Saved Coleridge
The English are ecclesiastical but rarely metaphysical; they think in churchyards. Elegy and practicality are the English modes, complementary rather than antagonistic, for elegy can be seen as practical mourning, a way of composing the laurels. Metaphysics, by contrast, is a mere burr of thought, an adhesion to be plucked off the sturdy English garment and flicked back into the dark thicket whence it came. Schopenhauer noted that “whenever anyone in England wishes to describe something as very obscure or indeed as totally unintelligible, he says it is like German metaphysics.” Perhaps he was thinking of Thomas Gray, the elegist of churchyards, who once complained: “Must I plunge into metaphysics? Alas, I cannot see in the dark; nature has not furnished me with the optics of a cat.”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge is the great English turncoat. He was burred in thought. Amid stolid Englishness, he was a traveling temerity—mobile, metaphysical, Germanic yet Englishly Protestant, the victor of systems. He loved, as he put it in a letter, to “conundrumize.” His prose work — his lectures on Shakespeare of 1818, the Biographia Literaria (1817), his copious notebooks and marginalia, and his late theological work, collected in Aids to Reflection (1825) and
the posthumous Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit — is a junction box of inheritances, full of magical combinations: Lessing and Kant and Schlegel, Bacon and Hartley and Locke. His prose is many-roomed, extraordinarily hospitable to all he had learned, in his great reading, from the English poets, above all Shakespeare and Milton: that is to say, although he can subdue words whenever he wants, he also lets them muster their palpabilities on the page, as words, letting them trail their etymologies like invisible hems. (His modern rival, in this regard, is Virginia Woolf, whose father gave her Campbell’s life of Coleridge to read when she was a teenager.) It is a dragging and dense style, sometimes obscure, with voluminous sentences that stretch like library corridors. He called this, in a typically lovely phrase, a prose that had “the hooks-and-eyes of memory.” (Woolf wrote of using language “with roots.”) At the same time, Coleridge is always bounding into simile and metaphor, and his use of the metaphorical often glints epigrammatically—as for instance when he wrote that “Swift was the soul of Rabelais dwelling in a dry place.”
Fittingly, his own scattered influence is hard to collect. Though some have suggested Hazlitt as the influence on Keats, it was probably Coleridge who gave the young poet his idea of “negative capability,” for Keats, before writing his famous letter, had read the Biographia, with its similar advocacy of what Coleridge called the “negative faith” that free drama requests of us. His criticism of Shakespeare has been surreptitiously influential: it is both intensely practical, grounded in texts and textual emendations (“practical criticism” is Coleridge’s phrase, from the Biographia), and intensely theoretical. His radical yet commonsensical Protestant approach to biblical criticism, which proposed reading the Bible as if it were like any other great text, influenced Matthew Arnold and subsequent Anglican theology. And he clearly had an effect on Melville, his true colleague in language, who read the Biographia in February 1848, before writing Moby-Dick. Both writers loved Sir Thomas Browne, the seventeenth-century essayist, for his loitering speculations and
thronged lexicon. Both indulged in what Melville called “philosophical ripping,” boisterous monologues of speculation and association. Both were drawn, in their reading of Shakespeare, to a kind of amoral self, to Shakespeare’s villains and fools and madmen, finding in those characters what Melville called “things which we feel to be terrifically true …” And of course both were in love with, indeed captives of, a kind of irresponsibility of metaphor, tending to see the world as a transit of likenesses.
Coleridge’s metaphors and similes accompany him as a kind of code, a shadow from which we can read the hour of his life. Here he is in Bristol, a young revolutionary, being hissed at during a political lecture. “I am not at all surprised,” shouts Coleridge over the crowd, “when the red hot prejudices of aristocrats are suddenly plunged into the cool waters of reason, that they should go off with a hiss!” And here is Coleridge giving way to characteristic self-pity: “I am in stirrups all day, yea, and sleep in my spurs.”
