books ) that express his deepest explorations of reality: particularly the Christian mysteries of the Triune God and mankind's re demption in Christ. But it is also bodied forth in the totality of his poetic work -- not, of course, with the same measure of definition ( because of the very nature of poetry, and because most of his imaginative efforts were composed during his earlier years ), but with the evocation of felt truth -- truth experienced through darkness-light, suffering-joy -- that is peculiar to poetry. In "Love" ( 1799 ) he writes of even "fears that kindle hope."19^ In "The Visionary Hope" ( written in 1810? and published in 1817 ) he tells of "That Hope, which was his inward bliss and boast,/Which waned and died, yet ever near him stood. . m his "Epitaph" ( 1833 ) he confesses that 195 "He ask'd, and hoped, through Christ.Even when he writes of "wishing without hope"196 ( in "The Blossoming 310 of the Solitary Date-Tree," 1805 ), or that "Work without Hope draws nectar in a sieve,/And Hope without an object cannot live" ( "Work without Hope, 1825 ), the radical orientation of his poems indicates not only his fundamental optimism -- what he would prefer to call 'faith1: the faith that includes a "living hope, living in death itself! . . . Dum expiro spero" — but its more or less fulfillment. But to sdvance the conclusion -- that Coleridge's vision of reality opens on to possibilities of hopeful change — is tantamount to claiming that his outlook on existence was essentially the comic: — the vision of reality that Christopher Fry perceptively described in his well-known article ( Vogue, January, 1951 ) as "an escape, not from truth but from despair: a narrow escape into faith." And this is precisely the cumulative argument of the above pages. As with the character in Terence, nothing human was alien to Coleridge; and the entire thrust of comedy, as Northrop Frye observes, is "to include rather 198 than exclude." Then, too, Coleridge was hypersensitive to the existential absurdity that is recognised paradoxi cally from within the "perspective of infinity" -- the "irrational, the inexplicable, the surprising, the non- i OQ senaical" that Wylie Sypher sees as constitutive of the comic. And the "pure sense of life. . .developed in count less different ways," that Susanne Langer identifies as the 311 "underlying feeling of comedy,"2^0 reveals its verve, de spite repeated encroachments of death-bearing defeat, throughout the entire body of Coleridge's work. But it is above all in the religious character of his vision of real ity -- that is, in its openness to infinite, personal trans cendence — that the comic is confirmatively evidenced in his literary achievements; just as it is in Shakespeare's The Tempest, the masterpiece which proves to be a veritable imaging of the topography and dynamism of Coleridge's vision of things. For the conclusion of The Tempest is a humble re quest for grace; that of humanity, and, above all, that of God. Whereas in the Elizabethan theatre it was customary for the chief actor to drop his characterization and step forward to ask acceptance for the play, in this Shakes pearean work the actor remains the character that he im personates. So a creation of the poetic imagination steps right into mortal existence, as it were, and, with unaf fected humility, he asks his audience to pray for him. The action of the drama is thereby transcended; its full re solution lies beyond its existential aesthetic integral- ness. As Northrop Frye writes, the play's action "is not simply cyclical, but dialectical as well; the renewing power of the final action lifts us into a higher world, and separates that world from the world of the comic action 2oi itself." w For by its very nature, the comic action must 312 remain in timed space, while its impulse reaches, through hard-edged finitude, toward the new Paradise. It responds to the welcome of grace; it asks for it; it opens itself on to it. Thus, the action of The Tempest moves to the very brink of grace. Even Caliban is aware of its need, 202 and will seek it out. Human grace, ’ 'nurture,” is not 20*1 enough: "humanly speaking,” mankind must perish. "Humanly speaking,” the significance of the late Renaissance "humanitas" may be read in these words: their gentle-bitterness is the fruit of long experience, both de liriously exhilarating and crushingly disappointing. They reflect the antimony that was so deeply felt by the people of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries; the shattering divergence between man's potential greatness on the one hand, and the frailty of the moral order and the ruthlessness of history on the other -- the same awareness of the variance between human aspiration and human accom plishment that is expressed variously in Michaelangelo's Poems, Montaigne's and Bacon's respective Essays. Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, Sidney's Arcadia, da Vinci's scattered per sonal jottings, Galilio's Siderius Nuncius. and Cervantes' Don Quixote; except that in the context of Shakespeare's The Tempest ( as in Coleridge's mind ) this grande tris- tezza opens in a surge of hope onto the fullness of grace beyond spatio-temporal resources. This is not to say that 313 it rebounds off the surface of existential reality. On the contrary; this hopeful faith rises to transcendence through the wholesome earth and the hard stubbornness of fallen mankind. Thus, the Canterbury pilgrims head in the direc tion of the Sanctuary, and already they are effected by its nearness; but they have not yet arrived there, nor will they ever while still in time — while still on the open landscape of the comic. All this has profound bearing on Coleridge's vision of reality; for the fundamental vision of The Tempest is eventually the same as that shared by Coleridge, whose mind worked within a Christian humanist tradition. His recognition that "humanly speaking," man "must perish -- utterly perish," ( one of the basic themes of "Christabel") interpenetrates all his work; as does his deeply-rooted conviction of man's redemption by divine help. For example C and it is the example ), in "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" ( 1797-1798 the old sailor whose "eye is bright" with insight into the extremes of human experience, is sad with the wisdom of the clown who must perform again and again the lovely grotesque, laughful/tearful, enchant ing/terrifying condensation of the human comedy, in order that his fellowmen might confront truth and thereby re ceive a temporary foretaste of the freedom that is beyond their fallen existence. Like Prospero, he constrains his fellowmen to accompany him into an experience of the 314 twofold, damnation-salvation, perspective of human destiny; for he knows that his 'Gospel* is recreative for those who hear it. Edward E. Bostetter complains of the "eternally /b!c7 alienated Mariner alienating in his turn the Wedding- Guestbut the poem has no mention of the old man's eternal alienation. On the contrary, it tells of his re ception of communing grace ( the kairos of lines 272-291 ) and of his prophetic mission, burdensome and liberating to himself and others, in time. To be sure, in the poem's fable ( the Mariner-and-Wedding Guest encounter that frames the myth of the old man's narrative ) the Mariner detains the Guest from the feast's "merry din" and "loud uproar" --206 t > ut not from the sacramental event of the wedding ceremony itself, which has already been accomplished; nor from the "goodly company" of "Old men, and babes, and loving friends/And youths and maidens gay!" with whom he would be 207 happy to accompany to the kirk to pray. He does not con demn the Carnival of the wedding-feast; but as one who has been made prophet, he sees not only the uninhibited rejoic ing, but, beyond this, the even more wonderful 'high seriousness * and precariousness of their destiny. In The Tempest Prospero celebrates the youth's and maiden's "contract of true love"^®® with a Masque's fertility- blessing ceremony. Its harmony of light, sound, and move ment, of virginity and virility, of gentleness and strength, forms a music of all creation. But it is that of a 315 transfigured creation, of a new humanity and a transformed cosmos, and not that of present existential reality; and, accordingly, Prospero interrupts the efflorescent loveli ness of the epithalamion. Similarly, the Mariner constrains the Guest from the wedding-feast because it contains il lusion as well as truth -- and because he is conscious of the profound value of the story that he must tell his fellow-man. Like Prospero, he had learnt that it is in the atmosphere of rich silence, and not in chatter and din, that human beings grow in the possession of their individ ual reality and begin to commune through one another's opacity and inexpressibility. Besides, having seen into the fire of reality he cannot allow his neighbor to remain satisfied with what Yeats called the "patter" ( though colorful and musical ) of "an easy man's insincerity, but must, prophet-wise, communicate to his fellow-man the very "brutality, the ill-breeding, the barbarism of 210 truth," — the full truth that points back to the church and its significance, and, beyond all finitude, to the transcendent reality of a personal God. IV. Critics are practically unanimous in according "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" an eminent position in Col eridge's life and work. As representative of late nine- teenth century opinion, Leslie Stephen claims that the "germ of all Coleridge's utterances may be found -- by a 211 little ingenuity -- in the 'Ancient Mariner."' In this century, George Whalley views it as a "profound and inex haustible myth of the human tragedy" and of Coleridge's own "There is no other single poem in which we come so close to the fullness of his innermost suffering. . . . For it is not only a crystallization of his personal experience up to the time of the composition of the first version, but also an appalling prophecy fulfilled to great extent in his life and successively endorsed by his own hand as time 212 passed." Humphry House agrees with those who hold that the poem "has a very serious moral and spiritual bearing 213 on human life," and markedly so on its creator's own. Emphasizing that insofar as the poem is truly the poet's, "insofar as it ultimately expresses him, it involves his own view of the world, his own values," Robert Penn Warren, whose remarks have been among the most influential in di recting recent views of the poem, argues that it embodies 21U Coleridge's sacramental view of Creation. Most recently Richard Haven suggests that '"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" remains the central document in Coleridge. . . . the work in which he best knew himself and in which he most fully embodied those patterns of experience which dominate his work both before and after."215 Clearly, if it be true 317 that his vision of reality was radically comic, as these pages argue, then such must be evident in this unique fo cusing of his insight into reality. One of the most provocative of modem interpreta tions of the poem is that by Edward C. Bostetter in his 216 article, "The Nightmare World of The Ancient Mariner." Directed immediately against Warren's influential essay, "A Poem of pure Imagination: An Experiment in Reading," the burden of its argument is that the poem "presents it self as the parable of the man who refuses to believe in the traditional cosmos and expresses his contempt and dis belief by an act that provokes the cosmos into reaffirming 217 itself in its most outrageous and arbitrary form." The poem focuses on the Mariner's act of rebellion, his killing of the albatross, "a compulsive sin which strips away the illusion of freedom and reveals just how helpless he is"218. a "trivial act of destruction," but nonetheless "god-defying and god-attracting."2* ’ ® Following on this crucial climax, "the poem is the morbidly self-obaessed account of a man who through his act has become the center of universal attention"22® — of men, supernatural powers, and of God alike. Thus, the poem's fate-determined uni verse , the heroic stance of its protagonist and his Sisyphus-like destiny to "pass, like night, from land to land,"22* - recounting his tale to others, all together body forth what is essentially the tragic. 