Romantic Literary Criticism Cover Image

Romantic Literary Criticism

Start Free Trial

Principles in Literary Criticism

Download PDF PDF Page Citation Cite Share Link Share

SOURCE: Jackson, J. R. de J. “Principles in Literary Criticism.” In Method and Imagination in Coleridge's Criticism, pp. 48-74. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969.

[In the following excerpt, Jackson discusses Coleridge's reaction to what he personally considered to be the poor quality of contemporary literary reviews, and his attempt to establish a set of standards by which literature could more properly be judged.]

Coleridge's efforts to reform literary criticism follow much the same patterns. The prevalence of biting, opinionated reviews seemed to him to be another instance of the intellectual weakness of his age. His opposition to reviewing is part and parcel of his more general attempt to improve the way in which his contemporaries thought. Again we find him attacking reliance on mere opinions, advocating dependence on principles, recommending the advantages of hard thinking, and finally describing a specific Method and attempting to implement it. It is generally accepted that he did recommend criticism based on principles; some have gone so far as to hail this recommendation and his subsequent attempt to fulfil it as being his special contribution to criticism; but the exact nature of the critical Method which he was proposing and the implications of it in his critical practice have not been treated publicly at any length.

By the turn of the century Coleridge had already shown his scepticism of reviewers. Like most young authors he was interested in what they had to say about his own work, but he was scornful of their claims to be taken seriously. Youthful gratification and irony combine in a letter written to his friend J. P. Estlin in 1796 announcing the public reception of his Poems: ‘The Reviews have been wonderful—The Monthly has cataracted panegyric on my poems; the Critical has cascaded it; and the Analytical has dribbled it with very tolerable civility.’1 And he adds to a similar account in a letter to Thomas Poole, that ‘as to the British Critic, they durst not condemn and they would not praise—so contented themselves with “commending me, as a Poet[”]—and allowed me “tenderness of sentiment & elegance of diction”.—’2 At the same time Coleridge was himself earning some money as a reviewer, and such examples of his work as are reliably identified as his seem to have been written seriously enough.3 His early comments on reviewing reveal a mild concern for reviews of his own poetry, the conviction that reviews in general should be written with a sense of responsibility, and the belief that readers ought not to rely on reviewers as infallible guides. His verses of 1801 on the ‘candid critic’ single out hostile unfairness as the main offence:

Most candid critic, what if I,
By way of joke, pull out your eye,
And holding up the fragment, cry,
‘Ha! ha! that men such fools should be!
Behold this shapeless Dab!—and he
Who own'd it, fancied it could see!’
The joke were mighty analytic,
But should you like it, candid critic?(4)

In the early years of the nineteenth century, a new force appeared in periodical literature. A handful of publications emanating from Edinburgh began to alter the tone of public literary discussion to such effect as to damage Coleridge's reputation both as a writer and as a man, and to induce him to crystallize his attitude to reviewing into one of outright antagonism. In 1802 the Edinburgh Review appeared; it was soon followed by the Quarterly Review, and eventually, in 1817, by Blackwood's Magazine. Coleridge was at first unconcerned. He writes reassuringly to Southey, whose Thalaba had attracted the attention of the fledgling Edinburgh Review: ‘—I heard of the Edinburgh review, & heard the name of your Reviewer—but forgot it—. Reviews may sell 50 or 100 copies in the first three months—& there their Influence ends.’5 Southey was less sanguine, and a few months later we find Coleridge applauding his doubts:

Your prophecy concerning the Edingburgh Review did credit to your penetration. The second number is altogether despicable—the hum-drum of pert attorneys' Clerks, very pert & yet prolix & dull as a superannuated Judge … the first article on Kant you may believe on my authority to be impudent & senseless Babble.6

By midsummer of 1803, Coleridge felt able to express a considered opinion of the new periodical and the city of its birth:

—I have not seen the Edingburgh Review—the truth is, that Edingburgh is a place of literary Gossip—& even I have had my portion of Puff there—& of course, my portion of Hatred & Envy.—One man puffs me up—he has seen & talked with me—another hears him, goes & reads my poems, written when almost a boy—& candidly & logically hates me, because he does not admire my poems in the proportion in which one of his acquaintances had admired me.7

But he is still uncertain of the influence enjoyed by the magazine, for he concludes lamely that ‘—It is difficult to say whether these Reviewers do you harm or good.—’8

The early years of the Edinburgh Review were sufficiently spectacular to jolt Coleridge out of his Olympian indifference; it rapidly became popular, and its standards were, to his way of thinking, debased and vicious. One cannot tell precisely when Coleridge realized its power for doing mischief—his return from Malta after two years absence may have alerted him in 1806, and sympathy for the Wordsworths' concern over Jeffrey's hostility in 1808 may have confirmed his suspicions.9 Whenever, and for whatever reason, Coleridge changed his mind, his comments about reviewing begin to assume the tone of a passionate crusade after 1808.

In 1808 he wrote conciliatingly to Francis Jeffrey to persuade that worthy—Coleridge had recently rebuked Southey gently for calling him ‘Judge Jeffrey’—10 to honour Thomas Clarkson's book on the slave trade with a fair hearing. The cause and the man were dear to him:

… I write to you now merely to intreat—for the sake of mankind—an honorable review of Mr Clarkson's History of the Abolition of the Slave Trade. … It would be presumptuous in me to offer to write the Review of his Work—yet I should be glad were I permitted to submit to you the many thoughts, which occurred to me during it's perusal.11

Jeffrey allowed Coleridge to write the review, but altered it slightly before publishing it. His alterations seem to have been accepted meekly enough at the time. Writing to Jeffrey himself, Coleridge is mild indeed; and he is only moderately critical when mentioning the changes in a letter to T. G. Street.12 Yet within four months he writes in the following terms to Humphry Davy whose Bakerian Lecture had been savaged:

The Passage in question was the grossest and most disgusting Keck-up of Envy, that has deformed even the E. R. Had the Author had the Truth before his Eyes, and purposely written in diametrical opposition, he could not have succeeded better—. It is high Time, that the spear of Ithuriel should touch this Toad at the ear of the Public.13

A little more than a year later, Coleridge maintained that the alterations in his review of Clarkson had merely confirmed his disapproval. ‘… Reviewing,’ he writes, ‘which is more profitable & abundantly more easy, I cannot engage in, as I hold it utterly immoral—and was confirmed in it by the changes, Jeffray made, in my Review of Clarkson's Hist. of Ab. in the Ed. Rev., the only case in which I thought myself warranted to make an exception.’14 Personal grievance may have played some part in his reaction, but it does not seem to have been the decisive element.

In the years that followed, Coleridge began to argue his opposition. He objected to the assertiveness and personal rancour which he detected in contemporary reviews, and he contended that this castigation of sinners rather than sins was the more unpardonable for being anonymous. In a letter to Lady Beaumont of 1810, Coleridge had explained why he could not write reviews: ‘… I deem anonymous Criticism altogether immoral, and our Reviews without any exception among the most pernicious publications of the age, and as aggravating the Disease, of which they are the symptoms.’15 It was a matter of ethics.

