SOURCE: "The Problem of the Imagination: Coleridge," in On Being Creative and Other Essays, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1932, pp. 97-133.

[In the following essay, Babbitt claims that, especially in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Coleridge overemphasizes the natural self ignoring a higher will in favor of a subrational animalistic self]

A striking feature of the whole modern movement has been its passion for origins. Tendencies that in other respects diverge widely agree in the assumption that, not the end as Aristotle asserts, but the beginning is 'the chief thing of all.' One may detect at least this likeness between the man of science who scoffs at the very idea of final causes and seeks to get back to electrons or chromosomes, and the primitivist who has a predilection for 'art's springbirth so dim and dewy' and sets 'the budding rose above the rose full blown.' We no longer believe in the nobility of the savage, but still hope, under the obsession of evolutionary theory, to derive our chief enlightenment regarding the human race itself from an endless prying into pre-history. Similarly, in dealing with the individual, we delve in the depths of the subliminal self and incline to interpret maturity in terms of childhood. Here again the backward glance is a bond between points of view that, at first sight, seem utterly dissimilar. At the very age, for example, when the child is hailed by Wordsworth as 'mighty prophet, seer blest,' he is most likely, according to Freud, developing an 'Œdipus complex.'

This passion for origins has been especially conspicuous for several generations past in both the creation and the critical study of art and literature. It has at last made possible a work like the recent important volume on Coleridge by Professor John Livingston Lowes [i.e., The Road to Xanadu, A Study in the Ways of the Imagination]. The search for sources—in this case the sources of The Ancient Mariner and "Kubla Khan"—has perhaps never been carried on more competently. In tracking Coleridge's immense and recondite reading Professor Lowes has displayed an industry little short of prodigious. He has claims to be regarded as the most accomplished of literary sleuths. He has devoted well over four hundred pages of his book to building up the background of two short poems, not to speak of a hundred and fifty pages of notes which are, in his own phrase, 'securely kenneled in the rear.' Moreover, he does not mean that his investigation should cater merely to learned curiosity. He has related it to another main preoccupation of our time—that with subliminal psychology—in the hope of thus throwing light on the mystery of the creative imagination itself.

Professor Lowes distinguishes three stages in the creative process. The first stage is conscious: the fixing of the attention on some particular field and the accumulation of material that bears upon it. In the second and, it would seem, essential stage the material thus accumulated sinks into the region of the subliminal self and there enters into new and unexpected associations. Professor Lowes seeks to show how in The Ancient Mariner and "Kubla Khan" the images that Coleridge had derived from his multifarious reading, especially of books of travel, were thus magically modified in the 'deep well of unconscious celebration.' The view of creative genius that has been popular ever since the eighteenth century has encouraged emphasis on the unconscious and the spontaneous, more or less at the expense of the purposeful. Thus Ruskin writes of Turner: 'He only did right when he ceased to reflect; was powerful only when he made no effort, and successful only when he had taken no aim.' In much the same vein Emerson declares of the Parthenon and the Gothic cathedrals: 'These temples grew as grows the grass'(!). Even the partisan of a pure spontaneity cannot, however, if one is to believe Professor Lowes, afford to be ignorant. An ample preliminary enrichment of the mind is desirable, if only that the unconscious may have something to work upon.

The third stage of the creative process recognized by Professor Lowes is, like the first, conscious. However magically the material supplied by the unconscious may have been modified, it is still more or less inchoate. It is only by an effort, deliberate though still imaginative, that it can be fashioned into a harmonious whole. The 'shaping spirit of imagination' has thus presided over The Ancient Mariner, whereas it is absent from "Kubla Khan". This latter poem may indeed be regarded as the most notable example in literature of creation that has not got beyond the second stage; at least if one accept the usual belief, based on Coleridge's own statements, that it came to him precisely in its present form as a fragment of an opium-dream. One may grant that Professor Lowes's account of the 'ways of the imagination' is relevant to the two poems he has studied and yet ask if he has not exaggerated its general relevancy. He says in his preface that he does not propose to consider whether The Ancient Mariner is classic or romantic or whether it meets the Aristotelian test of high seriousness. Actually, he has answered these very questions by implication in the body of the book when he mentions the poetical Coleridge in the same breath with Homer, Dante and Milton and uses the phrase 'supreme imaginative vision' in connection with The Ancient Mariner. My own endeavor will be to show that the imagination displayed in The Ancient Mariner is qualitatively different from that displayed in poetry that may rightly be regarded as highly serious. The whole problem has an importance transcending Coleridge and his influence, far-reaching though that influence has been. The imagination, as Pascal puts it, disposes of everything—even of religion, to an extent that Pascal himself would probably have been loath to admit. The importance of the subject is, however, equaled only by its difficulty. The chief difficulty is that 'imagination' belongs to a class of words, unhappily tending to increase, that have been used in so many meanings that they have almost ceased to have any meaning. One's first temptation is simply to banish words of this type from one's vocabulary. A saner precedure is to strive for more accurate definition, definition which, if it is to be valid, should be based first of all on a broad historical survey of what the general term under consideration actually has meant.

