Coleridges Writings Vol 5 On the Sublime

  Coleridge’s Writings On the Sublime Volume 5

  Edited by David Vallins Coleridge’s Writings General Editor: John Beer

Volume 5: On the Sublime

  COLERIDGE’S WRITINGS

Myriad-minded in his intellectual interests, Coleridge often passed quickly

from one subject to another, so that the range and mass of the materials he

left can be bewildering to later readers. Coleridge’s Writings is a series addressed

to those who wish to have a guide to his important statements on particular

subjects. Each volume presents his writings in a major field of human knowledge

or thought, tracing the development of his ideas. Connections are also made

with relevant writings in the period, suggesting the extent to which Coleridge

was either summing up, contributing to or reacting against current develop-

ments. Each volume is produced by a specialist in the field; the general editor

is John Beer, Professor of English Literature at Cambridge, who has published

various studies of Coleridge’s thought and poetry.

  Volume 1 ON POLITICS AND SOCIETY edited by John Morrow Volume 2 ON HUMANITY edited by Anya Taylor Volume 3 ON LANGUAGE edited by A.C. Goodson Volume 4 ON RELIGION AND PSYCHOLOGY edited by John Beer Volume 5 ON THE SUBLIME edited by David Vallins

  

Coleridge’s Writings

Volume 5 On the Sublime Edited by David Vallins Lecturer in English University of Hiroshima Japan

  Editorial matter and selection © David Vallins 2003 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.

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Patents Act 1988. First published 2003 by

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  ISBN 0–333–97250–3

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managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1772–1834.

  On the sublime/edited by David Vallins. p. cm.— (Coleridge’s writings; v. 5) Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 0–333–97250–3 1. Sublime, The.

2. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1772–1834— Criticism and interpretation.

  3. Sublime, The, in literature.

  I. Vallins, David.

  II. Title. PR4472.V35 2003 821 ′.7—dc21

  2003048281

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Yea (saith an enlightened physician), there is but one principle, which

alone reconciles the man with himself, with others and with the world;

which regulates all relations, tempers all passions, and gives power to over-

come or support all suffering; and which is not to be shaken by aught

earthly, for it belongs not to the earth—namely, the principle of religion,

the living and substantial faith ‘which passeth all understanding,’ as the

cloud-piercing rock, which overhangs the strong-hold of which it had been

the quarry and remains the foundation. This elevation of the spirit above

the semblances of custom and the senses to a world of spirit, this life in the

idea, even in the supreme and godlike, which alone merits the name of life,

and without which our organic life is but a state of somnambulism; this it

is which affords the sole sure anchorage in the storm, and at the same time

the substantiating principle of all true wisdom, the satisfactory solution of

all the contradictions of human nature, of the whole riddle of the world.

  (Friend [CC], 1: 523–4)

  This page intentionally left blank Contents Foreword

  ix

  Acknowledgements

  xi

  

List of Abbreviations xiii

Introduction

  1

  1 ‘These soul-ennobling views’: Enlightenment and Sublimity in Coleridge’s Early Writings 13 2 ‘A stirring & inquietude of Fancy’: Coleridge and the Sublimity of Landscape

  35 3 ‘A grand feeling of the unimaginable’: Transcendence in Literature and the Visual Arts

  81 i. General 83 ii. Individual authors and texts

  88 iii. The visual arts 108 4 ‘That life-ebullient stream’: Coleridge and

  Romantic Psychology 111 i. Evolution 114 ii. ‘Thought’ and ‘things’ 124 iii. Reason and understanding 131 iv. Politics and society 144 v. Love 146 vi. The psychology of the sublime 151

  5 ‘An intuitive beholding’: Aspects of the Sublime in Coleridge’s Religious Thought 155

  Notes

  170

  Bibliography

  186

  Index

  194

  This page intentionally left blank Foreword

  The appearance of hitherto unpublished material during the last hundred years has brought out more fully the range and complexity of Coleridge’s intelligence and knowledge. Complete publication of the Notebooks and Collected Works, together with that of the previ- ously assembled Collected Letters, have made it increasingly evident that this was the most extraordinary English mind of the time. The specialist or more general student who wishes to know what Coleridge had to say on a particular subject may, however, find the sheer mass of materials bewildering, since in his less formal writings he passed quickly from one subject to another. Coleridge’s Writings is a series addressed to such readers. In each volume a particular area of Coleridge’s interest is explored, with an attempt to present his most significant statements and to show the development of his thought on the subject in question.

