The critical tradition surrounding Romantic-period plagiarism has been almost exclusively focused on the transgressions of a single poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and one of the claims of this book is the contention that such silent literary appropriations were far more widespread and common among writers of the period and were viewed according to historically distinct standards of intellectual property. However, it is worth considering at the outset why Coleridge’s particular borrowings have sparked such controversy and sustained interest. That Coleridge’s debts to other writers are substantial is undeniable. They were catalogued piecemeal for readers as early as the nineteenth century, and Norman Fruman’s monumental work, Coleridge: The Damaged Archangel, effectively settled the questions of whether the poet had unacknowledged sources and what they were. However, had the critical tradition simply documented Coleridge’s borrowings, the case would be less interesting. Instead, Coleridge himself—his motivations, his evasions, his character—has frequently become the real subject of analysis. To observe this is not a criticism of the scholars who have shaped this tradition: the trajectory was, in a sense, inevitable. Coleridge himself cast his plagiarisms in terms of the unconscious, and Thomas DeQuincey, in his infamous 1834 serial exposé of the poet, characterized Coleridge’s most culpable intellectual debts as a personal neurosis. The psychological analysis of Coleridge’s plagiarisms, then, began almost from the moment the borrowings were publicly noted, and since the nineteenth century the question of consciousness has continued to shape some of the most important works of Coleridgean criticism, with the poet’s defenders evoking his prodigious powers of memory or eccentric work habits and with his critics documenting the extent of his obligations and deceptions. However, while Coleridge’s debts have been extensively catalogued, neither the constructions of plagiarism nor of the unconscious, as Coleridge and his Romantic contemporaries might have understood those terms, have been scrutinized. As we have seen, intellectual properly was an evolving legal category during the Romantic period, and plagiarism was often articulated as an aesthetic judgment rather than as a moral one. Likewise, notions of the unconscious and of psychological philosophy were emerging as modern discourses during the eighteenth century, but they cannot be understood in the familiar Freudian terms that were current only at the beginning of the twentieth century. Perhaps most importantly, the particular relationship between questions of consciousness and intellectual property in the Romantic period deserves much closer attention. For, if we are to understand the nature of Coleridge’s borrowings and, by extension, the nature of his art, we must understand what he might have intended by claiming his plagiarisms were unconscious—and what his contemporary critics might have imagined was at stake by claiming that they were not.
The public debate surrounding Coleridge’s plagiarisms began in 1834, with Thomas DeQuincey’s publication in Tait’s Magazine of four articles on the poet, in which his literary debts were catalogued for the reading public.1 Although DeQuincey’s claim to have been the first to call attention to Coleridge’s intellectual obligations was not strictly accurate (they had been noted by Coleridge himself as early as 1796), the Tait’s Magazine articles inaugurated the controversy and, in doing so, articulated some of the complexities that informed Romantic-period attitudes toward literary property.2 In Tait’s Magazine, DeQuincey calls to public attention four potential instances of plagiarism in Coleridge’s work: his debt to the German poet Friederike Brun in the “Hymn before Sun-rise” (1802), his borrowings from Milton in “France: An Ode” (1798), his reliance on George Shevlocke’s travel narrative A Voyage around the World (1726) in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1797-98), and his appropriations from the philosophical works of Friedrich W. J. von Schelling in the Biographia Literaria (1815-17) (TM 143-46). In three of the four instances, DeQuincey argues that the charges are overstated. In respect to the last—the appropriations from Schelling—he constructs an account that contemporary readers would have understood as a glancing but devastating critique of the Biographia Literaria and its author.
DeQuincey’s essays offer one of the most extensive contemporary discussions available to us of what constituted plagiarism in the Romantic period. In these articles, DeQuincey outlines three possible circumstances in which the appropriation from the text of another writer cannot be said to constitute culpable plagiarism: (1) when the author has improved upon the original work; (2) when the author has borrowed from a work so well known that a well-versed reader may be expected to credit the original source; and (3) when the borrowing has been unconscious. The first two circumstances address the nature of the particular textual relationship and rely upon aesthetic judgments, while the last circumstance addresses the problem of intention and relies upon psychological evaluation. On the basis of this definition, DeQuincey analyzes each case of literary borrowing, and he begins by dismissing the debt to Friederike Brun on the grounds that Coleridge has improved upon her work. In DeQuincey’s words, there can be no plagiarism, despite the extensive and often word-for-word correspondences, because “by a judicious amplification of some topics, and by its far deeper tone of lyrical enthusiasm, the dry bones of the German outline have been awakened by Coleridge into the fulness of life” (TM 143-44). DeQuincey asserts that Coleridge has not paraphrased the poem but has entirely recast the work from an original, despite the obvious verbal parallels between the two texts. Although the obligations to Brun and the degree to which such judgments of improvement were influenced by gender merit further critical attention and are discussed in detail in Chapter 3 of this study, the borrowing was permissible by contemporary standards. By the standards of the time, there was no plagiarism from Brun. Likewise, Coleridge’s appropriations from Milton’s Samson Agonistes (1671) in his poem “France: An Ode” are cast as an example of a poet’s legitimate use of literature understood to be part of the public intellectual tradition, on account of its familiarity to readers. On this occasion, DeQuincey argues that
to take a phrase or an inspiriting line from the great fathers of poetry, even though no quotation marks should be added, carries with it no charge of plagiarism. Milton is justly presumed to be as familiar to the ear as nature is to the eye; and to steal from him as impossible as to appropriate, or sequester to a private use, some “bright particular star[.]” (TM 144)3
Milton’s celebrity (figuratively his “star” status) as a poet effectively naturalizes his work and transforms it into a species of property not limited to exclusive or “private use.” Implicitly, DeQuincey draws a distinction here between two categories of borrowing: public appropriation and plagiarism. Works in the literary tradition, like the landscape (and perhaps most nearly like the rural village common of the eighteenth century), represent a class of multiple-use property subject to the rights of public domain and forage. As property of value to the entire community, such a work cannot be reserved for exclusive use, even by its author; rather, all authors are free to appropriate from it. Thus, while appropriation can represent a legitimate exercise of common property rights, plagiarism implies the illegitimate violation of rightful exclusivity. Neither the extent of the borrowings nor the absence of attribution is relevant. At stake is simply the class of property itself, and an author had no exclusive rights to a work that had become part of the familiar tradition. In short, DeQuincey tells us that a Romantic-period author could not be charged with plagiarism, irrespective of the extent of a literary obligation, provided the original work either had been improved upon or was part of the common tradition.
In dismissing these types of borrowing from the category of plagiarism, DeQuincey and his Romantic contemporaries were, of course, reflecting the attitude toward intellectual property that had predominated during the eighteenth century. However, unlike his neoclassical predecessors, DeQuincey brings the question of consciousness to bear in his analysis of literary appropriation, and, in doing so, he goes on to propose two additional instances of borrowing that he maintains represent possible instances of plagiarism on Coleridge’s part. The question of consciousness as it applied to plagiarism was complex; for, as DeQuincey demonstrates, not all instances of plagiarism were equally censurable. In the Tail’s Magazine essays, he distinguishes between two categories of plagiarism: “conscious” or culpable plagiarism and “unconscious” or merely aesthetic plagiarism. While both cases imply a species of literary failure within a text, only conscious plagiarism merits a moral condemnation of the author. In the instance of Coleridge’s debt to Shevlocke’s travel narrative, DeQuincey does not minimize the extent of the borrowings, but he argues instead that the appropriations may be presumed to be legitimately unconscious. In the instance of the debt to Schelling, DeQuincey is less generous.