318 Bostetter stresses the fact that this poem is above all a thing of pure imagination, and that to impose upon it laws of the "reflective faculty," including the moral, amounts to folly.222 He complains that Mr. Warren, et hoc genus omne, tries to "impose upon the poem a rigidly loci- 223 cal religious interpretation." However, he himself ap pears to be as determined to force on it his own convic tions ( which are every bit as moral and constitute a be lief ) that castigate the "superstitious fears" and "com monplaces," -- smelling of "sweet reasonableness and re ligious authority," --of the sacramental Christian view 224 of reality. He notes that the poem "moves relentlessly toward the transformation of its action into moral state ment . "225 Marking that Coleridge stated in the Biographia Literaria that his poetic endeavors were to treat of per sons and characters supernatural, "yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure from these shadows of imagi nation that willing suspension of disbelief from the mo ment, which constitutes poetic faith,"22^ Bostetter sees the "Rime" as a projection of the poet's inward nature ( and of our's ); especially of his "fear of a universe in which he was at the mercy of arbitrary and unpredictable * forces."227 He suggests that "the clue to the significance 319 of the poem" may be contained in the subtitle, "A Poet's 22R Reverie," which Coleridge affixed to it in 1800. That is, according to Coleridge's meaning of the term 'reverie,' and as endorsed by Miss Schneider's discussion of "Kubla Khan," the "Rime" is a "waking dream in which the mind though remaining aware relaxed its monitoring and allowed the imagination to roam freely in a 'streamy' process of association."229 That the imagination moves in unique freedom in the poetic experience, and that it works freely in the process of art, holds true. But, while recognising that the imag ination as a "rationalized dream" moves to where truths are "below the Surface" of consciousness, truths "that never perhaps were attached by us consciously to our own personal Selves,"230 one must always bear in mind, as did Coleridge, that a poem is created by the whole poet, and that the de gree of aesthetic wholeness of a poem ( and, critics unani mously agree, the "Rime" is consummately whole ) reflects the degree of integral contribution between the workings of the poet's mental faculties, in effect, the "Rime" mirrors the man Coleridge in a moment when he achieved briefly an extraordinary unity of his being -- one such blinding mo ment when the extremes of darkness and light, of terror and ecstasy, of the idea and the form, the subject and the ob ject, meet and are transmuted in the heightened existence of poetic intuition. Bostetter*s statement that 320 a poem may be the expression of complex attitudes which are not necessarily consistent with the poet's formal philosophy and indeed may contradict it. The discrepancy between the way in which the poet is sometimes led by his experience, needs, and fears to look at the world, and the way in which he says or thinks he is looking at it may be great. Ordinarily the poet proceeding from the perspective of his rea soned beliefs holds the discrepancy to a minimum. . . . But occasionally a situation or symbol releases deeply felt and usually repressed attitudes which in turn shape and determine the symbolic action of the poem — 231 is true as far as it goes. But his claim that Coleridge’s conversational poems ( presumably he includes the inimit able "This Lime-tree Bower my Prison," and "Frost at Mid night" ) may be taken as poems that proceed "from the per spective of. • .reasoned beliefs" and not from within the 232 unique freedom of poetic intuition, is nothing short of nonsense, and helps his whole interpretation of the "Rime" none at all. And his contention that in the "Rime," be cause of its dramatic structure "which provided an objec tive correlative dissociated from the poet," Coleridge "felt free to indulge" some of his "deeply felt and usually repressed attitudes,"233 catmot stand when examined in its specifications. One cannot quibble with Bostetter when he says that at no time in his life was Coleridge "at ease in his in- 234 tellectual speculations." All previous chapters above demonstrate this fact. But Bostetter goes on to claim that what Coleridge "wanted to believe in and increasingly 321 devoted his intellectual energies to asserting was a uni verse of order and benevolence in which man possessed free- 235 dom of willing and action to mold his own destiny." He declares that Coleridge buttressed his belief with common places --the ( enormously incomplete and imbalanced ) "foundations of Christian faith" --of "God's love for man, bird, and beast; the preferability of spiritual love to sexual love; the happiness to be found in penance and pray er," and with the vaguely pantheistic 'One Life,1 a "bene volent harmonious universe in which Coleridge publicly pro claimed his belief throughout his life and which he made the cornerstone of his philosophical and critical 236 theories." But these statements are factually erroneous• As pointed out above in Chapter IV, by 1796 Coleridge, dis illusioned by the French Revolution and increasingly more conscious of his own interior plight, had turned from Uni- tarianism. T. Robert Barth aptly describes Coleridge's poem, "Religious Musings" ( begun in late 1794 and revised several times between then and March 1796 ) as "a kind of epitome of his religious and social thinking during the Unitarian years."237 j ^ i s Christian view of the human con dition, and, for that matter, his intuition of the 'One Life* of beings, were not quite as simplistic as Bostetter would stake them out to have been. To dismiss Coleridge's confession of his belief in the fact of Original Sin as a melodramatic utterance in one of his "wild" letters to his 322 brother George, is, to say the least, completely unwarran ted.^^® McFarland refers to his notion of this sin as be ing "without doubt, the basic and irreducible ground of Coleridge's religious sensibility"239; and Coleridge's many relevant comments give considerable weight to this view: 1 believe, and hold it as the fundamental article of Christianity, that I am a fallen creature; that 1 am of myself capable of moral evil, but not of myself capable of moral good, and that an evil ground existed in my will, previously to any given act, or assignable moment of time, in my consciousness, 1 am bom a child of wrath. This fearful mystery I pretend not to under stand. I can not even conceive the possibility of it, -- but X know that it is so. My conscience the sole fountain of certainty, commands me to believe it, and would itself be a contradiction, were it not so -- and what is real must be possible.2^ . . .a Fall in some sense, as a fact, the possibility of which cannot be understood from the nature of the will, but the reality of which is attested by exper ience and conscience.2^ • . .1 profess a deep conviction that man was and is a fallen creature, not by accidents of bodily consti tution or any other cause, which human wisdom in a course of ages might be supposed capable of removing; but as diseased in his will in that will which is the true and only strict synonyme of the word, I, or the intelligent Self.242 A fall of some sort or other — the creation, as it were, of the non-absolute — is the fundamental postu late of the moral history of Man. Without this hy pothesis, Man is unintelligible.243 This one conviction, determined, as in a mould, the form and feature of my whole system in religion and morals, and even in literature. These arguments were not suggested to me by books, but forced on me by reflection on my own being, and observations on the ways of those about me. . . • From Pascal in his clo set. • .to the poor pensive Indian that seeks the missionary in the American wilderness, the humiliated 323 self-examinant feels that there is evil in our nature as well as good; --an evil and a good, for a just analogy to which he questions all other natures in vain. Such statements are not wildly melodramatic, but long dwelt upon and deliberate. Bostetter would have done well to have pursued further his remark that in the measure that it is a Christian universe, the world of the "Rime" bears "most striking affinity” with medieval Catholicism, seven teenth century Puritanism, or the lurid Calvinism of the contemporary E v a n g e l i c a l s 2 * ^ -- with the proviso that he dwell not only on their perspectives of guilt and damna tion ( which undoubtedly influenced him deeply, as noted in Chapter III ), but, at least in the belief of medieval Christiandom, those perspectives of freedom and joy: the fact, for instance, that, in the Divine Comedy, having journeyed through the fearsome comers of hell, Dante fol lows Virgil over the hip and thigh of the giant Satan, only to suddenly find himself not going downwards, but climbing up on the other side of the world; with Satan now, not standing up, but in the very attitude in which he was hurled from heaven: We mounted up, he first, I following, till, of the lovely things that heaven bears I beheld some, through a round opening; and thence we emerged to re-behold the stars.2^ Christian belief looks to the providential benevolence of 324 God; but it also confronts the fissured, groaning thing that is the universe, and the "jarring and. . .dissonant thing" that is man.^^ It is far from being the palliative envisaged by Freud in his The Future of an Illusion. It looks not only toward the lightsome joy that erupts into reality, but into what Yeats learnt to be its bitter, raw- ish "desolation."^*4 ® In the wholeness of the "Rime" ( not, it must be underscored, in the incomplete vision of its ’myth,' the Mariner's story ) the horror that Coleridge envisions is, in fact, one dimension of the total Christ ian look at reality; for it sees and acknowledges the fact of hell. Accordingly, the Mariner's impulsive killing of the albatross is not like the proudful, posturing non serviam gesture of Stephen Daedalus when he smashes the chandelier. Rather, it is an imaging of the lack of personal density in man's everyday decision-making, which, because of his finite soul-body nature, the alien web of circumstances that always intrinsically restrict him, and his ability to enter into reality only one moment at a time, is inevitably fragmentary and superficial. And its consequences, ex tending to his companions and throughout nature ( which, as Haven repeatedly points out, contained for Coleridge re flections of the make-up and functioning of the human mind ), body forth the de facto triggering by 'trivial' acts of outcomes that shuttle through the web and woof of 325 mankind's existential condition: thereby setting in re lief the awesome potential for good or evil that is even man's 'ontological incapacity' for full freedom in spatio- temporal existence. And the "Rime's universe of energized loveliness: The upper air burst into life I And a hundred fire-flags sheen, To and fro they were hurried about! And to and fro, and in and out. The wan stars danced between.*49 Sometimes a-dropping from the sky I heard the sky-lark sing; Sometimes all little birds that are, How they seemed to fill the sea and air With their sweet j a r g o n i n g ; * 5 0 and of stagnant death: Day after day, day after day, We stuck, nor breath nor motion; The very deep did rot, 0 Christ! That ever this should be! Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs Upon the slimy sea.252 And every tongue, through utter drought, Was withered at the root; We could not speak; no more than if We had been choked with aoot — *53 is not the imaginative projection of "the Christian uni verse gone mad /Fic7\ rising up and reaffirming itself 326 in the face of the philosophical heresies he hankered aftert"254 but the universe as it is in its extremes of beauty and ugliness -- and that which Christian belief ac knowledges to be fact: fact to be eventually transfigured in Christ's final Day of Judgment, when all extremes will meet. Both Humphry House and William Walsh caution against too .facile interpreting of the poem: The poem's richness at once tempts and defeats de finiteness of interpretation; as we commit ourselves to the development of one strand we find that in the very act of doing so we are excluding something else of importance.255 But a theme can exist with different degrees of pre sence in a work of art. It can be the burning centre consuming every thing that approaches it or the dom inant form which imposes itself at every point of the poem. But it can also be present in a quieter way, operating at a greater distance from the centre. It can exist, as in The Ancient Mariner, as a deeply implicit structure, circumscribing and defining, es tablishing premises and pointing directions and show ing itself explicitly on the surface only at critical places.256 Bearing these cautionary remarks in mind, one may well agree with Haven in his suggestion that the poem's story of a voyage in time and space is, at least on one crucially important level of its meanings, a "mental, spiritual jour ney": that the poem is "the final and successful culmina tion of a series of efforts to create in a poetic object an 'objective correlative' for 'inner' phenomena which the 327 philosophy tries to account for in abstract theoretic terras"^^; and with House himself in maintaining that the poem's exploration of consciousness in its response to reality was itself "part of the experience which led Col eridge into his later theoretic statements. . ."