“Beauty too is spiritual, the shorthand hieroglyphic of Truth—the mediator between Truth and Feeling, the Head and the Heart. The sense of Beauty is implicit knowledge—a silent communion of the Spirit with the Spirit in Nature, not without consciousness, though with the consciousness not successively unfolded.”—MS. Semina Rerum, p. 97.
THERE was no department in which the defects of the Hartleian philosophy were more glaring than in aesthetic 1 theory. In the Observations on Man, imagination is dismissed in a short paragraph in a section devoted to “Dreams”. The sense of Beauty is treated of under the head of “Pleasures and Pains of Imagination”. Beauty in nature is explained as a transference of “miniatures” of pleasant tastes, smells, etc., “upon rural scenes”; beauty in art, including poetry, as the result of successful imitation of Nature. When, as in the professed writers on “Taste”, the hard-worked principle of Association was combined with hide-bound adherence to the neo-classical modes, and the social snobbery of the time, it is easy to imagine what the result was likely to be.2
It did not require an acquaintance with the great contemporary revival of aesthetic philosophy in Germany to convince Coleridge of the fatuity of the whole system of British aesthetics; and Saintsbury is undoubtedly right in waving aside the controversy as to the relation between him and the Schlegels, and in setting down the resemblance as “mainly one of attitude—one of those results of ‘skyey influences’ which constantly manifest themselves” 3 in different persons of genius and talent more or less simultaneously. Saintsbury is speaking of Coleridge as a critic—”one of the very greatest critics in the world”,4 but what he says of him in this capacity in respect to the Schlegels is true of him in his capacity as philosopher in respect to the aesthetic theories of Kant and Schelling, of which these literary critics may be said to have been only the most popular exponents. Yet it may well have been under German influence that in a letter of October 1800 he writes of an “Essay on Poetry” as more “at his heart” than anything else.5
Up to 1818 he had produced only fragmentary essays: on Taste (1810), on the Principles of General Criticism (1814), and on Beauty (1818). In the Preliminary Treatise on Method in the latter year he assigns to Aesthetics “a middle position” in his formal classification of the sciences, between those which, like physics, deal with sensory facts by hypothetical constructions, and those which, like metaphysics, are concerned with “laws” apprehended through the Ideas of the reason. The fine arts, he there explains, “certainly belong to the outward world, for they operate by the images of sight and sound and other sensible impressions, and, without a delicate tact for these, no man ever was or could be either a musician or a poet, nor could he attain excellence in any one of these arts; but as certainly he must always be a poor and unsuccessful cultivator of the arts, if he is not impelled by a mighty inward force; nor can he make great advance in his art if in the course of his progress the obscure impulse does not gradually become a bright and clear and burning Idea”.6
With a subject, as he tells us, so much at his heart, and with so fine a text, it is surprising that, even in one so dilatory as Coleridge habitually was, nothing approaching a systematic treatment of it was ever attempted by him, and we have to gather his views on aesthetic from even more scattered sources than in the other main heads of his philosophy, with little to supplement them in the manuscript remains. The explanation may partly have been the reluctance of a man to revisit, as a land-surveyor, a country where he had once been a prince and a ruler, but far more the concentration of his interest, as years went on, on the philosophy of religion. Fortunately in the above-mentioned fragments, combined with what he says in the more familiar passages on the subject in the Biographia Literaria, there is sufficient to reconstruct at least in outline his general theory of art.7
2. PSYCHOLOGICAL AND METAPHYSICAL DATA
In view of the defects of current theories what he felt to be required was first a psychology that would explain the working of imagination as not merely a reproductive, but a creative process; and, secondly, a metaphysic that would account for the appeal which its creations make to what is deepest in the soul of man.