According to DeQuincey, Coleridge had borrowed when writing The Rime of the Ancient Mariner from Shevlocke’s travel narrative, A Voyage around the World, in which the author recounted the story of an unfortunate and superstitious mariner who killed an albatross following his benighted vessel (TM 145). Although the textual parallels here are far less extensive than those between the “Hymn before Sun-rise” and Brun’s poem, DeQuincey identifies this debt as a clear instance of illegitimate borrowing, which may be justified only because it was unconsciously performed. By turning to the question of consciousness at all, the implication is that Coleridge’s borrowings from Shevlocke’s text cannot be accounted for as a matter of either familiarity or improvement, and it is not difficult to understand DeQuincey’s reluctance to view this otherwise undistinguished travel narrative as part of the common national literary tradition. However, the question of improvement is somewhat more difficult because Coleridge’s obligations in this instance are largely narrative rather than word-for-word and because the changes to the context are apparent. While the standard of improvement in respect to the particulars of expression was quite generous in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the standard in respect to the borrowing of plot or what the Romantics called “machinery” or “situation” was remarkably rigorous. The best evidence of the risks an author took when appropriating narrative elements of another text is Coleridge’s own indictment (discussed at greater length below) of Matthew Lewis, whom he charged with “patchwork” plagiarisms of precisely this sort in Castle Spectre (1797). Likewise, what Ellen Donkin has characterized as the periodical “paper war” between Hannah More and Hannah Cowley centered on charges of plagiarism that arose from similarities in “essential circumstance[s] in the Plot, and Character” (Cowley iv) of their respective dramas, Albina (1779) and Percy (1779)—a matter deeply complicated by the fact that Percy was an acknowledged translation of a French tragedy and that both plays bear more than a passing resemblance to the unquestionably “familiar” Othello.4 In other words, critics in the period considered it particularly difficult to assimilate or to improve upon “machinery” successfully, and, in DeQuincey’s estimation, Coleridge clearly failed to meet the necessary standard of improvement when borrowing narrative elements of his poem from Shevlocke.
In the absence of either familiarity or improvement, the question of consciousness became central in determining the degree of authorial culpability, and DeQuincey was convinced that Coleridge borrowed unconsciously in this instance because, when confronted with the correspondences, the poet denied the debt. This led DeQuincey to believe that Coleridge may have been unconscious of his own actions. To confirm the unwitting nature of the debt, DeQuincey turned to the testimony of William Wordsworth, and Wordsworth, while confirming Shevlocke as Coleridge’s source, proposed that “it [was] very possible … that, before meeting a fable in which to embody his ideas, he [Coleridge] had meditated a poem on delirium, confounding its own dream-scenery with external things” (TM 145). DeQuincey argues that Coleridge’s associations and, subsequently, his borrowings were unconscious, to the degree that they were unknown to the author himself. Such unconscious borrowings were considered aesthetically treacherous because the author’s ability to exercise mastery over the materials (and, therefore, to write good poetry) was jeopardized by the unwitting nature of the appropriation, but they carried with them no moral censure at all. They were potentially a matter of bad verse but not bad faith. Indeed, unconscious plagiarism was not considered unusual in the least; according to DeQuincey, “An author can hardly have written much and rapidly who does not sometimes detect himself, and perhaps, therefore, sometimes fail to detect himself, in appropriating the thoughts, images, or striking expressions of others” (TM 226). As one of the conditions of authorship, unconscious plagiarism, although perhaps regrettable, ultimately became a legitimate form of appropriation—in other words, hardly a plagiarism at all.
In the matter of Coleridge’s borrowings from Schelling, however, DeQuincey could find no such justifications, and he begins by arguing that the other legitimizing principles do not apply to this instance. There is, he asserts, neither improvement nor familiarity. In respect to the standard of improvement, DeQuincey finds that “the entire essay, from the first word to the last, is a verbatim translation from Schelling, with no attempt… to appropriate the paper by developing the arguments or by diversifying the illustrations” (TM 146). Had Coleridge improved upon Schelling, which might have been as simple as adding to this extended transcription a few of his own examples, DeQuincey acknowledges that the threshold for improvement would have been met. Indeed, so long as improvement existed, verbatim borrowings and unacknowledged sources were irrelevant. For modern readers, this is a striking implication. While the twenty-first century values linguistic uniqueness and proper citation, the Romantics—despite having been associated almost exclusively with values of autogenous originality—placed a great deal of importance on models of appropriation. Furthermore, in respect to the question of familiarity, DeQuincey observes that this was also a plagiarism that Coleridge “could in prudence have … risked only by relying too much on the slight knowledge of German literature in this country” (TM 146). Had Schelling been better known to Coleridge’s contemporaries, there would have been no indiscretion. The implication here for modern readers is, perhaps, no less striking: had Coleridge filled the Biographia with transcriptions from the works of Milton, Shakespeare, or perhaps even Ann Radcliffe, his borrowings would have been irreproachable.
Having dispensed with the issues of improvement and familiarity, DeQuincey returns to questions of consciousness, the only remaining legitimizing principle on which plagiarism could be justified, and he argues that there are limits to plausibility. Addressing the issue of plagiarism in the Biographia Literaria, DeQuincey specifically characterizes Coleridge’s debt as a
circumstantial plagiarism, of which it is impossible to suppose him unconscious…. Many of his plagiarisms were probably unintentional, and arose from that confusion between things floating in memory and things self-derived which happens at times to most of us…. [however] no excess of candour the most indulgent will allow us to suppose that a most profound speculation on the original relations inter se of the subjective and the objective, literally translated from the German, and stretching over some pages, could, after any interval of years, come to be mistaken by the translator for his own. (TM 226)
Because Coleridge’s borrowings—already unacknowledged, unfamiliar, and unimproved—are also conscious, the appropriations are culpable, or, in DeQuincey’s phrase, “barefaced” plagiarisms (TM 146). Although DeQuincey remains willing to entertain the possibility of “confusion” in other instances, in respect to Schelling’s work the error is simply too substantial to have been accomplished without knowledge. This is a critical factor: for DeQuincey, consciousness implies a knowing or witting performance. As it turns out, Coleridge defines the unconscious rather differently.
The central disagreement between Coleridge and DeQuincey does not pertain to the categories of Romantic-period plagiarism but, rather, to the nuances brought to discussions of the unconscious and its operations in the aesthetic sphere. Georgian culture generally understood plagiarism in terms similar to those that DeQuincey outlines in his Tait’s Magazine essays, and it was understood that unconscious plagiarism represented a legitimate avenue of defense. Indeed, both the distinction between appropriation and plagiarism and the category of unconscious plagiarism had been part of the contemporary public discourse on intellectual property for at least a decade preceding DeQuincey’s essays. In fact, DeQuincey himself borrowed the argument from an 1823 essay “Recent Poetical Plagiarisms and Imitations,” written by Wordsworth’s friend and advocate Henry Taylor.5 However, as early as the 1796 “Advertisement” to The Monk, Matthew Lewis had acknowledged the possibility of “plagiarisms … of which I am at present totally unconscious,” and, in 1800, Anna Seward would speak of her “involuntary” and “unconscious plagiarism[s]” from Chatteron.6 Thus, when Coleridge evokes his unconscious plagiarisms—his poems involuntarily poured forth or composed “in a profound sleep” (STC 102), his “genial coincidences” with Schelling (STC 235)—he is evoking a relationship to intellectual property that was recently familiar to his contemporaries. However, while the general parameters for understanding Romantic plagiarism were in place as early as the beginning of the nineteenth century, debates as to which particular examples constituted plagiarism persisted, largely on account of the frequently subjective criteria used to understand appropriation. Many of the terms were hotly contested: what, after all, was the threshold of “improvement”? Which works formed part of the common literary tradition? What texts could a well-versed reader be expected to recognize? Perhaps most importantly for understanding Coleridge and his borrowings in the Biographia, what were the limits of unconsciousness? This last category, only emergent within British culture during the early eighteenth century and a distinctive part of the Romantic-period attitude toward literary property, was particularly open to interpretation and disagreement.
When we consider what Coleridge meant by the term unconscious, there is no indication that he understood the matter exclusively in terms of actions “unknowingly” performed. Indeed, in a keen but instructive irony, one definition of the term provided in the Oxford English Dictionary, given as “Not realized or known as existing in oneself” (A.3) and attributed to Coleridge in 1800 as its first recorded instance, seems to be precisely out of step with the nuances he brought to the term. Instead, Coleridge associated both the unconscious and his plagiarisms with the operations of habit. Even DeQuincey, in the Tait’s Magazine essays, observes that Coleridge’s plagiarisms had a habitual nature, comparable to his opium habit or to the habit of kleptomania, and he notes that, in respect to plagiarism, he had known other people who, like Coleridge, were “otherwise not wanting in principle, who had habits, or at least hankerings, of the same kind” (TM 147). What, then, is the Romantic psychology of the habit? The question preoccupied Coleridge, and it should perhaps preoccupy his critics, if we are keen to understand how he might have imagined his unconscious plagiarisms.
