COLERIDGE has too long been the special property of ‘the literati by profession’, a class about which he always had some doubts. In his day he enjoyed the company of chemists and physicists, medical men, politicians of every stripe, farmers, tanners, lawyers, painters and musicians, publishers, newspaper editors and journalists, civil servants, clerks, housewives, innkeepers, teachers and children, parsons and professors, as well as poets and novelists and an assortment of the literati. There is no lack of testimony that these people enjoyed him and found their interests reciprocated by him. He ought to belong to them all again.
Contrary to a very general impression, Coleridge was not just the inspired talker, a financial burden and practical problem to friends who supported the man Coleridge for the sake of the poet. It is perfectly clear to any reader of the letters that he entered into the lives and concerns of his acquaintances with a zestful mind interested in all manner of things and able to forget itself in its own energy. For example, take his relation to Thomas Poole and Humphry Davy. When he talked to Poole, a tanner and agriculturalist, he asked him about the processes of tanning and the economics of agriculture. He stored up for him in his notebooks hints on how to plant trees and the sorts and uses of fertilizers. When Poole had a chemistry problem in his tanyard, it was Coleridge who asked questions of Davy, the solutions of which helped to further Davy’s career. He also went to the Pneumatic Institution in Bristol and took part in some of the early experiments of Davy and Beddoes with nitrous oxide and other gases. Two or three years later when he was in Germany, in 1798-9, sugar was being experimentally produced from sugar beets, for the first time on any scale. Coleridge visited the laboratory, talked to the Director and took notes on the whole process; and he may even have brought back some of the seeds to Davy. (He made a notebook memorandum to get some.) Davy was an adviser to the Board of Agriculture and would be interested. Sugar beets were not grown in England, so far as I can find out, till several decades later, but Coleridge, in the sugar shortage during the Napoleonic Wars and the blockade of the West Indies, may have been the first Englishman to think that the sugar ration might be supplemented by a crop at home.
Or take his relation to Daniel Stuart the editor of the Courier. It has long been known that Daniel Stuart stood in the role of patron to Coleridge for some years, and helped him with loans of money and his practical knowledge during the production of Coleridge’s periodical the Friend. What is less well known is the extent to which Stuart relied on Coleridge for advice on editorial policy in both domestic and foreign affairs. It puts a new complexion on things, puts his requests to Stuart in a truer context, to see, in the manuscript letters, Coleridge hard-pressed with all sorts of incredible obstacles in publishing the Friend, writing in a large desperate-looking hand about some new frustration, and yet, in the same letter, writing long paragraphs in detailed answer to some question of Stuart’s as to the latest decision of the Cabinet or the recent appointment of the Commander-in-Chief of the Army. It is not altogether surprising, therefore, to anyone who knows this Coleridge, to find Sir Robert Peel, when his Factory Act of 1818 was in danger of being defeated, asking him to write a pamphlet for circulation among members of Parliament. Coleridge was ill in bed, but he responded with a trenchant brochure, here reprinted. It was credited at the time with helping to pass the Bill.
I am far from arguing that Coleridge was a practical person, but rather that the many-sidedness of his interests and his sheer mental energy and initiative have not been fully recognized. One of the purposes of this anthology is to try to suggest the richness of that manifold. Another purpose is to suggest what it is that gives his ‘myriad-mindedness’ (to borrow from him a phrase he applied to Shakespeare) its special focus and its particular vitality in our own time.
Coleridge said of the Lyrical Ballads that he and Wordsworth hoped by their choice and treatment of subjects, to excite in the first place an interest in familiar everyday things by showing anew their intrinsic wonder, and secondly, to make clear the inner truth and reality in the unfamiliar and ‘supernatural’. This twofold tearing away of the veil, of commonplaceness from the matter-of-fact, and of remoteness from the wonderful, is characteristic of his purposes everywhere. The familiar is not so simple, nor are the common assumptions about it always to be taken for granted; and the strange and marvellous may be simpler and more common than we know. Of nothing are these truths so true as of the workings and products of the human mind.