Coleridge had reflected profoundly on the process by which poetic images are generated in the mind. No psychologist has ever had a better opportunity of first-hand observation of it in his own mind, and there is no reason to believe that he here owed anything at all to German philosophy. He had broken with the associationist philosophy, but he had no intention of discarding association itself as properly interpreted. What he was led to hold as opposed to the current intellectualistic account was “that association depends in a much greater degree on the recurrence of resembling states of feeling than trains of ideas”. From this it at once followed that “a metaphysical solution (like Hartley’s) that does not instantly tell you something in the heart is grievously to be suspected”. He adds with a flash of his usual insight:
“I almost think that ideas never recall ideas, as far as they are ideas, any more than leaves in a forest create each other’s motion. The breeze it is runs thro’ them—it is the soul of state of feeling. If I had said no one idea ever recalls another I am confident that I could support the assertion.” 8
One regrets that he did not do so at length, but in these statements, under which, as he says, “Hartley’s system totters”, it is not difficult to see an anticipation of recent reforms in the psychology of association.9 What we have since learned is that the dominating factor in the process of suggestion, whereby imagination bodies forth the forms of things, both known and unknown, is not the temporal or spatial adjacency which the psychologists call “contiguity”, but “continuity of interest”10 —the emotional occupation of the mind with a significant idea, summoning from the depths of its experience the elements necessary for its expansion into a whole of meaning. British psychology in Coleridge’s time was as yet too undeveloped to provide a complete scheme, not to speak of a language, into which such a doctrine could fit. It was all the more to his credit that he was able to break away from existing schemes and affirm a principle which made them thenceforth an anachronism.
But to have demonstrated the place of emotion and interest in the process of revival was only the first step in the required reconstruction of aesthetic theory. If the work of imagination is merely revival, poetic creation is still unexplained. It was in taking this second step, probably, that Coleridge chiefly found help in his study of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, particularly in the recognition, in addition to the reproductive function of imagination, of another to which he attributes not only a productive activity of its own, but something of the fruitful and inexhaustible character of noumenal reality itself.11
It was for just such an extension of its functions that Coleridge was looking; and when he came upon it in his early excursions into German philosophy he eagerly seized upon it as giving him the desired hint. But it was only a hint. For if, as Kant held, the work of the imagination was continuous with that of the understanding, merely preparing the way for its exercise in the wilderness of the sensory manifold, and if the understanding in the end gives us no more than a world of appearance, a like limitation would have to be imposed on the deeper faculty. Under such conditions it would be impossible to find in the work of the poet and artist any analogue to the Creative Intelligence of which the world is the embodiment. Unless the activity of the productive imagination were conceived of as in some way identical with that of the Divine Imagining, it would be impossible to justify the claim of poet and artist to be seers and revealers of essential reality.
It was just this identity that Schelling 12 had sought to establish in opposition to the element of subjectivism in Kant and Fichte. Nature according to Schelling was not the creation of mind, it wax mind, albeit as yet in unconscious form. Nature in the narrower sense of which science speaks is not the thing-in-itself. Natural science abstracts from the meanings which Nature symbolizes and takes it as something merely finite. It is the function of art, therefore, as representing a higher level of the primeval activity of which both nature and mind are manifestations, to portray directly and concretely what science and philosophy can describe only abstractly. From the point of view thus reached it is possible to represent the work of the imagination as continuous not merely with the understanding, as Kant did, but as continuous with the creative work of the divine intelligence itself.
“To one and the same intelligence”, Schelling had written, “we owe both the ideal world of art and the real world of objects. Working unconsciously it gives us the world of reality, working consciously it gives us the world of art. The world of Nature is nothing more than the primeval, though still unconscious (and therefore unpurified) poetry of the Spirit. It is for this reason that it may be said that in the Philosophy of Art we have the universal organ and the keystone of the vault of philosophy.” “For”, as he goes on to explain, “it is in the work of art that the problem of the division which philosophy makes between thought and things first finds its solution: in this the division ceases, idea and reality merge in the individual representation. Art thus effects the impossible by resolving an infinite contradiction in a finite product”—a result it achieves through the power of the “productive intuition” we call “Imagination”.13
We can understand how, when he came on all this in Schelling, Coleridge thought he had found a “congenial coincidence”.14 He was unfortunate in the term “esemplastic”, which looked like a mistranslation of the German Ineinsbildung:15 he was still more unfortunate in the plagiarized passages from Schelling, which he prefixed as a kind of apparatus criticus to his own theory of the imagination: but he made no mistake in the value he attached to these ideas for a true theory of art in general and of poetry in particular. They only needed to be adapted to the personalistic metaphysics, which he sought to substitute for the pantheistic impersonalism of Schelling. He has suffered from his failure anywhere to work out in detail the reorientation of his views that this change involved in the theory of art, to the same extent as he did in the theory of nature. But there are abundant hints of how he came to conceive not only of the sense of beauty as a form of personal communication with the Spirit revealed in Nature, but of art as the interpreter of its life, and it is only fair to give him credit for this advance upon Schelling. Even what he says in his earlier mood of the selflessness and impersonality of genius, and the experience out of which it speaks is quite compatible with what he later came to hold of the conditions of a selfhood and individuality, which rest on quite other foundations than “the sensation of self”,16 however much this may be necessary as a phase of its development.