Although one answer to the question of how Coleridge understood habit and the unconscious elements of his art lies in his reading of German philosophy and in those texts he found so compelling as to borrow from wholesale, especially Kant and Schelling, his letters and journal notebooks offer extensive and often self-reflective commentary on the subject. Among his observations, the most striking is an early notebook entry, dated to 1803, in which Coleridge explicitly argues for habit as an unconscious phenomenon. He writes:
Is not Habit the Desire of a Desire?—As Desire to Fruition, may not the faint, to the consciousness erased, Pencil-mark-memorials of or relicts of Desire be to Desire itself in its full prominence?… May not the Desirelet [sic], a, so correspond to the Desire, A, that the latter being excited may revert wholly or in great part to its exciting cause, a, instead of sallying out of itself toward an external Object, B?… Whether the marvelous velocity of Thought & Image in certain full Trances may not be explained from the same cause?7
Characterizing habit as the “desire of a desire” and emphasizing its “erasure” from consciousness, Coleridge formulates a three-term analogy in which habit: desire:: desire: fruition. Erased from consciousness, habit is not unknown or inaccessible to consciousness but is instead a ruin, a memorial, a trace, a mark of erasure, still visible but serving only to point back to the thing which it no longer is. Like the Romantic ruin and its sublime landscape, habit becomes the means of return, a return to desire. Reflecting further, Coleridge proposes that habit, as the memorial of a desire once felt, is focused not on the object of desire but on the desire for desire itself. In philosophical terms, the exciting cause of the desire, i.e., habit (a) so corresponds with the desire itself (A) that the thing desired becomes not an object (B) but the exciting cause or the habit itself (a). Out of this complexity, an important fact emerges: for Coleridge, habit is not about the desire for an object, and it is not a desire for possession; instead, habit emerges as a desire to enjoy and to occupy (or perhaps figuratively to inhabit) the place of origin. Applied to Coleridge’s habitual plagiarism, we discover a claim for an erasure from consciousness conjoined to a claim for an enjoyment of the trace, and what emerges is a partial model of the unconscious. While the desire persists in mind, the action is occluded. From this perspective, plagiarism is the desire for the thing that created the desire (a text, an idea), not in the sense of a desire to own or to possess the object but in order to continue the experience and production of the desiring itself. In short, if Coleridge plagiarized from habit, he did so both knowingly and unconsciously and because it brought a form of pleasure.
In 1814, Coleridge further elaborated on the nature of habit, and the notion of a persistence of desire and an occlusion of the act continues to inform his understanding of the unconscious nature of the habitual. Writing of his laudanum addiction, Coleridge explains that:
By the long Habit of the accursed Poison i.e. opium 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 completely deranged, at times frenzied, dissevered itself from the Will, & became an independent faculty.8
Here, Coleridge explains how habit comes to be “erased” from consciousness in the separation of volition from the will: as actions become independent and operate irrespective of the will, it becomes possible for the subject to act “unwillingly” rather than “unknowingly.” In the derangement of the faculties, the subject acts instrumentally through volition in ways that may or may not correspond with what he or she desires or wills. If consciousness is predicated on willingness, rather than on knowingness, it becomes possible for plagiarism (or any other habitual act) to be at once deliberate and unconscious. Moreover, if we understand Coleridge to mean by unconscious the operations of habit and inhabitation, produced in disassociation from the will, several of the other ways in which he speaks about his plagiarisms come into focus. Throughout his works, Coleridge describes his plagiarisms according to three predominant metaphors: the phenomenon of ocular spectra, the concept of the “genial coincidence,” and—most memorably—the notion of the “divine Ventriloquist.”
Coleridge’s evocation of divine ventriloquism as a defense against plagiarism is, of course, well known. In respect to the plagiarisms from Schelling, he had claimed in the Biographia Literaria, “I regard the truth as a divine Ventriloquist: I care not from whose mouth the sounds are supposed to proceed, if only the words are audible and intelligible” (STC 237). One particularly important aspect of the ventriloquism image is its association with inhabitation and the unconscious. The subject of Coleridge’s ventriloquism and its relationship to literary possession has been admirably discussed by Susan Eilenberg in Strange Power of Speech: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Literary Possession, and Eilenberg argues for understanding ventriloquism as a model of possession that functions both legally and demonically for Coleridge. While Eilenberg’s reading is productive in many respects, when Coleridge casts plagiarism as a matter of throwing one’s voice into the body or (harkening back to the sixteenth-century metaphor equating body and text) the corpus of another, he is making a quite different point and one that rejects metaphors of possession or ownership in favor of metaphors of inhabitation or use. The distinction has very different implications for understanding how Coleridge imagined his relationship to intellectual properly.
Coleridge’s clearest statement on ventriloquism and its associations with the unconscious operations of habit is found in a letter dated 17 December 1800 to John Thelwall. In this letter, he requests that his friend
Write to me all particulars of yourself, I mean, your present Self—& whether in the higher excitements of mind, ratiocinating or imaginative, you have been able to conjure up religious Faith in your Heart, and whether if only as a Ventriloquist unconscious of his own agency you have in any mood or moment thrown the voice of your human wishes into the space without you, & listened to it as to a Reality [.] (CLSTC 1: 656)
Here, Coleridge not only specifies that the ventriloquist is unconscious but he illuminates what is at stake in the question of the unconscious itself by emphasizing the degree to which the categories of the unconscious and the unknowing are separate. After all, even as an unconscious ventriloquist, Coleridge assumes that Thelwall knows of his vocalization. However, Coleridge imagines that Thelwall may not know how it has happened. The ventriloquist, like the plagiarist, is unconscious only of “his own agency” in creating likeness, is unconscious of his volition.
While ventriloquism offers a rich model for understanding the philosophical nature of Coleridge’s anxieties surrounding unconscious plagiarism and the identity of voice, it has implications for reading his verse as well. Although several of his poems dramatize the unconscious operations of composition and vision, Coleridge’s most direct engagement with themes of plagiarism, ventriloquism, and volition occurs in Christabel (1798-1800), a poem that centers, both critically and aesthetically, on the appropriation of voice and its potency.
In his 1816 preface to Christabel, Coleridge drew an explicit connection between the poem and questions of plagiarism. Although the first two sections of Christabel had been completed by 1800, the work was not published until 1816, and the long delay occasioned concerns within Coleridge’s circle that his critics would misunderstand the direction of literary influence. Christabel had been widely circulated in manuscript among the Romantic literary coterie, and, as Coleridge knew, the poem had influenced the compositions of some of his more celebrated contemporaries, including Lord Byron and Walter Scott. He now feared that his own work would appear derivative of precisely those poems and poetic identities that it had helped to shape. Thus, the preface to the poem directly addressed his concern for “precluding charges of plagiarism or servile imitation from myself” (STC 66). However, while the dates of composition might have supported any claims to exclusive ownership and originality that Coleridge cared to assert, his preface further reveals the degree to which he understood literary correspondences and the inhabitation of poetic voice as part and parcel of the creative experience. He writes:
[T]here is amongst us a set of critics, who seem to hold, that every possible thought and image is traditional; who have no notion that there are such things as fountains in the world, small as well as great; and who would therefore charitably derive every rill they behold flowing, from a perforation made in some other man’s tank. I am confident, however, that as far as the present poem is concerned, the celebrated poets whose writings I may be suspected of having imitated, either in particular passages, or in the tone and spirit of the whole, would be among the first to vindicate me from the charge, and who, on any striking coincidence, would permit me to address them in this doggerel version of two monkish Latin hexameters:
’Tis mine and it is likewise yours;
But an if this will not do;
Let it be mine, good friend! For I
Am the poorer of the two. (STC 66)
In this wry explication, Coleridge maintains that literary property has its origins in communal and natural resources and that it cannot be considered exclusive except in the most conventional or “traditional” manner. He rightly ascribes these rigid attitudes toward literary origins and originality to his contemporary periodical reviewers, for whom the plagiarism debate represented a mode of critical practice. In Reading, Writing, and Romanticism: The Anxiety of Reception, Lucy Newlyn offers a reading of the preface to Christabel and of this doggerel that emphasizes precisely this “competitive-collaborative relationship between creativity and criticism” (xii); however, Newlyn also reads the preface as internally conflicted, asking whether “there [is] not a contradiction … between the collaborative idea of social diffusion embodied in the practice of ‘reading aloud’ and the proprietorial model of authorship implied in his resentment that ‘Christabel’ had been plagiarized?” (64). I call attention to Newlyn’s reading because it engages the traditional view of Coleridge and his relationship to literary property—a view that does not persuasively reflect the complexity of his position or his motivations. By characterizing the tone of the preface as resentful and the doggerel as a “disingenuous … device of false modesty” (64), Newlyn reads literally a passage that is marked by ironic gestures and that engages precisely the contradiction that she identifies. Coleridge demonstrates in his doggerel verse the degree to which ventriloquism and the inhabitation of poetic voice undermines conventional categories of authorship. Indeed, Coleridge privileges oral culture and collaboration over proprietorial models in a rather pointed response to the position taken by the periodical reviews, magazines whose contributors were disproportionately trained in the legal professions. The irony is heightened in the preface by the layers of allusion, as well; Coleridge is mimicking the poetic voice of Walter Scott, whose popular Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805) was deeply indebted to the unpublished Christabel for its characteristic and celebrated metrical devices—while simultaneously appropriating and translating the actual verses of an unnamed “barbarous Latin poet.”9 Represented as a form of ironic ventriloquism, the doggerel thus performs a complex self-imitation, in which Coleridge introduces the poem by projecting the site of its articulation elsewhere. The result is a poetic voice authentically original but identifiably other, and Coleridge’s point is that an author cannot have it both ways: if the material content of poetry is communal then the poetic identity produced by it must be as well.
