limity or majesty! But in this faith all things counterfeit infinity!' 1 This sense or faculty, for which the finite object counterfeits or symbolizes the infinite, the material part embodies the immaterial whole, is a peculiar possession, a thing 'which others want'. It is in fact, though Coleridge has not yet consciously defined it thus, the imaginative faculty, which, if allied with creative power, makes the poetwhich is indeed in a sense creative, wherever it exists. But the imaginative interpretation of nature is not necessarily in all minds the same. It may lead to pantheism. With Coleridge this was impossible because, as we have seen, he placed the exclusive, transcendent consciousness of God above all other forms of consciousness. To him, therefore, the beautiful in nature was necessarily regarded as symbolic of a spiritual reality, but not coexistent with it, nor yet an essential medium to its fruition. It is at best a reflection by which we are aided to a deeper knowledge of the reality: for, as he writes, All that meets the bodily sense I deem To infant minds; and we in this low world L That we might learn with young unwounded ken Thus individual objects, which to the intellect appear merely as parts of an undiscoverable whole, are to the gaze of imaginative faith the symbol of that totality which is its object. Through the medium of phenomena spirit meets spirit; but in that contact the symbol is forgotten, 1 Letters, p. 228. It is interesting to compare Schelling's words in the Transcendental Idealism (quoted on p. lxviii.) that every single work of art represents Infinity'. 2 Destiny of Nations, 11. 17 ff. A similar figure is found in Goethe, Faust, Pt. II, First Monologue: 'So bleibe mir die Sonne stets im Rücken,' and ib., ' Am farb'gen Abglans haben wir das Leben.' the means is discarded in the attainment of the end; or if it still abides in consciousness with the reality which it figures forth, yet its presence is secondary and subordinate. Such a spiritual experience does the poet prophesy for one who, with heart rightly attuned, Might lie on fern or withered heath, In a half-sleep, he dreams of better worlds The symbol is still present, but now only co-present with the direct consciousness of the ideal. The symbolic interpretation of nature, and the symbolic use of natural images, was thus a fact and an object of ~ reflection to Coleridge, even before the period of his settlement at Stowey, but we have no evidence that he had before that date assigned a definite faculty to this sphere of mental activity, or named that faculty the imagination. Indeed, a letter to Thelwall, written immediately before the migra tion to Stowey, seems to preclude such an hypothesis. In this letter he speaks of the imagery of the Scriptures as 'the highest exercise of the fancy': yet it is this very imagery which at a later date, in comparing the fancy with imagination, he adduces as an example of the latter power. There can, however, be no doubt that the conception of beauty, as the revelation of spirit through matter, had been fostered in him many years before through the study 1 Fears in Solitude, 1798, ll. 17–27. The italics are of course mine. of Plato and the Neo-platonists: and his habit of psychological research, influenced by the psychological methods of those days, must have urged him to assign to a definite faculty this particular mode of apprehending objects. But for the choice of the term imagination he had no warranty in the practice of English philosophy: nor did its etymology suggest such an application. Further, it must be borne in mind that Coleridge's speculations in the years previous to the closer intercourse with Wordsworth (which dates from the summer of 1797) were as much concerned with religion and metaphysic as with aesthetic proper. Hence we cannot wonder if his analysis of the poetic faculties proved a long and difficult task. According to his own account in the Biographia Literaria, it was during the recital by Wordsworth of a certain poem' that Coleridge first awoke to the sense of a specific quality, which this poem exhibited in a marked degree. He was peculiarly struck by its exhibition of 'the original gift of spreading the tone, the atmosphere, and with it the depth and height of the ideal world, around forms, incidents, and situations of which, for the common view, custom had bedimmed all the lustre, had dried up the sparkle and the dewdrops'. This quality, to whose existence his attention was first drawn in a concrete example of it, Coleridge no sooner felt than he sought to understand. 'Repeated meditations,' he adds, 'led me first to suspect (and a more intimate analysis of the human faculties, their appropriate marks, functions, and effects, matured my conjecture into full conviction) that fancy and imagination were two distinct and widely different faculties, instead of being, according to the general belief, either two 1 See Biog. Lit. i. 58, and note. 2 2 Biog. Lit. i. p. 59. The definition belongs of course to a later date. names with one meaning, or, at furthest, the lowest and highest degree of the same power.'1 If Coleridge's memory is to be trusted, the birth of this new conviction must be assigned to the year 1796, some eighteen months previous to the time of his real intimacy with Wordsworth. If the intervening period was devoted to this 'more intimate analysis of the human faculties', we may perhaps conclude that when their closer intercourse actually began, the distinction of fancy and imagination had been, to some extent, definitely formulated by Coleridge. Certainly it was his own belief that he, and not Wordsworth or any other, was the originator of the distinction.' When once it was made, however, its fuller elaboration and application in the concrete would no doubt form a frequent subject of the daily discussions at Stowey and Alfoxden. But whereas (the Biographia Literaria is again our witness) Wordsworth's interest in the distinction regarded chiefly its manifestations in poetry, the object of Coleridge, both then and later, was 'to investigate the seminal principle'. Of these two aspects of the matter, it seems probable that the former only was actually discussed between them. For in their discussions they were guided by a practical rather than a speculative aim: by no less an aim, indeed, than the initiation of a genuine poetry. And the function of such a poetry as they conceived it was to add 'the interest of novelty' to common appearances, not by arbitrarily distorting them into the fashion of an unreal world, but by a treatment of them which, faithful in externals, should yet reveal their underlying significance. This mutual interpenetration of natural and supernatural was to be achieved in a twofold manner. Το Coleridge was assigned the task of attaching a human interest to incidents and agents 'in part at least super natural''by the dramatic truth of such emotions as would naturally accompany such situations supposing them real';1 to Wordsworth that of 'directing the mind's attention to the loveliness and wonders of the world before us'. But both tasks demanded the exercise of one and the same faculty. This faculty, whose 'modifying colours' they compared to 'the sudden charm, which accidents of light and shade, which moonlight or sunset diffused over a known and familiar landscape', is none other than the imagination." The question here naturally suggests itself, to what extent the poems, written in this first period of the poets' intimacy, represent the conscious application of theories definitely formulated. It is indeed obvious that without the actual impulse to creation, the fullest insight into the nature of poetic activity could have helped them but little. Still, the conscious art of the poet must play its part in the most inspired creation, and he will undoubtedly profit by any knowledge which enables him better to direct the forces which he cannot evoke. In the present instance, however, our knowledge of the theoretical standpoint of the two poets at this time is too meagre to enable us to determine how far any of these poems is the conscious embodiment of this or that property of the imagination. But however this may be, we can at least be sure that their practice must have reacted on their subsequent theories. To Coleridge at least the moods of creative exaltation which produced the great poems of this period came as an entirely novel and unique experience; and, if this experi ence was destined never to be repeated, yet the memory of it must have lived on his mind, and formed not the least engrossing subject of his later speculations. The most frequent topic, however, of the Stowey days 1 Biog. Lit. i. 64. 2 Ib. ii. 5, 6. 9 See Fenwick note to Lucy Gray (Lyrical Ballads, 1800). |