In 1811 he opened his course on Shakespeare and Milton with an introductory lecture on false criticism and its causes. He divided the causes into those of an accidental and those of a permanent nature. The accidental he defines as those which arise out of differences between the circumstances in which we live and those of past writers.16 This appeal for historical perspective, though admirable and uncommon for the time, does not concern us immediately. Among the particular circumstances he names, however, he includes ‘The prevalence of reviews, magazines, newspapers, novels, & c.’17 Reviews, he declares, are ‘pernicious’, for three reasons: ‘because the writers determine without reference to fixed principles—because reviews are usually filled with personalities; and, above all, because they teach people rather to judge than to consider, to decide than to reflect. …’18 Pursuing the indulgence in personality, an ‘accidental’ cause, he continues:

The crying sin of modern criticism is that it is overloaded with personality. If an author commit an error, there is no wish to set him right for the sake of truth, but for the sake of triumph—that the reviewer may show how much wiser, or how much abler he is than the writer. … This is an age of personality and political gossip. … This style of criticism is at the present moment one of the chief pillars of the Scotch professorial court. …19

The bulk of his attack is directed at the spiteful motives and manners of the critics, their impudent assumption of superiority, and their irresponsible exploitation of the advantage of being nameless. He himself, he assures his listeners, will forgo such tactics; ‘above all, whether I speak of those whom I know, or of those whom I do not know, of friends or of enemies, of the dead or of the living, my great aim will be to be strictly impartial.’20

In 1815, Coleridge writes to Lady Beaumont promising to wreak vengeance upon the reviewer of Wordsworth's Excursion in the Edinburgh Review. Lapsing into an incoherence unusual for him, he declares passionately: ‘If ever Guilt lay on a Writer's head, and if malignity, slander, hypocrisy and self-contradicting Baseness can constitute Guilt, I dare openly, and openly (please God!) I will, impeach the Writer of that Article. …’21 His first and only book of criticism was at that time in the process of being written; it gave him the opportunity of airing the question of reviewing at some length. In Biographia Literaria, Chapter Three and the concluding part of Chapter Ten, Chapter Twenty-one, and the Conclusion, are all devoted to this theme. Combined with Coleridge's recommendations of ideal alternatives, the remarks on contemporary reviewing comprise more than a fifth of the book.22

He was soon to accept a makeshift truce with his enemies,23 but before he did so, Coleridge had publicly developed his observation of contemporary critical evils into clear diagnosis and prescriptive antidote. Like his more general suggestions for the reform of contemporary thought as a means of effecting social improvement, his analysis of critical shortcomings concentrates on the dangerous habit of offering opinions and making assertive judgements, and on the widespread indifference to the need for some canon of principles. Referring again to the decline of mental activity and the prevalence of intellectual apathy, Coleridge pleads the case for hard thought on the part of readers of criticism. Finally, putting to use the theory of Method which he was currently developing, he proposes a Method of philosophical criticism and attempts to offer an example in illustration of what he is advocating. He was openly sceptical of his attempt when he made it, and he invited improvements and argument.

I

Coleridge associated the bare assertion of opinions with the spirit of critical arrogance he deplored. Speaking in The Friend of ‘The true marks, by which Presumption or Arrogance may be detected’, he links the expression of opinion and abuse of one's opponents:

… as I confine my present observations to literature, I deem such criteria neither difficult to determine or to apply. The first mark, as it appears to me, is a frequent bare assertion of opinions not generally received, without condescending to prefix or annex the facts and reasons on which such opinions were formed; especially if this absence of logical courtesy is supplied by contemptuous or abusive treatment of such as happen to doubt of, or oppose, the decisive ipse dixi.24

Although he does not say so in so many words, such abuse of opinion presumably lies behind Coleridge's decision to expound ‘THE PRINCIPLES OF POETRY, and their Application as Grounds of Criticism’ in his 1811-12 series of literary lectures.25 His criticism is aimed not at the opinions themselves, but at the custom of presenting them unsupported. As he points out in the same lecture series, ‘These reviewers might be compared with the Roman praegustatores whose business it was to tell you what was fit to be eaten, and like the praegustatores the reviewers gave their opinions, but carefully concealed all the reasons for such judgements.’26 In a manuscript fragment Coleridge asks,

To what purpose should we reason with a Critic, who without affording a single proof of his competence or perhaps in spite of the most glaring proofs to the contrary, (nay, in spite of his own consciousness that he has never made himself master even of the means of studying the question;) will yet assure the Public, that a writer's arguments are nonsense, and his inductions falsehoods?27

Argument, then, is one of the signs that a reviewer deserves our attention. When a reviewer merely sets his opinion against the opinion of the author he is reviewing, the author, whose claim is self-evident, is more deserving of a respectful hearing. ‘I know no claim,’ Coleridge writes, ‘that the mere opinion of any individual can have to weigh down the opinion of the author himself; against the probability of whose parental partiality we ought to set that of his having thought longer and more deeply on the subject.’28

In Biographia Literaria, Coleridge tries to give evidence of his own competence and to show himself ‘master of the means of studying the question’. The autobiographical materials introduced into the work are calculated to explain to us the bias of his taste and to reveal the steps of thought by which he arrived at the ideas which he wishes to expound.29 A propagandist for a critical theory might have been better advised to conceal such a past, but Coleridge appears to be making a genuine effort to promote truth without at the same time believing that he enjoys a monopoly of it himself. Much of what he says about his schooldays shows us his later predilections in embryo, and no doubt he selected his material accordingly. In 1801 he had planned ‘a work on the originality & merits of Locke, Hobbes, & Hume’, as ‘a Pioneer to my greater work, and as exhibiting a proof that I have not formed opinions without an attentive Perusal of the works of my Predecessors from Aristotle to Kant’.30 We have noticed later manifestations of this early conviction that a philosopher ought to present evidence of his intellectual pedigree; in Biographia Literaria Coleridge is able to act upon it.

More important than the lack of such pedigree or guarantees of competence in the reviews, however, was the absence of accepted canons of criticism implied by popular reliance on tendentious opinions. Coleridge asserts that

… it is a truth of no difficult demonstration, that neither our literary or political Libellers could possess the influence, which it is too notorious that they now exert, but from the absence of all principles, and therefore of all safe and certain rules, of Method in the formation of the Reflection, the Taste, and the moral Tact as far as the great majority of English Readers are in question. …31

In Biographia Literaria he refers contemptuously to

… the substitution of assertion for argument; to the frequency of arbitrary and sometimes petulant verdicts, not seldom unsupported even by a single quotation from the work condemned, which might at least have explained the critic's meaning, if it did not prove the justice of his sentence.32

‘Even where this is not the case,’ he says, ‘the extracts are too often made without reference to any general grounds or rules from which the faultiness or inadmissibility of the qualities attributed may be deduced; and without any attempt to show, that the qualities are attributable to the passage extracted.’ What sort of ‘general grounds or rules’ he has in mind by this time appears from his statement, also in Biographia Literaria, that

… till reviews are conducted on far other principles, and with far other motives; till in the place of arbitrary dictation and petulant sneers, the reviewers support their decisions by reference to fixed canons of criticism, previously established and deduced from the nature of man; reflecting minds will pronounce it arrogance in them thus to announce themselves to men of letters, as the guides of their taste and judgment.33

Having diagnosed reliance on opinion as one of the chief failings of contemporary criticism, and having explained that its weaknesses are attributable to the lack of any testimony of competence and the absence of principles, ultimately of philosophical principles, Coleridge, like a true reformer, sets about offering examples of his alternative. As early as 1796, long before he was concerned with combating the malign influence of the reviews, he had announced that the reviews in The Watchman would be conducted according to fixed principles—this was in accordance with his lifelong preference for this mode of discourse.34 In his literary lectures, some fifteen years later, he is reported as promising something closer to the canons of criticism he hoped for: ‘the whole of the fabric he should raise in a manner rested upon laying the foundation firmly and distinctly. …’35 But his first extensive public attempt to provide an example is the series of essays which appeared originally in Felix Farley's Bristol Journal in 1814 under the title ‘On the Principles of Genial Criticism Concerning the Fine Arts’. He had already expressed himself privately in the ‘Fragment of an Essay on Taste’ written in 1810, and had posed the question ‘whether taste in any one of the fine arts has any fixed principle or ideal. …’36 Looking back over his own intellectual development, Coleridge describes how he came to seek solutions to such problems: ‘actuated … by my former passion for metaphysical investigations; I labored at a solid foundation, on which permanently to ground my opinions, in the component faculties of the human mind itself. …’37Biographia Literaria was to be the most elaborate presentation of these labours which he was ever to lay before the public.