Familiar things like words, for instance, are not dead counters or coins. They change, grow, split, carry overtones, defeat themselves. Grammar, it follows, is not the mechanics of language. Logic, if confined to Aristotelian propositions, is not commensurate with the requirements of thought. Science does not deal, though it may assume it does so, only with facts; it is based on hypotheses, and fictions. Education is not so simple as has been supposed; it is not a matter of pouring from big funnels into little ones under the overhanging rod; it is the training of a complex human personality and the inducements must be positive. In 1813 in a lecture on education he raised issues that are still being fought out to-day.
Obversely, the strange and unfamiliar may have laws and significance if we but look. Dreams are strange, if common, experiences, but are they merely what they commonly appear to be? Are they mere accidents? Do they not indicate something illuminating about the content and the degrees of consciousness, and about the associative processes of the waking as well as the sleeping state? And what of trances, oracles, mesmerism? Need these, from Pythagoras to the contemporary animal magnetists, be put down to trick and imposture? How does one mind work on another? What do we know about the imagination? In the tales of daemonology and witchcraft, are there not many cases that suggest pathological states? As he reads old John Webster’s Discovery of Supposed Witchcraft, he concludes that the states of mind in witches and bewitched are not so far from ‘normal’ as is supposed, and that what was needed was not the strong arm of the law so much as a new kind of care—a ‘neuro-pathology’ (see 40). ‘Medicine hitherto has been too much confined to passive works—as if fevers &c.—were the only human calamities. A Gymnastic Medicine is wanting, not a mere recommendation but a system of forcing the Will and motive faculties into action. There are a multitude of cases which should be treated as Madness—i.e. the genus madness should be extended and more classes and species made, in practice, tho’ of course, not in name’ (Notebook 14). This was written about 1808.
The more one reads Coleridge the more impressed one becomes with what can only be called a psychological approach to all human problems. Whether it be punctuation, or political sovereignty, a criticism of Richard II, the position of the mediaeval Church, or the baby talk of children, the state of Ireland or the work of the alchemists, he sees it as a piece of human experience, understandable in relation to the whole human organism, individual or social, so far as that organism can be comprehended as a whole. Politics are not a matter of events, facts, theories, and the isolated external circumstances only. No more is what passes for logic. Nor chemistry. Emotion comes in, motives, unknown ones as well as those that are acknowledged. Unknown especially to the participants.
This psychological approach has long been attributed to Coleridge as a literary critic but has not been so well recognized in other parts of his work. Everywhere it depends on his acute sense of the experiencing, integrating self, the complex human personality. In a comment on the margins of Thomas Taylor’s Proclus he protests against neo-platonism: ‘… Amid all these fine flights concerning the Soul, the Intellect, and the One, what becomes of poor “I”,—of the Self of each person? Whence comes, whither goes, the personality?’ And in the margins of Tetens, ‘What is a Thought but “I” thinking?’ In personality, clearly or obscurely, everything is connected with everything else. The necessity of seeing every problem in its relations and perspective, in a perspective increasingly multiple the more one knows, accounts for that sense of defeat by the complexity of his materials that sometimes paralysed him before he had fairly set out. ‘I seem to myself to distinguish Power from Strength and to have only the former,’ he writes Davy in 1804. Power without Strength. To a more naïve mind the tasks he set himself would have been simpler, or rather, a more naïve mind would not have seen them at all. For was he not groping towards a Gestalt psychology before the gestaltists? And in his reflections on consciousness, on the importance of the study of consciousness, on the sub-conscious (he used the phrase ‘below consciousness’) and on the unconscious, had he not a glimmering of Freudianism before Freud? And would he not have recognized in Jung’s doctrine of the collective unconscious, ideas that had in his own mind a sometimes dim and confused, but something more than merely primordial existence? His anticipations he could not at that time either formulate or develop with any scientific precision. He had not the medical knowledge, the case histories, the vocabulary or the hundred years of science between him and them. But he would have greeted some things in the work of all of them with a shout of recognition. This we know from his insight in a diversity of contexts. His interest in children as a source for the study of mental processes, in primitive people and their reactions and attitudes, in the personal literature of memoirs and biography, in dreams and other less conscious experiences, these he shared with many of his contemporaries; but in his insight into them he is closer to later psychologists. I venture to suggest, too, from the nature of his comments on them, that his defence of less rationalistic minds, for instance, mystics like Bruno and Jacob Boehme (Böhme), was aroused more by sympathetic psychological understanding than by any agreement in mystical opinions. Coleridge has been much maligned in regard to his interest in these and other aspects of the irrational.