^58 The fact of the matter is that whereas the truth about brings is demonstrable, the truth about their being must be felt truth. The 'isness* of ontological exper ience must be its own guarantee in pre-conceptual, im mediate affirmation. To know the quick of reality one must participate in it by involvement that can, at times, become a kind of intoxication. And, as twentieth-century man has come to realize more than ever, the ontological- moral experience of the dreadful ( the draining horror of the awareness that everything depends on one's conscious ness, and that one's consciousness is porous ) and the experience of the beautiful ( with its accentuation of the present tense, and its indulgence, as Alfred N. Whitehead says, in the "self-enjoyment derived from the immediacy of the show of things"259 ) both constitute the two major modes of experience that may jar free and open the human person's ontological sensitivity. As the Mariner's whole body drank in the rain (1. 304 ), so the whole human person comes to drink in reality. Furthermore, the experience of one who has been made thus transparent to irreducible reality, with 328 its soaring heights and its heaving abysses, necessarily, eludes any expression by the filtering, sterilizing tech niques of philosophical and scientific clear-and-distinct ratiocination. Thus, the insight of the "Rime" cannot be fully translated into the Gloss that Coleridge later af fixed to it. It can be shared adequately only through sym bols, which, in their peculiar radical openness, reflect the humility without which the human person is disqualified from ever experiencing the primary actuality of things. As Eliot puts it in "East Coker": The only wisdom we can hope to acquire is the wisdom of humility. . . ;260 such wisdom that opens in love to the presence of the be loved, and lives in mutual co-existence with the beloved. in "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" Coleridge bodies forth a profound poetic experience that opens onto the intuition of the need for fraced love ( agape ) in the much-maligned "moral tag" ( typical of love's trite ex pressions ) at its conclusion. Essentially, he emulates what Shakespeare does in The Tempest, using the 'white magic' of his art to rid his audience of "film of famil iarity" that blinds them to the surprise of reality ( and more so, of graced reality ) in their midst. In the comic theatrum tmindi of his play, encompassing the lyrical and the grotesque, the tragic and the ironical and satirical, 329 Shakespeare constrains his guests to look into the "dark backward and abysm of time"^®^ and seef not only the lu minous, sharp-fluid beauty of existence, but, in brutal, speeded close-ups, its stripped evil and horror: thereby penetrating down through the extremes of actuality, to bound, as William Lynch aptly expresses it, "up into insight"262 — ifito the articulation of prayerful, hopeful faith in prospero's last speech. Likewise in the "Rime" Coleridge presents, not a theory rendered in rhythm and rhyme to be speculated on, even with delight, but an experience to be contemplated and lived: an experience that was first lived by the whole Coleridge in the blinding moment of his poetic intuition that plumbed into his own personal being and in to the vast ocean of reality around him. Nor is it acci dental that both Prospero and the Mariner act but little, though both are always in the centre of the action of the respective dramas. For both, authentic poets, give them selves to the self-revelation of things, and to the ex plosive quality of being that cracks apart the superficial conventionality of existence. The consciousness of each is far more intensely involved in participative experience than is their physical activity; so that, even in midst of "blooming, buzzing confusion" they always remain, in 263 Heidigger's admirable phrase, 'shepherds of Being1. Bostetter is repelled by the poem's "grim and for bidding" universe so much so that he deems its Creator "a 330 jealous God," whose love, at best, is "the love of the benevolent despot, the paternal tyrant, the 'great Father' to whom each bends."26U nwo particular reasons evoke his repulsion and anger: the "caprice that lies at the heart" of this universe, and the impersonal, ruthless arbitrari ness of its hierarchal government.He is certain that the dice cast by Death and the Nightmare Life-in-Death are loaded, and that "the dice game makes chance the decisive 266 factor in the Mariner's punishment." But in the con text of the narrative, is not the whole account of the spectre-bark that of an hallucination or 'day-mare' exper ienced by the "weary" and "glazed"-eye seafarer in his fevered thirst? The narrative does not tell of the other two hundred men seeing the naked hulk, but only of their 267 response to his cry of "A sail! a sail!" Indeed, it should be remembered that the experiences related by the old man happen invariably while he is in a 'reverie' condi tion that balances between sleep and wakefulness. When he awakes from the sleep sent him by Mary, Queen of Heaven, he moves "light" as a "blessed ghost" through a world, like 26S that of The Tempest, made of exquisite music ; and it is during this heightened, dreamlike state that he sees the dead seamen rise and labor in ghastly quiet.269 Upon the sudden bounding of the ship he falls down "in a swound," and, before his "living life returned,"270 he overhears the two voices discussing his fate. While drifting into the 331 harbor-bay he praya: 0 let me be awake, my God! Or let me sleep alway --271 indicating again the hovering of his consciousness between sleep and wakefulness. He even refers to his awareness of the coming of "welcoming" grace ( symbolized in the tradi- 272 tional manner by a gentle breeze ) as a "dream of joy!" It is during this "spell" that he beholds the band of se- raphmen, "Each one a lovely light."273 prior to his final experiences in the Pilot's boat, he is stunned by the rumbling sound that splits the bay and smites the sky and ocean; when, "swift as dreams," he finds himself in the 27U boat. The Mariner's intense sharpness of extreme sen sation is evident throughout his experiences following on his killing of the bird: of the heavy, thick silence into which the ship first bursts, only to be "stuck" static, as 275 though it were but painted, and the living calm of the 276 harbor-bay steeped "with silent light" ; the "throats aslake, with black lips baked," and the Mariner's lips "wet" and throat "cold" and his very body drinking^^; the sun peering, with "broad and burning face," through the "rest less gossameres" of the spectre-bark's sales, or it stand- 27S ing, "No bigger than the Moon," in a hot and copper sky" ; the moon accompanied by roaring wind and pouring rain "from one black cloud," and shooting lightning "A river steep and wide"^^; Life-in-Death*a skin "white as leprosy,"280. the charmed water burning "A still and awful red," and the 281 very shadows "crimson" ; the frightful inertia of the dead bodies, each "a lifeless lump"282; and the backwards - forwards movement and sudden bounding, "like a pawing horse let go," of the ship-come-to-life288; the nauseaus rot of the deep, on whose slime "slimy things did crawl with legs,"28* * and the "heart as dry as dust,"288 and the blessed feel of dew and pleasant breeze and "leafy month of June"288 — cumulatively all,( with their intermittent coal escence, as it were, in the mutually opposite psychedelic visions of the watersnakes ) indicate an hallucinatory- like condition. And as Bostetter himself stresses in his article -- and, more importantly, as Coleridge's own per sonal notes attest times over -- the import of these re veries plumbs deep into the Mariner's past, including the immediate; and into Coleridge's own past. They focus on the awefulness of human actions, even, and peculiarly, of those that are unmotivated -- such as adumbrated in the story of the man who unknowingly, while casting aside a 28 7 date pit, put out the eye of a genii's son. In any case to return to Bostetter's anathematizing of the "loaded" dice; how can he maintain that chance governs the outcome of loaded dice? Do they not point to pre-determination/ pre-destination, touching that strain of Evangelicanism in 333 Coleridge's Christian outlook and the guilt-complex that was inbuilt into his psychic makeup? But, more fundamental to the whole context of the poem's experience, does not the dice game ( loaded or not ) shadow forth the existential fact of man's inability to foresee the repercussions that may follow on his impulsive acts? Then, too, when Bostetter complains about the manner in which the higher supernatural powers defer to the "prim itive totem force," the polar spirit, he makes no mention of the Mariner's "kind saint," or of the Mother of Christ, or of the numerous angels who do, in fact, take pity on the old man's "soul in agony.'*288 Nor docs he consider the basic Christian teaching of God's 'deference' to his crea tures as secondary causes in the unfolding of the inter woven histories of creation and redemption: a deference that reveals, not the disdain, but the respect of the Crea tor for his creatures. But the introduction of the Polar spirit carries special significance. It should be recalled that it is during his swoon that the Mariner hears of the "spirit who bideth by himself/in the land of mist and O f i Q snow" — in the region, that is, whence came the Alba tross. It is possible, of course, to view the Polar spirit and his activity as a piece of dramatic 'machinery,' rather as Shakespeare in The Tempest integrates Neo-Platonic con cepts of theurgy into his Christian world-view. But is it 33k not more likely that, since the Mariner is so profoundly obsessed with his killing of the bird, the Polar spirit em bodies his wish-fulfillment of forgiveness? For the old seafarer remains haunted by the accusa tion and curse of his shipmates, who superstitiously link ing their predicament with his killing of the albatross, held him responsible for their agony. Here in the "Rime" the 'action1 of guilt and remorse preoccupies Coleridge as it did in his attempts at drama. His fascination with the structure and functioning of the human mind, in its fully conscious, semi-conscious, and unconscious states, was con stantly shaped and textured by the form and feel of its core, the conscience; and his own, the only one accessible to him in all its delicate intimacy, was always more or less guilt-stricken. The Mariner's sense of mixed guilt and remorse For I had done a hellish thing, And it would work 'em woe.2*0 An orphan's curse would drag to hell A spirit from on high; But oh! more horrible than that Is the curse in a dead man's eye! Seven days, seven nights. I saw that curse, And yet I could not die.291 Like one, that on a lonesome road Doth walk in fear and dread, And having once turned round walks on, 335 And turns no more his head; Because he knows , a frightful f, Doth close behind him tread ■ images Coleridge's own; as do the Mariner's expressions of the nadir of despair Alone, alone, all, all alone, Alone on a wide wide sea! And never a saint took pity on My soul in agony.293 I looked to heaven, and tried to pray, But or ever a prayer had gusht, A wicked whisper came, and made My heart as dry as dust.294 I could not draw my eyes f£om theirs, Nor turn them up to pray.295 0 wedding-Guest! this soul hath been Alone on a wide wide sea: So lonely 'twas, that God himself Scarce seemed there to be --296 echoe many of Coleridge's own cries of desolation. But the Mariner's guilt/remorse does not become a thing of consuming self-hate: I mean the decrease of hope and joy, the soul in its round and round flight forming narrower circles, till at everj ^yre its wings beat against the personal * but opens onto self-integration through divine grace. The 336 Mariner is compelled, by the unremitting urgings of his prophetic vocation to tell his tale to others. And his story is not just terrifying, but beautiful, it tells not only of a fall but of a redemption: its essential message is one of hope. The world of the "Rime" is, then, not that of a self-hatred that "eddies round its favourite object, and exercises as it were a perpetual tautology of mind in thoughts and words which admit of no adequate substi tutes."2®® instead, it bodies forth the vast, open uni verse of the comic vision, with the sun daily rising from and returning into wide, distant horizons; and, too, the comic vision's instinct of such a universe laden with hid den life that is ready to burst open: that is, a universe of possible renewal and limitless potential. As William F. Lynch wisely writes: Certainly guilt cannot be denied, but it must be kept in its place. . . . Above all, it must be creative, not destructive. No man has the right, no matter how guilty, to strike at himself destructively. Real guilt should be liberating and creative; it should strive to restore things to place, to restore the good, to rejoice in the release from evil. A proper sense of guilt creates energy, restores personal relationship with man and God, gives peace. Inappropriate guilt, which is destructive and which makes matters worse than before, is not true guilt, but another form of evil.2®® Creative guilt works within the comic -- and it is this form of guilt that, all in all, the Mariner displays. Even in his "nightmare," as Bostetter tellingly calls it, the "old gt*ey-beard loon" is aware of the