In 1815 he wrote to Byron about the ‘Biographical Sketches’ he was engaged upon, and stated that his object was ‘to reduce criticism to a system, by the deduction of the Causes from Principles involved in our faculties’.38 He wrote in similar terms to Daniel Stuart of ‘… Biographical Sketches of my literary life, & opini[ons] (with the principles, on which they are grounded, & the arguments by which they were deduced) on Politics, Religion, Philosophy, and Poetry. …’39 In the Biographia, Coleridge apologized for the inclusion of so much philosophical argument. He assures his readers:

I would gladly … spare both myself and others this labor, if I knew how without it to present an intelligible statement of my poetic creed, not as my opinions, which weigh for nothing, but as deductions from established premises conveyed in such a form, as is calculated either to effect a fundamental conviction, or to receive a fundamental confutation.40

He introduces his critique of Wordsworth's poetry in similar terms: ‘… I have advanced no opinion either for praise or censure, other than as texts introductory to the reasons which compel me to form it.’41 His intention of rectifying critical malpractice is apparent. In an extended statement he outlines what he takes to be the correct way of criticizing:

… I should call that investigation fair and philosophical, in which the critic announces and endeavors to establish the principles, which he holds for the foundation of poetry in general, with the specification of these in their application to the different classes of poetry. Having thus prepared his canons of criticism for praise and condemnation, he would proceed to particularize the most striking passages to which he deems them applicable. … Then if his premises be rational, his deductions legitimate, and his conclusions justly applied, the reader, and possibly the poet himself, may adopt his judgement in the light of judgement and in the independence of free-agency. If he has erred, he presents his errors in a definite place and tangible form, and holds the torch and guides the way to their detection.42

Coleridge felt himself bound to attempt criticism of such a ‘fair and philosophical’ nature with the aim of clearing up some of the misunderstandings and disagreements which were produced by opinionated criticism. He repeats his suggestion, that the grounds are more important than the opinion which is derived from them. Speaking of his disagreements with his contemporaries, he says:

… where I had reason to suppose my convictions fundamentally different, 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 grounds common to both sides, from which to commence its explanation.43

The same spirit is exhibited at the conclusion of his criticism of Wordsworth.44

This was to be the corrective to the bad habits of contemporary reviewing, replacing special pleading with impartiality, achieving consistency by relying on fixed principles, and advancing our knowledge of literature and skill at criticizing it in a co-operative attempt to find grounds for general agreement. Coleridge's effort to reform criticism should, as I have endeavoured to make plain, be considered as part of his wider campaign for national reform, and not as an isolated literary attitude. It springs from basic assumptions about intellectual activity and is not simply an unbiased diagnosis of critical failings. The new reviews provided him with an occasion to express these assumptions, just as unsatisfactory political developments had, and, by bringing abstract theories to grips with concrete situations, to dramatize and illustrate what he believed.

II

When he turns to consider the ‘permanent causes’ of false criticism in his 1811-12 lecture series, Coleridge identifies three, the first two of which constitute his third reason for describing reviews as ‘pernicious’. These are: ‘the great pleasure we feel in being told of the knowledge we possess, rather than of the ignorance we suffer’, and ‘the custom which some people have established of judging of books by books’.45 These ‘causes’ recall Coleridge's views on education and the transmission of knowledge: namely that learning and knowing depend on effort, that there is no easy way to attain either, and that one of the failings of his time is the preoccupation with talismans which promise to make effort unnecessary. Coleridge had warned of this dangerous characteristic of reviews seven years earlier in a letter to Southey in which he refers to ‘the necessary Evil involved in their Essence, of breeding a crumbliness of mind in the Readers. …’46 In the lecture series, when he criticizes the Reviews ‘above all, because they teach people rather to judge than to consider, to decide than to reflect …,’47 he refers to the consequences of this shortcoming in similar terms: ‘they encourage superficiality, and induce the thoughtless and the idle to adopt sentiments conveyed under the authoritative We, and not, by the working and subsequent clearing of their own minds, to form just original opinions.’48 This comment is part of the broader assault which we have already seen him bent upon in the original issues of The Friend. Again he uses his image of the chamois-hunter:

… who but a fool, if unpractised, would attempt to follow him? it is not intrepidity alone that is necessary, but he who would imitate the hunter must have gone through the same process for the acquisition of strength, skill, and knowledge: he must exert, and be capable of exerting, the same muscular energies, and display the same perseverance and courage, or all his efforts will be worse than fruitless: they will lead not only to disappointment, but to destruction.49

Coleridge makes the connection with criticism explicit, and he seems to be suggesting that the reviewer cannot be a surrogate thinker for the reader. He asks:

Why has nature given limbs, if they are not to be applied to motion and action; why abilities, if they are to lie asleep, while we avail ourselves of the eyes, ears, and understandings of others? As men often employ servants, to spare them the nuisance of rising from their seats and walking across a room, so men employ reviews in order to save themselves the trouble of exercising their own powers of judging: it is only mental slothfulness and sluggishness that induce so many to adopt, and take for granted the opinions of others.50

Here Coleridge has taken a major step forward by proposing not only that the methods of criticism must be changed, but that they be directed towards other purposes. To suggest that reviews should devote themselves to teaching readers to read critically, instead of relieving them of the necessity of doing so by telling them what to read and what to ignore, was reform indeed! It would not be enough to outline principles of criticism and persuade others to accept them—Coleridge is no naïve exponent of systematic panaceas. The readers' minds must be accustomed to philosophic thinking; readers must be taught not to accept canons of criticism, but to construct them for themselves. This is the implication of Coleridge's disparagement of the over-optimistic school-books of his day:

Attempts have been made to compose and adapt systems of education; but it appears to me something like putting Greek and Latin grammars into the hands of boys, before they understand a word of Greek or Latin. These grammars contain instructions on all the minutiæ and refinements of language, but of what use are they to persons who do not comprehend the first rudiments? Why are you to furnish the means of judging, before you give the capacity to judge?51

Grammar and criticism are not, of course, entirely analogous, because while grammatical principles have been worked out and broadly agreed upon, critical principles are still in dispute. In criticism, if anywhere, the teacher is a student among students, offering not truth, but, for what they may be worth, his own efforts to discover truth. Coleridge is fully aware of the tentative nature of the discipline he is embarking upon, and he is willing to forgo the niceties of polished presentation in order to rough out his preliminary efforts. As he puts it later in the same series of lectures,

It is true that my matter may not be so accurately arranged: it may not dovetail and fit at all times as nicely as could be wished; but you shall have my thoughts warm from my heart, and fresh from my understanding: you shall have the whole skeleton, although the bones may not be put together with the utmost anatomical skill.52

It is his critical version of the ‘drama of Reason’, the presentation of ‘the thought growing, instead of a mere Hortus siccus’, which we saw him recommend in the preceding chapter. It is a modest invitation to the co-operation of his readers.