What one discovers in dealing in this fashion with the word imagination is that it has in the past been used primarily to describe the various impressions of sense or else a faculty that was supposed to store up these impressions. It therefore gives only appearances and not reality. Here is a main source of the persistent suspicion of the imagination that can be traced from early Greek times to the eighteenth century. When Saint Bonaventura, for example, says that the 'soul knows God without the support of the outer senses' he merely means to affirm that man is not dependent for his perception of religious truth on the imagination.

The association of imagination or phantasy with mere appearance no doubt explains why Aristotle does not employ the word at all in his Poetics. For poetry, he tells us, that is to be accounted highly serious, must penetrate beyond the impressions of sense to the universal. To be sure, this universal is not achieved directly, but only with the aid of 'myth' or fiction. Moreover, the art of representative fiction, as Aristotle conceives it, is intensely dramatic. To imitate the universal means practically to depict human actions not at random but with reference to some sound scale of ethical values. Centrality of vision is necessary if poetry is to have 'probability,' if, in other words, it is to disengage true unity and purpose from the welter of the actual. But though Aristotle's prime emphasis is in poetry and elsewhere on purpose, he recognizes man's almost insatiable craving for the marvelous. The more wonder the better, he seems to say, provided it does not involve an undue sacrifice of truth to the universal. Tragedy that has with the aid of representative fiction or significant illusion succeeded in portraying the universal through the particular, tends to raise the spectator to its own level and, as a result of this enlargement of spirit, to relieve him of what is merely petty and personal in his own emotions. This is the true katharsis that Milton has, with the intuition of a great poet, rendered so admirably at the end of Samson Agonistes.

I have been pointing out in my essay on Johnson that the neo-classic theorist made much of imitation and probability, but tended to divorce them from fiction in the sense of illusion; that fiction in this sense had come to be associated with certain forms of romantic extravagance; and that one of the reasons for the distrust of the imagination was its identification with a one-sided quest of wonder. Yet Voltaire himself had declared that 'illusion is the queen of the human heart.' The neo-classic inadequacy at this point was a chief factor in the rise of the romantic movement, a movement marked at its inception, as I have said, by the appearance of a new phrase, the 'creative imagination.' This creativeness was associated not with imitation but with spontaneity, which came to mean practically emotional spontaneity. Furthermore the movement speedily took on a primitivistic coloring.

The eighteenth-century theorists of originality and genius thus prepared the way for Wordsworth's definition of poetry as 'the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,' and for the closely related idea that this overflow is most likely to be found in peasants and other simple folk who are still close to 'nature.' Wordsworth, however, goes beyond the earlier primitivists by reinterpreting, largely it would seem under the influence of Coleridge, the word imagination. Imagination in the older sense of fiction, whether probable or improbable, he disparages. He himself lacked what he terms the 'human and dramatic imagination,' but felt he had something better in the 'enthusiastic and meditative imagination.' The imagination to which he accords his homage is not only 'Reason in her most exalted mood,' but the faculty that enables one, in contradistinction to the more or less arbitrary associations of mere 'fancy,' to achieve a true spiritual unity, not to be sure immediately but mediately through the objects of sense. For the Wordsworth of Tintern Abbey, God is, in M. Legouis's phrase, a 'gift of the senses,' a position radically opposed to that which appears in the sentence of Saint Bonaventura I have just quoted. Wordsworth has coined for his imaginative blending of himself with the landscape the phrase 'a wise passiveness.' But can one regard this imaginative blending as meditative? Genuine meditation requires effort. One may speak properly of the act of recollection but not of the act of revery; and it is pantheistic revery that Tintern Abbey plainly encourages. At all events, a striking feature of Wordsworth's poetical theory and, to no small degree, of his practice, is his dissociation of the imagination from effort or action in either the ordinary dramatic or the religious sense.