Be this as it may, when we try to take his philosophy of beauty and the artistic imagination as a whole, it is easy to see that the ideas that underlie it are, not anything for which he need have been directly indebted to Schelling, but first the old distinction between natura naturata and natura naturans—Nature as a dead mechanism, and Nature as a creative force essentially related to the soul of man, which so often forms his text: “Believe me”, he exclaims in one of the later manuscript passages, “you must master the essence, the natura naturans which presupposes a bond between Nature in the higher sense and the soul of man”; and secondly the view that, while Nature is truly thought and intelligence, “the rays of intellect are scattered throughout the images of Nature” as we know her, and require to be focussed for us by the genius of man if we are to have them in their full splendour: “To make the external internal, the internal external, to make Nature thought, and thought Nature—this is the mystery of genius in the Fine Arts”. What we call beauty is the condensed expression of this “thought”. For “this too is spiritual, this is the shorthand hieroglyphic of truth—the mediator between truth and feeling, the head and the heart. The sense (of) beauty is implicit knowledge—a silent communion of the spirit with the spirit of Nature, not without consciousness, though with the consciousness not successively unfolded.” To the sensitive mind the beauty of a landscape, which to the sensualist is only “what a fine specimen of caligraphy is to an unalphabeted rustic”, is “music”, and the very “rhythm of the soul’s movements”.17
It is in the light of this general theory of the nature of beauty that the familiar passages in the Biographia Litcraria and the fragment on Poesy or Art upon poetic imagination, taste, and the place of imitation must be read.
His theory of the first is given in the passages, familiar to students of literature, in which, discarding the heavy German panoply, he expresses his own view of the two forms of Imagination, and of “the poet described in ideal perfection”. “The Imagination then I consider either as primary or secondary. The primary Imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am. The secondary Imagination I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates in order to recreate: or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead. Fancy, on the contrary, has no other counters to play, but fixities and definities. The Fancy is, indeed, no other than a mode of memory emancipated from the order of space and time; and blended with, and modified by that empirical phenomenon of the will, which we express by the word Choice. But equally with the ordinary memory the Fancy must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association.”18
Coming in the next chapter to the nature of poetry, he admits that there may be poems which have pleasure for their immediate object. The admission has puzzled some of his critics, who have failed to notice that the pleasure he alludes to is of a peculiar kind, corresponding to the satisfaction of no casual appetites, but to what he elsewhere calls “the two master impulses and movements of man—love of variety and love of uniformity”.19 He allows further for poetry, such as we find without metre in Plato, Isaiah, Jeremy Taylor, and even in scientific treatises which have truth for their immediate object. In this wider sense poetic imagination would be synonymous with the genius which he describes in The Friend as the power “to find no contradiction in the union of old and new; to contemplate the Ancient of Days and all his works with feelings as fresh as if all had then sprung forth at the first creative fiat”, the power which “characterizes the mind that feels the riddle of the world, and may help to unravel it”.20
But he was not the man to confuse powers in reality as different as the purpose and the material are different in poetry and philosophy, and he goes on to give his idea of the work of the poet “described in ideal perfection”, as one “who brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other according to their relative worth and dignity. He diffuses a tone and spirit of unity that blends and (as it were) fuses each into each by that synthetic and magical power to which I would exclusively appropriate the name Imagination. This power, first put into action by the will and understanding, and retained under their irremissive, though gentle and unnoticed control (laxis effertur habenis), reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities: of sameness with difference; of the general with the concrete; the idea with the image; the individual with the representative; the sense of novelty and freshness with old and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion with more than usual order; judgment ever awake and steady self-possession with enthusiasm and feeling profound or vehement; and while it blends and harmonizes the natural and the artificial, still subordinates art to nature; the manner to the matter; and our admiration of the poet to our sympathy with the poetry.”21
To critics who take little interest in psychological analysis or philosophical theory such a description naturally appears to be merely ringing the changes on verbal distinctions.22 But this is to forget the devastation which the emaciated accounts current in Coleridge’s time of the work of the imagination had spread in men’s minds upon the whole subject, and the necessity of an energetic assertion of the presence of the element of passion combined with penetrative reflection, fundamental sanity of judgment, and a form of expression that would give some sense of the inner harmony of the material presented to the mind and therewith of the essential truth of the presentation.