It becomes clear to a reader of the many passages of selfsearching and confession, especially in the notebooks, that his awareness of the existence of almost unrecognized psychological factors in all human activity, comes from his awareness of himself. It has been said by Professor Elton that no man observes the imaginative process so closely in the very act of creation, as he. And the self-observation goes on, not only during the creation of poems, but continually, whatever he is engaged in. Why is it, he notes in a notebook entry in 1803—was he afraid of being laughed down if he had put the question anywhere else?—that a certain pair of black woollen bloomers he wears, creates an intolerably irritating skin condition? Doctors might well attend more to ‘cutaneous diseases’ he thinks, about which they know little or nothing. The entry goes on amusingly, about the possibility of beauty being really only skin deep, and becomes very involved, but the main thing is that such questions depend on accurate observation in defiance of expectation and conventions of thought. (The concept of allergies was not really developed until about 1915.) His conclusions are tentative in such fields, and not always correct. Emotions, particularly fears, distort the view. This he knows. (See 18, 37.) But the correctness of the observation, remarkable as it is, is less important than that the observations should be made at all.
What is farthest-reaching and most creative in other fields, in his literary criticism, philosophy, social criticism, theology, is rooted multifariously in and rises out of his own experience. It surely does not invalidate his critical or systematic views at all to suggest that in this sense their great strength and piercing insight depends largely on the subjective element in them. Perhaps ‘personal’ would be a less dangerous if less accurate word.
At his best, both in criticism and creation, he was able to take the materials of inner experience and to objectify them into works or fragments of truth or art—even in such a poem as ‘Kubla Khan’ which seems to have appeared out of the air. In a paper entitled ‘The “Dream” of Kubla Khan’, Miss Elisabeth Schneider interprets the poem as referring to the Dejection theme, the loss of joy, of song, of the vision of Paradise, of the creative power which once he had, and which, could he revive it, would enable him to build the pleasure dome of poetry. The whole article with its discussion of opium, and dreams, and its analysis of the origin and meaning of ‘Kubla Khan,’ is interesting, but what is pertinent here is that ‘the purest piece of black magic in the English language’ (Lowes) is the product of an imagination that is able to create a beauty of form and order out of deeply realized personal agony. Similarly ‘The Ancient Mariner’ clearly contains a large element of personal allegory—of fear, and guilt, and loneliness.1 Again the inner materials have taken shape in art; and it would be possible to show, if this were the place for it, that of Coleridge’s many unsuccessful poems, a number fail because, as in ‘The Three Graves’, the external materials are not sufficiently deeply realized to be subjectively endorsed; and conversely, as in the ‘Destiny of Nations’, because the subjective feelings are not sufficiently externalized either in the images of the natural world or in the medium of simple descriptive language.
The criticism of all kinds sometimes stands or falls for the same reason. Plato, for instance, as described in the fifth of the Philosophical Lectures has a good deal of Coleridge about him. He ‘began in meditation, thought deeply within himself of the goings-on of his own mind and of the powers that were in that mind, conceived to himself how this could be, and if it were, what must be the necessary results and agencies of it, and then looked abroad to ask if this were a dream or whether it were indeed a revelation from within, and a waking reality. He employed his observation as the interpreter of his meditation, equally free from the fanatic who abandons himself to the wild workings of the magic cauldron of his own brain, mistaking every form of delirium for reality, and from the cold sensualist who looks at death as the alone real life of the world, by not considering that the very object was seen to him only by the seeing powers, and what a little further consideration would have led him to deduce, that that which could make him see it must be an agent, and a power like his own, whilst that which was merely seen, which was purely passive, could have no other existence than what arose out of an active power that had produced it.’