In “Meter, Identity, Voice: Untranslating Christabel,” Margaret Rus-sett extends the discussion of plagiarism in the poem and its preface to illuminate these metrical issues that were clearly at stake in imitations of Christabel, and in doing so she outlines a way of understanding the Romantic category of “originality” that makes a great deal of sense.10 Coleridge was distinctly aware that Wordsworth, Byron, and Scott had each reemployed the “peculiar meter” (CLSTC 4:603) of Christabel, and there are numerous examples in the Romantic period of meter, style, or what Coleridge here calls “tone and spirit” being treated as elements of literary property capable of being plagiarized.11 Russett, however, extends this historical observation to link Coleridge’s writings on the metrical innovation in Christabel with both the formulation of voiced poetic identity and the theory of literary “untranslatableness” that he proposes in the Biographia, in order to argue that originality was not achieved through “novelty” or invention but rather through the process of “imbu[ing] an iterable pattern with unaccountable variation” (Biographia, qtd. in Russett 775-76). Understood in terms of meter, this means transforming familiar patterns of accentuation and stress through “countless modifications” of the inherited tradition rather than through “the introduction of new metres” (775). Or, as Russett puts it, “Originality does not consist in the repression of sonic matter, but in its mastery” (775). This succinctly articulates one of the central problems posed by plagiarism in the period and for Coleridge particularly: How are we to make sense of Romanticism’s rhetorical investment in “original” expression when unacknowledged borrowing was the norm, unless early nineteenth-century originality did not depend on ex nihilo creation or on all those models of solitary genius with which Romanticism has been conventionally associated? In his early study The Romantic Ventriloquists, Edward Bostetter made a similar argument about Coleridge’s use of the ventriloquism metaphor and its relationship to formal questions of style, voice, and poetic craft, proposing that Romantic writers adapted and assimilated the language of the “new cosmic syntax” (3) laid down by their eighteenth-century predecessors, a syntax that paradoxically defined the imagination as a form of ventriloquism.12 Bostetter reads Romanticism (and Modernism after it) as a failed and fragmentary aesthetic precisely because these authors were unable to imagine a new poetic language; other scholars have read Romanticism’s engagement with the discursive structures of their historical moment as a sign of their mastery. In either case, and as Russett’s argument so ably demonstrates, there is a tension between models of autogenous originality and the simple fact that language functions through a series of repetitions.
This tension, however, is primarily a belated critical invention. Assimilation and originality were not mutually exclusive categories in Georgian Britain, and, in making aesthetic judgments—including the judgment of plagiarism—the Romantics were centrally concerned with narrative mastery, domination, and control over borrowed materials. Perhaps most importantly, the anxieties that Christabel’s introduction into print culture occasioned for Coleridge were focused on the questions of consciousness, inhabitation, and volition that were central to his metaphor of ventriloquism. Part of his concern was for the disjunction between the success of his poem as an oral artifact and the proprietorial and critical demands of print culture. Coleridge articulates this dilemma in his reflections on the poem’s reception in the Biographia:
Year after year, and in societies of the most different kinds, I had been entreated to recite it [Christabel]…. This before the publication. And since then, with very few exceptions, I have heard nothing but abuse…. This may serve as a warning to authors, that in their calculations on the probable reception of a poem, they must subtract…. for the excitement and temporary sympathy of feeling, which the recitation of the poem by an admirer, especially if he be at once a warm admirer and a man of acknowledged celebrity, calls forth in the audience. For this is really a species of animal magnetism, in which the enkindling reciter, by perpetual comment of looks and tones, lends his own will and apprehensive faculty to his auditors. They live for the time within the dilated sphere of his intellectual being. (STC 476)
Here, Coleridge credits the sympathetic recitations of his poem with producing its initial popularity, and elsewhere in this section of the Biographia he acknowledges that Christabel’s transition into print circulation had resulted in a hostile critical reception that had surprised him. However, what interests me particularly is the way in which his account of these recitations recalls his earlier discussions of the dislocation of the will as a psychological faculty and its relationship to collective authorship. In Coleridge’s model of habitual plagiarism and divine ventriloquism, the volition of the author is severed uncharacteristically from the will and internally reproduces texts irrespective of what the will intends. In contrast, the “enkindling reciter” whom Coleridge describes in this passage imposes his will onto his listeners in an inverted form of ventriloquism, in which an embodied voiced consciousness draws the external inward in a process more akin to circumscription than projection. The result of imposing or temporarily inhabiting the will of another is the alteration of sensory and aesthetic perception. However, it also functions, at least metaphorically, as the instantiation of collective authorship; Dorothy Wordsworth’s claim that the poetic community she shared with William Wordsworth and Coleridge comprised “Three bodies, but one soul!” mirrors Coleridge’s reflections in the Biographia, and the interrupted sympathy that he had shared with the Wordsworths cannot have been far from his mind when considering either the origins of Christabel or its final fragmentation.13 In this passage, Coleridge likewise invokes the figure of the “enkindling reciter” as a means of suggesting that Christabel—or at least the version of it that was popularized and embraced within the literary coterie—was not the text he authored but was a performance brought into being by the relationship between speaker and listeners. While the effect is the opposite of plagiarism, the dilation of the speaking intellect beyond the proper boundaries of the self that Coleridge describes here is a useful figure for understanding how he understood the imposition and superimposition of voices, desires, and poetic identities, and it is clearly not a model that privileges proprietorial authorship.
In contrast to this philosophical reflection on Christabel’s transmission in the Biographia, Coleridge had also connected the problem of the poem’s plagiarism with questions of consciousness as early as 1810, when responding to a correspondent’s suggestion that Scott had plagiarized from his poem, and here Coleridge demonstrates how familiar the category of unconscious plagiarism was to Romantic-period readers. While acknowledging similarities between Christabel and the Lay of the Last Minstrel, Coleridge acquits Scott of charges of culpable plagiarism by observing, “An intentional plagiarist would have translated, not transcribed … [plagiarizing with] purpose implies consciousness” (CLSTC 3:357). Coleridge sees the transparency of Scott’s obligation (and, perhaps, the presumed “familiarity” of his own poem within the literary coterie—for he writes in the Biographia that “[d]uring the many years which intervened between the composition and the publication of the CHRISTABEL, it became almost as well known among literary men as if it had been on common sale” [STC 475-76]) as evidence that the borrowing could not have been performed with “consciousness” (3:357). However, by excusing Scott from any charges of culpable plagiarism, Coleridge leaves open the possibility that Scott may have borrowed unconsciously—an obligation with potentially negative aesthetic implications for Scott. Dorothy Wordsworth, at any rate, wrote in a letter from this period that she considered the unconscious nature of the obligation to be apparent, and this likely reflected the broader view of the Wordsworth-Coleridge circle (LWDW 1:633).