Yet as in Melville’s case, his metaphorical power has a life of its own, and acts in a contradictory manner, turning lament or complaint into its opposite, sheerly by existing as literary exuberance, and literary art. This is the irresponsibility I refer to, in which metaphor always goes beyond itself, often turning back on itself dialectically, turning negatives into positives and positives into negatives. For instance, Coleridge suffered terribly on his long voyage to Malta in 1804, but was able to summon the wit to complain, metaphorically, that his bed did everything but enable him to sleep in it: the bed was “like a great Genius apprenticed to a wrong trade.” Poetry has died in me, wrote Coleridge in 1801: “I was once a Volume of Gold Leaf, rising and riding on every breath of Fancy — but I have beaten myself back into weight and density, and now I sink in quicksilver, yea, remain squat and square on the earth.” Five years later, he again complained that he had got lost in “the unwholesome quicksilver mines of abstruse Metaphysics.” The reader wonders if these mines were either so unpleasant or so antipathetic to the spirit of poetry
if they spurred on Coleridge to turn them into such happy metaphor …
What was Coleridge like? Richard Holmes’s great biography has given us the best portrait. He was both wild and saturnine, inspired and arrested. From young radical to old conservative—a journey on which he was accompanied by Wordsworth and Southey—Coleridge was always an overwhelming talker and extemporizer. His lectures, such as we have them, are not written texts but aural showers, gathered by certain loyal listeners in notebooks and published posthumously. The Biographia was dictated to a friend over the summer of 1815. We see him pounding roads (Hazlitt noticed that he walked from one side to the other), messy with metaphysics, wayward, vulnerable, impossible. A friend said that if he were richer, he would pay Coleridge five hundred pounds a year to dine with him twice-weekly. He was big and shambling, physically careless, with dark eyes and a voluptuous mouth. He was large-hearted but irresponsible, a negligent husband and intermittent father. In his middle years, he moved from one friend’s house to another, promising to stay a few weeks and then installing himself for months, sleeping on sofas and housing himself in with hundreds of books and papers. Projects and proposals flowed from him: he wrote a ninety-page Greek grammar for his son, dreamed of establishing an observatory, founded, edited, and wrote most of a weekly paper, The Friend, for eighteen months (in 1810 and 1811), and spent several years discussing religious symbolism with Hyman Hurwitz, the director of the Hebrew Academy for Jews in Highgate.
But Coleridge was weak, too, and his writing, especially his criticism, represents a long struggle with his terrible rudderlessness, an entangled struggle with his own weakness, which he would elaborate
into a philosophy and a theology of self-consciousness. This immense, perforated organum of allusion and enigmatic suggestion is powered by, and ceaselessly returns to, the question of the self, and how to escape it, sacrifice it, redeem it, and finally know it.
Coleridge returned from Germany in 1800, his mind full of Kant and Lessing. The great spurt of poetic activity that produced the poems chosen for the Lyrical Ballads was over. He had already decided that “abstruse researches” had killed the poetic instinct in him, and he was veering toward a peculiar combination’ of piety and self-pity, each feeding off the other. His poems repeatedly take this shape—a trough of plaint rising to an aeration, in which the poet reminds himself and his readers of “truth in Christ” (“Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement”), or that God is the “Great universal Teacher!” (“Frost at Midnight”). In his moving poem “To William Wordsworth,” written in 1807, the night after hearing his friend read aloud all thirteen books of The Prelude, Coleridge reflects on Wordsworth’s greatness, and then considers his own thin powers (“And genius given, and knowledge won in vain”)—but then, Lear-like, reproaches himself—“That way no more!”—for wandering back onto such an “unhealthful road,” and for plucking “the poisons of self-harm.”