recreative touch of 337 divine grace: it enables him to bless the watersnakes "unaware," to pray ( even when he thinks he is not praying, as in lines 244-47 ), to be calm and to sleep, to ask the Hermit for sacramental absolution.300 And it is on the crest of the impulse of grace that he transcends the world of despair and tragedy, to turn to the kirk in the climate of everyday light; that is, to the localized concretization of the eventfulness of Christ's redemptive work. This, of course, is not to say that he turns from the 'myth* as from airy nothings of frenzied imagination; for his "nightmare" remains the thing of vital truth that Hippolyta describes in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night1s Dream: More witnesseth than fancy's images, And grows to something of great constancy. But, howsoever, strange and admirable --301 a kairos, a moment of grace, to the Mariner himself, and to the Wedding-Guest who listened to him, first nervously protesting, then "like a three years" child, ^2 aiuj then "stunned"^®^; to Coleridge himself, and to the poem's par ticipative reader. For, as Geoffrey Yarlott correctly in sists, "it is no accident thAt the 'framework' for The Ancient Mariner is provided by a wedding," with "the pre sence of the Wedding-Guest. , .a constant reminder of this basic symbol."304 Bostetter disagrees with investing these facts with any positive meaning, arguing that the Mariner "puts his tale in the place of the wedding."305 But he is 338 clearly wrong; for the old seaman restrains the Wedding Guest, not from the wedding ceremony, but from the wedding- feast that follows It. in the place of the Increasingly loud merrymaking, he puts the thing "of great constancy" that puts human love, as Warren remarks in a footnote to his article, "in the context of universal love," where in only it achieves its full meaning. In other words, he places the love of desire and of friendship, without which the human race cannot survive, in the love of agape. with out which the human race cannot attain its transcendent destiny. It is true that within the 'myth* the Hermit does not give sacramental absolution to the strange old man; and herein — as in the 'myth's* expressions of despair — the poet touches on tragedy: it carries an intimation of Col eridge's own hesitancy before the hinge, the caro-cardo. of Christ's humanness, with his subsequent emasculated notion of the Church. But this wavering is overridden beyond the 'myth* by the Mariner's advance from its strange ly heightened world into the everyday world of the Pilot and his boy and the Wedding Guest ( the Hermit, though bewild ered, senses the mystery of the Mariner; for, like the poet, he deals with mystery ); and by his confession of dependence on prayer -- like Prospero's poignant but hopeful And my ending is despair Unless I be relieved by prayer, Which pierces so, that it assaults 339 Mercy itself, and frees all faults. As you from crimes would pardoned be, Let your indulgence set me free.’®' For the comic vision, while opening onto the order of exis tence beyond time-space, never fails to turn simultaneously to the existential order beyond the art-produced world C of poem, drama, novel, etc. ): it is radically life- oriented. As bodied forth in the stuff of poetry, the comic vision always includes the cry "HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME!" that urges the constrained audience to leave the concentrated action of the art form, and to return to the 308 seeming commonplaces of their temporary "own countree, 309 where, rising again and again "the morrow mom," they must work toward full authenticity within themselves and around them. Necessarily, this work must include penance. Man's sins having been forgiven, the unwound ball of yam that is his life must still be rolled up; and God defers to man's free initiative. But within and beyond such penance, the comic vision reminds Everyman that he is truly a Wedding Guest, invited to the eternal wedding-feast that will celebrate the union of the divine Bridegroom, the Second person of the Trinity, and Humanity -- the astound ing union that true human marital love mysteriously sym bolizes : 1 charge you, daughters of Jerusalem, not to stir my love, nor rouse it, 340 until it please to awake. . . . Set me like a seal on your heart, like a seal on your arm. For love is strong as Death, jealously relentless as Sheol. The flash of it is a flash of fire, a flame of Yahweh himself. Love no flood can quench, no torrents d r o w n .310 One of the seven angels. . .came to speak to me, and said, "Gome here and I will show you the bride that the Lamb has married". . . . The Spirit and the Bride say, "Gome." Let everyone who listens answer, "Come."311 Unfortunately, Bostetter listens too much to the speaker in the Gloss. As Haven emphasizes, the Mariner- Wedding Guest encounter poses a problem "as important as the Mariner's experience itselfm312 a f i important, but within the same context of the comic vision: specifically the problem of communicating this vision through the poetic mode. There is no doubt that the Gloss contains passages of considerable insight and beauty. But it is not the thing of pure imagination. And heeding it too often in place of the poem itself, Bostetter is led ironically into imposing notions of the reflective faculty upon this "universe of pure imagination."^*-^ NOTES CHAPTER V 1. In Romanticism: Points of View, Editors Robert F. Gleckner and (herald E. Enscoe ( New Jersey, 1902 ), 177-178. 2. Cf. "Toward a Theory of Romanticism," in Romanticism: Points of View, eds. Robert F. Gleckner and Gerald E, Enscoe C Mew Jersey, 1970 ), 236. 3. The Condemned Playground ( London, 1965 ), 71-72. 4. CL, II, 731: To Thomas Poole, May 17, 1801. 5. CL, III, 491: To L. J. Morgan, May 15, 1814. 6. Cf. George Whalley, Coleridge. Sara Hutchinson and the ASRA Poems (London, 1955 ), 86f£. 7. CP, I, 419. 8. Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition ( Oxford. 1969 ) , 316.------ ---------------- 9. CL, I, 354: To Thomas Poole, October 16, 1797. 10. SC, II, 173. 11 • Ibid.. 154-55. 3.2. Ibid., 155. 13. Ibid., 150. 14. Ibid., 150; SC, I, 35. 15. The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, ed. Edmond Ruber -TMew Vork", 1963"), 277. --------- 16. Ibid., 253. 17. Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition ( Oxford, 1969 ),314. 18. The following summary of the meaning of existential 'Shipwreck1 Is taken from Karl Jasper's Philosophie ( Berlin, Springer-Verlag, 1932 ), 3 vole. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 342 CL, II, 1001. "The Christian Tragic Hero," in Moderns on Tragedy. ed, Lionel Abel ( New York, 1967 ), 41. Cf. Nathan A. Scott, Jr., "The Bins of Comedy and the Narrow Escape into Faith," The Christian Scholar. Vol. XLIV ( Spring, 1961 ), 9-3!T The Complete Poems and Plays 1909-1950 ( New York, 1945 ) ,136.------- ---------------- The Paradise Myth ( London: Oxford University Press, 1969 ), 124-47. Cf. The Frontiers of Drama ( London: Methuen and Company, Ltd., 1945 V. IS, 68. N, I, 1679. SC, II, 16 (3?). The Central Self ( London, 1968 ), 3. CP, II, 495. Cf. STC, 2; CL, I, 57-8. CP, II, 496: lines 4-7. Ibid., 498: lines 82-88. Coleridge ( London, 1953 ), 18-19. English Literature, 1789-1815 ( Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1963 ), 176. CP, II, 499: lines 117-121. Ibid., 881: lines 286-295. Ibid., 820: lines 20-25. Ibid.. 832: line 276. Ibid., 838: lines 126-133. Ibid.. 840: line 195. 343 41. Ibid. 844: lines 73, 75. 42. Ibid. 854: lines 78-82. 43. Ibid. 862: lines 111-115. 44. Ibid. 877: lines 208 -210. 45. Ibid. 856: lines 122-126. 46. Ibid. 878: lines 225-228. 47. Ibid. 855: lines 94-97. 48. Ibid. 855: lines 107-114. 49. Ibid. 874: lines 111-116. 50. Ibid. 862; lines 105-109. 51. Ibid. 883: lines 105-109. 52. Ibid. 897: lines 227-32. 53. Ibid. 928: lines 95-102. 54. Ibid. 888-89: lines 150-1 55. Ibid. 939: lines 58-61. 56. Ibid. 912: lines 328-29. 57. Ibid. 913: lines 352-53. 58. Ibid. 913: lines 379-382. 59. Ibid. 915: lines 436-37. 60. Ibid. 918: lines 23-24. 61. Ibid. 933: lines 240-43. 62. Ibid. 894: lines 348-349. 63. Ibid. 930: line 137. 64, The Byronic Haro: Types and Prototype* ( Minneapolis: University or Minnesota Press, iy&z ;. 65. Ibid.. 936: line 346. 344 66. Ibid., 923: lines 58-59. 67. N, I, 1766. 68. N, I, 223. 69. N, I, 1589. 70. Coleridge and the Abyssinian Maid ( London. 1967 ). 283ft. 71. N, I, 38, 72. N, I, 212. 73. The Road to Xanadu ( New York, 1939 ), 84. 74. CL, II, 387-78: To Thomas Poole, March 23, 1801. 75. F, I, lOn; Cf. AIDS, 235. 76. Ibid. 77. The Integrating Mind ( New York, 1962 ), 43. 78. Coleridge: The Work and the Relevance ( New York. 1867 ), 35.------- ----------------- 79. LR, 74. 80. The Tempest. Ill, ii, 133-34. 81. Ibid., II, i, 60-65. 82. Ibid., I, ii, 386-95. 83. Ibid., II, i, 50-55. 84. Ibid., II, i, 199ff. 85. Ibid., V, i, 226. 86. A Midsummer Night*s Dream, V, i, 12-13. 87. The Tempest, III, ii, 26. 88. Ibid., Ill, ii, 33. 89. F, I, 55^ 91n. 345 90. Cf. Hans L. Martensen, Jacob Boehme C New York, 1969 ), 28. 91. Cf. W. R. Inge, Christian Mysticism ( New York, 1899 )t 136. 92. IS_, 33-34. 93. Coleridge. Opium, and Kubla Khan" ( Chicago. 1953 ), 2$t>. 94. AIDS, 621. 95. LR, 307-8. 96. Notebook, 34, 13vf. 97. The integrating Mind ( New York, 1962 ), 116. 98. "The Tragic Vision: The World," in Moderns in Tragedy, ed. Lionel Abel ( Greenwich, Conn., 19g7 ), 271-95. 99. Cf. AIDS, Introduction. 100. Fear and Trembling, Translated by Walter Lcwre ( Princeton, 19^3 ), 78. 101. BLj_ II, 12. 102. CP, I, 426-27. 103. The Poetic Voices of Coleridge ( Detroit, 1963 ). 174-75.------- ---------- 104. CP, I, 376-380. 105. Ibid., 379: lines 51-54. 106. The Poetry of Experience ( London, 1957 ), 25, 107. CP, I, 429. 108. BL, II, 12; SC, I, 166. 109. CP, I, 295-98. 110. Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry ( Cleveland and kew York, 1954 >, 55-69. 346 111. L, I, 427: To Robert Smithey, August 7, 1803. 112. Life of Coleridge ( London, 1838 )f 257. 113. CL, I, 137-38: To Robert Southey, December 11, T794. 114. CL, I, 288: To Thomas Poole, December 18, 1796. 115. L, II, 987. 116. Cf. also William Walsh, Coleridge. The Work and the Relevance ( New York, 1967 ), lbff. 117. Cf, also Max Schulz, The Poetic Voices of Coleridge ( Detroit, 1963 ), CH. II, "The Farrago Voice," 11-26. 118. Letter dated May 12, 1819: CL, IV, 941-42. 119. Letter dated May 21, 1800: CL, I, 887-88. 120. CL, III, 349: To Andrew Bell, November 30, 1811. 121. N, II, 3182. 122. CP, I, 140n. 123. The Road to Xanada ( New York, 1959 ), 23. 124. N, I, 162. 125. N, I, 141. 126. N, 163. 127. Cf. "On the Essence of Laughter," in The Mirror of Art, Translated by Jonathan Mayne t London, 1955 ), 131-53. 128. Coleridge, Opium, and "Kubla Khan" ( Chicago, 1953 ), 282. 129. Ibid.. 286. 130. The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism C London, 1933 ), lm>. 131. Unpublished Fragments. 531. 347 132. CL. Ill, 355: December 15-21, 1811. 133. CP. I, 132, lines 27-34. 134. CL, II, 745-46: To Robert Southey, July 22, 1801 135. SM, xxvii. 136. TL, 391-92. 137. Ibid., I, 456. 138. Ibid., 456. 139. Ibid., 388. 140. Coleridge and Christian Doctrine ( Cambridge, flus.VTOT V,^97. ....... 141. The Phenomenon of Man, Translated by Bernard Mall ( Mew York, 1961 ). 142. Ibid., 196ff. Cf. also The Divine Milieu. (Mew York: Harper & Row, Tyfeb}. 143. TL, 403. 144. Ibid., 403. 145. Ibid., 403. 146. The Idea of Coleridge's Criticism ( Berkeley and Los"Angeles, 1962 >? 24. 147. TL, 412. 148. F, I, 466-67. 149. Cf. Teihlard de Chardin and the Mystery of Christ ( New York: Harper and Row, 1964 ), 34-66. 150. Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition ( Oxford. 1969 ), p. 151. CP, I, 315, lines 2-3. 152. Ibid., 97, lines 5-45. 153. Ibid., 98; lines 52-54. 348 154. The Poetic Voices of Coleridge ( Detroit, 1963 ), 73T” *” 155. CP, I, 100-2. 156. English Romantic Poetry C Berkeley and Los Angeles, 19b8 ), 29-30. 157. CP, I, 240-42. 158. CP, I, 178-181. 159. Method and Imagination in Coleridge's Criticism TLondon, 1967 ) ,"87. ------------------- 160. CL, IV, 641: To Daniel Stuart, May 13, 1816. 161. The Tempest. I, ii, 50. 162. CP, I, 385-86. 163. Ibid., 386-87. 164. Ibid., 387, lines 11-16. 165. Ibid., 478-81. 166. Ibid.. 480j lines 80-92. 167. The Crown of Life ( London, 1952 ), 247, 168. CP, I, II, 60-78. 169. CP, I, 213-237. 170. Ibid.. 235: lines 666-67. 171. Ibid., 217i lines 43-47. 172. ibid.. 217, lines 48-52. 173. Ibid.. 220: lines 127-28. 174. Ibid., 220: lines 129-134. 175. Ibid.. 225, lines 282-85. 176. The Tempest. I, ii, 400-1. 177. The Tempest: V, i. 213; Richard the Thirdi V. iii, 183. 349 178. Cf. "Coleridge's Conversation Poems," in English Romantic Poets: Modem Essays in CriticismT ed. H. HI AEriami T HSrVSTKT I W T , 1 W 57. --- 179. English Romantic Poetry ( Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1968 >,”307 180. CP, I, 455-56. 181. The Poetic Voices of Coleridge ( Detroit, 1963 ), 108,” lines "47:i5.---------- 182. CP, I, 264, lines 1-3. 183. Ibid., 265-66, lines 52-69. 184. Ibid., 266, lines 83-86. 