The adequacy of the description will be judged by philosophers according to their bent. There is no doubt about its source. Not that Coleridge’s most sympathetic interpretations are reserved for those with whom he agrees; but he knows best those with whose mental process he can identify himself in some degree or other. The Stoic ethics fail, and he dismisses them, because the Stoic distorted his own inner nature, denied it in his concern with the externals of behaviour. Democritus on the other hand, whose atomism is inadequate and in its later manifestations anathema to Coleridge, received much fuller attention and respect because, in making his atoms into forms and essences, he invented ‘a notion borrowed altogether from what he found within himself, namely the sense of power’. A sense of power, though doubtless, for Democritus, with a sense of strength.
The same acute personal realization (in the true sense of the word) runs through the social criticism. When he wrote his strong plea—and one of his firmest pieces of prose—on behalf of Sir Robert Peel’s bill to reduce the working hours of children in the cotton factories, he wrote from the conviction that the arguments of the opposition, based on the hue and cry of ‘free labour’, were deceptive, and that the labour of the children was not free at all, that they were in fact slaves of an expanding commercial enterprise. This he knew and felt from his personal knowledge of what freedom is and what slavery is. Slavery, he says, is a state of ‘hopelessness’1; slavery to commerce, or slavery to opium are psychologically very much the same thing. Opium he described late in life, in 1832 to Green, as ‘the curse of my existence, my shame and my negro-slave inward humiliation and debasement’. He knew what it felt like to be a negro slave, or a factory child. Slavery to anything prevents the fullest integration of the person and blocks creative activity. Hence the cotton-children must be made free. It is not a question of working hours but of life itself, of releasing them from the clutches of Death-in-Life.
So it is with slavery to opium and ill-health; and slavery too, to childhood fears, to unhappiness in marriage, to hopeless love. They all prevent that energetic pushing through to an order of things that would have made his own life more useful. This he knows too, and makes it, in ‘Dejection’, the subject of the saddest and most devastating piece of self-criticism in English poetry.
That the fulcrum of Coleridge’s thought is his awareness of the psychological factors in any kind of human experience, and that it derives its power from his own subtle and complex personal realizations, is, at the very least, a part of the truth about Coleridge.
The relations of things to one another and to his experience are often more remote and strange than in the examples I have cited. His public and even his private audiences felt this frequently. He himself was often troubled by obscure and difficult connexions he could not always hold on to, let alone articulate. And so the sentences grow and grow, the parenthetical qualifications and explanations thicken between the start and the finish, the page fills with the convoluted sentences of his at times verbose, gangliated prose. But this sense of the links, of the complexity, of interdependent inter-relations, not merely among ideas, the products of thought, but in the very process of knowing, makes Coleridge a questioner rather than a systematizer, provocative rather than dogmatic, a noser of nettles rather than a hunter of the hare. (See 114.) His is the kind of not-rigidly-compartmentalized mind that asks questions that are more important than the answers. And those persons who would much rather have questions answered than asked do not generally like Coleridge. It is, however, this genius for questioning and for holding some judgements lightly and tentatively, that gives him that ‘seminal quality’ that John Stuart Mill detected and that helps to make him intellectually congenial to our time.