  Among the various interests attracting Coleridge during his career, poetry, and the appreciation and criticism of literature, remained constant presences and the achievement of the sublime a dominant aspiration. The tragedies of Shakespeare marked one recent peak, while the work of Milton, who had come closest to producing an English form of epic poetry, called for emulation—and even supple- mentation, given the advances in knowledge and thought that had taken place since his death. The sublime was an ideal which could be aimed for not only poetically but intellectually: indeed, Coleridge remained unsure whether his aim should be to write an epic poem (the chief remaining subject for such an attempt being, he thought, ‘The Fall of Jerusalem’) or an opus maximum in philosophy (to be called the ‘Assertion of Religion’, perhaps).

  The loftiness of his aims was recognized in his circle—as is suggested by Southey’s rather withering description of The Ancient

  

Mariner as a ‘Dutch attempt at German sublimity’. Coleridge’s subse-

  quent attempts at demonstrating the sublimity of Nature, evident in many notebook descriptions, emerge openly in a poem such as the ‘Hymn before Sunrise’. As can be seen from the latter, however, a strong religious element was becoming increasingly bound up for him with x Foreword

  the quality. Meanwhile, in his lectures and works of criticism, he was exploring the extent to which it had informed works of art in more than one medium, ranging from the achievements of Shakespeare and Milton to the work of cathedral architects. Since his psycho- logical investigations had led him to enquire into the extent to which it should be thought of as a mental, or psychic, concept, moreover, this too was a theme constantly to be traced in his intellectual specu- lations and notably in his religious writing. Above all, any link between the human mind and the divine called, in his view, for an attitude of devotion. His Biographia Literaria ends in a turn of adoration towards the heavenly sublime which is to be repeated and elaborated in the last and culminating section of his major religious work, Aids

  to Reflection.

  Further volumes in the series will contain more sidelights on this preoccupation. Volumes on the range of his criticism, on Shakespeare and on the Bible will all refer to it at times, while a volume on Nature and Vision will supplement what is presented here, particularly by focusing on his capacity for analysis and minute observation in nature as well as his ability to range sweepingly over what she has to offer. The present volume, by focusing so firmly on the Sublime itself, will thus act as a firm and central guide to ideas that permeate much of the rest of his work. As always, the editorial work in the Princeton edition will be found invaluable by the reader who wishes to inquire further into particular passages.

  J.B.B.

  General Editor Acknowledgements

  Firstly, this volume would not have come into being without the initial suggestion and continuing guidance of the series-editor, John Beer, to whom I owe a particular debt of gratitude. Secondly, the Uni- versity of Hong Kong and, more recently, the University of Hiroshima have provided me with extensive facilities for research, as well as the opportunity to travel to libraries and conferences overseas, and I am grateful to my colleagues in both these institutions. Thirdly, Eleanor Birne and Emily Rosser at Palgrave Macmillan have given me valuable assistance and advice, as well as enthusiastic support for the project. Fourthly, my research assistants—Lorraine Wong in Hong Kong, and Sheila Lewis in London—provided significant help at an early stage of the project. I am also grateful to the anonymous reader of my initial proposal for the volume, whose knowledge and enthusiasm provided valuable guidance and encouragement. And the numerous Coleridge scholars with whom I have discussed related topics at successive Coleridge Summer Conferences have always been a key forum for testing my ideas and approaches. I am grateful to Oxford University Press for permission to reproduce a number of passages from Collected

  

Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E.L. Griggs (copyright © Oxford

  University Press, 1956–71), to The British Library for permission to reproduce a number of passages from Coleridge’s notebooks and to the estate of Kathleen Coburn for permission to reproduce a passage from Inquiring Spirit: A New Presentation of Coleridge from his Published

  

and Unpublished Prose Writings, ed. Kathleen Coburn. London: R.K.P.,

1951.

  This page intentionally left blank List of Abbreviations

AR (CC) S.T. Coleridge, Aids to Reflection. Ed. John Beer, CC 9

(1993).

Ashe S.T. Coleridge, Lectures and Notes on Shakespere and Other

English Poets. Ed. T. Ashe. London: George Bell, 1884.