For the relationship he establishes between sight and insight and the resulting facility with which he reads a transcendental significance into the 'meanest flower that blows,' Wordsworth was, as I have said, indebted to Coleridge, who was in turn indebted to the Germans; though as to the exact extent of the indebtedness in either case it is well not to be too dogmatic. One would therefore have anticipated that Coleridge in his treatment of imagination and kindred topics in the Biographia Literaria would be in accord with Wordsworth. Coleridge would not, however, be the baffling figure he is if such were entirely the case. In the earlier chapters of this work he does indeed set out to define imagination in a way that would apparently have confirmed Wordsworth at essential points, but tends to get lost in what he himself terms 'the holy jungle of transcendental metaphysics.' One is reminded by all this portion of the Literary Life of Carlyle's inimitable account of Coleridge's conversation at Highgate: if anyone asked him a question, Carlyle reports, instead of answering it, or decidedly setting out towards an answer of it, he would 'accumulate formidable apparatus, logical swim-bladders, transcendental life-preservers and other precautionary and vehiculatory gear for setting out.' After much preparation of this kind in the Literary Life, he seems in chapter thirteen to be getting under way at last; but just at this point someone writes him a letter (the someone as we know now was Coleridge himself) warning him that he is getting beyond the depth of his public and advising him to reserve his more recondite considerations for his work on the Logos (which was of course never written). Where upon Coleridge turns from Schelling and the Germans to Aristotle.

The result of this escape from the 'jungle' is a sudden increase in clarity. There arises out of the transcendental haze one of 'the balmy sunny islets of the blest and the intelligible' that, according to Carlyle, also emerged at times in Coleridge's conversation. Indeed the chapters in which Coleridge deals on Aristotelian grounds with the paradoxes into which Wordsworth had been betrayed by his primitivism constitute the chief islet of this kind to be found in his prose writings. Thus (if I may be pardoned for summarizing material so familiar) Coleridge, having laid down the principle that poetry requires an 'involution of the universal in the individual proceeds to apply this principle to The Excursion. Wordsworth has in this poem put sublime philosophic discourse in the mouth of a peddler. Some particular peddler may be sublime, Coleridge retorts, but peddlers as a class are not sublime. The peddler of The Excursion is a possible but not a probable peddler. Again, a child of six who is a 'mighty prophet' can scarcely be regarded as a representative child. Coleridge objects in like Aristotelian fashion to Wordsworth's assertion that the true language of poetry is to be found on the lips of dalesmen who enjoy the advantage of contact with the 'beautiful and permanent forms of nature.' Excellence of speech, Coleridge replies in substance, is a product of conscious culture. So far as the dalesmen possess it, it has come to them, not as an emanation of the landscape, but as a result above all of their reading of the Bible. Wordsworth was right in rejecting the 'gaudiness and inane phraseology' that had arisen from the imposition on poetry of the artificial decorum of a social class. But there is a true as well as an artificial decorum. Though the poet should eschew mere polite prejudice, he cannot afford to neglect in his choice of words their conventional associations, as Wordsworth, a recluse with a defective sense of humor, was at times too prone to do. The intrusion of words with trivial associations into serious verse will produce on readers the effect of 'sudden and unpleasant sinkings from the height to which the poet had previously lifted them.' Wordsworth is also guilty at times of a somewhat different type of indecorum—namely of using 'thoughts and images too great for the subject.' This latter type of disproportion Coleridge terms 'mental bombast.'