While Christabel’s public presentation engages questions of ownership, identity, and voice in the literary marketplace, the poem itself, written over fifteen years earlier, engages many of the same questions raised by the preface; themes of ventriloquism, entrancement, and volition shape the narrative of Christabel with implications for understanding Coleridge’s attitudes toward both plagiarism and authorship. Most dramatically, Christabel offers a model of unconscious imitation remarkably similar to (and roughly contemporaneous with) Coleridge’s 1800 and 1803 notebook reflections on the habit, the trance, and ventriloquism. In those reflections Coleridge had argued that the individual was “unconscious of his own agency” or “will” and, thus, not unknowing but unable simply to render accounts. In Christabel, Coleridge explores these unconscious operations in a dramatic framework, focusing on the enchantment of Christabel and the possession of her voice by Lady Géraldine. Offering a figuration of passive and unconscious imitation and invoking metaphors of both ventriloquism and the trances with which Coleridge associated inhabitation of this sort, the poem enacts the drama of plagiarism that Coleridge later feared would be applied to it.
Christabel incorporates several layers of narrative disruption, including instances of ventriloquism and enchantment. The central event of the poem is, of course, the corruption of Christabel’s person, both sexually and psychologically, through some unspoken and implicitly sexual liaison with the apparently supernatural Lady Geraldine, and it is significant that Christabel engages in these relations unconsciously but not unknowingly. The nature of Christabel’s enchantment is peculiar in this regard. If read in the context of Coleridge’s notebook entry on habit and enchantment, Christabel’s trance emerges as an encounter in which her own desires are acting freely, rather than as an experience in which, as Eilenberg suggests, she is possessed and controlled by an external influence. For, as Coleridge had explained in the notebooks, the trance represents an event that is unconscious only in the sense that desire (volition) operates independently of agency (will). In short, the trance always originates internally.14 Thus, in the consummate scene of the poem, Geraldine undresses in front of Christabel, famously revealing her breast, and the enchanted Christabel lies down to spend the night in the other woman’s arms. In the aftermath, Christabel knows what has come to pass; what she cannot account for is her own agency—and in this respect alone is she unconscious. Knowledge, without the ability to communicate it, is the explicit condition of Geraldine’s enchantment, such that she proclaims:
In the touch of this bosom there worketh a spell,
Which is the lord of thy utterance, Christabel!
Thou knowest tonight, and wilt know to-morrow,
This mark of my shame, this seal of my sorrow;
But vainly thou warrest,
For this is alone in
Thy power to declare,
That in the dim forest
Thou heard’st a low moaning,
And found’st a bright lady, surpassingly fair[.] (ll. 265-76)
Christabel is explicitly characterized as having knowledge of the event, both in the moment of its performance and in the aftermath.15 She is just as explicitly characterized as being “powerless” to declare how this experience came to pass—an inability predicated, in terms of the spell itself, by Christabel’s apparent volition in touching Geraldine’s breast. Most tellingly, the consequences of Christabel’s enchantment and of her enacted desires for Géraldine are the confusion of voice and identity, particularly through metaphors of ventriloquism.
If Christabel’s enchantment by Geraldine represents a dramatic portrayal of the Coleridgean unconscious in action, the effects of this liaison show the ways in which the “deranged” or “frenzied” volition can produce ventriloquism, “passive imitation,” and ultimately plagiarism. As the passage above suggests, the result of Christabel’s unconscious enactment of her desires is the erasure of agency. She is an “unwilling” participant only in the most precise sense of the term: the instrumentality of the will has been suspended. Unable to render accounts and unconscious in the Coleridgean sense of that category, Christabel also experiences the vocal effects of habit and inhabitation: passive imitation and ventriloquism. Unconscious of how her own desires operate in relation to agency, Christabel’s body becomes the site of an imitative identity as she begins to mimic Geraldine’s speech. To the enchanted Christabel and to the visionary poetic bard within the poem, Geraldine takes on the qualities of a snake (e.g., ll. 583-85), and Christabel ultimately comes to imitate both her appearance and her vocalizations. When Christabel tries to speak, she does so in the reptilian intonation she perceives in Geraldine: in once instance she “drew in her breath with a hissing sound” (l. 459) and at another “Christabel in dizzy trance / Stumbling on the unsteady ground / Shuddered aloud, with a hissing sound!” (ll. 587-89). The product of enchantment, like the product of habit, is the complete identification with desire and with the occasions that produce it. Moreover, these imitations are explicitly characterized as unconscious: Coleridge writes that Christabel “passively did imitate…. With forced unconscious sympathy” (ll. 605-9). Perhaps more clearly than anywhere else in his corpus, here is a description of how Coleridge imagined the inhabitation of the voice of another to operate. Christabel imitates Geraldine—both in voice and in identity—passively, unconsciously, even unwillingly. Yet this mimicry is likewise forced upon her, not through the agency of another but through the powers of her own sympathetic desires. If read as a figure for plagiarism, Christabel reveals the degree to which such imitations involve the passive, unconscious, and interdicted processes of desire and identification, escaping the willed intent of the author.
As the throwing of the voice and of the desires into a space beyond the proper boundaries of the self, ventriloquism represented for Coleridge one of the fundamental experiences of the unconscious and one of the principle justifications for plagiarism, and tracing this theme throughout Christabel reveals the problem of authorship engaged by the poem itself. For, if Christabel comes to sound unwittingly like Geraldine, it is also the case that she becomes the place into which Geraldine unconsciously throws the voice of her own desires. Implicitly, at least, Christabel’s body and its articulation is the site of ventriloquism, inhabited and “frenzied” by Geraldine’s voice and passions. However, Geraldine also begins to sound like Christabel as the poem progresses, and it may be that the process of identification and projection is not unilateral. In other words, Geraldine and all that she represents may be equally a product of Christabel’s psychological ability to create a persona for the “deranged” and autonomous volition.16 The riddle of the poem remains the question of agency. With each woman casting onto the other the voice of her desires and integrating those desires back into the self through passive imitation, it becomes uncertain who is the author—or, indeed, if a single author of either the poem’s texts or its deeds may be said to exist at all. The operations of the unconscious construct for the self and its desires a myriad of voices, and it constructs myriad places for those voices to inhabit, some of which are coterminous with the bodies and voices of others. Much like the complex self-mimicry performed in the poetic doggerel with which Coleridge prefaces this poem and which may be read as a model for reading the poem’s engagement with themes of voice and appropriation, Christabel explores the ways that the voice of the other and the voice of the self may coincide and counterinhabit each other.
The trance and its role in explaining unconscious processes that include plagiarism are also related to the second metaphor that Coleridge employed as justification for his intellectual obligations, the phenomenon of “ocular spectra.” Coleridge’s understanding of association, perception, and memory was informed by contemporary scientific and psychological models, and, as Alan Richardson has demonstrated in British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind, he was particularly sympathetic to early “cognitivist accounts of a modular and material brain-mind.”17 His knowledge of the “ocular spectra” was drawn primarily from the work on visual perception proposed in Joseph Priestley’s History and Present State of Discoveries Relating to Vision, Light, and Colour (1772), which Coleridge had read in the 1790s, and he specifically associated these “spectra” with the operations of the unconscious mind and with the processes of poetic composition. In this phenomenon, which John Livingston Lowes first explicated in his early work on Coleridge and plagiarism, The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination, Coleridge claimed to have experienced the return of certain images that had been impressed as “traces” on his optic nerve. Speaking of these visual experiences as word-images or “Thoughts & Images,” he asserts that they appeared to him in “certain Trances” that he also associated with habit. These ocular impressions, reshaped and unified, presented themselves to his unconscious mind’s eye as fully formed poetic expression, experienced as moments of intoxication, trance, reverie, or inspiration much like the process of composition described in the preface to “Kubla Khan” (1798).