In days when we value crystallized systems less and inquiry more, when the area of the unprovable has encroached on the proved, when the relative finds a less frightened acceptance than it once did, when investigations of psychology and sociology begin to be to this century what physics and chemistry and biology were to the last, we are more receptive to Coleridge. We can be more receptive than his contemporaries and certainly much more than the generations that succeeded him. Aside from the change in mental emphasis and interest, we have some advantages over his contemporaries. We care less about his not completing the ‘Opus Maximum’, although ironically enough we know that much more of it was actually written than they believed. We do not receive his letters telling us that works written only in his mind, or in fragments on the margins of other people’s books, are ‘practically ready for the press’. Many of the sources of irritation and moral condemnation (though Sir Edmund Chambers’s summary of his career rings with stern disapproval) have disappeared. On the hither side of the autopsy performed on him, and even without our knowledge of the long years of insidious, undiagnosed ill-health, we see in the list of his publications an impressive achievement. Not including the numerous editions of his poems, twelve volumes1 of his work were published in his lifetime; and fifteen1 more have been published since his death. If all the manuscript remains were to be published they would easily run to as many as a dozen more. The charge of idleness levelled against Coleridge is understandable from his friends and acquaintances who had no total picture of the man’s intellectual labours to go by, who were not in a position to appreciate the distance between him and most of them, and who judged by practical and tangible results. At this time of day, the charge of laziness and dilatoriness is a libel, and covers up a different sort of impatience with Coleridge.
Many persons dislike the tentative and exploratory. They want system and answers if only to refute them. But Coleridge must seek his audience among those who no longer expect to find in books, even by poets and philosophers, the whole truth arranged neatly and labelled as specifics for human ills. On the whole, however, are we not ready as never before to value those reachings out of the mind for what lies on the peripheries of knowledge and experience, to explore, as well as the interior of darkest Africa the still darker interior, at once familiar and unfamiliar, of the Town of Man-Soul? Coleridge should belong to us all again. At least he will meet half-way any reader who prefers being stimulated to being comforted. And to some he will bring his comfort too.
Possibly an anthologist need not defend himself for what is omitted. Yet the responsibility for not distorting an author is particularly great when one deals in unpublished materials. I have tried to be scrupulous, especially in quoting from manuscripts, to quote fully enough to be fair to Coleridge’s intention. In the selection of subjects treated and works quoted from, I can only say what Lamb wrote to Coleridge (confessing that he had not sent him a present of a pig). ‘Pardon me if I stop somewhere.’ It required considerable self-denial and strength of purpose to omit from this anthology a selection of the lesser known poems that might easily have gone into the first section. But the poems are available in a good complete modern edition and in many smaller ones. The Biographia Literaria, the Shakespearean Criticism, and a volume of Miscellaneous Criticism are published in modern editions also, and I have not quoted from any of them. Four volumes of letters are published, two in 1895 by E. H. Coleridge and two more in 1932 by E. L. Griggs. But the Friend, the Essays on His Own Times, the Aids to Reflection, the Statesman’s Manual, the Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, even the Table Talk, where are they? I have selected from these, and from others of the less well-known works, because the latter are in any practical sense unavailable, either not reprinted since the early editions or hidden away in obscure publications.
About one third of the items have never been published, and in these cases I have retained Coleridge’s eccentricities of spelling and punctuation with only slight modifications. I do so that the reader may haply remember to take them as Coleridge, in a notebook (as usual thinking about how his own and other minds work), enjoined: as ‘Hints and first Thoughts, often, too, cogitabilia rather than actual cogitata a me’, that they ‘may not be understood as my fixed opinions—but merely as suggestions of the disquisition; and acts of obedience to the apostolic command of “Try all things: hold fast that which is good”’.
This is not a golden book of Coleridge nor any book of Gems. Nor does it pretend to be a representative anthology of either themes or works. I must at the outset disclaim any attempt to set forth fairly or precisely, with due emphasis all round, what one needs to read in order to form a just estimate of the man or a full impression of his mind. Here is not Coleridge in his quiddity. Here is a basket of plucked plums and windfalls, collected while rummaging about in the more recondite materials. Working towards an edition of Coleridge’s notebooks has made it necessary to go through everything, published and unpublished, and this anthology is an attempt to share with the common reader some of the fruits of research, fruits that gleam, sometimes obscured by the heavy but still green foliage on the Coleridge tree.
I have arranged the items in the order that seems to me on this twelfth day of March, 1949, illuminating, and I have sworn to stop juggling. ‘The kind reader’ will observe that at least half the items might have been put in any other section than the one where now he finds them. I should like him, just as a point of interest, to try to decide where he would have put item 200 and item 227.