BL (CC) Biographia Literaria. Ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate,

CC 7 (1983).

  BL The British Library

CC The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. General ed.

  Kathleen Coburn. Associate ed. Bart Winer. Princeton N.J. and London, 1969–

CJ Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement. Trans. J.C. Meredith.

  Oxford: Clarendon, 1928; 1952.

  

CL Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Ed. E.L. Griggs,

6 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1956–71.

CLE S.T. Coleridge, Letters. Ed. E.H. Coleridge. 2 vols. London:

Heinemann, 1895.

CLU Unpublished Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Ed. E.L. Griggs.

  2 vols. London: Constable, 1932.

  

CIS Inquiring Spirit: a New Presentation of Coleridge from His Pub-

lished and Unpublished Prose Writings. Ed. Kathleen Coburn.

  London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951.

  

CM S.T. Coleridge, Marginalia. Ed. George Whalley et al. 6 vols.

  CC 12 (1980–2001).

CN The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Ed. Kathleen

Coburn et al. 5 vols. London: Routledge, 1957–2002.

  

CPW S.T. Coleridge, Poetical Works. Ed. E.H. Coleridge. 2 vols.

  Oxford: Clarendon, 1912. xiv List of Abbreviations

CPW (CC) S.T. Coleridge, Poetical Works. Ed. J.C.C. Mays. 3 pts.

  in 6 vols. CC 16 (2001).

  

C&S S.T. Coleridge, On the Constitution of the Church and

State. Ed. John Barrell. London: Dent, 1972.

C&S (CC) S.T. Coleridge, On the Constitution of the Church and

State. Ed. John Colmer. CC 10, (1976).

C&S (1839) S.T. Coleridge, On the Constitution of the Church and

State and Lay Sermons. Ed. H.N. Coleridge. London:

  William Pickering, 1839.

  

C17thC Coleridge on the Seventeenth Century. Ed. R.F. Brinkley.

  Durham, N.C.: Duke U.P., 1955.

  ELH English Literary History

EOT S.T. Coleridge, Essays on His Times in ‘The Morning

Post’ and ‘The Courier’, Ed. David V. Erdman. 3 vols. CC 3, (1977).

Friend (CC) S.T. Coleridge, The Friend. Ed. Barbara E. Rooke. 2

vols. CC 4, (1969). JHI Journal of the History of Ideas

Lects 1795 S.T. Coleridge, Lectures (1795) On Politics and Religion.

  Ed. Lewis Patton and Peter Mann. CC 1, (1971).

  

Lects 1808–19 S.T. Coleridge, Lectures 1808–19 On Literature. Ed.

  R.A. Foakes. 2 vols. CC 5, (1987).

  

Lects 1818–19 S.T. Coleridge. Lectures 1818–19 On the History of Phil-

osophy. Ed. J.R. de.J. Jackson. 2 vols. CC 8, (2000).

LS (CC) S.T. Coleridge, Lay Sermons. Ed. R.J. White. CC 6,

(1972).

MC Coleridge’s Miscellaneous Criticism. Ed. T.M. Raysor.

  London: Constable, 1936.

  

NTPM S.T. Coleridge, Notes, Theological, Political, and Miscel-

laneous. Ed. Derwent Coleridge. London: Moxon,

  1853.

  List of Abbreviations xv OED Oxford English Dictionary

PLects The Philosophical Lectures of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

  Ed. Kathleen Coburn. London: Pilot, 1949.

  

PMLA Publications of the Modern Language Association of

America

SC Coleridge’s Shakespearian Criticism. Ed. T.M. Raysor.

  2 vols. London: Constable, 1930.

  

Shedd The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Ed.

  W.G.T. Shedd. 7 vols. New York. Harper, 1884.

  

STI F.W.J. Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism.

  Trans. Peter Heath. Charlottesville, Va.: University Press of Virginia, 1978.

  

SWF S.T. Coleridge, Shorter Works and Fragments. Ed. H.J. Jack-

son and J.R. de J. Jackson. CC 11, (1995).

TL Hints Towards the Formation of a More Comprehensive

Theory of Life. Ed. Seth B. Watson. London: John

  Churchill, 1848.

  

TT Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

  Ed. H.N. Coleridge. London: John Murray, 1836.