185. "Coleridge on the Growth of the Mind," in the Bulletin of the John Reynolds Library C 1957 ). XXXlV, L72. 186. CP, I, 389; 14-19. 187. Ibid., I, 450-51. 188. Ibid., I, 489, lines 30-32. 189. Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry ( Cleveland and' Nw"7orE~)" , "Z11TT.------------ 190. CP, I, 412, lines 5-7. 191. CP, I, 430, lines 6-10. 192. Ibid., 431, lines 4, 6-7. 193. Ibid., 334, line 73. 194. Ibid., 416, lines 17-18. 195• Ibid., 492, line 8. 196. Ibid., 397, line 64. 197. Ibid., 447, lines 13-14. Cf. The Anatomy of Criticism < Prineton, 1957 ), 163-8b. 198. Ibid. 350 199. "The Comic Rhythm," in Comedy. Meaning and Form ( San Francisco, 1965 ), 20. 200. "The Meaning of Comedy," in Comedy, Meaning and Form C San Francisco, 1965 ), 20. 201. A Natural Perspective ( New York, 1965 ), 133. 202. The Tempest, V, i, 294-95. 203. The Tempest. VI, i, 190. 204. CP, I, 186-209. 205. "The Nightmare World of The Ancient Mariner," p.77. 206. CP, I, 187, lines 8, 591. 207. CP, I, 208, lines 601-4. 208. The Tempest, IV, i, 84. 209. On the Boiler ( Dublin, 1941 ), 14-15. 210. Unpublished letter to Ethel Mannin. 211. Hours in a Library ( London, 1892 ), III, 358. 212. "The Mariner and the Albatross," in Twentieth Century Interpretations of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," James D. Boulger C New Jersey, 1969 ) , llSff. 213. Coleridge ( London, 1953 ), 90ff, 214. "A Poem of Pure Imagination," An Experiment in Reading ( New York, 1946 ). 215. Patterns of Consci<waaass( Amherst, Mass., 1969 ), 216. " The Nightmare World of The Ancient Mariner." From Studies in Romanticism, !, 4 C Summer, 1962 ), and reprinted in ColeridgeT A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Kathleen Co bum ( New Jersey, 1967 ). The latter printing is quoted here. 217. Ibid., 76. 218. Ibid., 75. 351 219. Ibid. t 74. 220. Ibid.. 74. 221. CP, I, 208, line 586. 222. "The Nightmare World of The Ancient Mariner." P* 77. 223. Ibid., 69. 224. Ibid., 76. 225. Ibid., 77. 226. Ibid.. 77. 227. "The Nightmare World of The Ancient Mariner, p. 75 228. Ibid., 76. 229. Cf. Coleridge, Opium and "Kubla Khan" ( Chicago, 1953 ), 9o-9l. 230. Ibid., 229, 73. 231. Ibid. 232. Ibid., 72. 233. Ibid. 234. Ibid., 75. 235. Ibid. 236. Ibid., 67. 237. Coleridge and Christian Doctrine ( Cambridge, Mass., T959 TT^t . -------------- 238. "The Nighmare World of The Ancient Mariner." 75. 239. Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition. 226. 240. Coleridge's "Confessio Fidei" of 1810: LR, 16. 241. L, II, 648: May 30, 1815. 242. AIDS, 195-97. 352 243. TT, 303. 244. F, II, Appendix B., 312-14. 245. "The Nightmare World of The Ancient Mariner." 67-68, 246. The Divine Comedy, Translated by H. R. Hous (New York, lVbS), Canto XXXIV, lines 36-39, 166. 247. CP, II, 190. 248. The King of the Great Block Tower ( Dublin, 1934 ), WI 249. CP, I, 199, lines 313-17. 250. CP, I, 200, lines 358-62. 251. CP, I, 190, lines 115-18. 252. CP, I, 191, lines 123-25. 253. CP, I, 191, lines 135-38. 254. "The Nightmare World of The Ancient Mariner," 75. 255. Coleridge ( London, 1953 ), 93. 256. Coleridge: The Work and the Relevance ( New York, ) , p . 257. Patterns of Consciousness ( Amherst, Mass.. 1969 ), ir- 19. ------------- 258. Coleridge, 113. 259. Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect ( New York. 1927 V, 44.---- 260. The Complete Poems and Plays ( New York, 1934 ), * 261. The Tempest, I, ii, 50. 262. Cf. Christ and Apollo ( New York, ), 19-41. 263. Cf. F. D. Martin, 'The Aesthetic in Religious Experience," in Religious Studies ( Cambridge, Mass., October, 19bS ), IV, I, 1^24. 353 264. "The Nightmare World of The Ancient Mariner.” 71. 265. Ibid• | 0 0 • 266. Ibid• f 6 8 - 6 9 . 2 67. CP, I, 192 line 161. 268. CP. I, 2 0 0 lines 3 5 2 - 6 6 . 269. c p . I, 199- 200, lines 331 270. c p . I, 202 lines 38 9 -95. 271. CP. I, 2 0 4 lines 470.-71. 272. GP» I, 2 0 4 line 464. 273. cp» I, 2 0 5 line 495. 274. CP* I, 2 0 7 line 554. 275. c p . I, 190 line 116. 276. CP, I, 2 0 5 line 480. 277. CP, I, 198 line 304. 2 78. CP, I, 19 0 line 111. 2 79 . CP, I, 1 9 9 line 326. 2 80. c p . I, 1 9 4 line 192. 2 81. CP. I, 1 9 7 lines 2 6 9 -71. 2 8 2 . CP. I, 196 line 218. 2 83. CP. I, 2 0 1 lines 3 8 9 -90. 2 8 4 . CP. I, 1 4 1 line 125. 2 85. CP. I, 197 line 247. 286. CP, I, 20 1 line 370. 2 87. TT, H a y 31 1830. 288. CP, I. 196 line 235. 354 289. CP, I, 202, lines 402-3. 290. CP, I, 190, lines 91-92. 291. CP. I, 197, lines 257-62. 292. CP, I, 203, lines 446-51. 293. CP, I, 196, lines 232-35. 294. CP. I. 197, lines 243-47. 295. CP, I, 203, lines 440-41. 296. CP, I. 208, lines 597-600. 297. AP, 131. 298. CP, II, 1099. 299. Images of Hope: Imagination as Healer of the Mystics C Baltimore and Dublin, 1950 ), 205. 300. cp. i. 208, lines 574-77. 301. A Midsummer Night*s Dream, V, i, 25-27. 302. CP, I, 187, line 15. 303. CP, I, 209, line 622. 304. Coleridge and the Abyssinian Maid ( London, 1967 ), 155. 305. "The Nightmare World of The Ancient Mariner," 70, lOn. 306. "A Poem of Pure Imagination," An Experiement in Reading ( New York, 1946 ), 144, 136n. 307. The Tempest, Epilogue, lines 15-20. 308. CP, I, 207, line 570. 309. CP, I, 209, line 625. 310. The Song of Songs, VIII, 4-7. The Old Testament translations ( New York: 1966 ). are those of The Jerusalem Bible. The Doubleday and Company, Inc., 355 311. Revelation, XXI, 9; XXII, 17. 312. Patterns of Consciousness ( Amherst, Mass., 1969 ), 36-37. 313. "The Nightmare World of The Ancient Mariner." 77. CHAPTER VI EPILOGUE And nothing is more precious then a certain sacred weakness, and that kind of imperfection through which infinity wounds the finite. Jacques Maritain 356 CHAPTER VI Writers on the comic, such as Francis M. Cornford, Wylie Sypher, and Northrop Frye, have traced its origin to the death-and-resurrection religion rituals of the ancient Greeks.*' In profoundly symbolic ceremonies a hero-god was sacrificed with the dying of the old year ( with its ster ility, its death ), and given new birth with the emergency of the new year ( with its hopes, fertility, its promise of continued life ). The struggle between the passing and oncoming orders was typified in a contest, an agon, that culminated in the reception of new knowledge, anagnorisis. Following the slaying of the hero-god, his reincarnation was celebrated in a triumphal fertility procession or komoa, with his ’ ’ apotheosis'* surrounded by festival that moved back and forth between the cheerful and the obscene as expressions of the life-instinct. Now, perspectives of this same urge to resurrection may be seen in several dimensions of Coleridge's work -- notably, as shown above, in the ideal-real and the logic- passion 'debates' of his poetic and philosophical achieve ments; and in his steady advance in insight into the 357 358 meaning of transcendent, graced reality, as expressed in his theological writings. But these perspectives are dis- cernable above all in his growth in the Christian religion as a life. More and more Coleridge came to realize that, while man gradually fulfills himself through his articula tion in authentic words, and singularly in the words of philosophy, poetry and theology, it is above all through words that are enfleshed in and quickened by religious ritual and liturgy — pre-eminently the Christian — that man achieves his full destiny. Man must not only utter 2 words, he must actually become a "word of the Word" ; and this he is made through Christian sacramental ritual. Thereby, man is not only increasingly humanized; he is in creasingly divinized; and as Coleridge saw it, the first development is not fully possible except through the latter, for the divine Logos is the pattern of creation, and par ticularly of man. I Of course, Coleridge's progress from pistis to gnosis in matters of the Christian life was no easy matter. He was never a passive believer, not even in his early years. He would have no "tame and credulous faith." The atti tude of Sara Miles in Graham Greene's The End of the Affair: 1 believe there's a God — l believe the whole bag 359 of tricks, there1s nothing I don't believe, they could subdivide the Trinity into a dozen parts and I'd be lieve. They could dig up records that proved Christ had been invented by Pilate to get himself promoted and I'd believe just the same. I've caught belief like a disease. I've fallen into belief like I fell in love would have appalled him. Like Thomas Aquinas, Coleridge held that a faith which is not thought about is not faith. Now, his growth in the Christian life may be dis cerned in his changing attitude to the meaning of Baptism. True to character, he regarded the practice of infant bap tism with a questioning, censoring acceptance. Insisting on the essentiality of deliberation in sin, including what is termed 'original,' he concluded that to hold unbaptised infants as guilty and subject to punishment is tantamount to maintaining "a belief concerning a God, the most blas phemous and intolerable."^ For, he pointed out, not only do the "positive oft-repeated injunctions of Christ and Scripture, demanding previous faith and repentance in the subject to be baptised,"*’ and "an ordinance of admission to Christian membership, pre-requiring on the part of com petitor knowledge, repentance, and faith,contradict the implications of infant baptism; but, are not these inno cents already "de se of the kingdom of heaven?"** In point of fact, Coleridge refused to accept the traditional stand on the efficacy of the sacraments' material signs as such: 360 . . .it Is neither the outward ceremony of Baptism, under any form or circumstance, nor any other cere mony, but such a faith in Christ as tends to produce a conformity to his holy doctrines and example in heart in life. • . . Whatever else is named essential is such because, and only as far as, it is instru mental in this, or evidently implied therein.9 Although as consummate artist he played celebratingly with signs and symbols ( specifically with the densely sacra mental stuff of fresh, pregnant words ), Coleridge was strangely negative in his criticism of the sacramental in religious ritual, even to the point of harsh prejudice, as in his comments on the "superstitious" ceremonials of the Maltese Catholics10: prejudice that is not accounted for simply by his anti-Popery and contempt for the "moloch Priest" who "prefers/The prayer of hate, and bellows to the herd."11 However, as Robert Barth notes, Coleridge left the way open to "some kind of efficacy for the sacramental sign, and yet an efficacy not of its own but derived from the faith of which it is an external sign": a , r kind of sacra- 12 mental occasionalism." And so he tolerated infant bap tism as a "sacrament of conditional promise and as a means of grace, but not as a sacrament of effect, and an immediate conveyance of grace.m13 He would "not deny the possibility of the reality of the influence of the Spirit on the Soul of the Infant."11* Happily undertaking the role of god father, he admitted that none of the Church's services 361 effected him more than the baptismal ceremony. There is no doubt, therefore, that, in Coleridge's mature opinion, his own baptism in infancy was his "inauguration into the rights and duties of Immortality."