[65] FORMS of intellectual and spiritual culture sometimes exercise
their subtlest and most artful charm when life is already passing from
them. Searching and irresistible as are the changes of the human spirit
on its way to perfection, there is yet so much elasticity of temper
that what must pass away sooner or later is not disengaged all at once,
even from the highest order of minds. Nature, which by one law of
development evolves ideas, hypotheses, modes of inward life, and
represses them in turn, has in this way provided that the earlier
growth should propel its fibres into the later, and so transmit the
whole of its forces in an unbroken continuity of life. Then comes the
spectacle of the reserve of the elder generation exquisitely refined by
the antagonism of the new. That current of new life chastens them
while they contend against it. Weaker minds fail to perceive the
change: the clearest minds abandon themselves to it. To [66] feel the
change everywhere, yet not abandon oneself to it, is a situation of
difficulty and contention. Communicating, in this way, to the passing
stage of culture, the charm of what is chastened, high-strung,
athletic, they yet detach the highest minds from the past, by pressing
home its difficulties and finally proving it impossible. Such has been
the charm of many leaders of lost causes in philosophy and in religion.
It is the special charm of Coleridge, in connexion with those older
methods of philosophic inquiry, over which the empirical philosophy of
our day has triumphed.
Modern thought is distinguished from ancient by its cultivation of the
"relative" spirit in place of the "absolute." Ancient philosophy
sought to arrest every object in an eternal outline, to fix thought in
a necessary formula, and the varieties of life in a classification by
"kinds," or genera. To the modern spirit nothing is, or can be rightly
known, except relatively and under conditions. The philosophical
conception of the relative has been developed in modern times through
the influence of the sciences of observation. Those sciences reveal
types of life evanescing into each other by inexpressible refinements
of change. Things pass into their opposites by accumulation of
undefinable quantities. The growth of those sciences consists in a
continual analysis of facts of rough and general observation into
groups of facts more precise and minute.
[67] The faculty for truth is recognised as a power of distinguishing
and fixing delicate and fugitive detail. The moral world is ever in
contact with the physical, and the relative spirit has invaded moral
philosophy from the ground of the inductive sciences. There it has
started a new analysis of the relations of body and mind, good and
evil, freedom and necessity. Hard and abstract moralities are yielding
to a more exact estimate of the subtlety and complexity of our life.
Always, as an organism increases in perfection, the conditions of its
life become more complex. Man is the most complex of the products of
nature. Character merges into temperament: the nervous system refines
itself into intellect. Man's physical organism is played upon not only
by the physical conditions about it, but by remote laws of inheritance,
the vibration of long-past acts reaching him in the midst of the new
order of things in which he lives. When we have estimated these
conditions he is still not yet simple and isolated; for the mind of the
race, the character of the age, sway him this way or that through the
medium of language and current ideas. It seems as if the most opposite
statements about him were alike true: he is so receptive, all the
influences of nature and of society ceaselessly playing upon him, so
that every hour in his life is unique, changed altogether by a stray
word, or glance, or touch. It is the truth of these relations that
experience [68] gives us, not the truth of eternal outlines ascertained
once for all, but a world of fine gradations and subtly linked
conditions, shifting intricately as we ourselves change--and bids us,
by a constant clearing of the organs of observation and perfecting of
analysis, to make what we can of these. To the intellect, the critical
spirit, just these subtleties of effect are more precious than anything
else. What is lost in precision of form is gained in intricacy of
expression. It is no vague scholastic abstraction that will satisfy
the speculative instinct in our modern minds. Who would change the
colour or curve of a rose-leaf for that ousia akhrômatos,
askhêmatistos, anaphês+--that colourless, formless, intangible,
being--Plato put so high? For the true illustration of the speculative
temper is not the Hindoo mystic, lost to sense, understanding,
individuality, but one such as Goethe, to whom every moment of life
brought its contribution of experimental, individual knowledge; by whom
no touch of the world of form, colour, and passion was disregarded.
Now the literary life of Coleridge was a disinterested struggle against
the relative spirit. With a strong native bent towards the tracking of
all questions, critical or practical, to first principles, he is ever
restlessly scheming to "apprehend the absolute," to affirm it
effectively, to get it acknowledged. It was an effort, surely, an
effort of sickly thought, that saddened his [69] mind, and limited the
operation of his unique poetic gift.