  

TT (CC) S.T. Coleridge, Table Talk. Ed. Carl Woodring, CC 14,

(1990).

TW R.B. Litchfield, Tom Wedgwood, the First Photographer.

  London: Duckworth, 1903.

  

Watchman S.T. Coleridge, The Watchman. Ed. Lewis Patton. CC 2,

(1970).

W&C Wordsworth and Coleridge: Studies in Honor of George

  McLean Harper. Ed. E.L. Griggs. Princeton, N.J.: Prince- ton U.P., 1939.

  

WMemoirs Christopher Wordsworth, Memoirs of William Wordsworth. 2 vols. London: Moxon, 1851. xvi List of Abbreviations

WPW The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. E. de

  Selincourt and Helen Darbishire. 5 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1940–1949. word Text struck out thus indicates a deletion in Coleridge’s manu- script. < > Indicates an insertion between the lines in Coleridge’s manu- script. [ ] In passages from Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, indicates an insertion by the editor. Introduction

  No other British Romantic focuses so consistently as Coleridge on the importance of transcending the material, the everyday, or the mundanely comprehensible in favour of a confrontation with the infinite forces which, like many of his contemporaries, he sees as underlying both human consciousness and the natural world. Wordsworth’s evocations—particularly in The Prelude and the ‘Intim- ations’ ode, as well as ‘Tintern Abbey’—of the sublime emotions through which we recognize the divine spirit informing the universe are perhaps still better-known than the numerous passages of Coleridge’s early poems which evoke an analogous intuition. Yet the number and variety of texts and contexts in which Coleridge empha- sizes the grandeur of the forces underlying human experience, and associates this intuition not only with elevation and excitement, but also with a liberating sense of calmness and of freedom from merely temporal concerns, is in fact far greater than in the case of Wordsworth. Coleridge, indeed, is the foremost British advocate of the aesthetic of transcendence with which Romanticism is so often asso- ciated—not only in the sense of recommending that aesthetic more powerfully and philosophically than any other British author, but also in his influence on other writers of the period, of whom Wordsworth is of course the most prominent. It is, indeed, among the numerous testimonies to his influence and achievement in these respects that historicist interpreters of Romantic idealism—most notably Jerome McGann—should have directed their critiques of Romantic ‘ideology’ primarily at Coleridge, correctly identifying him as the principal British advocate of the post-Kantian philosophies

2 Introduction

  1

  which culminate in the works of Hegel. Similarly in his own period, Coleridge was prominent among those whom the younger gener- ation of Romantic authors identified as promoting idealist values associated with an opposition to the French critique of aristocratic

  2

  and religious authority. At the same time, however, it is primarily in response to Coleridge’s and Wordsworth’s example that Shelley, in particular, seeks to formulate an interpretation of the sublime which eschews ideal concerns in favour of a more modern sense of the sublimity of the forces revealed by natural science—an aim which implicitly asserts the value of the emotions expressed by Coleridge,

  3

  while rejecting his interpretations of them. That Coleridge’s sublime emotions should have been so closely associated not only with philosophy and religion, but also with political concerns, moreover, highlights both the diversity of the contexts in which he expresses such emotions, and at least one of the reasons why Wordsworthian sublimity is more firmly anchored in the imaginations of many readers. Coleridge’s sublime, that is, is not only the Wordsworthian feeling of a divine spirit animating the physical world and the human mind, but also a sense of the vital importance of questioning every form of received opinion, and shaping the practical world of society and politics around the renewed feeling of our own tran- scendent immateriality which that intellectual struggle engenders. Above all, it is the feeling of mental activity—of striving to compre- hend and express intuitions which always resist full encapsulation in language—that Coleridge registers, and seeks to reproduce, in his analyses of science, psychology, morality, metaphysics, and politics, as well as in his poetry and aesthetic writings.