Given Coleridge's conviction that one must labour to learn, and his desire to teach in a fundamental way rather than simply to inform, it is not surprising that Biographia Literaria should be a forbidding book. Coleridge knew that his argument would not be understood by many, and he gives specific instructions to his reader in Chapter 11 when he asks that ‘he will either pass over the following chapter altogether, or read the whole connectedly’.53 He admits that not everyone can, or even need, be a philosopher,54 and launches off on his well-known comparison of the philosophical and non-philosophical ways of knowing:

The first range of hills, that encircles the scanty vale of human life, is the horizon for the majority of its inhabitants. On its ridges the common sun is born and departs. From them the stars rise, and touching them they vanish. By the many, even this range, the natural limit and bulwark of the vale, is but imperfectly known. … But in all ages there have been a few, who measuring and sounding the rivers of the vale at the feet of their furthest inaccessible falls have learnt, that the sources must be far higher and far inward. …55

Coleridge is for the moment more interested in the ‘few’, but he is anxious lest the obstacles he is placing in their way may be too much for even these stalwarts. He voices his anxiety when introducing the ten theses ‘for those of my readers, who are willing to accompany me through the following Chapter. …’56 And in his much-maligned letter to himself he is able to joke about the bewilderment which many are likely to feel.

This letter deserves more respectful attention than it usually gets. It is true that Coleridge, by using it as an escape device, admits that he cannot yet entirely explain the philosophy he is expounding, and that he encourages the suspicion that he has not yet thought the whole of it out to his own satisfaction; but to suggest, as Hazlitt and Christopher North were the first to do, that Coleridge was perpetrating a wordy fraud on his readers, will not do. As I shall try to show later in this essay, the failure to include the promised chapter does not seriously damage what is left, and his suggestion that it be reserved for his ‘announced treatises on the Logos or communicative intellect in Man and Deity’ is far from being the bombastic insincerity it is sometimes taken for.57 In fact, Coleridge foresees the very criticisms which have been levelled at him ever since, and puts them so wrily that one feels that only the extreme hostility of his age to the kind of thought he was advocating could have denied him the sympathetic and charitable hearing he had asked for others.58

Coleridge's mysterious ‘friend’ mentions the unfamiliar ring of his views and exposition:

your opinions and method of argument were not only so new to me, but so directly the reverse of all I had ever been accustomed to consider as truth, that even if I had comprehended your premises sufficiently to have admitted them, and had seen the necessity of your conclusions, … I should have felt as if I had been standing on my head.59

Stepping briefly out of character, the ‘friend’ comments more knowingly: ‘You have been obliged to omit so many links, from the necessity of compression, that what remains, looks … like the fragments of the winding steps of an old ruined tower’.60 As the letter implies, and as readers have continued to point out ever since, Coleridge's educational experiment was a failure. It was not that he had neglected to make allowances for the frailties of students—the interspersed autobiographical materials were ingeniously contrived to make his position clear on various matters on which he felt he had been misunderstood, and they serve much the same function as the ‘Landing-places’ so tolerantly scattered through The Friend, but that he failed to bridge the gap between his own thought, habituated to Transcendentalist notions and terms, and the thought of his contemporaries.61 It was a question of underestimating the requirements of his audience, not of being indifferent to them. What matters here is that we be aware of his wish to instruct fundamentally, and of his belief that such instruction was the true role of criticism.

III

The final step in Coleridge's attempt to reform criticism is his proposal of specific philosophical principles on which it should be based. We considered in the preceding chapter Coleridge's recommendations of the way in which thought should be conducted, his outline of the process of Method. Biographia Literaria is Coleridge's attempt to carry his Method into practice in the particular sphere of criticism. We have learned that ‘progressive transition’ is the essential characteristic, and that it should be unified by being based upon a preconception derived from the ‘interior of the human intellect’. It remains for us to show that Biographia Literaria was intended to exemplify this theory of Method, and to indicate how apt an example it is.

Coleridge says at one point in the Biographia that ‘The ultimate end of criticism is much more to establish the principles of writing, than to furnish rules how to pass judgement on what has been written by others; if indeed it were possible that the two could be separated.’62 He had noticed long before the damaging effect which the vague use of terms would have on any such enterprise,63 and he now makes a related assertion: ‘The first lesson of philosophic discipline is to wean the student's attention from the degrees of things, which alone form the vocabulary of common life, and to direct it to the kind abstracted from degree.’64 His attempt to clarify his differences with Wordsworth over the distinction between Imagination and Fancy is relevant to all three concerns—the establishment of principles of writing, the discrimination of critical terms, and the drawing of attention from degrees of things to kinds of things. And it is in his attempt to distinguish between Imagination and Fancy that Coleridge tries to put his Method into effect. In doing so he provides an example of what he meant by Method.

The first step in carrying out such a plan is, as we have learned, to settle upon a preconception, initiative or Idea. Coleridge devotes considerable space to establishing it. His opening argument in Chapter 12 is reminiscent of the terms used in his description of Method itself. ‘A system,’ he says, ‘which aims to deduce the memory with all the other functions of intelligence, must of course place its first position from beyond the memory, and anterior to it, otherwise the principle of solution would be itself a part of the problem to be solved.65 He calls again on the analogy of geometry: ‘In geometry the primary construction is not demonstrated, but postulated.’66 ‘Geometry therefore,’ he continues, ‘supplies philosophy with the example of a primary intuition, from which every science that lays claim to evidence must take its commencement. The mathematician does not begin with a demonstrable proposition, but with an intuition, a practical idea.’67 He recognizes the limits of his analogy by pointing out that the greater complexity of philosophy denies it the convenience of diagrammatic illustration: ‘Philosophy is employed on objects of the inner sense, and cannot, like geometry appropriate to every construction a correspondent outward intuition.’68

The problem is one which we have already encountered in our consideration of Coleridge's treatment of Method. He persists in spite of the inherent difficulties: ‘Nevertheless philosophy, if it is to arrive at evidence, must proceed from the most original construction, and the question then is, what is the most original construction or first productive act for the inner sense.’69 In trying to answer this question Coleridge goes farther than he does in his Method essays, by discriminating between the degrees of ‘inner sense’ possessed by different people. Just as some are philosophers and some are not, some are capable of attaining ‘to a notion of [their] notions’ and some are not.70 The absence of simplifying visual representations of ‘notions’ makes transmission of them to those whose ‘inner sense’ is undeveloped or lacking difficult or impossible. Coleridge writes that,

To an Esquimaux or New Zealander our most popular philosophy would be wholly unintelligible. The sense, the inward organ for it, is not yet born in him. So is there many a one among us, yes, and some who think themselves philosophers too, to whom the philosophic organ is entirely wanting. To such a man, philosophy is a mere play of words and notions, like a theory of music to the deaf. …71

As a prelude to a philosophical statement, such reasoning is likely to seem tendentious or unfair, disqualifying those who disagree as being philosophically deficient—indeed the tone of it may have exasperated some of Coleridge's own reviewers—but it is of a piece with his later remark in his Philosophical Lectures: ‘There is a point which is above all intellect, and there are truths derived from that point which must be presumed, … and when such principles are denied you may at least candidly say, “We differ on principles”, and charitably think that that man must be made a better before he can be made a wiser man.’72 It certainly is not a matter for argument, and Coleridge, whatever he may think about its consequences, makes no attempt to pass off his statement as more than the assumption that it is.