Coleridge maintained that these spectra, which he attributed both to psychological and physiological factors, were part of his experiences with memory and with poetic composition, and they consequently intersect with his attitudes toward textual appropriation, external influence, and plagiarism. In an 1801 entry in the notebooks, Coleridge linked the experience of these spectra both to the unconscious and to his own production of poetic images. In vivid language, he writes:
Wednesday—Afternoon. Abed—nervous—had noticed prismatic colours transmitted from the Tumbler—Wordsworth came—I talked with him—he left me alone—I shut my eyes—beauteous spectra of two colours, orange and violet—then of green, which immediately changed to Peagreen, & then actually grew to my eye into a beautiful moss, the same as the one on the mantle-piece at Grasmere,—abstract Ideas—& unconscious Links!! (NSTC 925 21.124)
In Coleridge’s account, the prismatic colors refracted through the glass of the tumbler impressed themselves upon his optical nerve so that, when he closed his eyes, they appeared first as spectra and then, through unconscious association, as an image of moss. However, with its precise and poetic attention to detail and language, the notebook entry further suggests the degree to which Coleridge understood the spectra as an experience of composition. For, while the spectra give rise to “abstract Ideas” and associations, they also are productive of specific poetic language—the word-images in which the mental perception unconsciously takes shape. Above all, the spectra are a phenomenon of memory made present, and in this instance the associative nexus centers on the experience of seeing and re-seeing the mantle-piece in Wordsworth’s house. However, the source for such imagery might as well be textual in its origins: words and the images they produce can be replicated in the mind’s eye. Through the imaginative processes of association and synthesis, the mind could produce or reproduce word-images (including texts authored by another writer) that had been impressed upon it previously. In this event the mode of textual transmission is not mimetic but organic and unconscious, even where the results are identical, and, in such a scenario, plagiarism, like the act of poetic composition itself, becomes a product of the imagination’s visual operations within the unconscious mind. In fact, the ocular spectra are simply another manifestation of the trance, an experience that we have already seen had strong associations for Coleridge with both plagiarism and the unconscious. It is also rooted in the psychology of the Coleridgean habit. We might understand spectra rather like desire: as the marks of erasure and the means through which the mind returns, unconsciously and creatively, to its exciting cause.
Coleridge’s evocation of ocular spectra has been generally dismissed by the critical tradition, in large part, I suspect, because the scientific investigations upon which Coleridge’s theories were based did not pass into the cultural mainstream. Even Lowes, who must rank as one of Coleridge’s staunchest defenders on this point, characterizes the phenomenon negatively, as a psychological trick of the mind and as a productive failure of memory that Coleridge employed to explain his obligations. Fruman and the poet’s later critics dismiss the notion as absurd, self-serving, and evidence of his self-rationalizing compulsions. In both instances, the critical impulse is to cast Coleridge’s borrowings in terms of a psychological disruption. Yet, the problem of the ocular spectra raises an interesting historical dilemma. As a matter of historical coherence, it becomes difficult to justify dismissing the scientific basis that Coleridge had for using the ocular spectra as a justification for plagiarism without jettisoning the theory of aesthetics that he constructed on that same foundation. Coleridge’s descriptions of the phenomenon are consistent not only with his reflections on habit and its unconscious operations but also with the ideas of association and imaginative psychology he subsequently developed throughout the Biographia Literaria.18 His discussion of the “inward eye” of poetic perception explicitly links the ocular spectra and its internal processes to theories of association, leading to this observation in the Biographia: “It is a well-known fact, that bright colours in motion both make and leave the strongest impression on the eye. Nothing is more likely too, than that a vivid image or visual spectrum, thus originated, may become the link of association in recalling the feelings and images that had accompanied the original impression” (STC 398). Indeed, throughout the Biographia, Coleridge is concerned with the ways in which visual perception produces internal correspondences and abstract categories, and he bases his theory of poetry on the creative mind’s associative and “symbolic” capacities. In short, the notion of the ocular spectra is part and parcel of Coleridge’s theory of poetic composition.
As implausible as the experience of ocular spectra may seem to modern readers, Coleridge’s justification of his plagiarisms from Schelling on account of a “genial coincidence” has elicited the most consistent critical denunciation. Indeed, the question of his debts to Schelling and to other contemporary German philosophers remains a particularly sensitive issue; as Michael John Kooy remarked in Coleridge, Schiller, and Aesthetic Education, the nature of the influence has been largely understudied on account of a “nervous fixation on sources” that has left us “unaccustomed, even unwilling, to think of Coleridge’s relationship with other thinkers except in terms of either slavish dependence or absolute ignorance.”19 However, although the “genial coincidence” has been seen as one of the most improbable and disingenuous aspects of Coleridge’s self-justification, his employment of the term also has more complex philosophical resonances and implications than often have been acknowledged. Coleridge’s understanding of the term coincidence, in particular, warrants further consideration in respect to both the question of unconsciousness and the question of plagiarism.
In its current modern usage, “coincidence” implies a notion of the accidental and the unaccountable, but Coleridge understood the term in a distinct philosophical sense that was informed by and indebted to the very work and correspondences that he was seeking to address: Schelling’s System des transcendentalen Idealismus (System of Transcendental Idealism). Responding in the Biographia Literaria to charges of plagiarism, Coleridge famously observes that
In Schelling’s ‘NATUR-PHILOSOPHIE,’ and the ‘SYSTEM DES TRANSCENDENTALEN IDEALISMUS,’ I first found a genial coincidence with much that I have toiled out for myself…. It would be but a mere act of justice to myself, were I to warn my future readers, that an identity of thought, or even similarity of phrase will not be at all times a certain proof that a passage has been borrowed from Schelling, or that the conceptions were originally learned from here. In this instance, as in the dramatic lectures of Schlegel to which I have before alluded, from the same motive of self-defence against the change of plagiarism, many of the most striking resemblances, indeed all the main and fundamental ideas, were born and matured in my mind before I have ever seen a single page of the German Philosopher[.] (STC 235)
Coleridge proposes that, despite the apparent lack of originality or, more precisely, of linguistic uniqueness, the ideas and expression in the Biographia were the products of his creative and mental activities. The similarities, he implies, are a matter of “coincidence.” This passage has been almost universally discredited because the idea of such an extended and fortuitous coincidence has seemed far too genial to grant much credence. Elsewhere, however, Coleridge is clear that he expects his readers to understand his evocation of “coincidence” in this passage precisely. By coincidence, Coleridge means something closer to the original sense of the term: that the two texts inhabit the same space and that they literally coincide. Put another way, Coleridge understands the matter philosophically—indeed, in terms borrowed from his reading of Schelling, who in the opening passage of the System des transcendentalen Idealismus had written, “All knowledge is founded upon the coincidence of an objective with a subjective.—For we know only what is true; but truth is generally taken to consist in the coincidence of presentations with their objects” (§1.1).20 In the Biographia, Coleridge incorporated this same passage into his discussion of the authorship and the imagination (chapter 12), and the engagement with Schelling at this particular juncture in his argument suggests the degree to which he associated the processes of logical argumentation and coincidence with precise philosophical argumentation.
There are two ways of unraveling the particulars of how Coleridge imagined “coincidence” to have operated in the process of poetic and aesthetic composition. The more complex but potentially treacherous route is to attempt to recover how Coleridge read or misread Schelling’s original text. Schelling, at least, is reasonably clear on the point, proposing that knowledge and truth are always experiences of coincidence between nature and self, objective and subjective, conscious and unconscious, and he writes elsewhere in the System des transcendentalen Idealismus that coincidence may be understood as a matter of “reciprocal concurrence” (§1.2). The second way lies in Coleridge’s reflections on the subject in the notebooks. Commenting on Walter Scott’s purported plagiarisms, Coleridge uses the same term, but he explains his meaning rather more clearly, writing, “Coincidence here is used as a negative—not as implying that Likeness between two Works is merely accidental, the effect of chance, but as asserting that it is not the effect of imitation” (CLSTC 3. 358). Here, Coleridge acknowledges that coincidences between the thoughts and expressions of writers are not what are commonly understood by coincidence at all. The contrast he develops is not between intention and chance but between original and imitation, and Coleridge asserts that, in the absence of studied or what he often calls “servile” imitation, correspondences of this nature between texts and expressions cannot be said to constitute plagiarism. Coleridge’s formulation leaves open, of course, the additional possibility that these similarities arose unconsciously—which he continues to define in terms of the unwilling rather than the unknowing. Indeed, Coleridge understood Schelling to be proposing that, where the argument is philosophically true, repetition is inevitable; the works of two authors are the same simply because their individual subjective expressions (i.e., identities) have both coincided with the same objective phenomena (i.e., nature, logic). Or, put more simply, Coleridge understood it thus: that the similarities were not the result of willful imitation, but neither were they unknown to him. They were the result of the unconscious, inevitable, logical coincidence of two intelligences inhabiting the same subjective experience.