So what the reader of our own generation will least find in Coleridge's
prose writings is the excitement of the literary sense. And yet, in
those grey volumes, we have the larger part of the production of one
who made way ever by a charm, the charm of voice, of aspect, of
language, above all by the intellectual charm of new, moving, luminous
ideas. Perhaps the chief offence in Coleridge is an excess of
seriousness, a seriousness arising not from any moral principle, but
from a misconception of the perfect manner. There is a certain shade
of unconcern, the perfect manner of the eighteenth century, which may
be thought to mark complete culture in the handling of abstract
questions. The humanist, the possessor of that complete culture, does
not "weep" over the failure of "a theory of the quantification of the
predicate," nor "shriek" over the fall of a philosophical formula. A
kind of humour is, in truth, one of the conditions of the just mental
attitude, in the criticism of by-past stages of thought. Humanity
cannot afford to be too serious about them, any more than a man of good
sense can afford to be too serious in looking back upon his own
childhood. Plato, whom Coleridge claims as the first of his spiritual
ancestors, Plato, as we remember him, a true humanist, holds his
theories lightly, glances with a somewhat blithe and naive
inconsequence from [70] one view to another, not anticipating the
burden of importance "views" will one day have for men. In reading him
one feels how lately it was that Croesus thought it a paradox to say
that external prosperity was not necessarily happiness. But on
Coleridge lies the whole weight of the sad reflection that has since
come into the world, with which for us the air is full, which the
"children in the market-place" repeat to each other. His very language
is forced and broken lest some saving formula should be
lost--distinctities, enucleation, pentad of operative Christianity; he
has a whole armoury of these terms, and expects to turn the tide of
human thought by fixing the sense of such expressions as "reason,"
"understanding," "idea." Again, he lacks the jealousy of a true artist
in excluding all associations that have no colour, or charm, or
gladness in them; and everywhere allows the impress of a somewhat
inferior theological literature.
"I was driven from life in motion to life in thought and sensation:" so
Coleridge sums up his childhood, with its delicacy, its sensitiveness,
and passion. But at twenty-five he was exercising a wonderful charm,
and had already defined for himself his peculiar line of intellectual
activity. He had an odd, attractive gift of conversation, or rather of
monologue, as Madame de Staël observed of him, full of bizarreries,
with the rapid alternations of a dream, and here or there an unexpected
summons into a world [71] strange to the hearer, abounding in images
drawn from a sort of divided imperfect life, the consciousness of the
opium-eater, as of one to whom the external world penetrated only in
part, and, blent with all this, passages of deep obscurity, precious,
if at all, only for their musical cadence, echoes in Coleridge of the
eloquence of those older English writers of whom he was so ardent a
lover. And all through this brilliant early manhood we may discern the
power of the "Asiatic" temperament, of that voluptuousness, which is
connected perhaps with his appreciation of the intimacy, the almost
mystical communion of touch, between nature and man. "I am much
better," he writes, "and my new and tender health is all over me like a
voluptuous feeling." And whatever fame, or charm, or life-inspiring
gift he has had as a speculative thinker, is the vibration of the
interest he excited then, the propulsion into years which clouded his
early promise of that first buoyant, irresistible, self-assertion. So
great is even the indirect power of a sincere effort towards the ideal
life, of even a temporary escape of the spirit from routine.
In 1798 he visited Germany, then, the only half-known, "promised land,"
of the metaphysical, the "absolute," philosophy. A beautiful fragment
of this period remains, describing a spring excursion to the Brocken.
His excitement still vibrates in it. Love, all joyful states [72] of
mind, are self-expressive: they loosen the tongue, they fill the
thoughts with sensuous images, they harmonise one with the world of
sight. We hear of the "rich graciousness and courtesy" of Coleridge's
manner, of the white and delicate skin, the abundant black hair, the
full, almost animal lips--that whole physiognomy of the dreamer,
already touched with narcotism. One says, of the beginning of one of
his Unitarian sermons: "His voice rose like a stream of rich, distilled
perfumes;" another, "He talks like an angel, and does--nothing!"