^ For in this initiation rite of "the alone saving Church. . .the condition @ inceptive of Redemption,"^ the human person makes a claim to the opus perfeeturn, the finished redemptive work of Christ, and thereby opens his being to the "vital real act"^ of spiri tual incorporation into the glorified God-Man. Baptism is thus a sacrament of promise, of hope. At the very least it gives expression to one's welcome by the Church, Christ* mystical continuation, into the awful action that is at once a "redemption from spiritual death" and a "regenera tion to spiritual life"**8: the process that Coleridge ven tured to describe as a kind of "transubstantiation" into the Kyrios He boldly anticipated the studies of some of to day's most prominent theologicans ( including the notion of the 'supernatural existential' put forward by the Cath olic, Karl Rahner ), and seems to have been little con cerned with a discontinuity between the natural and the supernatural orders. He viewed the justification/sancti fication of naan by Christ as a work that involved no ele vation of his nature to a higher ontological level, but rather the restoration of his native being, as it was be fore the Fall, But he would have none of the naturalism 362 of his contemporaries. Throughout his often obscure grop- ings he emphatically refers to the ontological newness of the Christened individual's variegated potential. Unaided by Christ, man "must perish -- utterly perish."2® United with Him, such that He indwells in his innermost reality and has His Spirit work in him, a man is put in "spiritual continuum" with "a higher Nature, that is indeed above 21 Nature." He is made, in fact, a word of the Word; and his radical God-likeness is quickened and made generative. Camus' notion of becoming a saint without God would have sounded ridiculous -- though, no doubt, intriguing — to Coleridge. In agreement, then, with traditional doctrine, he stressed that the salvivic self-communication of God to man through Christ calls for one's full personal response in authentic I-Thou relationship. Faith, which subsists in the synthesis of the individual's reason and will, and thereby encompasses his entire selfhood, forms the initial "mean and condition" of his engraftment onto the mystical Christ.22 Paradoxically, in its beginning and continuance, this act/virtue is both an absolutely gratuitous gift of divine benevolence and an incoercible free movement by the human creature; just as it is at once both a "fidelity to God" and a "fidelity to our own being.Drawing from the Aiigustianian theological tradition, and from the phi losophy of Plotinus with its prodosepistrophe. emanation- 363 return concept, Coleridge saw man as made in the Divine image; but with a God-likeness that is not given to him in ready-made perfection, but rather, one that he must will and labor at indefatigably. Man must, with honest delibera tion, expand his person toward its destined wholeness by communing, through the Word-made-Flesh, his prototype, with the divine center toward which all creation and supremely mankind, converges. Now, the will is "in an especial and pre-eminent sense the spiritual part of our humanity, the synonym of the deepest meaning of the 'I1^; and within its freedom, its chief perfection, and the very climate of 26 interpersonal communion, it is the prime mover of human activity. Accordingly, its coadunation with the God- oriented reason ( its immediate source of illumination ) integrates all the constitutive elements of the human being in fealty to God. Coleridge thus envisions the harmony of all man's powers in a poised unity at the summit of his being ( what the Church Fathers called the pheuma ) when it is one with the Divine Will. Such is perfect faith. But precisely because of his created freedom, man possesses the choice of disavowing his true destiny. Col eridge's comment in another context — that , f Whatever a man's excellence is, that will be likewise his fault"^— is most relevant here; for the root of all man's greatness is his freedom, and it is from within his freedom that he 364 can sin. Willing himself apart from his Creator, the on tological focus of his creaturehood, he embraces the dark "mystery of Self-contradiction"^®: he chooses his own un freedom; A will cannot be free to choose evil — for in the very act it forfeits its freedom, and so far becomes a corrupt Nature self-enslaved. It is sufficient to say, that a will can choose evil, but in the moment of such choice, ceases to be a free will. . .29 Recoiling from the center of his being, the human person shrinks inward, seeking to find a "center of centrifuge — and thus in the Self-love, it becomes Hate and the Lust full of Hate -- and in striving to be one ( instead of stri ving after and toward the One ) it becomes the infinite many."30 it refuses to image faithfully the Absolute Will and becomes a lie. A "separated finite," it disintegrates: • . .not affirming the identity of its reality with the reality of God. . .it necessarily makes -- itselfI shall I say? or rather a self that is not God, and hence by its own act. . .alien from God. . . . What could follow but a world of contradictions, when the first self-constituting act is in its essence a con tradict ion?31 Carried to its eternal conclusion by the "false and alien- 32 ated Will," this recession from God opens onto a hell that, in its final removal from the light and warmth of the divine presence, amounts to an interminable "conscious madness."33 365 But historically — and for Coleridge history was of tremendous import — there is much more to be taken into ac- count: the towering fact that man is a creature who has actually fallen. With Pascal, Coleridge was sensitively aware that there is "much beast and some devil in man, as there is "some angel and God" in him; there is the "sense of a self-contradicting principle" in his nature, and a "disharmony in the different impulses that constitute it."3^ He would not accept the traditional teaching about Original Sin, but considered the notion a pleonism; for all sin, he argued, since it originates in the sinner’s will, must be 'original.' Nor would he attribute it to Adam, despite his role as "a representative Man virtually con taining all men — that he was not only man but Mankind.”35 Moreover, he emphasized the discord and corruption of man's being rather than man's guilt, with consequent imbalance in his general concept of the process of man’s justification by his Redeemer. But he reiterated his firm belief in the actuality of this sin, whatever be its source, "in the will of the sinner, but yet in a state or condition of the will not peculiar to the individual agent, but consnon to the 36 human race," or even in "peccant" creaturehood itself. The fact of its presence is overwhelming; for there is evil in the universe, as he images it forth in his poem "Relig ious Musings" ( 1794-96 ): 366 The lion couches; or the hyaena dips Deep in the lucid stream his bloody jaws; Or serpent plants his vast moon-glittering bulk, Caught in whose monstrous twine Behemoth yells, His bones loud-crushingI — 37 and this evil is concentrated in man; a truth that must be forthrightedly confronted if one is to remain sane. I believe most steadfastly in original Sin; that from our mothers1 wombs our understandings are darkened; and even where our understandings are in the Light, that our organisation is depraved, and our volitions imperfect; and we sometimes see the good without wishing to attain it, and oftener wish it without the energy that wills and performs --38 Coleridge was unyielding in his conviction that some sort of fall is the "fundamental postulate of the moral history of man," without which not only is man unintelligible, but "God becomes Abracadabra; a sound, nothing else"^^; even if, he conceded from humbling self-knowledge, its "fearful mys tery" remains "too profound for human insight. Beyond the existential absurdity of "Reality's dark dream,he sensed meaning that is God-hidden. How, he reasoned further, if, in order that man as creature ( that is, as a being -toward, one who radically needs ) be able to respond in faith to God, the "fundamental work of the Spirit" must first prepare him, then surely divine assistance is all the more drastically required to coadunate the "will of reason" of fallen man to the Divine Will in faith? 367 Thus: 1 not only believe, that by Faith alone can 1 be justified, and that if 1 live at all, except the life-in-death under the curse of a most holy but for me impracticable Law, it is not I, but Christ that liveth in me ( Gal. ch. ii, 11-20 ) and that this faith is not mine but of Grace -- the faith of the Son of God, who communicates it to me, and whose right eousness is the alone righteousness by which I can be saved -- and yet there must be an act of receiving on my part — but this very act is the effect of Grace — what shall I say then? Am 1 no longer responsible? God forbid! My conscience would scream a Lie in my face if I but tried to think it. No! — but that I am applying the petty Logic of Cause @ Effect, where they are inapplicable.**3 The faith and the righteousness of a Christian are both alike his, and not his -- the faith of Christ in him, the righteousness in and for him. . . . /ft isT our1s, yet God's; God1 a, yet our * s.^ Giving himself to God in a freedom that is itself a gift from God, man's fiat receives articulation from within the radiating focus of his person, it is, therefore, no mere U5 "theory, or a speculation," but a life; and one which, in eternity, burgeons ecstatically into an "intuitive Be holding of Truth in its eternal and immutable Source."1 *® And it is this life whose beginnings in Coleridge were signaled by his Baptism: an event of far-reaching significance which is ignored, curiously, by most of his biographers -- even by Lawrence Hanson in his ambitious volume on the poet-philosopher1s early years.^ But if Baptism initiated Coleridge into "the rights and duties of Immortality,"1 * 8 these privileges/obligations were to be realized by him through the mortal stuff of his 368 make-up and the long sequence of vicissitudes that comprized his time-spaced condition. He himself well knew the norm of faith to be "a total, not a partial; a continuous, not a desultory or occasional energy.But man is a patheti cally weak creature: Man is a giddy thing, and this is my conclusion.50 Rising from his deepest freedom, which is altogether beyond his comprehension, the existential act/virtue of a man's faith is shot through with the ever-threatening ambivalence of his freedom. The burden of the essential obscurity of faith ( the fact that its transcendent meanings must be translated into the infinitely inadequate, though only available, symbols formed from mundane experience, and are consequently concealed to an enormous degree in the very "translucence"5* 1 of these incarnations ) is compounded by the jeopardy posited by man's innate concupiscence: his vulerability before temptation. There is the existential 'overhang' of his belief toward unbelief; an actual simul taneity of the two, a simul fidelis et infidelis. Besides, the infused habitus of faith is not just an object that is given once-for-all by God to the individual, it depends precariously on its being continually renewed by God in absolute liberality; it is forever dependent on the divine free disposition. As Coleridge's younger contemporary, 369 Fydor Dostoevsky, learned intensely, imaging it in such characters as Ivan, Alyosha and Dmitri Karamasov, faith is present in the believer in hovering actuality. And it was conspicuously so with Coleridge. From a childhood of devout Christian practices, he grew into adulthood through a rascally sporting of "infidel vanity" and the experiencing of a "kind of religious Twilight." 52 He was affronted by "that mongrel whelp" of many guises that paraded under the name of Christianity. He often doubted: My Mind, shipwrecked by storms of doubt, now mast- less, rudderless, shattered, -- pulling in the dead swell of a dark @ windless sea.53 Though still in "heart" devoted to Christ, he gave up re cognising Him as the God-Man.^ Then groping -- never "in a strait line," as De Quincey described his walk,^5 but meanderingly, searching drunken-like into the "breadth and length and height and depth" of measureless being: sometimes with a "hollow Faith and for an ambiguous pur- 56 pose" ; frequently with a desperate anguish; and again, with steady, confident reflection — Coleridge became "more and more a religionist."^ Emphatically, at no time did he become the conformist that the term 'religionist* would suggest. Instead, he remained, not only "one of the most gifted and utterly incalculable spirits who was ever 370 58 let loose upon the planet," as John L. Stowes observes, but one such who was ever let loose in the Church. Minds of great calibre such as NewmanTs were disturbed when Col eridge "indulged in a liberty of speculation" and "advanced conclusions which were often heathen rather than Christ - 59 ian." Coleridge<would play his intellect ad libitum. But his mind, in its structure and dynamism so contemporary to the twentieth century, had its own remarkable integr'-.y. And the universe of the Church was quite spacious enough for him to go throughout its vital expanse; discovering, straying, but eventually arriving at a rich calm that is reflected, for example, in these lines of his later years and days: Yet, in the strict sense, reality is not predictable at all of aught below Heaven. 'Es enim in coelis, Pater noster qui tu vere esl1 Hooker wished to live to finish his ecclesiastical Polity: — so I own I wish life and strength has been spared to me to com plete my Philosophy. For, as God hears me, the or iginating, continuing, and sustaining wish and design in my heart were to exalt the glory of his name; and which is the same thing in other words, to promote the improvement of mankind. But visum aliter Deo, and his will be done.60 And 1 thus, on thus, on the brink of the grave, sol emnly bear witness to you, that the almighty Re deemer, most gracious in his promises to them that truly seek him, is faithful to perform what he has promised; and has reserved, under all pains and In firmities, the peace that passeth all tinderstanding, with the supporting assurance of a reconciled God, who will not withdraw His spirit from me in the con flict, and in His own time will deliver me from the evil one.61 371 In Coleridge there was not a little of the poseur, with its "manner of paying court while seeming to obtrude oneself," its self-love and pretension.