Though Coleridge's critique of Wordsworth is thus Aristotelian in its details, transcendentalism would seem to reappear in its conclusion; and transcendentalism is a doctrine that mixes about as well with that of Aristotle as oil with water. 'Last and preëminently,' he says,' I challenge for this poet [i.e., Wordsworth] the gift of IMAGINATION in the highest and strictest sense of the word.' If Coleridge had been a more thoroughgoing Aristotelian, he might have found that the chief source of 'mental bombast' in Wordsworth arises from the disproportionate significance that he had been led by his transcendental philosophy to attach to natural appearances; when, for example, he exclaims, on his discovery of the small celandine, that he will 'make a stir, like a sage astronomer.' The stir would seem justified only in case it could be shown that, through imaginative communion with the small celandine, he attained a real spiritual unity. But what proof is there of the reality of a communion achieved in that way? One may perhaps best reply in the words of Coleridge:

Oh, William, we receive but what we give
And in our life alone does nature live.

In that case the nature with which one communes is not nature as known to the impartial observer but merely a projection of one's own mood on outer objects—in other words, a form of the pathetic fallacy. It follows, as I have remarked in a previous essay, that the unity thus achieved is not real but fanciful, so that the distinction between imagination and fancy that both Wordsworth and Coleridge strove to establish breaks down at the center.

Compared with the poetry that portrays action through the medium of fiction with reference to normal experience, communion with nature of the transcendental sort would appear to be only a new and fascinating mode of escape. The need of escape is deep-seated and universal and has been satisfied in manners manifold in the literature of the past. One would not, indeed, err greatly in choosing as epigraph for about nine tenths of this literature these lines of Emily Dickinson:

I never hear the word 'escape'
Without a quicker blood,
A sudden expectation,
A flying attitude.

The chief instrument of escape is the imagination—a certain quality of imagination. One need not quarrel with imagination of this quality when it shows itself frankly for what it is. It becomes dubious only when put at the basis of what purports to be idealism or even religion. This form of self-deception has flourished especially in connection with our modern return to nature. Thus Rousseau writes: 'My soul wanders and soars in the universe on the wings of imagination in ecstasies that surpass every other enjoyment.' The results that follow from indulging this type of imagination are scarcely of a kind to satisfy either the humanist or the man of science. The wandering and soaring, they would agree, are for the most part, not in the universe, but in the tower of ivory. Similarly the 'liberty' and 'intensest love' to which Coleridge lays claim as a result of 'shooting his being through earth, sea and air' are accomplished only in dreamland. Like the Wordsworth of Tintern Abbey, Coleridge is setting up in this passage of "France: An Ode", pantheistic revery as a substitute for true meditation.

This is not of course the whole truth about either Wordsworth or Coleridge. Wordsworth attains at times to a truly religious elevation. In associating this elevation, however, with the 'light of setting suns' or some other aspect of outer nature, he is encouraging a confusion between spiritual and æsthetic perception. As a matter of fact, the first person who seems to have done justice aesthetically to the light of setting suns is 'the notorious ribald of Arezzo,' Aretino (letter to Titian, May, 1544).

There is, again, in Coleridge an element of genuine religious vision. He seems singularly different, however, in the total impression he produces, from the religious teachers of the past. These teachers, whether a Saint Bernard or a Buddha, are as energetic and purposeful as the head of some great industrial enterprise in our own time, though, one scarcely need add, in an entirely different way; whereas one can scarcely find in the whole annals of literature another personality so richly endowed as Coleridge and at the same time so rudderless. According to the familiar anecdote, he could not even determine which side of the garden walk would suit him best, but corkscrewed back and forth from one side to the other. There is more here than the ordinary contrast between the willingness of the spirit and the weakness of the flesh. His irresoluteness is related in at least some measure to his primitivism—above all to his notion that genius is shown primarily in a capacity for sinking 'back again into the childlike feeling of devout wonder.' It is no doubt true, as Mencius remarked long ago, that the great man is he who has not lost his child's heart; but it is also true that greatness appears in the power to impose on life a masculine purpose. It is not easy to estimate the precise proportion of primitivistic to genuinely religious elements in Coleridge himself. Regarding his major influence, it is possible to speak more confidently. This influence has, in Walter Pater's phrase, been a 'part of the long pleading of German culture for the things behind the veil.' Practically this has meant an interest in the elusive phenomena that are off the center of normal consciousness; the very phenomena, in short, to which Professor Lowes had devoted so much attention. As a result of his preoccupation with these crepuscular regions Coleridge impressed at times those who approached him as almost somnambulistic. The picture Peacock has drawn of him in Nightmare Abbey with his curtains drawn at midday and sprinkling salt on the candle to make the light burn blue has at least the truth of caricature.