These poisons were both figurative and literal, of course. Coleridge had been suffering terrible pain and intestinal storms for several years. He thought these were brought on by delicate nerves. In January 1801 his health had collapsed—swollen joints, rheumatic fevers, an enlarged testicle—and he had dosed himself heavily with opium. This was probably the beginning of serious addiction. The opium seized his insides, causing constipation. On his voyage to Malta in 1804, according to Richard Holmes, Coleridge suffered the humiliation of having strenuous enemas administered by the ship’s officers. Severe addiction lasted a long time, from 1804 until 1816, when a friend persuaded Dr. James Gillman to take a distinguished addict into his home. The addict, warned the friend, needed the supervision
of a doctor to ensure that he would follow a regulated plan of withdrawal. Typically, Gillman expected to have Coleridge for a few months in his house, but Coleridge was Gillman’s guest for sixteen years, until his death in 1834.
The servitude of this addiction prompted an awful self-reckoning for Coleridge. Opium, and the behavior it encouraged or accompanied, lost Coleridge the respect and alliance of the man he most revered, Wordsworth. By 1809 Wordsworth, who had seen Coleridge effectively abandon his wife and children, had seen Coleridge move from temporary house to house, had seen the nectary of Coleridge’s lyric gifts dry into tendrils of metaphysics, decided that he must warn his more naive friends against letting Coleridge into their houses. He wrote to Thomas Poole that Coleridge “neither will nor can execute anything of important benefit either to himself, his family or mankind.” Coleridge heard that Wordsworth had intervened against him, and went to pieces. His notebooks, as Holmes quotes from them, are painful to read. Again and again, in the direst anguish, he returned to the thought that Wordsworth has “no Hope of me!”
A contrasting diptych might be made of the temperamental differences between Wordsworth and Coleridge. The former, relatively unbookish, autonomous, calmly propulsive, a natural genius, self-measuring and self-measured, a little priggish, convinced, as he put it in The Prelude, that he was “chosen” to be a great poet. The latter, book-bound, helpless and social, combustible and stalled, an unnatural genius, self-invigilating and self-exceeding, desperately devout, cast out of poetry’s choosing by his manic interest in philosophical thought, and absolutely in love with Wordsworth, with the man and with his flowing lyric potency. His response to Wordsworth’s alienation was the Biographia, which lovingly explicated Wordsworth’s poetry. Yet in 1817 Henry Crabb Robinson reported that the book had given Wordsworth no pleasure: “The praise is too extravagant and the censure inconsiderate.”
But the deeper pain of addiction, to judge from Coleridge’s writings, issued from the apprehension of the weakness of his will. Coleridge found himself utterly conquerable. Again and again he writes of this. In a long letter to John Morgan, written in 1814, he laments that “by the long long Habit of the accursed Poison my Volition (by which I mean the faculty instrumental to the Will, and by which alone the Will can realize itself — its Hands, Legs, & Feet, as it were) was compleatly deranged, at times frenzied, dissevered itself from the Will, & became an independent faculty.” He continued: “What crime is there scarcely which has not been included in or followed from the one guilt of taking opium? Not to speak of ingratitude to my maker for the wasted Talents; of ingratitude to so many friends who have loved me I know not why; of barbarous neglect of my family.” He called opium “this free-agency-annihilating Poison,” and often stressed that he had not freely gone to it for pleasure, but had been driven to it “by cowardice of pain, first of mental pain” and then “of bodily Pain.”
Opium, which caused terrible dreams, had given Coleridge a particular fear of sleep, of dreaming, and perhaps of the untethered life of memory itself: in a word, of the unconscious. “The Pains of Sleep,” an agonizing poem written in 1803, describes nights of “fiendish dream” and “the unfathomable hell within.” Coleridge pictures the will caught in a kind of cleft, “burning” to do the right thing, but “still baffled”: “To know and loathe, yet wish and do!” A year later, on the Malta voyage, he confided to his notebook that he feared sleep as “a pandemonium of all the shames and miseries of the past life from earliest childhood all huddled together.” Memory had become the ticking of a bad conscience for Coleridge, and dream the emblem of a soiled vitality.