**2 In 1803 Kitty Wedgwood saw through his self-masking and wrote her bro ther Tom that she had perceived in their friend "too great a parade of superior feeling," and that "an excessive good ness and sensibility is put forward, which gives an appear ance, at least, of conceit, and excites suspicion that it 63 is acting." Nor was there a lack of some fundamental warrant in Underwood's and Mackenzie's scathing retort that "there was more humbug in Coleridge than in any man that was ever heard of. . . . For S.T.C., as Max Schulz comments, Pecksniffian humility was, indeed, "second na ture. Its presence is discernible in the young poet who would "fight the bloodless fight/Of Science, Freedom, and the Truth in Christ "*>6; and still more blatantly, through probably with less responsible vanity, in the ' im- provisatore* poet and the "absolutely incorrigible"^ monologist of later years. But Virginia Woolf rightly points out that Coleridge was "a man of exaggerated self- consciousness, endowed with an astonishing power of self- analysis," a "Pecksniff who despised his own hypocrisy."**® He reproved himself: Coleridge! Coleridge! will you never learn to appropriate your conversation to your company! Is it not desecration, indelicacy, and a proof of 372 great weakness and even vanity to talk to, etc., as if /you were/ talking to Wordsworth or Sir Beaumont?69 Agnosce Teipsum. Over the years he came to know himself to an extraordinary degree; and ( not the least of his ac complishments ) he learnt to live, not only with his multi faceted genius, but with his unlovely wretchedness. in any event, though until as late as his thirties Coleridge seems to have sometimes used the Christian re ligion "to facilitate a pose or to play an intellectual game for a benefactor,"^ the fundamental sincerity of a Christian orientation within his entire life is beyond question. His insistence that man "may rather be defined a religious than a rational Creature"^ received unique confirmation in his own struggle with his spiritual destiny. It is not surprising, then, that most commentators, such as Elizabeth Winkelmann, conclude that what "in the last analysis is a purely religious motive, a longing for the supernatural, a striving to find a connection of some kind between the finite and the infinite, runs through his 72 work." Even J. H. Muirhead, for whom Coleridge's theo logical preoccupations amounted to a hindrance to his philosophical pursuits, concedes that his nature was profoundly religious not only in the Pla tonic sense of belief in the supremacy of Good as an abstract quality, nor in the Spinozistic sense of ab sorption in the vision of the wholeness of things, 373 but in the sense of longing for a personal relation with a Mind and Will as at once the source of all reality and a living presence in the soul.73 More recent summations, like those of Walter Jackson Bate and William Walsh, are in the same vein: If we wish to understand and assess Coleridge's car eer, we must do so at least partly in terms of what mattered most to him: the hope that his life, what ever its failings, might ultimately be religious in shape, intention, meaning.7^ But it is quite certain that religion was for Coler idge during the great part of his life much more than something which he found philosophically reason able and politically respectable. Coleridge was a naturally religious man. Everything he did, however fine or however gross, had a reference to what Henry James called 'an order of goodness and power greater than this world by itself can show* which we under stand as the religious spirit.*75 Far from being a flight away from reality, as H. N. Fair child c o m p l a i n s ,76 Coleridge's theological investigations were a search toward the very "ground of all being." Granted that, "groaning under a deep sense of infirmity and manifold imperfections," he felt "the want, the ne- 77 cessity, of religious support." But his concern was not merely with a "Sheet A n c h o r " 7 ** for mental-emotional weak nesses, but, primarily, with truth itself. He declared himself to be one who not only loves Truth even for itself, and when it reveals itself aloof from all interest, but who loves it with an indescribable awe. . .79 37 k Nor were his endeavors only a matter of metaphysical specu lation, as Miss Cobum intimates regarding his return to orthodox Christianity.®® Coleridge was alert to this pos sibility, to this ever imminent temptation to which he was prone to succumb. "1 have been too neglectful of practical religion," he admitted, " -- I mean, actual and stated prayer, and regular perusal of scripture as a morning and evening duty I . . .thof Christianity is my Passion, it is 81 too much my intellectual Passion." His religious prac tices assuredly left much to be desired; not least by him self. But self-scrutiny such as this cannot but have made his life more prayerful, more consciously God-toward than he credited himself with. He knew well the meaning of prayer as "faith passing into act; a union of the will and the intellect in an intellectual act. it is the whole man who prays. Less than this is wishing, or lip-work; a charm or a mummery."8^ His interest in prayer, deeming it the very highest energy that the human being can bring forth, came from his personal experience; for if ever a man at tempted prayer ( and the attempt is_ prayer ), Coleridge did, learning it intimately, sometimes even as a wrestling that made him turn cold to his soul: You have no conception of the dreadful Hell of my mind @ conscience @ body. You bid me pray. I do pray in wardly to be able to pray; but indeed to pray, to pray with the faith to which Blessing is promised, this the reward of Faith, this is the Gift of God to the Elect. 375 O if to feel how infinitely worthless I am, how poor a wretch, with just free will enough to be deserving of wrath, @ of my own contempt, @ of none to merit a mo ment's peace, can make a part of a Christian's creed; so far 1 am a Christian --®3 My main Comfort therefore consists in what the Divine call, the Faith of Adherence -- and no spiritual Effort appears to benefit me so much, as the one, earnest, importunate, @ often for hours momently repeated, Prayer: *0 believe! Lord, help ray Unbelief! Give me Faith but as a mustard Seed: @ 1 shall remove this mountain! Faith! Faith! Faith! I believe -- 0 jjive me Faith! 0 for my Redeemer's sake give me Faith in my Redeemer. ^ If at times his belief was more of a "compound of Philoso phy and Christianity,"8- * it became decreasingly so. His Christianity grew to englobe, climate-like, his philosophy, his poetry, his entire life. Like his English weather it was, in several respects, an erratic Christianity. But it was always there, giving essential form and direction to his activities; for its vital center moved from within the deep of the authentic Church Universal. Early perceptive of the vanitas vanitatum in his 86 human condition — even of the "toys" of his mental achievements -- Coleridge prized his religious beliefs as his , f wealth in poverty," his "joy in sorrow," his "peace in tulmult."8^ Not that they provided him with a defini tive resolution to the conflicts that wrenched and gangrened his life. He had to learn experientially the incomplete ness that is bound up with man's very finitude, and with the intrinsic nature of the Christian life: that man, even 376 man renewed by divine grace, is never finished. He would image this characteristic in much of his work; often, no doubt, by way of failure, but at times, splendidly, with full intellectual/poetic awareness. "He could not bear to 88 complete incompletely," his daughter Sara recalled. Thus Coleridge remained caught up in the balanced tension that structures human existence as such, and which was pro nouncedly manifest in his life: the innate imperfection that grace gradually transforms from within, even while setting in more visible relief the weaknesses that distort the individual human personality, as surely happened in Coleridge's case. II Coleridge's progressive awareness of the meaning of the Christian life is remarkably manifested in his two poems "On the Christening of a Friend's Child,"®® first published in 1797, and "My Baptismal Birthday," first published in 183**, the year of his death. Both are poor; the first exceptionally so. He himself would offer them, not as poetry, but for their thematic content. in the first, he speaks of the ability to "Forget the waste of death" because of the continuation of life in the lovely child — but of life solely of this world. Likening the daughter and her mother to a "bud, that green 377 and rude/Peep'd at the rose's side," the poet looks to the day when, "Alike in shape, place, name" to the rose, the bud will bloom "Where bloom'd its parent stud,/Another and the same'" But, not only does the verse lack the rich significance of, say, Shakespeare's use of the 'doctrine of increase' in his sonnet sequence, but it carries no mention whatsoever of the profound meaning of the occas ion of the child's Christening. The second poem contains none of the embodied exultation of Gerard Manley Hopkins' lines: Enough! the Resurrection, A heart's-clarion! Away grief's gasping joyless days, dejection. in a flash, at a trumpet crash, I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and this Jack, joke, poor potsherd, Patch, matchwood, immortal diamond, Is immortal diamond;90 instead it is tired, labored: God's child in Christ adopted, -- Christ my all, -- What that earth boasts were not lost cheaply, rather Than forfeit that blest name, by which I call The Holy One, the Almighty God, my Father? — Father.’ in Christ we live, and Christ in Thee -- Eternal Thou, and everlasting we. The heir of heaven, henceforth 1 fear not death: in Christ I live! in Christ I draw the breath Of the true life! — Let then earth, sea, and sky Make war against me! On my heart I show Their mighty master's seal. In vain they try To end my Life, that can but end its woe. -- Is that a death-bed where a Christian life? -- Yes! but not his -- 'tis Death itself there dies. 1 378 But the sincerity of this verse is obvious. They reveal his recognition of Baptism as a religious rite in which he was plunged into the paschal mystery of Christ: the advance of the God-Man in spatio-temporal, fallen existence, through his sacrificial Death-Resurrection-Ascension onto his hea venly proclamation as the glorified Kyrios. Paradoxically, it is by his sacramental union with the death of Christ, that the individual person is incorporated into the living Mystical Christ ( and through his humanity, put in union with the Trinity ): his new life begins with a real, if sacramental, death. And, again paradoxically, it is through another death, this time physical, that the Christ ian^ being-with-God-through-Christ opens onto its fullness. Coleridge, who, out of his many agonies had several times 92 cried his terror at "Night-mare Life-in-Death," at the end of his years looked forward to Life-in-death. For him, then, Baptism had come to signify a new creation, of which the creation of the cosmos out of the void at the beginning of time was the exemplar; a deliverance from destruction, symbolically anticipated by God's rainbow-signaled covenant with Noah after the Flood; a crossing through, and an escape from, a world of nightmarish desert and harrowing exposure, as typified in the past by the exodus of Israel from captiv ity; and an assumption onto a new level of eschatological being, as already symbolized by the carrying away of the prophet Elijah by the the whirlwind of the Holy Spirit — 379 all of which symbols Coleridge had played upon throughout his career. in a very real sense, then, Coleridge's whole series of undertakings may be described as efforts toward his deeper understanding of death. Most true it is, that I have looked on truth Askance @ strangely.9** Like Hamlet, the Shakespeare manque, he had looked front - ally into the meaninglessness of death. As he expresses, with quiet sadness, in "Love’s Apparition and Evanishment" ( 1834 ), there were times when, with the "eyeless face" of despair, he looked down into the "ruin'd well" of his heart, waiting vainly for the comfort of "human sound" and for the assurance that hope still lived. But, like Shakes peare himself in the fevered, "millioned accidents" of the Sonnet-sequence, he survived, having learnt that by graced love, agape -- that which feeds on death until death disa ppears : So shalt thou feed on Death that feeds on men, And Death once dead, there's no more dying then — he was able to declare, quite simply, confidently: "Death to me subscrives."9^ in death, and only in death, with its total loss of everything ephemeral, restricting, alien, and its absence of further advance into indeterminate open 360 future, he would become the whole person that he had al ways aspired to be; a being of perfect soulbody unity, and total interiority, capable of making the definite de cision of his fidelity to God with utter clarity. And in a very real sense, too, the essential rhythm of ColeridgeTs advance in insightful love toward his final ( and, paradoxically, first ) Amen, was by way of the move ment of dance; even though, at times, with not a little ungainliness: even as in a dance touch @ join @ off again, @ rejoin your partner that leads down with you the whole dance spite of these occasional off-starts, all still not merely conform to, but f of, and ) in, @ forming, the delicious harmony. . .96 Unlike, for instance, Paul Tillich's ontological notion of "the power to be" as constitutive of being over against non-beingColeridge's concept/intuition was that of love priming this power to be: that being's power against ne gation flows from a natural, ecstatic superabundance in itself, given it by its Creator who is himself Super- 98 plenitude. And whereas Tillich's response to existence was that of the tragic "courage to be," with its primacy of power over love, Coleridge's was that of the comic, joyously bouyant "love to be" — the human response to reality that, tuned to the dance of creation, makes its way to stand up eventually, beautiful before God.