This relationship between genial coincidences and the revelation of philosophical truths is an important element of how Coleridge understood his own innocence from plagiarism, and it is obviously related to the notion of the “divine ventriloquist” discussed earlier in this chapter. Following Schelling’s argument, unconscious concurrences are logically valid because the objective truth is out there to be found, and, when Coleridge proposes that his borrowings are the result of unconscious ventriloquism, he likewise emphasizes the truth-value of the shared linguistic claims. Addressing the problem of plagiarism in the Biographia, Coleridge insists upon both the unintentional rather than imitative nature of the coincidence and the value that he places on the truth of the perceptions. “Let it,” he writes,
be not charged on me as ungenerous concealment or intentional plagiarism. I have not indeed … been hitherto able to procure more than two of his books, viz. The 1st volume of his collected Tracts, and his System of Transcendental Idealism…. I regard the truth as a divine ventriloquist: I care not from whose mouth the sounds are supposed to proceed, if only the words are audible and intelligible. (STC 237)
Coleridge directly associates truth and ventriloquism in this passage, and his employment of the voice metaphor further extends the range of coincidence beyond the logical content of abstract thought to include modes of expression and identity. At the same time, by associating his plagiarisms with unintentional actions, Coleridge effectively inoculates himself here and throughout the Biographia against the most serious form of Romantic failed appropriation, culpable plagiarism. His dilemma, however, is that he cannot acquit himself of aesthetic plagiarism. How does a writer convincingly persuade his or her readers that the work is good? As poets have always known, self-confidence does not guarantee critical applause or commercial success. The judgment of aesthetic plagiarism—based on an assessment of the degree to which an author has asserted narrative or lyric control over his or her borrowed materials and unified the voiced identity of the text—rested in the perceptions of readers and reviewers. While culpable plagiarism was concerned with where textual borrowings had come from and with the intention with which they were reemployed, aesthetic plagiarism hinged on the question of improvement and concerned only what a writer had done with his or her materials. Reading Coleridge’s insistence on voice rhetorically, the metaphor of ventriloquism also operates as an attempt to argue for the internal mastery (and eternal overmastery) of his writing.
In its attitude toward literary property and appropriation, literary Romanticism valued texts that, however disparate their sources, maintained a unified and distinct authorial style. Simply put, an author had sufficiently changed or had “improved” upon the work of another writer if he or she had assimilated the text into his or her own literary persona, especially through control of poetic or narrative voice. Questions of the production of voice were at the center of Byron’s troubles with charges of plagiarism and are discussed at length in Chapter 4. However, Coleridge also addresses this subject in the course of his reflections on imitation. Most notably, in the Biographia Coleridge recognizes voice as an element of literary property, and he proposes that highly personal poets such as Wordsworth have little reason for anxiety. Imitation—conscious imitation—is itself bound to fail if the original poetry is sufficiently distinct in respect to subjectivity. Perhaps responding to Wordsworth’s repeated assertions that Byron had plagiarized stylistic aspects of his writing such as tone and voice, Coleridge argues that Wordsworth’s poetry is characterized by a particularly identifiable and unique textual persona. He writes that “it would be difficult and almost superfluous to select instances of diction peculiarly his own, of a style which cannot be imitated without it being at once recognized, as originating in Mr. Wordsworth” (STC 374). The assertion is that Wordsworth’s voice remains so tied to the person of the author (and the “matter-of-factness” of his existence) that it remains his own even in the context of other texts. Where Wordsworth believed that his tone and style were subject to appropriation by his literary competitors, Coleridge maintains that the efforts to mobilize his lyric voice through imitation cannot ultimately succeed because the resulting text will always be marred by the presence of two competing voices, and the imitator will fail to improve upon or to assimilate fully his or her borrowed text. The consequence of such a muddled text—irrespective of the nature or extent of the correspondences—was plagiarism. Hybrid texts of this sort, much like dramatic narratives, ran the risk of internal incoherence; in Coleridge’s words, “Either the thoughts and diction are different from that of the poet, and then there arises an incongruity of style; or they are the same and indistinguishable, and then it presents a species of ventriloquism” (STC 397). Here, with remarkably clarity, is the contrast Coleridge imagined: plagiarism represented an “incongruity of style” and an inability to infuse the text of another with the authorial voice. Its opposite is ventriloquism: when, through mastery and projection, one voice speaks through two bodies and two texts.
Coleridge’s attitude toward univocal narrative or lyric control is important for understanding the charges of plagiarism that he leveled against other Romantic-period writers. To appreciate that Coleridge’s literary obligations, however extensive and silently rendered, operated in a context of intellectual-property standards that was historically distinct from our own is one matter. To appreciate why someone who availed himself so fully of this license would censure others for borrowings that often appear far less significant is another. The question of Coleridge’s apparent hypocrisy remains a troubling concern for even his most sympathetic and historically imaginative readers. Coleridge was unquestionably a writer who operated, even by contemporary standards, at the margins of legitimate appropriation and in the rhetorical complexities of literary-property discourse; yet he repeatedly accused other writers—with debts apparently less extensive than his own—of plagiarism. Ungenerous at best, the matter reeks of bad faith. However, without discounting the possibility that Coleridge harbored some competitive motives and could be cranky in a plain old-fashioned way, his hypocrisy has been overstated. The charges that he brought against his literary contemporaries emphasize the critical and evaluative rather than personal or moral nature of his censure, and his commentaries on the plagiarisms of other writers clearly indicate that his investment was in assessing the narrative coherence of these texts. In other words, Coleridge was concerned with aesthetic plagiarism and not culpable plagiarism, and his concern was with the quality of their literature. In making these charges, Coleridge believed that he was responding to a deficiency in the work itself, particularly a deficiency in the matter of voice, and he based his judgments on the criteria of Romantic-period plagiarism that were broadly familiar to his contemporaries.
When Coleridge charges other writers with plagiarism, he is charging them not with deception but with a lack of genius and with the failure to unify or to individualize textual voice. The degree to which Coleridge and his Romantic-period contemporaries associated plagiarism with issues of voice cannot be underestimated. Coleridge spoke of the plagiarisms of both James Mackintosh and Matthew Lewis in terms of their having created discontinuous or “patchwork” texts, by which he meant that they had failed to assimilate their borrowed materials or to unify their work. In an 1801 letter to Thomas Poole, Coleridge wrote of Mackintosh: “I attended 5 of his Lectures—such a wretched patch work of plagiarisms from Condilliac [sic]—of contradictions, and blunders in matter of fact” (CLSTC 2: 675). In 1798, he had described Matthew Lewis’s plagiarisms in Castle Spectre (1797) in nearly the same language: “I suspect, Mr. Lewis has stolen all his sentimentality, moral and humorous…. The whole plot, machinery, & incident are borrowed—the play is a mere patchwork of plagiarisms” (CLSTC 1: 379). In these charges, “patchwork” is as important a term as “plagiarism.” For Coleridge the problem with the respective borrowings of Mackintosh and Lewis is not the fact of the appropriations per se but each author’s failure to unify, transform, or improve upon his borrowed materials. By returning to the question of improvement, which was a question of authorial control for the Romantics, Coleridge articulates his critique within what is by now, I hope, a familiar critical discourse, and it is perhaps not surprising that, in looking at the failures of others, he should have paid particular attention to the aspect of appropriation at which he excelled: the ability to make his materials his own.
This ability to make one’s materials one’s own was an important component of the Romantic-period discourse on plagiarism; responding to charges of plagiarism in Don Juan, Byron used almost precisely those words in his defense. For both Coleridge and Byron the central issue in plagiarism was a question of voice, and Coleridge in particular considered the individuation of voice, rather than linguistic uniqueness, to be the crucial feature in identifying both plagiarism and the literary failure that it represented. The very emphasis on ventriloquism suggests, as both Eilenberg and Russett have also observed, that Coleridge understood successful and literary appropriation in terms of voice—quite specifically in terms of the unifying voice of “truth” irrespective of “from whose mouth the sounds … proceed” (STC 237).21 When responding to Wordsworth’s critique of Byron, Coleridge likewise formulated questions of literary originality in terms of uniqueness of voice, reflecting in the Marginalia that “W. Wordsworth calls Lord Byron the Mocking Bird of our Parnassian Ornithology; but the Mocking Bird, they say, has a very sweet song of his own, in true Notes proper to himself” (qtd. in Fruman 95). While Byron may borrow, even ventriloquize, Coleridge observes that, so long as the notes are proper to himself, the song must be judged lovely.