The Aids to Reflection, The Friend, The Biographia Literaria: those
books came from one whose vocation was in the world of the imagination,
the theory and practice of poetry. And yet, perhaps, of all books that
have been influential in modern times, they are furthest from artistic
form--bundles of notes; the original matter inseparably mixed up with
that borrowed from others; the whole, just that mere preparation for an
artistic effect which the finished literary artist would be careful one
day to destroy. Here, again, we have a trait profoundly characteristic
of Coleridge. He sometimes attempts to reduce a phase of thought,
subtle and exquisite, to conditions too rough for it. He uses a purely
speculative gift for direct moral edification. Scientific truth is a
thing fugitive, relative, full of fine gradations: he tries to fix it
in absolute formulas. The Aids to Reflection, The Friend, are [73]
efforts to propagate the volatile spirit of conversation into the less
ethereal fabric of a written book; and it is only here or there that
the poorer matter becomes vibrant, is really lifted by the spirit.
De Quincey said of him that "he wanted better bread than can be made
with wheat:" Lamb, that from childhood he had "hungered for eternity."
Yet the faintness, the continuous dissolution, whatever its cause,
which soon supplanted the buoyancy of his first wonderful years, had
its own consumptive refinements, and even brought, as to the "Beautiful
Soul" in Wilhelm Meister, a faint religious ecstasy--that "singing in
the sails" which is not of the breeze. Here again is one of his
occasional notes:--
"In looking at objects of nature while I am thinking, as at yonder
moon, dim-glimmering through the window-pane, I seem rather to be
seeking, as it were asking, a symbolical language for something within
me, that already and for ever exists, than observing anything new.
Even when the latter is the case, yet still I have always an obscure
feeling, as if that new phenomenon were the dim awaking of a forgotten
or hidden truth of my inner nature. While I was preparing the pen to
make this remark, I lost the train of thought which had led me to it."
What a distemper of the eye of the mind! What an almost bodily
distemper there is in that!
Coleridge's intellectual sorrows were many; [74] but he had one
singular intellectual happiness. With an inborn taste for
transcendental philosophy, he lived just at the time when that
philosophy took an immense spring in Germany, and connected itself with
an impressive literary movement. He had the good luck to light upon it
in its freshness, and introduce it to his countrymen. What an
opportunity for one reared on the colourless analytic English
philosophies of the last century, but who feels an irresistible
attraction towards bold metaphysical synthesis! How rare are such
occasions of intellectual contentment! This transcendental philosophy,
chiefly as systematised by the mystic Schelling, Coleridge applied with
an eager, unwearied subtlety, to the questions of theology, and poetic
or artistic criticism. It is in his theory of poetry, of art, that he
comes nearest to principles of permanent truth and importance: that is
the least fugitive part of his prose work. What, then, is the essence
of his philosophy of art--of imaginative production?
Generally, it may be described as an attempt to reclaim the world of
art as a world of fixed laws, to show that the creative activity of
genius and the simplest act of thought are but higher and lower
products of the laws of a universal logic. Criticism, feeling its own
inadequacy in dealing with the greater works of art, is sometimes
tempted to make too much of those dark and capricious suggestions of
genius, which even [75] the intellect possessed by them is unable to
explain or recall. It has seemed due to the half-sacred character of
those works to ignore all analogy between the productive process by
which they had their birth, and the simpler processes of mind.
Coleridge, on the other hand, assumes that the highest phases of
thought must be more, not less, than the lower, subject to law.
With this interest, in the Biographia Literaria, he refines Schelling's
"Philosophy of Nature" into a theory of art. "There can be no
plagiarism in philosophy," says Heine:--Es giebt kein Plagiat in der
Philosophie, in reference to the charge brought against Schelling of
unacknowledged borrowing from Bruno; and certainly that which is common
to Coleridge and Schelling and Bruno alike is of far earlier origin
than any of them. Schellingism, the "Philosophy of Nature," is indeed
a constant tradition in the history of thought: it embodies a permanent
type of the speculative temper. That mode of conceiving nature as a
mirror or reflex of the intelligence of man may be traced up to the
first beginnings of Greek speculation. There are two ways of
envisaging those aspects of nature which seem to bear the impress of
reason or intelligence. There is the deist's way, which regards them
merely as marks of design, which separates the informing mind from its
result in nature, as the mechanist from the machine; and there is the
pantheistic way, which identifies the two, which [76] regards nature
itself as the living energy of an intelligence of the same kind as
though vaster in scope than the human. Partly through the influence of
mythology, the Greek mind became early possessed with the conception of
nature as living, thinking, almost speaking to the mind of man. This
unfixed poetical prepossession, reduced to an abstract form, petrified
into an idea, is the force which gives unity of aim to Greek