  In order to understand the unity of Coleridge’s writings, or the enduring concerns expressed in the progression from the Conversation Poems to Aids to Reflection and On the Constitution of the Church and

  

State, indeed, we must first recognize the supreme importance he

  consistently attaches to the activity of pursuing, and seeking to express, the meaning of our experience. Both in the speculations of his early verse and in his later analytical prose, Coleridge continually evokes—and at the same time seeks to stimulate—a religious fervour whose function was explicitly to free himself and his readers from the limitations of a world unenlivened by mental effort and activity. The emotions he describes as resulting from that activity, however,

  Introduction

  3

  to comprehend the size of a mountain which resists encapsulation in a single intuition, or with the feeling of our inward security and transcendence which is produced by a confrontation with irresistible

  4

  forces in the natural world. Coleridge himself, indeed, both illustrates and explains the similarity between these emotions in describing how the ‘intellectual movement connected with looking forward’ involves a feeling of ‘hope’ resembling that produced by a view of mountain

  5

  summits stretching into the distance. Just as, in Kant’s theory, mountains produce the sense of ‘a supersensible substrate (transcend- ing both nature and our faculty of thought) which is great beyond every standard of sense’, that is, so Coleridge’s attempt to understand the origin of consciousness produces the feeling of a truth which, in

  6 Wlecke’s words, ‘infinitely recedes from adequate comprehension’.

  Yet far from focusing repeatedly on the same inaccessible or inex- pressible truths, Coleridge emphasizes the necessity of a continual development and progression of consciousness in order to free himself from the limitations of the external world. Only through such productive activity, he suggests, can we experience the ‘life-ebullient stream’ of creative energy which underlies and shapes all aspects of

  7 our consciousness.

  Rather than being primarily an expression of political or social conservatism (as some critics suggest), therefore, Coleridge’s idealism serves the emotional imperative of freeing himself from the sense of imprisonment and even despair which he found was produced by an exclusive focus on material things, or by an absence of mental activity and engagement. In case this seem either a selfish or a solipsistic con- cern, however, one should also point out that this aim is consistently associated by Coleridge with a sense of hope, and that this hope is often focused on the liberation of human beings in general from practical tyranny, as well as from the limitations of conventional

  8

  opinion. The irresistible force of Coleridge’s own inquisitive intel- lect undoubtedly made him more sympathetic to those who were similarly uncomfortable with the intellectual stasis or subjection

  9

  which he associated with empiricist or scientific world-views; yet in exhorting his readers to envisage higher ideals than material ones he is, I would argue, less concerned with preserving the economic and political advantages of his class than with a form of emotional survival which cannot be separated from the experience of the

  10

4 Introduction

  For Coleridge as much as for any Romantic, indeed, the feeling of the sublime is the feeling of life itself, intuited through the medium of our own mental activity and striving. In his early writings, moreover, this feeling is often closely associated with the expectation of an improvement in society, and especially with the increasing freedom and knowledge celebrated by many eighteenth-century thinkers, and which Coleridge himself connects with the ideal of democratic liber-

  11

  ation from aristocracy and tyranny. As his own experience of finan- cial and personal misfortune, as well as of the war with France, continued, however, his aspirations increasingly turned towards the spiritual and religious transcendence which is treated so sceptically by McGann, yet which—in combination with his continuing political, scientific, and literary interests—makes him both the most challenging and the most diverse of British Romantic authors. While recognizing the conservative, and even anti-democratic, implica- tions of his later political thought, therefore, we should also recog- nize the unique force and vividness with which he expresses the Romantic quest for higher ideals than those of practical power and material prosperity. In a world ever-more focused on precisely the latter concerns, moreover, Coleridge’s emphasis on the uniquely human values of spiritual calm and identification with the indefinable essence of one’s fellow human beings and of the natural world has considerably more relevance than a historicist emphasis on its class-

  

12

  context might lead one to expect. Though Shelley’s version of the sublime rejects Coleridgean metaphysics, indeed, his humanistic emphasis on the importance of recognizing the power of imagination in the discoveries of science, and preserving its influence in their application, clearly owes much to Coleridge’s theory of imagination, and similarly celebrates the indefinable, creative power underlying all aspects of perception, thought, and creativity, in opposition to

  13

  the negative effects of industrial development. Hence we should not be discouraged by Coleridge’s intellectualism, nor the poetic obscurity often surrounding his references to ‘sublime ideas’, from recognizing the vigour and unique diversity with which he expresses the values that chiefly define Romanticism, separating it equally from the empiricist outlook most prominent in eighteenth-century authors, and from the scientific materialism which, in Victorian writing, increasingly conflicts with and suppresses the Romantic