Not surprisingly, perhaps, it was at this very moment, while the will was in shabbiest abeyance, that Coleridge began to formulate a coherent theory of the will, and its relation to memory and control. It is not too neat to say that his interest in the will bloomed at the
instance of its actual collapse, and that its central importance was then developed theoretically in inverse proportion to his own lack of will.
It was in 1801 that Coleridge, with the help of Kant, first began to throw off his youthful interest in the associationism of David Hartley, who, adapting Locke, had argued for the importance of the impact of physical sense-impressions, and had seen the mind as a passive screen on which experience threw its defining pigments. Coleridge started to insist that a free will was an essential component of the self, and that Hartley’s theories made the self a creature of mechanical effects. In the Biographia, he wrote that under Hartley “our whole life would be divided between the despotism of outward impressions, and that of senseless and passive memory.” This would be mere “lawlessness.”
Kant offered Coleridge a way of making the self both passive and active. On the one hand, the world is phenomenal: we gather and order the phenomena of perception. Coleridge called this the faculty of understanding, and in the Biographia it becomes, roughly, the “primary imagination.” On the other hand, said Kant, the world was noumenal: there were transcendent things-in-themselves, unknowable, and this domain is grasped by the practical reason or will. This practical reason asserts itself not by argument but by command and precept; it is how we believe in God. Coleridge bent and expanded Kant’s category, stripping it of its philosophical restraint and making it something closer to free will, and at other times closer to the decisive and controlling activity of the imagination. Coleridge called this faculty “reason” (in the Biographia it is, roughly, the “secondary imagination”), by which he did not mean the Enlightenment virtue of universal and necessary rationality, but instead a more Kantian organ, something that “sees invisible realities or spiritual objects.”
This great effort of comprehension had its roots in Coleridge’s sickness. The Biographia is an extraordinary work not least as the record of an exploding consciousness. But it is moving in part because
of the spectacle it offers of a self willing itself to have a will. He writes there that “I know myself only through myself.” The Biographia, necessarily trapped within this self-searching, pulls in opposite directions, toward the self and, in horror, away from it. It is as self-evading as it is self-observing. There is a remarkable passage at the end of chapter 6 when Coleridge, having dismissed the “lawlessness” of Hartley’s associationism, concludes nevertheless that memory is endless, and that “all thoughts are in themselves imperishable,” and that God might well “bring before every human soul the collective experience of its whole past existence.” With mounting horror, Coleridge continues: “And this, this, perchance, is the dread book of judgement, in whose mysterious hieroglyphics every idle word is recorded!” Perhaps, says Coleridge, none of our past acts can be loosened from the chain of memory, a chain “to all whose links, conscious or unconscious, the free will, our only absolute self, is coextensive and co-present.” But then, having stared at the horrid infinity of memory, Coleridge simply turns away from it, in a gesture similar to the Lear-like moment in his poem “To William Wordsworth,” and announces: “But not now dare I longer discourse of this, waiting for a loftier mood, and nobler subject, warned from within and without, that it is profanation to speak of these mysteries.”
So against the palpable fear of a limitless and arraigning memory is posed the free will, and the will’s capacity to cure itself, which has now been elevated into “our only absolute self.” Six years later, De Quincey, in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, would agree with Coleridge that memory is the dread book, and would utter the strikingly Freudian thought that “there is no such thing as forgetting.” Yet De Quincey celebrates opium as Coleridge never does, swimming in the azure of its visions, waters that for Coleridge were green and drowning. Coleridge seems to need to resist De Quincey’s happier drift, De Quincey’s surrender to the magical utopianism of opium dreams, and this means, in some respects, resisting
the drift of consciousness. A will exists, insists Coleridge, “whose function it is to control, determine, and modify the phantasmal chaos of association.” It is surely clear that Coleridge is talking not merely about Hartley here, but about the chaos of free consciousness itself. Even as Coleridge enacts a stream of consciousness, and enacts a considerable feat of memory (recall that he dictated the Biographia to a friend, so the entire book is a kind of Sternean performance), he warns against that enactment. For what is stream of consciousness, really, but a stream of association? Sterne had made this clear enough in Tristram Shandy, a novel deeply admired by Coleridge.