philosophy. Little by little, it works out the substance of the
Hegelian formula: "Whatever is, is according to reason: whatever is
according to reason, that is." Experience, which has gradually
saddened the earth's colours for us, stiffened its motions, withdrawn
from it some blithe and debonair presence, has quite changed the
character of the science of nature, as we understand it. The
"positive" method, in truth, makes very little account of marks of
intelligence in nature: in its wider view of phenomena, it sees that
those instances are a minority, and may rank as happy coincidences: it
absorbs them in the larger conception of universal mechanical law. But
the suspicion of a mind latent in nature, struggling for release, and
intercourse with the intellect of man through true ideas, has never
ceased to haunt a certain class of minds. Started again and again in
successive periods by enthusiasts on the antique pattern, in each case
the thought may have seemed paler and more fantastic amid the growing
[77] consistency and sharpness of outline of other and more positive
forms of knowledge. Still, wherever the speculative instinct has been
united with a certain poetic inwardness of temperament, as in Bruno, in
Schelling, there that old Greek conception, like some seed floating in
the air, has taken root and sprung up anew. Coleridge, thrust inward
upon himself, driven from "life in thought and sensation" to life in
thought only, feels already, in his dark London school, a thread of the
Greek mind on this matter vibrating strongly in him. At fifteen he is
discoursing on Plotinus, as in later years he reflects from Schelling
that flitting intellectual tradition. He supposes a subtle, sympathetic
co-ordination between the ideas of the human reason and the laws of the
natural world. Science, the real knowledge of that natural world, is
to be attained, not by observation, experiment, analysis, patient
generalisation, but by the evolution or recovery of those ideas
directly from within, by a sort of Platonic "recollection"; every group
of observed facts remaining an enigma until the appropriate idea is
struck upon them from the mind of a Newton, or a Cuvier, the genius in
whom sympathy with the universal reason becomes entire. In the next
place, he conceives that this reason or intelligence in nature becomes
reflective, or self-conscious. He fancies he can trace, through all
the simpler forms of life, fragments of an eloquent prophecy about the
[78] human mind. The whole of nature he regards as a development of
higher forms out of the lower, through shade after shade of systematic
change. The dim stir of chemical atoms towards the axis of crystal
form, the trance-like life of plants, the animal troubled by strange
irritabilities, are stages which anticipate consciousness. All through
the ever-increasing movement of life that was shaping itself; every
successive phase of life, in its unsatisfied susceptibilities, seeming
to be drawn out of its own limits by the more pronounced current of
life on its confines, the "shadow of approaching humanity" gradually
deepening, the latent intelligence winning a way to the surface. And
at this point the law of development does not lose itself in caprice:
rather it becomes more constraining and incisive. From the lowest to
the very highest acts of the conscious intelligence, there is another
series of refining shades. Gradually the mind concentrates itself,
frees itself from the limitations of the particular, the individual,
attains a strange power of modifying and centralising what it receives
from without, according to the pattern of an inward ideal. At last, in
imaginative genius, ideas become effective: the intelligence of nature,
all its discursive elements now connected and justified, is clearly
reflected; the interpretation of its latent purposes being embodied in
the great central products of creative art. The secret of creative
[79] genius would be an exquisitely purged sympathy with nature, with
the reasonable soul antecedent there. Those associative conceptions of
the imagination, those eternally fixed types of action and passion,
would come, not so much from the conscious invention of the artist, as
from his self-surrender to the suggestions of an abstract reason or
ideality in things: they would be evolved by the stir of nature itself,
realising the highest reach of its dormant reason: they would have a
kind of prevenient necessity to rise at some time to the surface of the
human mind.
It is natural that Shakespeare should be the favourite illustration of
such criticism, whether in England or Germany. The first suggestion in
Shakespeare is that of capricious detail, of a waywardness that plays
with the parts careless of the impression of the whole; what supervenes
is the constraining unity of effect, the ineffaceable impression, of
Hamlet or Macbeth. His hand moving freely is curved round as if by
some law of gravitation from within: an energetic unity or identity
makes itself visible amid an abounding variety. This unity or identity
Coleridge exaggerates into something like the identity of a natural
organism, and the associative act which effected it into something
closely akin to the primitive power of nature itself. "In the
Shakespearian drama," he says, "there is a vitality which grows and
evolves itself from within."
[80] Again--
He, too, worked in the spirit of nature, by evolving the germ from
within, by the imaginative power, according to the idea. For as the
power of seeing is to light, so is an idea in mind to a law in nature.
They are correlatives which suppose each other.