In view of all this there is no clause in the definition which we would willingly spare, however differently modern taste might desire to have it expressed. The account errs rather by defect than by excess, seeing that it contains no detailed reference to the kind of diction which Coleridge conceived of as essential to poetry (“the best words”, as he elsewhere expresses it, “in the best order”), in the sense in which he is here using the term. But he does not forget this, and in his discussion of it later in the Biographia, particularly in his criticism of Wordsworth’s heresy, he makes ample amends. This falls outside of our subject What we have here to note is the liberation which this new insight into the nature and the work of imagination brought to his own mind and the confidence with which it inspired him in all he afterwards wrote.
While Coleridge was more interested in poetry than in the plastic arts, and first developed his theory of the imagination with a view to a true understanding of what was greatest in the poetry of his own country, he enables us to see how he applied these ideas to art in general. In his essay on Poesy or Art23 he closely follows Schelling in his discussion of the sense in which art is imitative. If the function of the imagination is to unite sameness with difference, art can never consist in merely copying nature. Mere sameness as in a waxwork disgusts because it deceives. True imitation, as compared with mere copying, starts from an acknowledged difference. Starting from this, every touch of Nature gives the pleasure of approximation to truth. But the truth is not to nature in the limited meaning of the word, as the object of mere sense experience. The world we meet in art is the world of sense, but it is the world of sense twice-born, and appearing in that “unity of the shapely and the vital which we call beauty”. It is this uniqueness and intuitiveness of the experience which makes it something wholly inexplicable by “association”. It often depends on the rupture of association. So too with “interest”. So far from being derivable from interest in the narrower sense of the term, “beauty is all that inspires pleasure without and aloof from and even contrary to interest”.
Here Coleridge’s idea of Nature, as above explained, came to his aid. There is an inner and an outer nature, and the imitation must be of that which is within. “The artist must imitate that which is within the thing, for so only can he hope to produce any work truly natural in the object, and truly human in the effect.”24
It was a merit in contemporary writers on “taste” to recognize the place in art of the emotional response which they called “sensibility”. Their mistake was to interpret this as a form of self-feeling. On a view like Coleridge’s the whole emphasis fell upon depth of feeling, but it was feeling for a world in which the self in any personal sense no longer occupied a place, but might be said, as in love, to have “passed in music out of sight”. “Sensibility, indeed”, he wrote,25 “both quick and deep, is not only a characteristic feature, but may be deemed a component part, of genius. But it is not less an essential mark of true genius, that its sensibility is excited by any other cause more powerfully than by its own personal interests; for this plain reason, that the man of genius lives most in the ideal world, in which the present is still constituted by the future or the past; and because his feelings have been habitually associated with thoughts and images, to the number, clearness, and vivacity of which the sensation is always in inverse proportion.”