This interest in the abnormal was by no means confined to Coleridge. It has been said of his age in general that it 'grovelled in the ghastly and wallowed in the weird.' Such an age had in The Ancient Mariner its appropriate masterpiece. In its psychology and incidents and scenic setting it marks the extreme sacrifice of the verisimilar to the marvelous. It is at a far remove from the Aristotelian high seriousness, which not only requires relevancy to normal experience but a relevancy tested in terms of action. Apart from the initial shooting of an albatross the Mariner does not do anything. In the literal sense of the words he is not an agent, but a patient. The true protagonists of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Professor Lowes remarks rightly, are the elements—'Earth, Air, Fire and Water in their multiform balefulness and beauty.' As Charles Lamb puts it:' I dislike all the miraculous part of the poem, but the feelings of the man under the operation of such scenery dragged me along like Tom Piper's magic whistle.' Between a poem like The Ancient Mariner in which the unifying element is feeling and a poem which has a true unity of action the difference is one of kind; between it and let us say The Fall of the House of Usher the difference is at most one of degree. In this and other tales Poe has, like Coleridge and indeed partly under his influence, achieved a unity of tone or impression, a technique in short, perfectly suited to the shift of the center of interest from action to emotion.

Intense emotion, especially under the stress of a unique experience, is isolating. Perhaps no work embodies more successfully than The Ancient Mariner the main romantic motif of solitude. ('Alone, alone, all, all alone!') Here if anywhere the soul is a state of the landscape and the landscape a state of the soul—the outer symbol of a ghastly isolation. The mood of solitude based on the sense of one's emotional uniqueness is closely interwoven, again, as every student of the modern movement knows, with the instinct of confession. Rousseau himself says of certain childhood experiences:' I am aware that the reader does not need to know these details but I need to tell them to him.' In much the same fashion the Wedding Guest does not need to hear the Mariner's tale, but the Mariner needs to relate it to him. The psycho-analysts have, with rare effrontery, applied to the relief that results from a yielding to the confessional urge the noble term katharsis. It should be apparent that the term cannot be applied in its correct meaning to mere emotional overflow nor again to fiction in which wonder and strangeness prevail so completely, as in the present case, over imaginative imitation of the universal.

It follows from all that has been said that The Ancient Mariner, judged by the quality of the imagination that informs it, is not only romantic but ultra-romantic. One should not therefore disparage it, or in general regard as the only test of poetry its degree of conformity with the model set up by Aristotle in his Poetics. One must insist that in the house of art are many mansions. It does not follow that the mansions are all on the same level or of equal architectural dignity. That The Ancient Mariner is good in its own way—almost miraculously good—goes without saying. The reason for thinking that this way is inferior to the way envisaged by Aristotle is that it is less concerned with moral choices in their bearing on the only problem that finally matters—that of man's happiness or misery. Professor Lowes's praise will seem pitched in too high a key to anyone who accepts this or some similar scale of poetical values. He himself is not quite consistent at this point. At one moment he agrees with Coleridge that the fiction of the poem should have been openly irresponsible like that 'of the Arabian Nights' tale of the merchant's sitting down to eat dates by the side of a well, and throwing the shells aside, and lo! a genie starts up, and says he must kill the aforesaid merchant, because one of the date shells had, it seems, put out the eye of the genie's son.' In general Professor Lowes seems to dismiss the whole demand for probability as worthy only of literary philistines like Mrs. Barbauld, who complained, it will be remembered, of The Ancient Mariner that it was 'improbable and had no moral.'

At other moments, though recognizing the grotesque disproportion between the Mariner's initial act and its consequences, Professor Lowes seems to take the tale seriously as a treatment of the great drama of guilt and expiation. The fact is that it is impossible to extract any serious ethical purport from The Ancient Mariner—except perhaps a warning as to the fate of the innocent bystander; unless indeed one hold that it is fitting that, for having sympathized with the man who shot an albatross, 'four times fifty living men' should perish in torments unspeakable.

