Coleridge- Darker Reflections

by Richard Holmes

  *These ideas of memory and repetition ultimately go back to Plato’s belief that all knowledge is a form of rediscovery. In a philosophical (Kantian) sense, Coleridge believed that all perceptions were a combination of immediate sense-impressions, a priori mental forms (such as space, time, causality) and memory (“associations”). But in an emotional sense he believed that the perception of our most intense relationships could be cyclical, and symbols of some deeper unity of desire, revealed by such phenomena as “déja-vu” and the mysteriously repeated imagery of dreams. The belief can be found frequently among Romantic writers, perhaps in its most intense form in the work of Gérard de Nerval, whose wandering life and worship of the imaginary “Aurelia” has many parallels with Coleridge’s experiences. (See Richard Holmes, “Dreams”, in Footsteps, 1985.)

  *Coleridge saw this power of displacement of the self into the other, of self-projection or self-metamorphosis, as central to the workings of the Imagination. He had already described it in a wonderful letter from Greta Hall in July 1802, which he may well have recalled in this public lecture. “It is easy to cloathe Imaginary Beings with our own Thoughts & Feelings; but to send ourselves out of ourselves, to think ourselves in to the Thoughts and Feelings of Beings in circumstances wholly 8c strangely different from our own: hoc labor, hoc opus: and who has achieved it? Perhaps only Shakespeare…A great Poet must be, implicite if not explicite, a profound Metaphysician. He may not have it in logical coherence, in his Brain & Tongue; but he must have it by Tact: for all sounds, & forms of human nature he must have the Ear of a wild Arab listening in 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.” (Letters, II, p.810; and discussed in Early Visions, pp. 324–7.)

  *Coleridge originally applied this to his own presentation of “characters supernatural, or at least romantic” in the Lyrical Ballads. ”…So as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith.” (See the general discussion in Biographia, Chapter 14.) But seized upon by Keats in his Letters as “Negative Capability”, and by Shelley in The Defence of Poetry (1821), it gradually emerged as perhaps the single, most influential phrase and critical concept that Coleridge ever produced. (See I.A. Richards, Coleridge on Imagination, 1934.) In one week in 1997 I recorded seven separate uses of the phrase in newspaper articles and radio programmes variously describing films, books, drama, and scientific theories (though, characteristically, none credited it to Coleridge). Part of its power lies in its memorable description of imaginative receptivity, a hospitable freedom or playfulness of mind, rather than a fixed and perhaps premature intellectual judgement.

  *Coleridge inspired Davy to write one of his best poems at this time, which connects science and Poetry as methods of investigating the eternal laws of the universe.

  All speaks of change: the renovated forms

  Of long-forgotten things arise again;

  The light of suns, the breath of angry storms,

  The everlasting motions of the main.

  These are but engines of the Eternal will…

  Without whose power, the whole of mortal things

  Were dull, inert, an unharmonious band,

  Silent as are the Harp’s untuned strings

  Without the touches of the Poet’s hand.

  (See David Knight: Humphry Davy: Science and Power, 1992, p. 69.) The Royal Institution took some seventy years to recover from Coleridge’s appearance, but then began commissioning lectures in his honour, among which have been those by Leslie Stephen, “Coleridge” (1879); Kathleen Coburn, “Coleridge: A Bridge between Science and Poetry” (1973); and Richard Holmes, “The Coleridge Experiment” (1996), all published in The Proceedings of the Royal Institution of Great Britain. For the fascinating links between Romantic science and poetry, see Trevor H. Levere, Poetry Realized in Nature: Coleridge and Early Nineteenth-Century Science, 1981.

  *Wordsworth’s fear of Coleridge’s “monsters” is highly suggestive of their relationship at this time. Monsters and “daemonic” eruptions (often with sexual significance) are also an important and connected presence in Coleridge’s poetry, both in the early ballads and the later poems of self-analysis, and Keats would record them as one of the characteristic topics of his conversation in 1819. See Ted Hughes’s fine speculative essay, “The Snake in the Oak”, in Winter Pollen (1994).

