1

later period.' Even of Kant no regular study was as yet undertaken. The actual fruits of the visit to Germany were a command of the language and an acquaintance with the nation's genius in its language and literature.

III. KESWICK.

Coleridge left Germany in July, 1799. Almost exactly a year later he entered his new home at Keswick and resumed his intimacy with Wordsworth. During the intervening year two tasks had absorbed his energiesthe political contributions to the Morning Post and the translation of Wallenstein. This latter work he describes as a 'soul-wearying labour', and to it in after years he ascribed his inability to finish Christabel. Whatever the cause may have been, the vein of poetry which flowed so abundantly at Stowey had now almost run dry. For a long time the efforts to resume Christabel proved fruitless, and when at length the impulse came, it was inadequate to the completion of the poem. To this inertness of the poetic faculty was joined a strange indifference to the beauties of nature. In a letter to Josiah Wedgwood (written during a visit to London in 1801) he complains of 'a total inability to associate any but the most languid feelings with the Godlike objects' which had lately surrounded him and the mood which he here chronicles was of frequent occurrence. The same causes (the chief among them being, doubtless, ill-health and growing domestic discord) which clouded his imagination, drove him to concentrate his whole energies on philosophy. His first task was to reconsider thoroughly his own speculative standpoint: and the result, a definite abandonment of empiricism, whether sceptical or dogmatic. In a series of letters to the same friend (written early in the year 1801) he criticizes severely the philosophy of Locke; and in March Biog. Lit. i. 141.

:

1

of the same year he writes to Poole, 'I have not only entirely extricated the notions of time and space, but have overthrown the doctrine of association, as taught by Hartley, and with it all the irreligious metaphysics of modern infidels-especially the doctrine of necessity.' 1 Coleridge's final abandonment of Hartley's system has been attributed to the influence of Kant; but this letter, written as it was when Coleridge was only beginning his serious study of Kant, forbids such a conclusion. It is probable indeed that the conviction which it records had been long maturing in his mind. Even before he left England there had dawned upon him, as we have seen, a certain 'guiding light', in his growing sense of the limitations of the unaided intellect. To this ever deepening insight, the systems of the intellect had themselves contributed, through their evident contradiction of his own experience. For in that experience he had been made conscious that the most genuine apprehension of reality is of the nature of a direct intuitional act, to which thought and emotion are alike indispensable, in which they are indeed inseparably blended. And this consciousness had grown clearer as the years advanced. 'My opinion is,' he writes in March of this year, 'that deep thinking is attainable only by a man of deep feeling; and that all truth is a species of Revelation.' Hence his distrust, now definitely formulated, of any system which ignores the essential

1 Letters, i. 348.

2 See Note to Letters, i. 351. Leslie Stephen grounds his conclusion on the (unprinted) letters to Josiah Wedgwood, in which Coleridge still sticks to Hartley and the Association doctrine'. Apparently, then, Coleridge's final emancipation was the result of that spell of 'most intense study' during the early days of March (Letters, i. 348).

3 As early as 1796, he had publicly expressed his sense of the inadequacy of the 'mechanical philosophy'. See foot-note to lines contributed to Southey's Joan of Arc (quoted in Cottle's Early Recollections of S. T. Coleridge, ii. 242).

activity of the mind in experience. 'Newton' (to quote from the same letter) 'was a mere materialist. Mind in his system is always passive-a lazy looker-on at an external world. If the mind be not passive, if it be indeed made in God's image, and that too in the sublimest sense the image of the Creator, there is ground for suspicion that any system built on the passiveness of the mind must be false as a system.' Thus Coleridge, largely if not entirely by the force of independent thinking, has reached a mental attitude in sympathy with the critical philosophy and its developments.

1

Coleridge's speculations in these years produced no direct fruit in published writings, but their scope and character is indicated in his correspondence. The most arduous seem to have been concerned with the nature of poetry. His project, mentioned to Davy in 1801, of writing 'an essay concerning Poetry, and the pleasures to be derived from it, which would supersede all the books of morals, and all the books of metaphysics too', reveals the importance attached by him to the fact of poetic inspiration as a datum of philosophy. The subject

matter of the essay is defined as 'the affinities of the feelings with words and ideas'. And again, 'my most serious occupation is a metaphysical investigation of the laws by which our feelings form affinities with each other and with words.'

Of these investigations the results may be found scattered here and there throughout his writing; they were never sufficiently unified to be embodied in a single system. Not the least engrossing of them (to judge by the direction of his thoughts at this time, and the fact of his constant intercourse with Wordsworth) must have been the distinction of fancy and imagination. This, which had originally 2 Ib. i. 347.

1 Letters, i. 353.

suggested itself as a distinction of poetic qualities, must by this time have come to have a deeper meaning for Coleridge. His growing conviction that insight into truth is essentially dependent upon the will and the emotions which mould the will, and are themselves moulded by it, would here find a ready application. For whereas the activity of fancy is practically independent of the artist's emotional state, it is only under the stress of emotion that the imagination can exercise its interpretative power.

Of Coleridge's speculations at this time, however, any account must of necessity be incomplete, dependent as it is on the detached utterances of poems and letters. From a public expression of his views he was withheld no less by diffidence than by lack of initiative. 'I solemnly assure you,' he writes of these meditations to Poole', 'that you and Wordsworth are the only men on earth to whom I would have uttered a word on this subject.' To this method of self-communication one advantage at least attaches that not the opinions only, but the experiences from which they sprang, are revealed as otherwise they could not be. And of Coleridge we learn that his deepest philosophy was drawn not from the speculations of other men, but from the teaching of life, the inevitable conclusions forced on him by his own experience, bodily, mental, and spiritual, in his intercourse with men and in the companionship of Nature. It was from his own deep craving for love, as the one condition of real living, that he won his conviction of the vivifying power of emotion-a conviction soon extended beyond the sphere of personal relations. 'Life,' he writes to T. Wedgwood, 'is limitless sensation': (and the context shows us that the word is used in no merely physiological sense) . . . 'Feelings die by flowing into the mould of the intellect, becoming ideas.'

1 Letters, i. 352.

Hence the inadequacy of the theory of mechanical associa tion. How flat, how wretched,' he writes to Southey in 1803, 'is Hartley's solution of the phenomena (of memory). Believe me, Southey, a metaphysical solution that does not tell you something in the heart is grievously to be suspected as apocryphal. I almost think that ideas never recall ideas, as far as they are ideas, any more than leaves in a forest create each other's motion-the breeze it is that runs through them-it is the soul, the state of feeling.''

By the word 'idea' in this passage Coleridge evidently understands not merely general notions, but any form of mental image or impression. And in this detachment of the ideas from all participation of feeling, and consequent solution of the principle of their coherence, he sees the work of the abstracting intellect, which seeks to construct from this congeries of detached particulars an organic experience, but in fact creates merely a world of lifeless forms, unconnected and devoid of motive power. Such a world is, indeed, a 'work of fancy'; but it is fancy exercised unconsciously and unwillingly. And as to these fantastic deliverances of the mere 'dry intellect' Coleridge opposed that fuller insight of heart and mind which alone could be fruitful of a true philosophy, so in the region of artistic creation he contrasted the cold and arbitrary combinations of fancy with the 'living educts' of the imagination. Of this contrast a striking illustration is given in a letter to Sotheby (September, 1802), where Coleridge compares the Greeks with the Hebrews in their idealization of nature. To the Greeks,' he writes, 'all natural objects were dead, mere hollow statues: but there was a goddess or goddessling included in each. In the Hebrew poetry you find none of this poor stuff, as poor in genuine imagination as it is mean in intellect. At best