In the meanwhile, contrary to Mrs. Barbauld's assertion, The Ancient Mariner actually has a moral ('He prayeth best, who loveth best,' etc.). Moreover, this moral, unexceptionable in itself, turns out, when taken in its context, to be a sham moral. The mode in which the Mariner is relieved of the burden of his transgression, symbolized by the albatross hung about his neck—namely, by admiring the color of the water-snakes—is an extreme example of a confusion to which I have already alluded: he obtains subrationally and unconsciously ('I blessed them unaware') the equivalent of Christian charity. Like many other works in the modern movement, the poem thus lays claim to a religious seriousness that at bottom it does not possess. To this extent at least it is an example of a hybrid and ambiguous art.

By turning their attention to the wonder and magic of natural appearances Wordsworth and Coleridge and other romantics opened up an almost inexhaustible source of genuine poetry. Wonder cannot, however, in this or in any other form serve as a substitute for the virtues that imply a something in man that is set above the phenomenal order. If we are to believe the great teachers of the past, the pathway to religious wisdom does not lie through the flower in the crannied wall or the equivalent. The attempt to base religion on wonder becomes positively grotesque when Walt Whitman declares that 'a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.' The underlying confusion of values has, however, persisted in less obvious forms and is indeed the most dubious legacy to our own time from the romantic age. Thus Mrs. O. W. Campbell asserts that 'Christ was the first romantic and the greatest.' According to Mr. Middleton Murry, again, when a person does not dare to come out and attack Christ openly he vents his spleen on Rousseau.

The distinction between two entirely different orders of intuition that is being blurred or obliterated by the writers I have just been citing is closely related to the problem of the imagination. Perhaps no recent critic has spoken more wisely on the nature of this relationship than a French contemporary of Coleridge—Joubert; and that at the very time when Coleridge was insinuating that 'a Frenchman is the only animal in the human shape that by no possibility can lift itself up to religion or poetry.' Joubert not only displays the same high type of vision that appears at times in Coleridge but he has the advantage over Coleridge of not being addicted either to opium or German metaphysics. The most important distinction made by Joubert is that between an imagination that does not rise above the impressions of sense and an imagination that gives access to the supersensuous, that is, in short, an organ of insight. It is only with the aid of this latter type of imagination that one achieves the 'illusion of a higher reality'; the illusion is indeed, according to Joubert, 'an integral part of the reality.'

One cannot afford to disdain in the creative process what may be termed the spontaneities, all that seems to come as a free gift, for example, the magical combinations and permutations of images in the 'deep well.' Coleridge, however, falls into a dangerous primitivistic exaggeration when he says that 'there is in genius itself an unconscious activity; nay, that is the genius in the man of genius.' The imagination that Joubert calls the 'eye of the soul' is fully conscious and also creative, though in a different sense: it creates values. It does so by coö perating with reason in the service of a higher will. The unconscious activities must be controlled with reference to the values thus created with the help of the ethical imagination, as one may term it, if they are to have direction and purpose, in other words human significance. Technique is admittedly something that must be consciously acquired. The question of the ethical imagination is, however, plainly one that concerns not merely the technique or outer form of creative work, but its inmost essence.

Failure to make some such distinction as that I have been attempting, exposes one to the risk of confounding work that has abundant human substance with work that has little or none. Serious confusions of this kind are rife at the present time—more serious indeed than any with which Professor Lowes may be properly charged. For example Mr. E. E. Kellett writes in his recent volume Reconsiderations: 'There is something in the very choice of subject which marks out the supreme poet from his fellows. It is not an accident that Coleridge chose to write of diablerie and witchcraft. . . . The fact that Chaucer's subjects are in the main of the earth, earthy, is significant of the limits of his poetic genius.'