Rather abruptly, he now declares that the postulate of philosophy is the injunction ‘know thyself’.73 We shall consider his attempt to delve into the way in which one can know anything in the next chapter; for the time being it suffices to notice the course of Coleridge's argument. He is introducing the problem of the relationship between the perceiver and the things perceived—or to use his synonyms, between Subject and Object, Self and Nature. He is content to paraphrase Schelling when discussing the question of the precedence of Subject and Object, and by falling back on the German philosopher as a sort of shorthand he is perhaps overdoing the presentation of the ‘drama of Reason’. While one can make something of this discussion in the light of his general philosophical aims and efforts, a reader denied access to such aids is likely to feel baffled by the sudden administration of a Transcendental bolus.74 Having forearmed ourselves by our examination of the essays on Method, however, the problem and the terms used should seem less strange.

Coleridge begins by describing two ways of thinking about how we know things. He remarks 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’.75 Having admitted so much, he goes on to suppose them separable for the purpose of examining the nature of their union, and discusses the implications first of holding that the objective precedes the subjective, and then of holding that this succession is reversed.

In reading his account, we should bear in mind the relations of Law and Theory. If the objective is taken to be the first, we have what Coleridge calls ‘the problem of natural philosophy’.76 This is what in the essays on Method he has called the relation of Theory. Having assumed that nature precedes the observing self, Coleridge maintains, the natural philosopher moves from nature to the self, or intelligence: ‘The necessary tendence … of all natural philosophy is from nature to intelligence; and this, and no other[,] is the true ground and occasion of the instinctive striving to introduce theory into our views of natural phænomena.’77 Moving from observation of material things, the scientist tries to achieve universal principles of laws: ‘The highest perfection of natural philosophy would consist in the perfect spiritualization of all the laws of nature into laws of intuition and intellect.’78 In Biographia Literaria Coleridge withholds the expression of scepticism about the likelihood of achieving satisfactory results which he was later to permit himself.79 In the 1818 Friend he describes the sequence of scientific thinking uncompromisingly as ‘representative not constitutive, and … indeed little more than an abbreviature of the preceding observation, and the deductions therefrom’.80 In the Biographia he refrains from condemnation and describes the ideal end of science:

The Phænomena … must wholly disappear, and the laws alone … must remain. Thence it comes, that in nature itself the more the principle of law breaks forth, the more does the husk drop off, the phænomena themselves become more spiritual and at length cease altogether in our consciousness. … The theory of natural philosophy would … be completed, when all nature was demonstrated to be identical in essence with that, which in its highest known power exists in man as intelligence and self-consciousness. …81

The essays on Method have provided us with the technical meaning of the phrase ‘the principle of law’ for Coleridge.

‘Natural Philosophy’ represents the extreme of materialistic investigation for Coleridge, and he wishes to show that even in it the investigator is led unconsciously to the subjective:

… even natural science, which commences with the material phænomenon as the reality and substance of things existing, does yet by the necessity of theorising unconsciously, and as it were instinctively, end in nature as an intelligence; and by this tendency the science of nature becomes finally natural philosophy, the one of the two poles of fundamental science.82

Ideal though this process may be for science, philosophy, according to Coleridge, demands a different one.

He now examines the consequences of supposing the opposite—that the subjective precedes the objective. As one might have anticipated, it turns out to be the supposition of ‘the transcendental or intelligential philosopher’, and it is analogous to the relation of Law. When thinking in this manner, one is careful ‘to preclude all interpolation of the objective into the subjective principles of [one's] science …’.83 This result is achieved by means of ‘an absolute and scientific scepticism to which the mind voluntar[il]y determines itself for the specific purpose of future certainty’.84 It is a constitutive philosophy which tries to deal with two widely held assumptions or positions, one of which Coleridge wishes to criticize, and the other of which, while he holds it up for view as an assumption, he feels cannot be dismissed. Coleridge tells us that the philosopher's scepticism is aimed not at ‘the prejudices of education and circumstance, but those original and innate prejudices which nature herself has planted in all men, and which to all but the philosopher are the first principles of knowledge, and the final test of truth’.85 He reduces these to ‘the one fundamental presumption, that there exist things without us’.86 A presumption, be it noticed, on which the scientific relation of Theory he has just described is predicated. Coleridge does not attempt to prove that the ‘prejudice’ is not correct, but he suggests the impossibility of demonstrating that it is:

… inasmuch as [the presumption] refers to something essentially different from ourselves, nay even in opposition to ourselves, [it] leaves it inconceivable how it could possibly become a part of our immediate consciousness; (in other words how that, which ex hypothesi is and continues to be extrinsic and alien to our being, should become a modification of our being). …87

The fact that the presumption is indemonstrable rules it out as a foundation stone for philosophy as far as Coleridge is concerned.

The other fundamental presumption, the sense of self-consciousness (or as Coleridge cryptically calls it, ‘I Am’) is also indemonstrable; however, he finds it impossible to abandon. ‘It is,’ he admits, ‘groundless indeed; but then in the very idea it precludes all ground, and separated from the immediate consciousness loses its whole sense and import. It is groundless; but only because it is itself the ground of all other certainty.’88 As he points out, there is a difference between the ‘certainty’ of this position and the position that there exist things without us, but he is heedful of the widespread acceptance of the latter and he seeks to reconcile the disparity, which ‘the transcendental philosopher can solve only by the supposition, that the former is unconsciously involved in the latter; that it is not only coherent but identical, and one and the same thing with our own immediate self consciousness’.89 He concludes that ‘the office and object’ of the transcendental philosophy is ‘To demonstrate this identity. …’90 Unfortunately Coleridge does not unravel the problem here; instead he refers us to his promised but uncompleted Logosophia. In its place he offers the ten ‘theses’ with the excuse that ‘The science of arithmetic furnishes instances, that a rule may be useful in practical application, and for the particular purpose may be sufficiently authenticated by the result, before it has itself been fully demonstrated.’91 We have, it seems, come to a link in Coleridge's chain of reasoning which he has not yet worked out to his satisfaction. In a sense too we have come to the end of a false start; the explication was too detailed to be kept up.

Coleridge does not abandon the chase, he simply embarks upon it anew with a statement of the results which he had hoped to arrive at, and tells us that they ‘will be applied to the deduction of the imagination, and with it the principles of production and of genial criticism in the fine arts’.92 While the theses may not be as full a discussion as we might wish, or as full as Coleridge evidently felt was desirable, they are in themselves sufficient to provide us with a general picture of the lines on which he has been thinking. This time he restricts his attention to the relation of Law.