^^ 381 NOTES CHAPTER VI 1. Cf. Francis M. Comford, The Origin of Attic Comedy ( London, 1914 ); and Northrop Frye, "The Argument of Comedy," in English institute Essays ( New York, 1948 ). 2. Cf. J. Robert Barth, Coleridge and Christian Doctrine C Cambridge, Mass., l%9 ), I3ff. 3. Cf. AIDS, Introduction. 4. The End of the Affair ( New York, 1951 ), 98ff. 5. LR, 192. 6. NED, II, 48. 7. Ibid. 8. IR, 187. 9. AIDS, 338; Notebook 24, 51-51vff. 10. Cf. Donald Sultana, Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Malta and Italy ( Oxford, 1969 ). 11. CP, I, 116, lines 185-86. 12. Coleridge and Christian Doctrine ( Cambridge, Mass., l9«>9 ) ,172 . 13. CL, IV, 581: To Thomas A. Methuen, August 2, 1815. 14. Notebook 37, 79f. 15. L, II, 750, August 14, 1828. 16. Cf. Roberta F. Brinkley, Coleridge on the Seventeenth Century ( Durham, 1955 ), 360. 17. L, II, 710, May 25, 1820. 18. AIDS. 310-11. 19. LR, 288. 382 20. PL, 222. 21. AIDSf 300-1. 22. Cf. Ul, 424; AIDS, 152-53. 23. LR, 557, 564. 24. AIDS, 196. 25. UL, II, 335; BL, 1, 80; Notebook 26, 32-33f. 26. BL, I, 168. 27. Cf. William Walsh, Coleridge: the Work and the Rele vance I New York: 196T"TI— ------------------ 28. Notebook 26, 121f. 29. Notebook 26, 31-31vff. 30. Notebook 31, 33f. 31. Opus Maximum. MS Huntington, 39-43. 32. Notebook 54, /^L3v_7"f. 33. TT. 349, September 28, 1830. 34. F, Appendix B, 529. 35. Notebook 4, /jfJT'f. 36. LR, 67. 37. CP, I, 119, lines 272-76. 38. CL, I, 396: To George Coleridge, March 10, 1798. 39. LR, 217. 40. TT, 303. 41. CP, I, 367, line 95. 42. AIDS. 152-53. 43. TT, 169. 44. Notes on Donne: LR, 92. 383 45. AIDS, 233, 46. Notebook 25, I34vf. 47. The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Early VearaTC New York. 1962).------- ----------- 48. L, II, 750, August 14, 1828. 49. LR, 565. 50. Much Ado About Nothing, V, iv, 106-7. 51. QSM, 437-38. 52. CL, I, 123: To Robert Southey, November 3, 1794. 53. BL, I, 132-34. 54. Cf. James D. Boulger, Coleridge as Religious Thinker ( New Haven, 1961 ), 175, In. 55. The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. F. P. Howe (London and Toronto, 1930 - 34 ), XV, 113. 56. N, II, 2448. 57. CL, I, 253. 58. The Road to Xanada ( Boston and New York, 1927 ), p ' . 43ff. --------- 59. Newman, "The Prospects of the Anglican Church" C 1838 ), in his Essays Critical and Historical C London, 1897 ), 268. 60. TT, 169. 61. TT, 304: To his Godson Adam Steimetz, July 13, 1834. 62. Cf. Gabriel Marcel, Homo Viator ( Paris, 1944 ), Prolegomenes A Une-Metaphysique de L,Eaperance. 17f f. 63. Ouoted bv R. B. Litchfield in Tom Wedgood ( London. 1903 ), 139. 64. Quoted by Charles Wentworth Dilke in The Papers of a Critic ( London, 1875 ), I, 32-33. 38 4 65. The Poetic Voices of Coleridge ( Detroit, 1963 ), VST-------- --------- 66. CP, I, 108, lines 61-62. 67. Cf. Henry Crabb Robinson, Dairy Reminiscences and Correspondence, ed. Thomas Saddler ( Boston, 1671 ), 68. The Death of the Moth ( London, 1942 ), 70. 69. AP, 67. 70. Coleridge as Religions Thinker. 175n. 71. N, I, 2223. 72. Coleridge und die Kantische Philosphie ( Leipzig: Meyer and Muller, 1933 ), l2. 73. Coleridge as Philosopher ( New York, 1930 ), 35-36. 74. Coleridge ( London, 1953 ), 213. 75. Coleridge: The work and the Relevance ( New York, 1957-------- ------ ------------------------ 76. Religious Trends in English Poetry ( New York, 1949a>, 2u3-3Ii7,' *--------- 77. 1S_i 3-4. 78. Cf. Geoffrey Yarlott, Coleridge and the Abyssinian Maid. lOff. 79. IS^ 39. 80. N, II, 2445n. 81. CL, I, 407: To John P. Estlin, May 14, 1798. 82. Notebook 34, 10-12vff. g3. CL, III, 478: To Joseph Cottle, April 26, 1814. 84. CL, III, 499: To J. J. Morgan, Mary 27, 1814. 85. CL, I, 900-1000; Sir George and Lady Beaumont, 1803. 86. CL, I, 267; To Benjamin Flower, December 11, 1796. 385 87. CL, I, 235: To John Colson, September 6 , 1796. 88. Memoir and Letters of Sara Coleridge, ed. Edith Coleridge ( London, 1873 V,' I ', 193. 89. CP, I, 176. 90. The Poems of Gerard Manly Hopkins, eds, W. H. Gardner and N. H. Mackenzie ( London, 1967 ), 72-73. 91. CP, I, 490. 92. CP, I, 194, line 193. 93. Cf. J. Robert Barth, Coleridge and Christian Doctrine ( Cambridge, Mass., 1964 ), 186-95. 94. Cf. N, I, 215. 95. Sonnets, 146, lines 13-14; 107, line 10. 96. AP, 118; N, II, 2396; PL, 168. 97. The Courage to Be ( New Haven, 1954 ), 190ff. 98. Frederick D. Wilhelmsen, The Metaphysics of Love ( New York, 1962 ), 97-155. 99. N, I, 265. Books. INDEX AP Snimae Poetae; From the Unpublished Note-books of Samuel Taylor Coleridge^ Edited by Ernest ilartley Coleridge. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1895. BL ETographia Literaria. Edited by J. Shawcross, 2 vols, London: 5xford University Press, 1958, LL Coleridge on Logic and Learning; With Selections from the Unpublished Manuscripts. Edited by Alice D. Snyder. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1929. MC Coleridge*s Miscellaneous Criticism. Edited by Thomas Middleton Raysor. Cambridge: ’ Harvard University Press, 1936. CSC Coleridge on the Seventeenth Century. Edited by Roberta F. Brinkley. Durham, toorth Carolina: Duke Univer sity Press, 1955. SC Coleridges Shakespearean Criticism. Edited by Thomas Middleton Raysor. 2 vols. London: Constable and Company, 1930. CL Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Edited by Earl Leslie Griggs, 4 of 6 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956-59. CP Ceinplete poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Edited by Ernest Hartley Coleridge, 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912. CW TKe Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, with an introductory Essay upon his Philosophical ana Theo logical Opinions. Edited by w.G.T. Shedd. 7 vols. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1854. 386 387 AIDS Vol. I.: Aids to Reflection SM SFatesman's Mannai Appendix C : TL TTTeory of Life Vol. II. Vol. III. The Friend» 2 vols. The edition edited by J. Shawcross is used in this study. Biographia Literaria. Vol. IV.: NLS Lectures upon Shakespeare and Other Dramatists. Vol. V.: LR THe Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Vol. VI.: PCS On the Constitution of the Church and State. LS jT"Lay Sermon. TT Table Talk. Vol. VII.: Poetic and Dramatic Works. CIS Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit. Edited by H. St. Hart. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957. F. The Friend. Edited by Barbara E. Rooke* 2 vols. ( Bol* 1ingen Series LXXV ), New Jersey: Princeton Univer sity Press, 1969. 388 IS Inquiring Spirit;A New Presentation of Coleridge from His ‘ Published and t)nprlnt ed Prose Writings. Edited by Kathleen Coburn. London: Rout:ledge and Kegan Paul, 1951. LNS Lectures and Notes on Shakespeare and Other English Poets. Edited by I. Ashe. London: George Bell and Sons, 1890. NED Notes on English Divines. Edited by Derwent Coleridge. 2 vols. ( London, 1853 ). N The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Edited by Kathleen Coburn. 3 o£ 6 vols. ( Bollingen Series L ), New York: Pantheon Books, 1957-61* NT PM Notes, Theological. Political, and Miscellaneous. Edited by Derwent Coleridge. London, 11353. PL The Philosophical Lectures of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Hitherto Unpublished" Edited by Kathleen < 5 oburn. Hew York: Philosophical Library, 1949. TT The Table Talk and Omniana of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Edited by T. Ashe. London: fteorgeBell and Sons, 1888. UL Unpublished Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, includ ing Certain Letters Republished from Original Sources, fidIted by Earl Leslie Griggs, 2 vols. BIBLIOGRAPHY A. PRIMARY SOURCES Books. Animae Poetae: From the Unpublished Note-books of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Edited by Ernest Hart ley Coleridge. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1895. Biographia Literaria. Edited by J. Shawcross, 2 vols. London: Oxford University Press, 1958. Coleridge on Logic and Learning: With Selections from theUnpubllsned Manuscripts. Edited by Alice D. Snyder. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1929. Coleridgefs Miscellaneous Criticism. Edited by Thomas MiddletonRaysor. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936. Coleridge on the Seventeenth Century. Edited by koberta F. Brinkley. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1955. Coleridge’s Shakespearean Criticism. Edited by Thomas Middleton Raysor. 2 vols. London: Constable and Company, 1930. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Edited Earl Leslie Griggs, 4 of 6 vols, Oxford: Claren don Press, 1956-59. Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Edited”by Ernest Hartley Coleridge, 2 vols. oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912. The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, with an introductory Essay upon his frKllosophical and Theological opinionsT Edited by W.G.t. Shedd. 7 volsT itew York: Harper & Brothers, 1854. Vol. I.: Aids to Reflection Statesman's Manual 389 Appendix C Vol. II Vol. Ill Vol. IV Vol. V: Vol. VI; Vol. VII Theory of Life The Friend. Biographia Literaria. Lectures upon Shakespeare and Other Dramatists^ The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. On the Constitution of the Church and State. A Lay Sermon. Table Talk. Poem and Dramatic Works. Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit. Edited by H. St. Hart. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957. The Friend. Edited by Barbara E. Rooke. 2 vols. ( Bol- 1ingen Series LXXV )f New Jersey: Princeton Uni versity Press, 1969. Inaw fu§? Spirit: A New Presentation of Coleridge from [is Published and Unprinted Prose Writings. Edited by Kathleen Coburn. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951. Lectures and Notes on Shakespeare and Other English Poets. Edited by T. Ashe. London: George Bell and Sons, 1690. Notes on English Divines. Edited by Derwent Coleridge. 2 vols. ( London, IB53 ). The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Edited by Kathleen Cobum. 3 of 6 vols• ( Bo 11 ingen Series L )f New York: Pantheon Books, 1957-61. 390 Notes, Theological. Political. and Miscellaneous. Edited by Derwent Coleridge. London: 1853. The Philosophical Lectures of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Hitherto Unpublished" Edited by fCathleen Coburn. New York: Philosophical Library, 1949. The Table Talk and Omniana of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Edited by T. Ashe. London: George Bell and Sons• 1888. Unpublished Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Includ- ing Certain Letters Republished from Original Sources'! fedited by Earl Leslie Griggs, 5 vols. 391 BIBLIOGRAPHY B. SECONDARY SOURCES I• Books Abrams, Meyer H. The Mirror and the Lamp. New York: Oxford University Press, 1953, English Romantic Poets: Modern Essays in Criticism, taew York: Oxford university Press. r m t.------ Adair, Patricia M. The Waking Dream. New York: Barnes and Noble, Inc., 19bS. Appleyard. J.A. Coleridgefs Philosophy of Literature. Cambridge, Mass,: Harvard University, 1965. Armour, Richard W. and Howes, Raymond F. Coleridge the Talker. Ithaca, New York: Cornell Univer sity H ’ ress, 1940. Baker, James Volant. Sacred River; .Coleridgefs Theory of Imagination. Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 1957. Ball, Patricia M. The Central Self: A Study in Ro- mantic and Victorian Imagination. University of London: The Athlone Press, 1968. Barth, J. Robert, S.J. Coleridge and Christian Doc trine. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969. Bate, Walter Jackson. Coleridge. New York: The Macmillan Company, l96?T. From Classic to Romantic: Premises of pS'te Tn Eighteenth tientury Engl and J New York: Harper and Srottiers C Harper Torchbacks ), 1946. Beer, J. B. Coleridge the Visionary. London: Chatto and Windus, 19597 Beyer, Werner W. The Enchanted Forest. New York: Barnes and Noble, Inc., l%3. 392 393 Bodkin, M. Archetypal Patterns in Poetry. London: Oxford University Press-, L93t*. Boulger, James D. Coleridge as Religious Thinker. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961. Brooks, Cleanth. The We11-Wrought Urn. New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1947. Burke, Kenneth. The Philosophy of Literary Form. Second Editioru Baton Rouge, La.: Louislana State University Press, 1967. ______. Language as Symbolic Action. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968. Calleo, David P. Coleridge and the Idea of the Modern State. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1966. Campbell, James Dykes. 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