  *It has been suggested that nearly a fifth of Coleridge’s original subscribers were Quakers, many of them gathered by Thomas Clarkson. See Deirdre Coleman, Coleridge and The Friend, 1988. But there is a more general problem of identifying Coleridge’s readership, because in a sense he was trying to create what did not yet exist, a cross-party and inter-denominational “intelligenstia”. This challenge of creating an appropriate audience, and finding a prose style to engage them, affects much of his later work. (See Marilyn Butler, “The Rise of the Man of Letters: Coleridge”, in Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries, 1981.)

  *This combination of projected and reflected perceptions is characteristic of Coleridge’s poetic and psychological approach to more general problems of Romantic epistemology. This whole passage could be seen as a demonstration of the Kantian concept of the “subjective” imposing itself on the “objective” view of reality. See Roger Scruton, Kant, 1985; or for that matter Jostein Gaarder’s Sophie’s World, 1995, pp. 268–79, which uses a very similar illustration. M.H. Abrams has examined the more literary implications of the Romantic doctrine of “vision” in a classic study, The Mirror and the Lamp, 1953. But the example of Luther also raises the issue of the moral ambiguity of Imagination: could it be demonic and dangerous under certain conditions? How far can it, or ought it to be, subjected to the Will?

  *The image of the shipwreck, a development of the Ancient Mariner’s experience and John Wordsworth’s tragic fate, was of cardinal importance to Coleridge and feeds into a rich 19th century tradition of such metaphysical disasters, from Gericault’s painting “The Raft of the Medusa” (1819) to Rimbaud’s poem “Le Bateau Ivre” (1871). For the image of the fateful sea-voyage, see also Early Visions, pp. 173–4.

  *The notion that certain kinds of knowledge can only be gained by a slow transitional passage through mystery and doubt, as opposed to a rapid logical unfolding, was one of Coleridge’s most suggestive ideas for his later Victorian readers. “For how can we gather strength but by exercise? How can a truth, new to us, be made our own without examination and self-questioning – any new truth, I mean, that relates to the properties of the mind, and its various faculties and affections! But whatever demands effort, requires time. Ignorance seldom vaults into knowledge, but passes into it through an intermediate state of obscurity, even as Night into Day through Twilight.” (Footnote to the 1812 edition, in The Friend, II, p.81.) A similar idea is pursued in Cardinal Newman’s An Essay in Aid of A Grammar of Assent, 1870.

  *It was Montaigne who first observed that sleeping dogs and cats made eye and body movements that indicated the existence of a dream world in all higher animals. (Essays, 1595, Book One, No. 21, “On the Power of the Imagination”.) But neither the work of Freud (On the Interpretation of Dreams, 1900), nor modern Consciousness Theory – with its analogies from computer processes – have yet produced a satisfactory explanation of the mechanism and function of dreams, of the kind that Coleridge thought desirable. (See Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained, 1992.) Coleridge suggested, before Freud, that a certain universal symbolic language might be employed in the “Night World”; and speculated that there were several levels of human dreaming. (See Notebooks III, 4409, “The Language of Dreams”.) Though sadly he never produced the systematic treatise “On Dreams, Visions, Ghosts, Witchcraft” promised in The Friend (II, p. 117), my narrative shows him recording and carefully classifying various “genera
and species” of them: “nightmares” characterized by a continually frustrated sense of rational control; half-conscious “reveries”; dreams produced by physiological impulses in the body; dreams connected with forms of “passive” memory-association; dreams actively directed by a “dramatizing” and creative power apparently still awake in the mind; and dreams entering a deeper and more mysterious world of “divination”. (See The Statesman’s Manual, 1816, Appendix C; and Table Talk 1 pp. 52–4.) Opium-dreams, or dreams in general, were analogies of the creative act whenever the poet was writing freely from his inspiration. Thus, in a marginal note on the theologian Eichhorn, Coleridge insisted on the “inspired character” of the Book of Ezekiel, “from the analogy of Dreams during an excited state of Nerves, which I myself have experienced, and the wonderful intricacy, and yet clarity of the visual Objects”. (Marginalia, 3, p. 38.) For a general discussion see my “Preface to the Visionary Fragments” in Selected Poems, 1996; and Patricia Adair, The Waking Dream: A Study of Coleridge’s Poetry, 1967.