He begins by asserting the correlation of Knowledge and Reality,93 a necessary preliminary if one is proposing to apply metaphysical conclusions to something as relatively concrete as ‘imagination’. He goes on to distinguish between ‘mediate’ and ‘immediate’ or ‘original’ truths, pointing out that in order to have ‘mediate’ truths one must first have ‘immediate’ ones. The immediate truths must therefore be sought first. In the third thesis, Coleridge states that ‘We are to seek … for some absolute truth capable of communicating to other positions a certainty, which it has not itself borrowed; a truth self-grounded, unconditional and known by its own light. In short, we have to find a somewhat which is, simply because it is.94 Such a truth must be its own predicate, and there must be no possibility of ‘requiring a cause or anticedent [sic] without an absurdity’.95 The fourth thesis states that there can be only one such principle,96 and the fifth, that it can be found ‘neither in object or subject taken separately’, and must, therefore, be found in that ‘which is the identity of both’.97

Coleridge has now brought us to the point which he had previously tried to reach by a different route, this time omitting the relation of Theory. He next expands a little upon the absolute Truth which he is looking for. In Thesis VI he describes it:

This principle … manifests itself in the Sum or I am, which I shall hereafter indiscriminately express by the words spirit, self, and self-consciousness. In this, and in this alone, object and subject, being and knowing, are identical, each involving and supposing the other. In other words, it is a subject which becomes a subject by the act of constructing itself objectively to itself; but which never is an object except for itself, and only so far as by the very same act it becomes a subject.98

This ‘spirit, self, and self-consciousness’, according to Thesis VII must be an act—and here Coleridge appears to be tipping the balance of the ‘coinstantaneous’ union of subject and object in favour of the subject—; ‘the spirit (originally the identity of object and subject) must in some sense dissolve this identity, in order to be conscious of it: fit alter et idem. But this implies an act. …’99 Coleridge maintains that an act necessarily presupposes a will: ‘it follows therefore that intelligence or self-consciousness is impossible, except by and in a will’.100 And here he casts off another shackle of the mechanistic philosophy which he has earlier ridiculed, by affirming that the will is free: ‘The self-conscious spirit therefore is a will; and freedom must be assumed as a ground of philosophy, and can never be deduced from it.101 This ‘self-consciousness’, being a union of subject and object, ‘can be conceived neither as infinite or finite exclusively, but as the most original union of both’.102

In his ninth thesis, Coleridge reminds us that he is not now referring to the science which moves from object to subject, but exclusively to the kind which moves from subject to object: ‘This principium commune essendi et cognoscendi, as subsisting in a will, or primary act of self-duplication, is the mediate or indirect principle of every science; but it is the immediate and direct principle of the ultimate science alone, i.e. of transcendental philosophy alone.’103 He is not offering an exposition of being, but only of knowing, for beyond knowledge it is impossible to inquire: ‘The principle of our knowing is sought within the sphere of our knowing. … It is asserted only, that the act of self-consciousness is for us the source and principle of all our possible knowledge.’104

Coleridge has now completed his attempt to establish an initial Idea, the initiative of the critical system he wishes to expound. I do not think that one can praise his organization of material, and yet, for all his irresolution, for all his circling and weaving around the point he is trying to make, his meaning is fairly clear. He is belittling thought based on the observation of phenomena (the relation of Theory, the method of natural science) and advocating thought based on scrutiny of the mind itself (the relation of Law). If we are to attain the sort of absolute knowledge which Coleridge believes is essential, we must begin with the Self and not with Nature. Coleridge declares his ultimate ambition to be ‘to construct by a series of intuitions the progressive schemes … till I arrive at the fulness of the human intelligence’.105 For the present, however, he is only concerned with arriving at an explanation of the poetic faculty of imagination; he assumes the fuller exposition of the position ‘I Am’ into ‘the fulness of the human intelligence’ as his principle, ‘in order to deduce from it a faculty, the generation, agency, and application of which form the contents of the ensuing chapter.’106 He is again admitting a gap in the chain, but a gap in detail; we are being asked to accept the results and implications of an argument which he promises to expound later. He is not giving up the attempt to arrive at a description of the creative act of poetry derived from first principles. Boldly he informs his readers: ‘I shall now proceed to the nature and genesis of the imagination. …’107

It is at this point that commentators tend to lose patience with Coleridge.108 Having been twice balked by lacunæ which demand considerable charity on the part of the reader, they jib at the third one which Coleridge lightheartedly ushers in with the fanfare of an expostulatory letter from his judicious ‘friend’. After an opening bow in Chapter Thirteen to his eminent predecessors Descartes and Kant, Coleridge abruptly gives up. This time he offers ‘results’ with a vengeance: ‘… I shall content myself for the present with stating the main result of the Chapter, which I have reserved for that future publication, a detailed prospectus of which the reader will find at the close of the second volume.’109 It was only adding insult to injury to omit even the prospectus. The ‘main result’ is, of course, the familiar description of ‘Primary Imagination’, ‘Secondary Imagination’, and ‘Fancy’.

I shall recur to these definitions in the fifth chapter, and shall try to show the relevance which the philosophical discussion we have just traced has to them; for the moment, however, we are only concerned with the extent to which the ‘deduction’ of Imagination from first principles may be said to exemplify the theory of Method which Coleridge has advocated. It must be admitted, for a start, that it is likely to win few converts. The difficulty with Coleridge's procedure is that the reader is not permitted to know where he is being taken or why he is being taken there; by obscuring the end in view, the intricacies of the way are allowed to become confusing and even irritating. Indeed, unless one is thinking within a framework of ideas which is at least roughly similar to Coleridge's before beginning to read him, the whole enterprise is likely to seem unforgivably capricious. By way of palliating this indictment, it may be noted that Coleridge's discussion in earlier chapters of his track through the works of various philosophers, if followed carefully, goes a long way towards providing the necessary framework. What Coleridge has failed to do is to make the link clear.

Inadequate though it may be, there can be little doubt that Coleridge intended Biographia Literaria as an example of the Method we have watched him expound. It will be enough to recall its characteristics. First of all, an initiative upon which ‘progressive transition’ may be built. ‘It is manifest, that the wider the sphere of transition is, the more comprehensive and commanding must be the initiative. …’110 The sphere of transition could scarcely be wider than that attempted in the Biographia—to deduce the faculty of Imagination from first principles. The nature of the initiative depends on the nature of the relations between the objects observed. As I have suggested, the relation of Law prevails; for it an absolute and unconditional ground is necessary, ‘a truth in the Mind itself, pregnant with the consequence of other truths in an indefinite progression’.111 In just such terms, Coleridge has offered the position ‘I Am’—the one original and immediate truth. Next comes the progressive transition itself, pursued ‘through all its ramifications’.112 Here, as we have seen, Coleridge has offered only a token—it is in the matter of ‘progressive transition’ that he falls down—but his failure is one of execution not of intent. The attempt to carry out this aspect of Method is evident enough. As we have noticed, Coleridge thought it unlikely that Method based on the relation of Law could be completely within the capacity of man; nevertheless he shared the ideal he attributes to Plato—‘… to find a ground that is unconditional and absolute, and thereby to reduce the aggregate of human knowledge to a system’.113 Like Kant, he hoped that some part of the ideal might be achieved. The definition of Imagination was the fruit of his efforts.