So it is that Coleridge alights on his lovely image of the self winning its way against a counterflow, just as a water insect “wins its way up against the stream, by alternate pulses of active and passive motion, now resisting the current, and now yielding to it in order to gather strength and a momentary fulcrum for a further propulsion. This is no unapt emblem of the mind’s self-experience in the act of thinking.” But what this emblem perhaps evades is that in the case of the self, and especially in the case of Coleridge’s self, the countercurrent against which we struggle is not provided by nature, does not mysteriously or naturally come from outside, but is produced by the self. The self makes its own obstacles, which it must then surmount. Yet this surmounting is then likely to throw up fresh obstacles. It can be put this way: the self medicalizes itself, or, in the classical term, mithridatizes itself—healing itself by poisoning itself, poisoning itself by healing itself: exactly the dynamic of Coleridge’s opiumtaking.
Generally, the great pathos, tension, and comedy of Coleridge’s work is that he commits the sins he warns against—and commits
them while in the act of warning against them. It is why he is so likable a Christian, despite his orthodoxy. His piety shares its borders with a rogue state. His devoutness is a brave face, not self-exhortation so much as self-accusation. It is a comic struggle. A local example is found, as I suggested earlier, in his joyous use of digressive metaphor, and his simultaneous awareness that such digression must be bridled. Coleridge, of course, who happily called himself a “philoparenthesist,” or lover of parentheses, does not bridle himself, but merely produces further digressions about how he should not digress. In one of the letters from Germany that appears in the Biographia, he discourses wildly on German and Latin etymology, and then reproaches himself: “Now I know, my gentle friend, what you are murmuring to yourself—This is so like him! running away after the first bubble, that chance has blown off from the surface of his fancy; when one is anxious to learn where he is and what he has seen.’” Like Melville, Coleridge uses metaphor to describe and censure his own volubility; then metaphor, being itself a species of volubility, an extender of discourse with a free life of its own, becomes merely an exhibit in the case against itself.
Coleridge lacked Melville’s atheistic instincts, yet in a somewhat similar way to Melville he was always being thwarted by his own fertility. He had an immense desire for unity and wholeness, and writes often about the harmonization of discordant opposites: it is his very definition of the imagination and its power. Yet his own speculative powers and drives always caused that unity to undergo a splitting, which only made the need for a harmonious solution more pressing.
One way in which Coleridge sought to find a harmonious reconciliation of opposites—a way, as it were, of taming the irresponsibility of the self—was by turning to God. If Coleridge first asked that the self know itself, he next asked that the self redeem itself. These were not abstract questions for Coleridge. He fervently believed that “Know Thyself was both the great demand of philosophy and the
great demand of God; he liked to quote Juvenal,”From heaven descended the ‘Know Thyself.’” The problem is not simply that it is hard to know oneself but that conscious self-knowledge may make the self harder to see, obscure the cleanliness of the self. For consciousness is irresponsible. Paradoxically enough, conscious self-knowledge makes conscious self-knowledge harder. Coleridge knew this: “Do you know your knowledge?” was one of his teasing questions.
And conscious self-knowledge makes very difficult that longing for stability and order that Coleridge seems, religiously, to desire—“the only absolute self,” the “very and permanent self.” At the end of his Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, he writes that Christianity lets “the unsubstantial, insulated self pass away as in a stream,” an orthodox enough formulation. But where is “the only absolute self” to be found? Coleridge could hardly be optimistic, despite all the theoretical exhortation, about the absoluteness of his own self. His life had been a convoy of shames, his free will flabby and weak. So he must offer himself up for redemption, to be saved. Coleridge had a deep sense of his sinfulness and a firm belief in original sin. Thus he writes, again in perfect orthodoxy, “To conquer ourselves is the only true knowledge.” Yet isn’t this an awfully long way from the “Know Thyself” which Coleridge dreamed of as the path to redemption? This, in Christian sacrifice, is more like self-obliteration. It seems, then, that for Coleridge, philosophical redemption (“Know Thyself”) was at loggerheads with religious redemption (“Conquer Thyself”); conscious self-knowledge (the philosophical path) was contradicted by unconscious knowledge (the religious path). Thus Coleridge proceeded, attempting at once to escape, conquer, save, and know himself.