  Introduction

  5

  This volume, therefore, aims to demonstrate the centrality of the aesthetic of the sublime not only in many of Coleridge’s poems but also in his prose writings on landscape, literature, the visual arts, psychology, metaphysics, religion, and politics. Chapter 1 focuses on those passages of his early writings—primarily in verse, though occasionally in prose—which most vividly illustrate his early enthusiasm for liberty, equality, and the philosophical and religious ‘enlightenment’ of humanity. These passages—dating from between 1794 and 1798—combine a celebration of social and political ‘progress’ with expressions of faith in a benevolent deity who renders the universe generally progressive, and whose aim of increasing human happiness will itself be advanced by an optimistic faith in His benevolence and wisdom. Coleridge’s theories in these writings are at once materialist in their Hartleian vision of the physical or mechanical processes underlying the progressiveness of humanity, and Neoplatonic in their celebration of ascending stages of enlight- enment and spirituality. This paradoxical nexus of theories and traditions, moreover, is itself combined with an almost tangible excitement at the prospect of Britain’s beginning to follow the ideals of French ‘liberty’, and sweeping away the antiquated institutions and beliefs of earlier ages. Though philosophically paradoxical, however, this hybrid vision not only echoes Hartley’s philosophy (whose combination of materialist, Neoplatonic, and Christian

  14

  elements is well-documented), but also—and more substantially— Priestley’s combination of Hartley’s theories with an enthusiasm for philosophical enlightenment and an emphasis on the self-fulfilling quality of a faith in the intrinsic progressiveness of nature and

  15

  humanity. Coleridge in these writings, therefore, is perhaps as paradoxically eclectic as in any of his later works, yet also presents his youthfully-optimistic vision with a degree of vividness and passion as great as in any of his later writings, and which is perhaps rendered still more intense by its association with so unambiguously radical a programme. These writings, indeed, often problematize the view of Coleridge as primarily a conservative writer, and highlight the extent to which his later visions of transcendence are anticipated in his early celebrations of a ‘progress’ which is not only spiritual and intellectual, but also democratic and egalitarian.

  Chapter 2 explores those of Coleridge’s landscape-descriptions—

6 Introduction

  reflect the values of the Romantic sublime as defined by Kant and (to a significant extent) by Burke. Their most prominent foci are the landscapes of the Lake District, of Scotland, and of the Mediterranean regions which Coleridge visited in 1804–6; and the contrast which these locations presented with his early surroundings is almost tangible in the excitement—and, sometimes, the almost Burkeian ‘terror’— with which he associates them. Perhaps the most distinctive feature of these passages, indeed, is the vividness with which they combine an emphasis on the grandeur, remoteness, wildness, and savagery of mountain regions with a degree of individuality in describing their forms and the emotions they produce which anchors them firmly in the experience of an observer unusually sensitive to the effects of outward forms as well as to the subleties of feeling and logical argument. In his descriptions of Glen Coe as of the Sierra Nevada or the mountains of Morocco looming in the distance on his journey to Malta, indeed, Coleridge is so intensely visual a writer that McGann’s emphasis on his suppression or exclusion of material reality—be it that of ‘history’, or of the material conditions of life more generally—

  16

  seems to demand some reassessment. The intense physicality of these and many other passages of Coleridge’s writing, moreover, highlights the extent to which his spiritual and religious concerns arise as a response to practical circumstances of diverse kinds, including the bodily sufferings which his notebooks also record in great detail,

  17

  and which were among the reasons for his journey to Malta. If his fascination with the sublimity of mountains represents a flight from such misfortunes, however, it also shares the unembarrassed and seemingly spontaneous emotional vividness of his early response to the work of Schiller, which he described as producing so genuine

  18

  a sense of fear that he ‘tremble[d] like an Aspen Leaf’. Coleridge’s response to the landscapes which his age defined as most sublime, that is, at once exemplifies the characteristic values of Romantic aesthetics, and communicates their menacing or awesome qualities with such physical and emotional detail as to make them a compelling aspect of the reader’s own experience. As with many of his evocations of sublime feeling, therefore, Coleridge’s landscape-descriptions com- bine elements unique to their historical (and literary-historical) context with a force and individuality which raises them well above the merely generic. Here as elsewhere, indeed, the distinctiveness of his

  Introduction

  7

  thoughts, and emotions it invokes reflect contemporary theories— and most prominently those of Kant—as to the structure and meaning of the sublime experience, while at the same time being firmly anchored in the concrete and the sensory.