Taste then there must indeed be by which the genuine can be distinguished from the spurious, “the proper offspring of genius from the changelings which the gnomes of vanity or the fairies of fashion may have laid in its cradle or called by its name”.26 But the word is burdened with associations derived from its primary sensory meaning, especially of passivity and natural instinctiveness, and thus fails to bring out the dependence of the thing on experience, meditation, and the acquired power of recognizing, as intuitively as the trained scientist recognizes truth by its own light, words and images fit to give “the touch of nature” to the material in hand. It is this defect that Coleridge seeks to remedy in the definition he has given to taste. Taste, he tells us, is “an attainment after a poet has been disciplined by experience, and has added to genius that talent by which he knows what part of his genius he can make acceptable and intelligible to the portion of mankind for which he writes”.27 And again it is “such a knowledge of the facts, material and spiritual, that most appertain to his art, as, if it have been governed and applied by good sense, and rendered instinctive by habit, becomes the representative and reward of our past conscious reasonings, insights and conclusions”.28 For this reason there can be no rules for the exercise of taste any more than for imagination. “The rules of Imagination are themselves the very powers of growth and production. Could a rule be given from without, poetry would cease to be poetry and sink into a mechanical art.” 29
6. THEORY AND PRACTICE IN LITERARY CRITICISM
It was in this way that Coleridge carried the theory of beauty in nature and art, and especially in the art of poetry, as far beyond anything hitherto current in England, as he carried the art of literary criticism beyond anything that had been achieved by his predecessors. Yet this union in him of a genius for criticism, second only to the very greatest, with the metacritical craving for a theory of aesthetic, has aroused the same suspicion among literary men as the union of the poet and the metaphysician already discussed.30
To those who hold that aesthetic theory is a species of “Bohemian glass” and distrust its “false subtlety”, or who accept Schlegel’s witty definition of it as “the salt which dutiful disciples are going to put upon the tail of the Ideal (enjoined upon them as so necessary to poetry) as soon as they get near enough”, will be prepared to ask with Saintsbury31 whether Coleridge is not “just so much the more barren in true criticism as he expatiates further in the regions of sheer philosophy”, or even with J. W. Mackail 32 to reject his whole theory of poetry as “a large incoherent abstraction inapplicable and fortunately unapplied by him to the body of the criticism of which it is the introduction”.
But this would be wholly to mistake the function of a philosophy of beauty, and the distinction between it and the art of criticism. The distinction is not, as Saintsbury would have it, “that Philosophy is occupied by matters of the pure intellect; and literary criticism is busied with matters which, though not in the loosest meaning, are matters of sense”.33 It is true that philosophy is concerned with theory, but, since the theory is of life in all its departments, it is concerned with will and feeling as well as with intellect. It takes all experience: moral, aesthetic, intellectual: the sense of duty, what Saintsbury calls “the amorous peace of the poetic moment”, the love of truth, as its data. If any of them is not there, philosophy cannot give it. Theory or no theory, each man has to depend on his own sensitiveness to the unique quality involved in particular forms of experience. What philosophy seeks to do is to understand wherein this unique quality consists; what it implies as to the world which is thus experienced; and, finally, how these experiences and the worlds that correspond to them are related to one another. It may be able to go but a small way in this, but it is bound to go as far as it can, and is at least justified in going so far as to indicate the falsity of theories which, like that of the Associationists in the present ease, not only fail to understand, but would dissolve the experience altogether by resolving it into something quite different. If there are “Happy Warriors” for truth and beauty, who find the appeal to the heart that has “felt” sufficient, and who can afford to neglect such defensive theorizing, there are others less happy, whose minds are disturbed and their feelings confused by inadequate theories, and to whom more adequate ones may be a real help to full enjoyment.
Quite apart from this, moreover, there are those to whom metaphysic may itself be a form of “that immortal fire which”, as Saintsbury eloquently puts it, “each generation keeps burning to soften what is harsh, feed what is starved, anoint and cheer and clean what is stiffened and saddened and soiled in the nature of man”.34 We know at any rate that these were the things that Coleridge sought and thought that he found in metaphysics. “What is it”, he asks,35 “that I employ my metaphysics on? To perplex our clearest notions and living moral instincts? To extinguish the light of love and of conscience, to put out the life of arbitrament, to make myself and others worthless, soulless, Godless? No, to expose the folly and the legerdemain of those who have thus abused the blessed organ of language, to support all old and venerable truths, to support, to kindle, to project, to make the reason spread light over our feelings, to make our feelings diffuse vital warmth through our reason—these are my objects and these my subjects. Is this the metaphysic that bad spirits in hell delight in?”
