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

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.2 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.

To

This mutual interpenetration of natural and supernatural was to be achieved in a twofold manner. Coleridge was assigned the task of attaching a human interest to incidents and agents 'in part at least super2 Ib. i. 63.

1 Biog. Lit. i. 60.

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 experience 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 2 Ib. ii. 5, 6.

1 Biog. Lit. i. 64.

3 See Fenwick note to Lucy Gray (Lyrical Ballads, 1800).

was doubtless that which provided the main theme of Wordsworth's Preface to the Lyrical Ballads-his theory of poetic diction. Of this preface Coleridge wrote in 1802, 'It is half a child of my own brain, and arose out of conversations so frequent, that, with few exceptions, we could scarcely either of us, perhaps, positively say which started any particular thought.' Now in the preface, whatever may be implied, there is no definite allusion to the distinction of fancy and imagination. This fact, taken in conjunction with the evidence of the Biographia Literaria, justifies the conclusion already drawn, that, while the distinction was acknowledged by both poets at the time of their first intimacy, it was Coleridge who was chiefly concerned with its elaboration,

It is not without purpose that so much stress has been laid upon the actual date of these speculations. Coleridge was now on the eve of his departure to Germany. As yet he was practically a stranger to German literature and thought. Certain of Schiller's dramas, the Oberon of Wieland, Voss' Luise, and a few other works, comprised the extent of his acquaintanceship. Kant was still 'the utterly unintelligible Emanuel Kant'3: Lessing he only knew as a theologian. His conception, therefore, of the imaginative faculty, as it existed previous to his visit to Germany, must have been arrived at entirely independently of German influence.

3

The surest way, perhaps, of grasping the significance of these investigations is to regard them as typical of Coleridge's whole mental and spiritual attitude at this time. From his poetry we have gathered how abhorrent to his

1 Letters, i. 386.

2 The distinction is incidentally mentioned in a note to The Thorn (Lyrical Ballads, 1798), but the definition there given rather tends to show that the question had not been fully thought out by Wordsworth.

3 Letters, i. 203 n.

deeper self were the doctrines to which he felt himself intellectually committed. Hartley's theory of knowledge (according to which the mind is the mere theatre, or at best the passive spectator, of mechanical processes whose results it somehow comes to regard as its own free acts), if not definitely abandoned by Coleridge before his departure for Germany, was yet doomed in his better judgement. To a mind aching to behold 'something one and indivisible' this philosophy, which regards the soul and the universe as a mere conglomeration of particulars, and 'never sees a whole', could not fail, sooner or later, to stand revealed in all its bareness.

It is not improbable that Coleridge, who in his ceaseless researches into the mind's workings was guided by this doctrine of association, should have arrived by this clue at a definite conception of that mode of associating objects (subjectively necessary, but objectively arbitrary and contingent) to which he was to assign the name of fancy. And as long as the theory of association was accepted by him as applicable to the whole range of mental experience, so long would fancy appear an adequate designation for the highest forms of poetic activity. But when Wordsworth's poem was read to him, and he awoke to a sense of its peculiar excellence, Coleridge found himself in the presence of a power and activity which could by no means be adjusted to Hartley's scheme, a mode of apprehension 'not dreamt of in his philosophy'. For here the mind appeared as no mere passive recipient of external impressions, at the mercy of its own contingent and partial experience, but as endowed with an active and creative perception of the reality underlying experience, an insight independent of that experience and inherent in its own nature. Thus to Coleridge, however little explicitly or consciously, the distinction between the imagination and the fancy presented itself as the distinction of two types of