Hegel once remarked of Schelling that he conducted his education in public, and much the same might be said of Coleridge. It is not that his ideas are presented inconsistently, or that he keeps changing his views, but that he offers his thinking to the public before he has come to the end of it. In Biographia Literaria we have neither the relentless Kantian progress which he admired, nor even the indefatigable exhaustiveness of Hartley, but rather a trial run of ideas which he has conceived in their general outlines and not yet articulated in particular details. As a whole it resembles personal notes for a philosophy. Coleridge knew that he had not given a very convincing demonstration of his Method of criticism, and his reference to it as ‘so immethodical a miscellany’ is apter than one might have guessed at first reading.114 Years later he was to regret the inadequacy of the philosophical passages in the Biographia.115

Why then should he have placed them before the public at all? What did he think he might achieve by doing so? The answer lies, I think, in the two motives for publication discussed in our first chapter—financial necessity and reforming zeal. The first forced him to publish something, and a book of criticism seemed possible to him; the second encouraged him to try to right contemporary wrongs and may have overridden the dissatisfaction he felt at having to offer ideas so incomplete. His references at each gap to works which he will publish in due course are, one feels, genuine enough as evidence of what he meant to do and they must have acted as a salve to his conscience. Even if we regard his publication of his critical Method before its time as ill-advised, we should pause before rejecting it as still-born.

Coleridge's contemporaries, and particularly the haughty reviewers of Edinburgh, were predisposed to condemn any philosophical work which smacked of German metaphysics. In the twentieth century, although Transcendentalism is in eclipse, there is no longer so general an impulse to be intolerant of it. It has been pointed out that one of the most interesting aspects of Coleridge's criticism is the critical method it implies. Gordon McKenzie, for example, states that ‘The most important value of Coleridge for modern literary criticism lies in his attempts to formulate a method and a technique by which literature may be approached.’116 More recently Sir Herbert Read has maintained that ‘The distinction of Coleridge, which puts him head and shoulders above every other English critic, is due to his introduction of a philosophical method of criticism.’117 It is not that the example is successful, but that it suggests how one might go about attempting a philosophic method for oneself.

It is appropriate to conclude by recalling what Coleridge had to say in the course of his Philosophical Lectures on the construction of philosophies:

Every truly great mind is to be considered in two points of view, the first is that in which he may be said to exist universally, to act upon all men in all ages; and that is the grand idea which he first originates, the grand form and scheme of generalization. And the next is, when quitting the part of the architect, he himself becomes one of the labourers and one of the masons. There you will find in him the imperfections, of course, of every human individual; and while you give him every praise where he succeeds you will never permit it to detract from his merits where he fails.118

Coleridge the critic was architect of the work on which he became so indifferent a labourer; the essays on Method provide us with an essential part of the blue-print of his intentions.

Notes

  1. CL, I, 224.

  2. CL, I, 227.

  3. CL, I, 263, 270, 273, and 318. For a discussion of Coleridge's early reviews, see above, Chapter 1, n. 66.

  4. PW, II, 962.

  5. CL, II, 912.

  6. CL, II, 936.

  7. CL, II, 953.

  8. CL, II, 953.

  9. The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Middle Years, ed. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford, 1937), I, 165 and 168.

  10. CL, III, 58-9 and n.

  11. CL, III, 117.

  12. CL, III, 148-9; 124-5.

  13. CL, III, 135-6.

  14. CL, III, 272. For a later but more detailed account of his feelings towards Jeffrey's revisions, see UL, II, 407-8.

  15. CL, III, 275. Cf. 316-17; and SC, II, 75.

  16. SC, II, 33.

  17. SC, II, 33. Cf. British Museum MS, Egerton 2800, fol. 89r: ‘It is too certain, that the grievances here enumerated have been rendered both more diffusive and more intense by the nature, number, and prodigious circulation of Reviews and Magazines, which with Newspapers, and a Shelf or two of Beauties, Extracts, and Anas, form nine tenths of the Reading of nine tenths of the reading Public. …’

  18. SC, II, 33.

  19. SC, II, 34.

  20. SC, II, 38. Cf. CL, III, 107; and F, I, 318n.

  21. CL, IV, 564. By this time he had begun to feel the critical lash himself. See CL, III, 433 and 532. In a letter to Stuart, Coleridge mentions a cabal of notables which he and Bowles had talked over as being capable of running a review in opposition (CL, III, 539).

  22. Reckoning without the interpolations. See Everyman, p. xviii.

  23. See A. L. Strout, ‘Knights of the Burning Epistle’, Studia Neophilologica, XXVI (1953-4), 79-80. In a letter written to John Murray in 1816, Coleridge mentions the characteristics he considered appropriate for a review (CL, IV, 648). Cf. the conditions he tried to impose on Blackwood's Magazine in 1819 (CL, IV, 976). See also British Museum MS, Egerton 2800, fol. 84r. The financial return must have been the principle motive. (Cf., for example, CL, IV, 665). The restraint shown in Biographia Literaria concerning the Edinburgh Review (BL, II, 117-18; Everyman, pp. 237-8) is the more remarkable when Coleridge's real feelings are known.

  24. F, I, 41.

  25. SC, II, 23.

  26. SC, II, 74-5.

  27. TM, Appendix, p. 86.

  28. BL, II, 116; (Everyman, p. 237).

  29. ‘It will be found, that the least of what I have written concerns myself personally. I have used the narration chiefly for the purpose of giving a continuity to the work, in part for the sake of the miscellaneous reflections suggested to me by particular events, but still more as introductory to the statement of my principles. …’ (BL, I, 4; Everyman, p. 1).

  30. CL, II, 707.

  31. TM, Appendix, p. 88.

  32. BL, II, 123; (Everyman, p. 241).

  33. BL, I, 63; (Everyman, p. 36).

  34. W, pp. 5-6.

  35. SC, II, 48. Cf. CL, III, 29; and SC, II, 38 and 62.

  36. Shawcross, II, 248-9.

  37. BL, I, 22; (Everyman, p. 11).

  38. CL, IV, 598.

  39. CL, IV, 591.

  40. BL, I, 92; (Everyman, p. 53).

  41. BL, II, 181; (Everyman, p. 277). Cf. George Watson's recent statement: ‘Coleridge … is essentially a critic who practises descriptive criticism only as an illustration’ (The Literary Critics: A Study of English Descriptive Criticism [Harmondsworth, 1962], p. 113).

  42. BL, II, 116-17; (Everyman, p. 237).

  43. BL, I, 53-4; (Everyman, p. 30).

  44. BL, II, 181; (Everyman, p. 277).

  45. SC, II, 35-6.

  46. CL, II, 1039.

  47. SC, II, 33.

  48. SC, II, 33.

  49. SC, II, 35.

  50. SC, II, 36.

  51. SC, II, 35.

  52. SC, II, 82.

  53. BL, I, 237; (Everyman, p. 135).

  54. BL, I, 240; (Everyman, pp. 136-7).

  55. BL, I, 241-3; (Everyman, pp. 137-8).

  56. BL, I, 264; (Everyman, p. 149).

  57. BL, I, 293; (Everyman, p. 166). As Alice Snyder points out: ‘With regard to actual performance, the case for Coleridge is stronger than it appears when one thinks, for instance, of the twelfth chapter of the Biographia. Unpublished manuscript material gives striking evidence of the patience with which Coleridge tried to practice what he preached, in the way of leading the student on, simply and naturally’ (Coleridge on Logic and Learning, p. 47).

  58. For an account of contemporary hostility, see René Wellek, Kant in England, pp. 25ff.

  59. BL, I, 291; (Everyman, pp. 164-5).

  60. BL, I, 293; (Everyman, p. 166).

  61. On ‘landing-places’ as a means of ‘bribing’ the reader's attention, see F, I, 324-5. George Whalley has drawn attention to the similarity of technique in Biographia Literaria: ‘The Integrity of Biographia Literaria’, Essays and Studies, n.s. VI (1953), 99.