In one area, however, Coleridge absolutely triumphed, and with an interesting lack of struggle. This was in his literary criticism, and in particular in his writing on Shakespeare. For here we find that there is a peaceable recurrence of many of the terms that are at war in his philosophy and theology of the self, now applied with perfect ease and equanimity to literature. Or more exactly, the terms that clog Coleridge’s drama of the self become freeing when applied to the drama of fictional selves. His idea of “negative faith” which is expounded in the Biographia, is really no more than the idea that true drama subdues us by its own free force. Negative faith “permits the images presented to work by their own force, without either denial or affirmation of their real existence by the judgement.” In other words, the supervening will or judgment is quieted, is lulled into a kind of sleep, and a sort of willing passivity overcomes the watcher. What was such a menace to the self theoretically is here a strategy of dramatic power.
In a lecture from 1818, Coleridge makes this even clearer. The point about literary works, and especially drama, he says, is that we are watching fictional representations. “The true pleasure we derive from theatrical performances arises from the fact that they are unreal and fictitious.” In this world, dramatic illusion is most like dreaming, says Coleridge. In sleep, we undergo “a suspension of the voluntary and therefore of the comparative power. The fact is that we pass no judgment either way—we simply do not judge them to be unreal—in consequence of which the images act on our minds, as far as they act at all, by their own force as images.”
Illusion is like sleep (clearly this is yet another formulation of the “willing suspension of disbelief”), and differs from it, says Coleridge, only in degree, rather than in kind. In sleep, we pass into dream with “a sudden collapse into this suspension of Will”; “whereas in an interesting play” we are brought gradually to this
point by poet and actors, “and with the constant and positive Aidance [i.e., aid] of our own Will. We chuse to be deceived.” We place ourselves in a state in which “the Images have a negative reality,” and anything that gets in the way of this negative reality breaks the illusion—in other words, wakes us up.
So: our will is watchful, and may be roused by incredible work, but is apparently content to doze in the perfume of its own suspension. Notice that Coleridge is aiming for a theory of illusion in which we choose, by an act of will, to suspend the will. Thus he achieves in literary criticism what he could not achieve in his writing about the self: a paradoxical harmonization of apparent opposites. In his writing about the self, Coleridge always seeks more will, and is in danger of its suspension; in his criticism, he seeks less will, and cherishes its suspension.
Why is he able to escape, in literary criticism, what oppresses him so strongly in his philosophical writing? I suggest that he is able to escape because he is able to escape himself, and able to escape religion, or God. He leaves himself and literally suspends himself in other selves, the characters that the ideal dramatist creates. And this ideal, of course, the writer who preeminently enables this escape, was that delightfully unreligious, or prereligious, almost pagan dramatist, Shakespeare.
Coleridge’s sense of the way we can drift in imagination is striking, and makes him a brilliant analyst of the way Shakespeare lets his characters drift in soliloquy and solipsism. In a marginal note on one of Sir Walter Scott’s novels, Coleridge censures Scott for trying to create a delightful, rambling character like Mistress Quickly and muffing it. Scott’s character is too busy expressing strong authorial opinions, and is not irresponsible or freely discursive enough. “It is the weak memory that is discursive not the strong feeling,” is his shrewd comment.
Coleridge has a very astute eye for the freedom of Shakespeare’s characters. Repeatedly he defends Shakespeare’s heavy use of puns,
conceits, similes, and metaphors against those who, like Dr. Johnson, would censure them as unnatural or forced. Coleridge argues that, on the contrary, Shakespeare’s greatness lies in this. Prospero’s commandment to Miranda, for instance, that she advance “the fringèd curtains of her eyes” is not absurd, he maintains, for it is precisely the stagy, melodramatic language Prospero would use. Coleridge, unsurprisingly, defends the freedom of metaphor.