If there are those to whom these words make no appeal, it might be well for them to ask whether the fault is in Coleridge or not rather in themselves. For the particular metaphysic of beauty, with which we have in this chapter been concerned, we need not be deterred even by the great authority of the writers I have named from claiming its due. Fragmentary as it is, eked out, as at one time it certainly was, by studies from Kant and Schelling, it marked a new starting-point in British aesthetics. It gave us for the first time in England the elements of a theory, in the light of which the poetry that, along with political freedom, is her most characteristic contribution to civilization, can be better understood, the enjoyment of it can be made a more understanding enjoyment.
1 Though disliking the word, as unfamiliar, for “works of taste and criticism”, Coleridge found it “in all respects better and of more reputable origin than billetristic”, at that time its rival.—Blackwood’s Magazine, October 1821.
2 Treating of Colour in his Essay on Taste (published in 1790, in its sixth edition in 1825), Archibald Alison, the best known probably of the Scottish “aesthetic empirics”, writes: “The common Colours, for instance, of many indifferent things which surround us, of the Earth, of Stone, of Wood, etc., have no kind of Beauty, and are never mentioned as such. The things themselves are so indifferent to us, that they excite no kind of Emotion and, of consequence, their Colours produce no greater Emotion, as the signs of such qualities, than the qualities themselves. The Colours, in the same manner, which distinguish the ordinary dress of the common people, are never considered as Beautiful. It is the Colours only of the Dress of the Great, of the Opulent, or of distinguished professions, which are never considered in this light. The Colours of common furniture, in the same way, are never beautiful: it is the colours only of fashionable, or costly or magnificent Furniture, which are considered as such. It is observable, further, that even the most beautiful Colours (or those which are expressive to us of the most pleasing Associations), cease to appear beautiful whenever they are familiar. The Blush of the Rose, the Blue of a serene Sky, the Green of the Spring are Beautiful only when they are new and unfamiliar”, and so on through what George Saintsbury calls “long chains of only plausibly connected propositions” which with the school were the substitute for actual reasoning: “the turning round of the key being too often (one might say invariably) taken as equivalent to the opening of the lock” (History of Criticism, pp. 165–6.) It is this kind of thing that Carlyle pillories at the beginning of his French Revolution. “No Divinity any longer dwelt in the world; and as men cannot do without a Divinity, a sort of terrestrial upholstery one had been got together, and named Taste, with medallic virtuosi and picture cognoscenti, and enlightened letter and beiles-lettres men enough for priests.”
3 History of Criticism, p. 396, n. 1. The whole passage is in general harmony with the view taken in this study as to the relation of Coleridge’s ideas to German philosophy.
4 Op. cit., p. 206.
5 He adds characteristically that “its title would be on the elements of poetry, it would be in reality a disguised system of morals and politics”. Cp. Letters of February 1801 and July 1802.
6 op. cit., p. 69. The passage may well have suggested to Browning his account of the poet’s aim: “Not what man sees, but what God sees—the Ideas of Plato, seeds of Creation, lying burningly in the Divine Hand—it is towards these he struggles.”—Essay on Shelley.
7 What follows is deeply indebted to Mr. Shawcross’s excellent account in his edition of this book, vol. i. pp. 47 foll.
8 Letter to Southey, August 7, 1803 (Letters, 1895 ed., i. P. 428).
9 Saintsbury, op. cit., p. 166, notes as one of the main fallacies of associationist aesthetics, “the constant confusion of Beauty with interest”. Cp. Bosanquet’s criticism of it in Science and Philosophy, essay xxiii, on “The Nature of Aesthetic Emotion”.
10 G, F. Stout’s phrase. See Manual of Psychology, 3rd ed., p. 558.
11 See Professor Norman Kemp Smith, in Commentary on the Critique of the Pure Reason, p. 264.
12 Schelling’s Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur was published in 1797.
13 See Werke, vol. iii. p. 349,
14 “Perhaps”, observes Leslie Stephen, “the happiest circumlocution ever devised for what Pistol calls ‘conveying’.”—Hours in a Library, iv. p. 351.