It may be maintained that Dante has a depth of religious insight that puts him definitely above Chaucer. But to accord to romantic diablerie the same rating as to religious insight and to dismiss Chaucer, one of the most human of poets, as 'of the earth, earthy' in comparison with the Coleridge of The Ancient Mariner, is surely inadmissible. Here and elsewhere in his volume, Mr. Kellett reminds one of the French partisans of 'pure poetry.' So much is eliminated by the Abbé Bremond, the chief spokesman for this group, as not being of the essence of poetry, that it is, like Jowett's idea of God, in danger of being defecated to a pure transparency. Poetry becomes a je ne sais quoi, an 'electricity,' an indefinable magic that is similar, the Abbé Bremond would have us believe, to the mysterious and impalpable something that is present in the attitude of prayer. The truth is that the Abbé is ready to make an abject surrender of conscious discrimination and control in favor of a pure spontaneity, with a resulting confusion of the subrational with the superrational and finally of romanticism with religion that, in so prominent a churchman, is positively disconcerting.

The sacrifice of human substance to the Moloch of spontaneity is even more manifest in the contemporary French group known as the 'superrealists' (surréalistes), affiliated in their point of view with the English and American writers who abandon themselves to the 'stream of consciousness.' The very name that the members of this group have assumed would indicate that they are in error as to the direction in which they are moving. What they term 'reality' is plainly not above but below the human and rational level. The upshot of the quest of creative renewal in this region would appear to be, if one may judge from some of the contributions to transition, the organ of the group, a sort of psychic automatism.

I am not going too far afield in speaking of the surréalistes apropos of Coleridge. If a poem like "The Pains of Sleep" anticipates Baudelaire, "Kubla Khan," as I have already remarked, probably remains the best example of a spontaneity that, so far from having been disciplined to either humanistic or religious purpose, has not even undergone any technical shaping of the kind one finds in The Ancient Mariner. It illustrates what Coleridge himself calls the 'streamy nature of association' in revery at least as well, and far more agreeably, than, let us say, the closing pages of Joyce's Ulysses.

The notion that one becomes creative only by being spontaneous is closely related to the notion that one becomes original only by being unique. If we are to judge by surréalisme and other recent literary cults the time is approaching when each writer will, in the name of his genius conceived as self-expression, retire so completely into his own private dream that communication will become impossible. To be sure the drift of these recent cults towards sheer unintelligibility marks a violent extreme of the kind that usually comes towards the end of a movement. It is an extreme, however, that points to a one-sidedness in the movement from the start—the tendency, namely, to exalt the differences between man and man and to disparage or deny the identities. The result has been a fatal confusion between individuality and personality. True personality is not something that, like individuality, is bestowed upon a man simply because he has taken the trouble to be born. It is something that he must consciously win with reference to a standard set above his merely temperamental self; whereas there has probably never been a blade of grass, which, if it become vocal, might not say truthfully, in the language of Rousseau, that, if not better than other blades of grass, at least it was different. The notion that one may become creative simply by combining temperamental overflow with a greater or lesser degree of technical skill has resulted in work that often displays genius indeed but suffers at the same time from a taint of eccentricity; work in which, in Aristotelian parlance, the wonderful quite overtops the probable. Anatole France writes of Victor Hugo, perhaps the extreme example of genius of the eccentric type: 'One is saddened and at the same time frightened not to encounter in his enormous work, in the midst of so many monsters, a single human figure. . . . He wished to inspire wonder and long had the power to do so, but is it possible always to inspire wonder?'

The doctrine of imitation, setting up as it does some standard with reference to which a man must humanize his gift, whatever that gift may chance to be, is, in all its forms, chastening; perhaps, in some of its forms, too chastening. One remembers the prostration of the literary aspirant before the models during the neo-classic period. On the other hand, the doctrine that discredits imitation in favor of spontaneity does not put a man sufficiently on his guard against what Buddha and other sages have declared to be the two root diseases of human nature—conceit and laziness. It would not be difficult to find modern applications of a sentence that was written by Robert Wolseley as long ago as 1685: 'Every ass that's romantic believes he's inspired.'

But to return to Coleridge: at his best, especially when he insists that great poetry must be representative, he can scarcely be charged with having encouraged the over-facile type of inspiration. One may ask however whether he has brought the doctrine of representativeness, with its inevitable corollaries of imitation and probability, into sufficiently close relation with his actual defining of the imagination and its rôle. The most famous of his critical phrases, 'that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith,' does not appear to afford any adequate basis for discriminating between poetic faith and poetic credulity. The fact that a fiction of any kind is enthralling is no sure proof that it has human substance. Otherwise certain detective stories would merit a high literary rating. The phrase was actually framed with a view to justifying The Ancient Mariner, a tale that lacks probability, not only in Mrs. Barbauld's sense, but, as I have been trying to show, in Aristotle's as well. Nor is it enough to speak of 'the shaping spirit of imagination,' for the imagination may shape chimeras. One cannot again be wholly satisfied with the definition of 'the primary imagination' as 'a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.' This would seem to be an invitation to the romantic to exalt himself to the level of deity before making sure of the validity of his imaginings apart from his own emotions.