In the long, drifting, metaphorical soliloquies that Shakespeare’s characters use, Coleridge sees a very emblem of the way the imagination drifts. This drifting imaginative power sounds almost like Bakhtin: in defending Shakespeare’s conceits, writes Coleridge, we must allow for an effort of the mind, which is attempting to describe what it cannot describe, and this is the attempt “to reconcile opposites and qualify contradictions, leaving a middle state of mind more strictly appropriate to the imagination than any other, when it is, as it were, hovering between images. As soon as it is fixed on one image, it becomes understanding; but while it is unfixed and wavering, between them, attaching itself permanently to none, it is imagination.” Leaving aside the accuracy of this description, what is striking is that Coleridge makes Shakespearean soliloquy, and Shakespearean metaphor within the soliloquy, the very definition of the imagination.
So it is not surprising that Coleridge, like Melville, is drawn to those characters who are, in a sense, most “irresponsibly” free—Shakespeare’s malefactors and evil theorists, his comics and fools and madmen, like Iago and Lady Macbeth, Hamlet, Lear, and Othello. Coleridge observes that Shakespeare often uses such characters to speak general, even wise, truths. In Table Talk, he is reported to have said that “it is worth while to remark the use which Shakespeare always makes of his bold villains as vehicles of expressing opinions and conjectures of a nature too hazardous for a wise man to put forth directly as his own.” He notices this about Iago, for instance, and calls him “a bold partisan for truth”; and argues that Lady Macbeth is not
simply evil: her conscience is not dead, but is “continually smarting within her.” He always argued that the much mocked Polonius should not be acted as a fool, but as a wise man who possessed wisdom no longer useful to the court around him: “the personified memory of wisdom no longer possessed.” Regan and Goneril were Shakespeare’s only “pictures of the unnatural,” and as a result they are almost faceless and characterless to us.
“In thus placing these profound general truths in the mouths of such men as Cornwall, Edmund, Iago etc, Shakespeare at once gives them utterance, and yet shows how indefinite their utterance is.” This is what I mean by Coleridge’s appreciation of the irresponsible or amoral self. He lacked Dr. Johnson’s moral shudders, his desire to rewrite Shakespeare. Instead, he likes the irresponsibility of Shakespearean creation, and delights in the bottomlessness of Shakespearean characters—that they, “like people in real life, are to be inferred by the reader.”
He was fascinated, as every reader is, by Shakespeare’s invisibility, by his selflessness; and that fascination is marked by Coleridge’s own inability to escape himself. Thus he writes in one lecture: “Yet with all these unbounded powers, with all his might and majesty of genius, he makes us feel as if he were unconscious of himself.” Shakespeare achieves what Coleridge never could, unconsciousness. Yet Coleridge was obsessed with the defense of Shakespeare’s conscious intentions. In his discussion of Shakespeare’s conceits and puns, he always stresses that Shakespeare intended everything he did, that he never erred, and that it is our job as readers to credit Shakespeare with inerrant intentionality. The famous formulation occurs in the seventh lecture from 1811: Shakespeare “never introduces a word, or a thought, in vain or out of place … [The plays form] a most perfect, regular, and consistent whole.”
Thus Coleridge, always searching for an organic reconciliation of opposites, finds the deepest reconciliation in Shakespeare—who miraculously manages to be the great poet of intention yet also the
great poet of will-lessness and unconsciousness; a dramatist whose impeccable sense of illusion requires that we will the suspension of our own wills; and whose characters, as embodiments of the imagination itself, move freely between fixities and travel into an irresponsible freedom, turning negatives into positives by speaking “indefinite,” unspeakable truths.
It is often remarked that the Biographia Literaria announces a theoretical chapter on the imagination but never provided it; surely, instead, Coleridge found it in Shakespeare.