  *Coleridge’s hopes and fears about the political developments in American society are similar to the later views of Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America (1835). Though Tocqueville saw America as the great world-cradle of liberalism, like Coleridge he feared the possible “tyranny” and “apathy” of an uneducated majority. “If ever freedom is lost in America, that will be due to the omnipotence of the majority driving the minorities to desperation and forcing them to appeal to physical force.” (Book I, Part II, Chapter 7.) Here again Coleridge makes early reference to his notion of an “intelligenstia”, a “National clerisy” or thinking class of educated men from many backgrounds, who would be capable of guiding and mediating the various forces and special-interests that drove social change. (See Henry Coleridge, Preface (1839) to Coleridge’s Church and State, 1829, Appendix A.)

  *This would have been virtually a complete set of lecture transcripts for the first and only time in Coleridge’s life, except for a later fatality, when his grandson, the meticulous and faithful editor Ernest Hartley Coleridge, somehow lost the Tomalin copies on the Great Western Railway during a train journey from Torquay, consigning them to the limbo of British Rail Lost Property where they were eventually joined by the first manuscript of T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, lost on the South Eastern Line. One wonders what Lady Bracknell would have said about these derelictions, and how much Coleridge would have enjoyed Wilde’s sense of perfect fatality.

  *There is always more to be said on this subject (see Early Visions, pp. 231–2; pp. 334–5), but it needs most of all a sense of perspective. In an age much concerned with “the originality” of genius, there were many disputes about plagiarism, most of which have now been forgotten. Chatterton was accused of plagiarising the medieval Rowley (though he invented him); Walter Scott was accused of plagiarising Coleridge in his ballads; Wordsworth of plagiarizing Walter Savage Landor in a poem; even Byron of plagiarizing Coleridge in “The Maid of Corinth” (rather exquisitely, he made the accusation himself).

  But Coleridge was a special case. It is perfectly clear that between 1811 and 1816 he incorporated dozens of unacknowledged passages from German authors, either literally translated or freely adapted, in his lectures and published works. The most significant of these are A. W. Schlegel in the Shakespeare Lectures, Kant in “An Essay on Genial Criticism” (1814), and Schelling and Maass in the Biographia Literaria (1817). His contemporaries were aware of this, and there are published comments by Crabb Robinson, Hazlitt, Wordsworth, De Quincey (“Coleridge”, Tait’s Magazine, 1835), and J. F. Ferrier (“The Plagiarisms of S. T. Coleridge”, Blackwood’s Magazine, 1840); as well as a detailed record and defence of his borrowings in the edition published by his faithful daughter Sara Coleridge (1847).

  But for nearly a hundred years academic criticism ignored the problem, or sidelined it, until two notably damning studies: René Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism (volume 2, 1955); and Norman Fruman, Coleridge, the Damaged Archangel (1971). The pendulum then swung the other way, and for some twenty years it became customary to treat much of Coleridge’s critical prose (as well as some of the minor poetry) as a tissue of plagiarisms: exactly what Coleridge had most feared. However, some balanced view has now emerged among scholars, championed by Thomas McFarland in Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (1969), and lucidly confirmed by Rosemary Ashton in Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Critical Biography (1996). With the publication of Coleridge’s Notebooks for this period (notably volume 3, 1973); a new edition of the Biographia (2 vols, 1983); and a much more detailed record of the Literary Lectures (2 vols, 1987) it has become clear that the issue is extremely subtle.

  Coleridge undoubtedly stole from the German writers, and lied about doing so. For a man of such originality and intellectual brilliance this is itself an acute problem in psychological terms, obviously connected with the mendacious habits of his drug-addiction, his astonishing lack of self-worth, and the moral humiliations of his private life – not least in the relationship with the Wordsworth circle. This is an area in which biography can, I hope, throw some sympathetic light into the lonely darkness of his solitary study and the endless, sometimes desperate, “night-conversations” with his fellow authors.