We must conclude therefore that, in spite of many admirable remarks by the way, Coleridge does not succeed in disengaging his theory of the imagination sufficiently from the transcendental mist. It is to be regretted above all that he did not affirm clearly the rôle of the imagination in giving access to a supersensuous reality; an affirmation that is necessary if the doctrine of imitation and probability is to be relieved of every suspicion of formalism. Instead, he inclined to see the highest use of the imagination in Wordsworth's communing with natural appearances, and so became one of the promoters of the great pathetic fallacy that has been bewildering the human spirit ever since.

Wordsworth, who tended to read into the landscape what is not there (for example, 'unutterable love'), at the same time that he rendered, often fortunately, the wonder that is there, disparaged science. Yet probably the chief reason for the comparative eclipse of the imagination that seizes what is normal and central in human experience in favor of the imagination that yields to the lure of wonder has been the discoveries of science. These discoveries have engendered an intoxication with novelty for which the past offers no parallel. The modern man has been kept on the tiptoe of expectation by one marvel after another. For the moment he is thus imaginatively enthralled by the conquest of the air. He is infinitely removed from the Horatian nil admirari, even though he does not set out deliberately, like a certain French minor poet, to 'live in a state of bedazzlement.' As a result of the interplay and coö peration of the various forms of naturalism, the attitude of the modern man towards life has become purely exploratory—a sheer expansion of wonder and curiosity. He cannot even conceive another attitude. Yet a situation is gradually growing up that may force him to conceive it. Wonder has a large place in the scheme of things, but is after all only a sorry substitute for the law of measure of the humanist or for the religious virtues—awe, reverence and humility.

If one wishes to understand how humanism and religion have been more or less compromised by the modern movement with its 'Renascence of Wonder,' it is still helpful to go back to its earlier stages. Matthew Arnold expressed the opinion that the burst of creative activity in English literature through the first quarter of the nineteenth century had about it something premature. Whatever justification there may be for this opinion is found in the failure of the romantic leaders to deal critically enough with the idea of creation itself. The doctrine of creative spontaneity towards which they inclined, though in the case of Coleridge with reservations, suffered, as I have been trying to show, from a one-sidedness that has persisted to the present day. Unless this one-sidedness is corrected, it is to be feared that art and literature will be menaced with a more than Alexandrian decline. As a matter of fact, Joyce's Ulysses, which has been saluted by Miss Rebecca West, speaking for no inconsiderable portion of the younger literary set, as a work of 'majestic genius,' marks a more advanced stage of psychic disintegration than anything that has come down to us from classical antiquity. If there is to be any recovery of humanistic or religious truth, at least along critical lines, it would appear desirable to associate the creative process once more, not with spontaneity, but with imitation, imitation of the type that implies a supersensuous model imaginatively apprehended. According to the late Stuart Sherman, 'the great revolutionary task of nineteenth-century thinkers was to put man into nature. The great task of twentieth-century thinkers is to get him out again.' Superficially, the most serious danger of the primitivistic immersion of man in nature to which Sherman refers is that it leads to a denial of reason; a still graver danger, one finds on closer scrutiny, is that it leads to an obscuring of the true dualism—that between man's natural self and a higher will—or more frequently to the setting up of some subrational parody of this will such as one finds in The Ancient Mariner. The obscuring of the higher will has coincided practically with the decline of the doctrine of divine grace with which it has in the Christian Occident been traditionally associated. The issues involved evidently extend far beyond the boundaries of literature. But, to consider literature alone, it would seem necessary to recover in some form, perhaps in a purely psychological form, the true dualism, if creation is once more to be achieved that deserves to be accounted highly serious—creation, in other words, that is informed by the human and dramatic quality of imagination.