  Chapter 3 explores Coleridge’s writings on the sublime effects of diverse forms of literature in verse and prose—including his own poetry as well as the works of Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Schiller, and others—additionally comparing these with his less extensive discussions of sublimity in the visual arts. As the passages collected in this chapter demonstrate, the ‘faculty that forms the many into one’, or ‘the power of reducing multitude into unity of effect’ (as Coleridge variously describes imagination) is as central a concept in his analyses of the sublime effects of Shakespeare or Milton as in his discussions of the ways in which the act of percep- tion itself transforms the ‘raw data’ of sensuous impressions into

  19

  organically unified wholes. What the sublime effects he discovers in these authors ultimately depend on, indeed, is precisely their capacity to achieve a ‘balance or reconciliation’ of ideas with images and of passion with logical or poetic form, and thus to direct the reader’s attention away from the ‘fixities and definites’ of empirical perception, promoting instead that ‘strong working of the mind’ which Coleridge sees as underlying any intuition of ultimate

  20

  truths. As Coleridge himself puts it in a comparison of the beauti- ful and sublime, ‘No object of Sense is sublime in itself; but only as far as I make it a symbol of some Idea.’ ‘Nothing that has a shape,’ he continues, ‘can be called sublime except by metaphor. . . . So true it is, that those objects, whose shape most recedes from shapeliness are commonly the exciting occasions’ (SWF, 1: 597). Hence his repeated emphasis—particularly in discussions of Milton, and other seventeenth-century authors, though also of his own sometimes complex prose-style—on the achievement of an organically-evolving combination of ideas within each sentence or paragraph, which at once evokes the author’s depth of thought or understanding, and

  21

  involves the reader in striving to grasp its elusive meaning. Not only the sublime ideas expressed by the author, indeed, but also the author himself quite frequently becomes the focus of Coleridge’s discussions of sublimity in literature—most prominently in the case of Shakespeare, whom he even described as ‘deriving his

8 Introduction

  22

  influence’. In the case of Wordsworth, however, Coleridge particularly praises those passages of his poems which most vividly evoke the expansion of consciousness that Wordsworth (like Coleridge himself) associates with an intuition of fundamental truths. Despite his doubts over the appropriateness of describing a six-year-old child as a ‘philosopher’, indeed, the ‘Intimations’ ode is prominent among the poems which Coleridge uses to illustrate the imaginative power expressed in Wordsworth’s finest work, while the ‘high’ or ‘elevated’ style of ‘Tintern Abbey’ and other poems is described as revealing ‘the gift of IMAGINATION in the highest and strictest sense of the word’, and as making him the ‘nearest of all modern writers to

23 Shakespear [sic] and Milton’. In contrast, Coleridge’s early

  response to the work of Schiller reveals considerable enthusiasm for the more sophisticated German examples of Gothic ‘terror’—a response which differs sharply from his more negative views of Gothic fiction in English, such as Lewis’s The Monk or Radcliffe’s The

24 Italian. In an early letter to Southey, indeed, Coleridge even sug-

  gests that Schiller’s Die Räuber is more sublime than any of the

  25

  works of Milton, though his taste for the sublimity of ‘terror’ seems increasingly to have been replaced by more philosophical and religious forms of transcendence as his career continued.

  An emphasis on organic unity again informs Coleridge’s less numerous discussions of the visual arts—for example in his descrip- tion of Raphael’s Galatea as achieving ‘the balance, the perfect reconciliation . . . [of] the two conflicting principles of the FREE LIFE, and . . . the confining FORM’, in which the latter is ‘fused and . . . almost volatilized by the interpenetration and electrical flashes of the former’ (SWF, 1: 374). As this passage shows, Coleridge’s principle of ‘coadunation’ or ‘reducing multitude into unity’ not only connects his literary criticism with his discussions of the visual arts, but also highlights the close connections between his critical and metaphys- ical opinions: the ‘life’ that informs Raphael’s painting, that is, ‘inter- penetrates’ its ‘confining forms’ in a way closely resembling the effects of that ‘life’ which, according to Coleridge’s Theory of Life, ‘discloses itself from within as a principle of unity in the many’ (SWF, 1: 510). Yet we should also note his remark on the relatively ‘narrow limit of painting, as compared with the boundless power of poetry’. ‘Painting’, he continued, ‘cannot go beyond a certain point’,

  Introduction

  9

  ‘the substitution of a grand feeling of the unimaginable for a mere

  26 image’.