  But from a historical viewpoint, the process is challenging and significant in a quite different way. Coleridge championed the new German criticism and idealist philosophy, adapted it and developed it in an English context, and successfully made it part of the Romantic movement. His intellectual heirs are De Quincey, Thomas Carlyle, J. S. Mill, and Matthew Arnold. It is impossible to imagine a modern view of literary form, creativity and the unconscious, or poetry itself, without Coleridge. Many of the specific concepts he was supposed to have plagiarized – such as the notion of “organic form”, the attack on the “dramatic unities”, the “fusing” power of the imagination, the role of the dream and the symbol – have a long and complex intellectual history in 18th century criticism, German, French and English. As in the physical sciences (with concepts like Evolution, Magnetism or Polarity, all of great interest to Coleridge) one can say they were afloat in the Zeitgeist throughout Europe. But time and time again it is Coleridge who formulates them most subtly and most memorably in his generation.

  Where he stole – and one repeats, he did steal – he also transformed, clarified and made resonant. He brought ideas to life in a unique way. Moreover, far more than any of his German sources, he always wrote as a poet. His exquisite sensitivity to language, his psychological acuity, his metaphors and extended images of explanation (as well as his sudden asides) have no equivalent in his German sources, not even in Schlegel. It is this aspect of his work that has proved most enduring, as we shall see. To sum up: one can say that Coleridge plagiarized, but that no one plagiarized like Coleridge.

  *Many other British poets would make the attempt in Coleridge’s lifetime – Wordsworth in The Borderers (1797), Byron in Manfred (1817) and Sardanapalus (1821), Shelley in The Cenci (1819), Keats in Otho the Great (1819) – but none of them reached the commercial stage. It says much about contemporary taste that the most successful of “literary” adaptations in the West End was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in 1823. It is one of the enigmas of cultural history that it was the French Romantic poets – Hugo, Alfred de Vigny, Alfred de Musset – who succeeded in taking the popular stage by storm. (See for example Graham Robb’s wonderfully melodramatic Victor Hugo, 1997.)

  *Alhadra’s dreamy landscape descriptions, and their connections with the writing of “Kubla Khan”, are examined in Early Visions, pp. 162–3.

  *Modern medical opinion holds that an addict may tolerate some 5 grams of morphine a day, before overdose and death; but it is difficult to establish the equivalent in the unregulated concentrations of nineteenth-century pharmacists’ opium. Depending on its composition, a pint of laudanum might contain 3 grams of morphine, but Cottle claimed Coleridge had been consuming 2 pints per day (6 grams) at this time. (Early Recollections,
1837, 2, p. 169.) Opium was also measured in “grains”, and “drops”. One grain equals approximately 25 drops, or half a teaspoonful. A medical analgesic dose, used like aspirin, was one or two grains (a teaspoonful) every six hours. Coleridge claimed to have reduced his dose to this level (8 grains per day) under Dr Daniel in April 1814, but it is very doubtful if he sustained this for any length of time. Violent, uncontrolled fluctuations in dose-levels are characteristic of the unsupervised addict, depending on health, mood, social demands – and, of course, money. Coleridge’s experience was probably like De Quincey’s, who records that in 1816 his own dose sometimes rose as high as “8,000 drops” (320 grains) per day, and sometimes dropped as low as “160 drops” (6 grains). Such a regime, wrote De Quincey, “defeats the steady habit of exertion; but creates spasms of irregular exertion. It ruins the natural power of life; but it develops preternatural paroxyms of intermitting power.” (De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater, 1822; see also his article “Coleridge and Opium-Eating”, Blackwood’s Magazine, January 1845.) Various assessments are given in Alethea Hayter (op. cit., 1968); Molly Lefebure, Coleridge: A Bondage of Opium, 1974; and Stephen Weissman, Coleridge, 1989, “Appendix on Opium”. Until proper research began in the 1820s (notably by German chemists) the only contemporary study of the drug and its effects was Samuel Crumpe, An Inquiry into the Nature and Use of Opium, 1793. The supply of opium only began to be regulated with the foundation of the Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain in 1841, and the first Pharmacy and Poisons Acts of 1868.