  62. BL, II, 85; (Everyman, p. 217).

  63. SC, II, 37.

  64. BL, I, 158-9; (Everyman, p. 92).

  65. BL, I, 250; (Everyman, p. 142).

  66. BL, I, 250; (Everyman, p. 142).

  67. BL, I, 251; (Everyman, pp. 142-3).

  68. BL, I, 251; (Everyman, p. 143).

  69. BL, I, 251; (Everyman, p. 143).

  70. BL, I, 252; (Everyman, p. 143).

  71. BL, I, 253; (Everyman, p. 144). I have removed the comma which stands after ‘inward organ’ and replaced it after ‘for it’ as the sense demands.

  72. PL, p. 153.

  73. BL, I, 254; (Everyman, p. 144).

  74. Watson rightly excuses the perplexity of the Victorians: ‘[They] could not be expected to understand what he was talking about: some of his texts had not been printed, most had not been edited, and his criticism was nearly all of an order that would respond only to close and concentrated exegesis’ (The Literary Critics, p. 113).

  75. BL, I, 255; (Everyman, p. 145).

  76. BL, I, 256; (Everyman, p. 145).

  77. BL, I, 257; (Everyman, p. 146).

  78. BL, I, 257; (Everyman, p. 146).

  79. e.g. PL, pp. 360 and 361.

  80. F, III, 183.

  81. BL, I, 257-8; (Everyman, p. 146).

  82. BL, I, 258; (Everyman, p. 146).

  83. BL, I, 259; (Everyman, p. 147).

  84. BL, I, 259; (Everyman, p. 147).

  85. BL, I, 260; (Everyman, p. 147).

  86. BL, I, 260; (Everyman, p. 147).

  87. BL, I, 260; (Everyman, pp. 147-8).

  88. BL, I, 261; (Everyman, p. 148).

  89. BL, I, 261; (Everyman, p. 148).

  90. BL, I, 261; (Everyman, p. 148).

  91. BL, I, 263; (Everyman, p. 149).

  92. BL, I, 264; (Everyman, p. 149).

  93. BL, I, 264; (Everyman, pp. 149-50).

  94. BL, I, 265; (Everyman, p. 150).

  95. BL, I, 266; (Everyman, p. 150).

  96. BL, I, 266; (Everyman, pp. 150-1). Cf. British Museum MS, Egerton 2826, fols. 77-8.

  97. BL, I, 267; (Everyman, p. 151).

  98. BL, I, 267-8; (Everyman, pp. 151-2).

  99. BL, I, 270; (Everyman, p. 153).

  100. BL, I, 270; (Everyman, p. 153).

  101. BL, I, 270; (Everyman, p. 153).

  102. BL, I, 271; (Everyman, p. 153).

  103. BL, I, 271; (Everyman, p. 153).

  104. BL, I, 272-3; (Everyman, p. 154).

  105. BL, I, 275; (Everyman, p. 156).

  106. BL, I, 275; (Everyman, p. 156).

  107. BL, I, 282; (Everyman, p. 159).

  108. Christopher North seems to have been the first to express his impatience publicly. See, ‘Some Observations on the “Biographia Literaria” of S. T. Coleridge, Esq.—1817’, Blackwood's Magazine, II (1817), 16-17.

  109. BL, I, 295; (Everyman, p. 167).

  110. TM, p. 2.

  111. TM, p. 4.

  112. TM, p. 7.

  113. F, III, 158.

  114. BL, I, 92; (Everyman, pp. 52-3).

  115. TT, II, 335.

  116. Organic Unity in Coleridge, p. 1. Cf. Frederick Denison Maurice, The Kingdom of Christ (London, 1842), 2nd ed., I, xi, where Coleridge's writing is given credit in that ‘… it shews us what we have to seek for, and that it puts us into a way of seeking’.

  117. Coleridge as Critic, p. 18. Cf. Coburn: ‘… the principles of Method are the principles of literary criticism’ (‘Coleridge Redivivus’, p. 120).

  118. PL, pp. 191-2. Kathleen Coburn's speculation (PL, p. 192n) that ‘generalization’ is perhaps an erroneous substitution for ‘organization’ seems to me too to be consistent with Coleridge's usage. Cf. also PL, pp. 148-9; F, II, 88-9; and III, 314.

Key to Abbreviations

A to R S. T. Coleridge. Aids to Reflection in the Formation of a Manly Character on the Several Grounds of Prudence, Morality, and Religion: Illustrated by Select Passages from Our Elder Divines, especially from Archbishop Leighton. London, 1825.

BL———. Biographia Literaria; or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions. London, 1817. 2 Vols.

CL———. Collected Letters, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs. Oxford, 1956- 4 Vols.

C of Pure R Immanuel Kant. Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith. London, 1956.

EOHOT S. T. Coleridge. Essays on His Own Times forming a Second Series of the Friend, ed. Sara Coleridge. London, 1850. 3 Vols.

Everyman———. Biographia Literaria, ed. George Watson. London, 1956.

F———. The Friend: A Series of Essays, in Three Volumes, to Aid in the Formation of Fixed Principles in Politics, Morals, and Religion, with Literary Amusements Interspersed. London, 1818. 3 Vols.

F (1809)———. The Friend; a Literary, Moral, and Political Weekly Paper, excluding Personal and Party Politics, and the Events of the Day. Penrith, 1809-10.

LR———. The Literary Remains, ed. Henry Nelson Coleridge. London, 1836-39. 4 Vols.

MC———. Miscellaneous Criticism, ed. Thomas Middleton Raysor. London, 1936.

N———. The Notebooks, ed. Kathleen Coburn. New York, 1957- 2 Vols. (double).

NOED———. Notes on English Divines, ed. Derwent Coleridge. London, 1853. 2 Vols.

PL———. The Philosophical Lectures, ed. Kathleen Coburn. London, 1949.

PW S. T. Coleridge. The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge. Oxford, 1912. 2 Vols.

SC———. Shakespearean Criticism, ed. Thomas Middleton Raysor. London, 1960. 2 Vols.

Shawcross———. Biographia Literaria, ed. J. Shawcross. London, 1907. 2 Vols.

SM———. The Statesman's Manual; or The Bible the Best Guide to Political Skill and Foresight: A Lay Sermon, Addressed to the Higher Classes of Society, With an Appendix Containing Comments and Essays Connected with the Study of the Inspired Writings. London, 1816.

TM———. Treatise on Method as Published in the Encyclopædia Metropolitana, ed. Alice D. Snyder. London, 1934.

TT———. Specimens of the Table Talk, ed. H. N. Coleridge. London, 1835. 2 Vols.

UL———. Unpublished Letters, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs. London, 1932. 2 Vols.

W———. The Watchman. Bristol, 1796.

Vorlesungen Friedrich Wilhelm Johann Schelling. Vorlesungen über die Methode des academischen Studiums. Tübingen, 1803.

Get Ahead with eNotes

Start your 48-hour free trial to access everything you need to rise to the top of the class. Enjoy expert answers and study guides ad-free and take your learning to the next level.

Get 48 Hours Free Access
Previous

Poetic Diction: Wordsworth and Coleridge

Next

Accommodating Aeschylus: Coleridge, Theology, and Literary Criticism

Loading...