15 In Anima Poetae we find esenoplastic substituted for esemplastic—a less ambiguous translation.
16 See p. 143 above.
17 Semina Rerum, MS. C, p. 97. In a marginal note in his copy of Kant’s Logik (handbook, edited by G. B. Dasche), p. 9, criticizing Kant for his approval of a writer who denies the existence of a priori rules determining aesthetic judgment, Coleridge writes: “This is true in part only. The principles (as it were the skeleton) of Beauty rest on a priori Laws no less than Logic. The Kind is constituted by Laws inherent in the Reason; it is the degree, that which enriches the formalis (e?) into the formosum, that calls in the aid of the senses. And even this, the sensuous and sensual ingredient, must be an analogon to the former.”
18 Biographia Liter aria, ch. xiii. Cp. ch. iv, where he illustrates the distinction between imagination and fancy in more detail. In his Essay on Poetry as Observation and Description, Wordsworth declares that “fancy is given to quicken and beguile the temporary part of our nature, Imagination to incite and support the eternal”. Nominally Wordsworth is criticizing Coleridge’s definition of the Fancy as “the aggregative and associative power” on the ground that it is “too general” (see Coleridge’s reply, Biog. Lit., Shawcross, p. 112 fin.). In reality he is developing it with his own more massive power and suggesting a phraseology to describe it, as in the phrase “meditative Imagination”, which reappears in Ruskin’s well-known classification in the Stones of Venice, of the associative, the contemplative, and the penetrative uses of this faculty. What Coleridge contributes is a metaphysics which he would have claimed makes all our thoughts upon the subject in his own phrase “corrosive on the body”, by connecting the distinction with his favourite one between reason and understanding, as he does here by implication, explicitly in Lay Sermons (Appendix B).
19 Anima Poetae, p. 153. Cp. the continuation of the marginal note quoted above: “It is not every agreeable that can form a component part of Beauty”, and what he says of the “poetical method” in Principles of the Science of Method, p. 41, as requiring “above all things a preponderance of pleasurable feeling, and, where the interest of the events and characters and passions is too strong to be continuous without becoming painful, … what Schlegel calls a musical alleviation of our sympathy”.
20 Op. cit., ch. iv.
21 Ch. xiv.
22 See J. W. Mackail, in Coleridge’s Literary Criticism. Cp. per contra Leslie Stephen’s remark: “Coleridge’s peculiar service to English criticism consisted in great measure in a clear appreciation of the true relation between the faculties (poetical and logical).” Op. cit., P. 350.
23 Shawcross, ii. p. 253.
24 See what Miss Snyder says on Coleridge’s Theory of Imitation as an illustration of the union of opposites, The Critical Principle of the Reconciliation of Opposites as employed by Coleridge, p. 50 foll.
25 Biographia Liter aria (Shawcross), ii. p. 65.
26 Op. cit., ii. p. 65.
27 Shawcross, op. cit., ii. p. 281.
28 Op. cit., ii. p. 64.
29 Op; cit. With these views on taste and sensibility should be taken what Wordsworth has written to like effect. See Prose Works, vol. ii. pp. 82, 87, 131, where sensibility as a mark of the poet is associated with wide knowledge of human nature, earnest observation and contemplation of the “goings-on of the Universe”; and p. 127, where he declares that “the profound and the exquisite in feeling the lofty and universal in thought and imagination; or, in ordinary language, the pathetic and the sublime: are neither of them, accurately speaking, objects of a faculty which could ever without a sinking in the spirit of Nations have been designated by the metaphor—Taste”.
30 Above, p. 44.
31 Who quotes these criticisms. Op. cit., p. 353, n. 6, and p. 396.
32 Coleridge’s Literary Criticism, Introduction. (London, 1908.) With the view here implied of the relation of Coleridge’s theory to his practice of criticism we may contrast that of Lowell, quoted by Miss Snyder (op. cit., p. 36), according to which his philosophy of polar opposites “served to sharpen his critical insight”, while the union of it with concrete observations “resulted in a criticism that does more than deepen the layman’s appreciation of the works criticized”.
33 Op. cit., p. 142.
34 Op. cit., p. 334.
35 Anima Poetae, p. 42.