  Chapter 4 explores the role of the sublime in Coleridge’s psycho- logical theories, and especially his increasing opposition to the materi- alist views of mental functioning proposed by eighteenth-century philosophers such as Locke and Hartley. As I have shown elsewhere, even Coleridge’s earliest references to Hartley place far more emphasis on the increasingly spiritual forms of consciousness he describes as resulting from the unconscious association of ideas, than on the

  27

  materialist theories which he uses to account for this process. As his thought and reading developed, however, Coleridge increasingly became the most vigorous British opponent of those systems which sought to explain our ideas as the products of unconscious reactions to external forces, rather than as elements in a conscious reflective process involving an attempt to give logical expression to intuitive convictions. In addition to stressing individual freedom—not only in the process of thinking, but also in the moral choices which empiricism tended to problematize—Coleridge suggests that every act of thought involves an attempt to articulate intuitions which always resist full or adequate expression. Hence not only the individual will, but also the convictions which we strive to express in the process of thinking or writing, acquire a sublime quality which Coleridge contrasts with Hartley’s emphasis on the purely physical origin of ideas, stressing what he sees as empiricists’ failure to question the spontaneous appearances of perception, or indeed to explain how consciousness could arise out of matter. These two central foci of his psychology— individual freedom, and the intuition of a truth exceeding the limi- tations of the concrete or perceptible—are combined with particular vividness in his evocations of the ‘stream’, or flowing, of life itself— the indefinable creative process underlying and continually manifested

  28

  in our perceptions and interpretations of the world. As Hazlitt pointed out, indeed, despite his emphasis on the individual will, Coleridge cannot easily be convicted of the ‘egotism’ often associ- ated with Romanticism in general, and with his own writings in

  29

  particular. Every individual, he argues, chooses whether to accept a ‘lower’ and more imitative existence resembling the automatism described by Hartley, or whether to engage in critical reflection which raises us to a higher level of being, and ultimately allows us a direct

  30

10 Introduction

  therefore, we also choose whether to remain isolated from each other as a fragmented mass of conflicting selves, or whether to achieve a fuller recognition of our ultimate identity as parts of an infinite

  31

  unity originating in God. Hence Coleridge’s psychological theories, as much as his writings on the aesthetics of landscape or of literature, depend on the idea of an infinite shaping power which is beyond comprehension or definition, yet is most fully and productively manifested in our efforts to comprehend it. It is, indeed, precisely this Neoplatonic vision of a universal shaping force that underlies his hierarchical theory of imagination in Biographia Literaria, as well as his broader emphasis on the importance of fulfilling our potential for far greater degrees of spiritual insight and creative achievement

  32

  than those envisaged by empiricists. This chapter, therefore, treats the psychological and metaphysical theories of Coleridge’s middle period in combination, illustrating the ways in which his concepts of the mind as well as of the deity manifest this key preoccupation with seeking to express the shaping force which underlies all human thought, as well as the physical world of nature.

  The passages which most vividly express this fascination with the indefinableness of ‘life’ or ‘spirit’ are arranged in a number of sections according to the context in which they occur. The first of these sections illustrates Coleridge’s preoccupation with the gradual ‘ascent’, or evolution, of both nature and humanity towards higher levels of insight and virtue; the second illustrates his persistent interest in the distinction or opposition between surface appearances and the spiritual forces underlying them; the third illustrates the recurrent emphasis— especially in the writings of his middle and later periods—on the importance of transcending the mundane ‘understanding’ through contemplating ideas of Reason (though the discussions of this topic whose significance is primarily theological are included in the last chapter); the fourth section groups those passages which evoke his fascination with the view of society as intrinsically hierarchical, and as naturally governed by those of greatest insight or genius; the fifth highlights his emphasis on the sublimity of love and its ideal transcendence both of self and of a physicality detached from spirit- ual values; and the last section groups a number of passages explor- ing the psychology of the experience of the sublime, in terms of its emotional value as well as the psychological mechanisms through

  Introduction

  11