This notion of qualitative propriety—rather than exclusive property—thus emerges as the definitive aspect in judging the success and, therefore, the appropriateness of borrowing in the Romantic period. Describing his own writings and efforts at literary appropriation, Coleridge articulates this matter of voice in terms of authorial subjectivity or “spirit”:
He who can catch the Spirit of an original, has it already. It will not [be] by Dates, that Posterity will judge the originality of a Poem; but by the original spirit itself. This is to be found neither in the Tale however interesting, which is but the Canvass, no nor yet in the Fancy or the Imagery—which are but Forms & Colors—it is a subtle spirit, all in each part, reconciling & unifying all—. Passion and Imagination are its most appropriate names; but even these say little—for it must be not merely Passion but Poetic Passion, poetic Imagination. (CLSTC 3:361)
Again, in an 1804 notebook entry, he observes of his borrowings from metaphysics that quoting is a skulking trick and after all “the Soul is all Mine” (NSTC 2: 2375). In both instances, Coleridge insists that spirit pervades, unifies, and instantiates the literary text and that originality creates its own origins. From the perspective of his own metaphor, Coleridge maintains that he has thrown his voice completely into the corpus of the other; plagiarism, then, becomes unsuccessful ventriloquism, and Coleridge has succeeded. Put another way, “Coleridge’s plagiarism is,” as Norman Fruman first noted, “transcendental idealism in action” (154). Fruman meant something quite different when he made this claim, yet, as we have seen, Coleridge’s attitude toward plagiarism cannot be easily disassociated from his readings in Schelling and in metaphysical psychology. Schelling had argued that unconscious nature surpassed conscious art in one respect: it had life. Coleridge would claim more for art and propose that the goal of the poetic genius was to throw consciousness into the world and to make nature speak; in an act of creative ventriloquism the poet, thus, would plagiarize nature and produce living art.
My objective in this discussion has not been to suggest that Coleridge is right or wrong or to evaluate the merits of his defense. Whether Coleridge was or was not a nineteenth-century plagiarist is probably an irresolvable question, precisely because, even by Romantic-period standards, he operated at the limits of legitimate appropriation, and he justified his borrowings in philosophical and psychological terms that were either contested or unfamiliar. What we can say is that the responses that he gave to the charges of plagiarism brought against him were entirely in keeping with what was, in fact, a highly motivated argument between the Romantics and their reviewers and that the charges of plagiarism that he lodged against contemporaries were consistent with a broadly understood set of expectations regarding the deployment of the term. We can likewise say with some assurance that the critical tradition has been and remains invested in Coleridge’s obligations. His alleged plagiarisms continue to occasion controversy, and this is often productive. However, unless the controversy is framed by a historical context, the debate is senseless; judged by modern standards, Coleridge is obviously guilty. Yet, as I have argued, plagiarism in the Romantic period was not formulated primarily in moral terms. More importantly, interrogating the processes of aesthetic judgment that led to assertions of plagiarism in Georgian Britain enriches our understanding of the period and its literary investments.
Early nineteenth-century critical assessments of Coleridge’s borrowings demonstrate how important aesthetic judgments were for evaluating charges of plagiarism. While DeQuincey’s indictment represents one of the only sustained public efforts in the period to prove another writer guilty of culpable plagiarism, his argument proceeds from the critical assumption of literary failure. DeQuincey asserts that Coleridge’s inability to improve upon the materials borrowed from Schelling is self-evident, knowing that only such a “negation of improvement” could expose an author to the judgment of plagiarism, either culpable or aesthetic. Had Coleridge successfully assimilated his textual sources in the Biographia, the consciousness or unconsciousness of his obligations would have been irrelevant, regardless of their extent. The appropriations from Brun were dismissed by DeQuincey on precisely these same grounds, and because those improvements are also represented as self-evident it is difficult to know what other cultural factors might have influenced the exercise of aesthetic judgment. In both instances, however, the recognition of literary success or failure determined the outcome in regard to questions of plagiarism. Plagiarism was a function and a consequence of writing badly, and Romantic-period writers and their readers understood the stakes to be primarily aesthetic.
The critical tradition that has described Coleridge’s plagiarisms, on the other hand, has focused intently on the questions of consciousness and morality. Coleridge was to a large extent responsible for initiating this trajectory. He cast his borrowings in psychological terms and availed himself fully of the avenue of defense that “unconscious plagiarism” offered to British writers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. However, the articulation both of plagiarism and of consciousness evolved over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the historical and aesthetic contexts from which Coleridge’s “unconscious” appropriations emerged eventually were replaced by a later sensibility that was much more deeply invested in the moral and legal aspects of authorship. It is difficult to say precisely when the definition of the unconscious as Coleridge understood that term ceased to operate as a plausible argument. DeQuincey was one of the first commentators to obscure the historical complexities surrounding consciousness when he elides in the Tail’s Magazine essays any discussion of the contemporary philosophical arguments about psychology that his other writings make clear he knew. DeQuincey makes one argument about the limits of unconsciousness, and Coleridge makes another, but both were positioned in relation to shared Romantic-period attitudes toward literary property and its appropriation. When Sara Coleridge defended her father from plagiarism in the late 1840s, unconscious plagiarism apparently no longer operated so freely as a legitimate form of appropriation, and she unwittingly adopted DeQuincey’s definition of the unconscious rather than her father’s.22 When J. F. Ferrier and C. M. Ingelby documented Coleridge’s plagiarisms at the end of the nineteenth century, they did so without examining what the term might have meant for an earlier generation and at a time when notions of intellectual property and ownership were still in transition.23 By the time John Livingston Lowes and Adrien Bonjour came to psychoanalyze Coleridge in the early twentieth century, his neuroses had already been defined and his plagiarisms became, for both his defenders and his critics, a matter of uniquely personal desires and needs.24 His borrowings continued to be documented in the 1950s by scholars as prominent as Joseph Warren Beach and René Wellek without historical interrogation into what might have constituted plagiarism in another century, and even the monumental works of Thomas McFarland, Jerome Christensen, and Norman Fruman have cast the debate in terms of both twentieth-century attitudes toward intellectual property and post-Freudian categories of the unconscious.25 Defending Coleridge, McFarland ironically argues precisely the thing that would have most horrified the poet: that his plagiarisms in the Biographia Literaria reveal a pattern of implicitly unassimilated “mosaic organization” (27). Condemning the poet through assiduous research, Fruman judges Coleridge according to standards that his contemporaries never would have thought to apply to his borrowings. In the end, the critical tradition surrounding Coleridge tells us more about the ways in which the category of literary property has evolved and about our own relations to it than it tells us about the poet or the stakes being contested when charges of plagiarism were made in early nineteenth-century Britain.
Yet, while the historical contexts of Romantic plagiarism have been elided from the critical tradition surrounding the poet, it may be that Coleridge has, in some respect, albeit indirectly, shaped the current postmodern critical discourse on literature and literary property. The perspective most resonant with Coleridge and with Romantic-period categories of literary property remains psychoanalysis, and Coleridge’s unconscious plagiarism represents a prototype of the form of expression that Roland Barthes or Jacques Lacan call jouissance—and, surprisingly, to use the term is not anachronistic. The word was current in Britain during the eighteenth century and had long-standing use in continental property law as a notion associated with the use, enjoyment, or occupation of an estate or property, rather than outright possession, ownership, or right of disposal.26 There is much here in common with Coleridge’s characterization of plagiarism as inhabitation of various kinds. In current psychoanalytic terms, jouissance has come to signify textual excess or, in the early analysis laid out by Barthes in The Pleasure of the Text,
criticism always deals with the texts of pleasure [plasir], never the texts of bliss [jouissance]…. With the writer of bliss (and his reader) begins the untenable text, the impossible text…. you cannot speak “on” such a text, you can only speak “in” it, in its fashion, enter into a desperate plagiarism, hysterically affirm the void of bliss (and no longer obsessively repeat the letter of pleasure)[.]27
Criticism, indeed, has not dealt with Coleridge’s “texts of bliss,” although works such as the Biographia Literaria might be read precisely as such a joyfully desperate plagiarism and as an effort to speak in the text and corpus of the other. In the final analysis, it may be that the very elements that have made Coleridge’s texts impossible and, perhaps, untenable have been mis-recognized, along with the poet’s relation to the tradition that he inhabited and to the literary texts that surrounded him.