Reasoning in the business of real life,' a title expanded later into 'Consolations and Comforts from the exercise and right application of the Reason, the Imagination, and the Moral Feeling, especially addressed to those in sickness, adversity, or distress of mind, from speculative gloom, &c.' Whether this work (whose title anticipates the prospectus of The Friend) would have thrown light on his conception of the imagination, must be left to conjecture: for he left England with his schemes unrealized. But the title suggests that his chief interest lay not in the direction of pure aesthetic, and is characteristic of a mind which could not devote itself exclusively to any special department of knowledge, and remain indifferent to its wider, above all to its human, significance. In the same year, 1803, a letter to Godwin alludes to a yet more ambitious work, which subject is nothing less than 'the omne scibile, what we are and how we become what we are-so as to solve the two grand problems how, being acted upon, we shall act'. But the execution of these tasks, problematic, perhaps, in itself, received a definite check in the visit to Malta, which Coleridge undertook in the spring of 1804.

IV. MALTA.

Coleridge remained abroad for something more than two years. It was a dark period in his life. The bodily maladies, to escape which had been a primary motive of his visit to Malta, pursued him even there, and were aggravated by the growing sense of domestic trouble and personal isolation. In Malta he threw himself into public affairs, becoming first the private secretary to Sir Robert Ball and afterwards public secretary in the island. The duties imposed by these offices were heavy, and left him little leisure for more congenial tasks. But his note-books show us that in his spare moments he was busy with the abstrusest psychological problems. His chief studies were

probably still in Kant. With Fichte's writings he had made some acquaintance before he left Malta;' but of Schelling he probably made no serious study until a later date. Among the intellectual gains of these years is to be reckoned a deeper insight into the nature of the fine arts, of which, as he declared, he learned more during the three months at Rome than he would have acquired in England in twenty years. Religious questions, too, must have occupied him deeply. Shortly after his return to England we find that he has fully accepted the Trinitarian. position. To give to this creed a philosophical expression, or at least to demonstrate its harmony with a true philosophy, became afterwards his most absorbing task.

V. LECTURES AND THE FRIEND'.

On his return to England, Coleridge seems at first to have settled down as assistant to Stuart. But he found journalism less to his taste than ever; and being in pressing need of money, he turned his thoughts to lecturing. Already in 1806 he contemplated delivering a course of lectures at the Royal Institution, on the subject of 'Taste', but they were not actually given till the winter of 1807-8, and the title finally chosen was not 'Taste', but the 'Principles of Poetry'. Of these lectures only the scantiest record has been preserved in the notes taken by Crabb Robinson.3 This is the more to be regretted, seeing that, according to Coleridge, the opinions they embodied were substantially the same as those of the lectures of 1812, delivered after Coleridge had become acquainted with Schlegel's lectures.* In a letter to

Already in 1804 he speaks of the affinities between Fichte and himself. Anima Poetae, p. 106.

2 Cottle, Remin. 314-25;

3 Diary, &c. 1872, vol. i. p. 140.

Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, delivered 1808, pub. 1809. See note to Biog. Lit. i. 21 f. n.

Mrs. Clarkson, Crabb Robinson speaks of Coleridge as having 'adopted in all respects the German doctrines'. What these doctrines may have been is not stated; but no doubt Coleridge drew largely on Kant's analysis of beauty. Thus Robinson speaks of him as 'working in Kant's admirable definition of the Naiv'.'

In the autumn of 1808 Coleridge took up his abode in Grasmere, where he was soon busy planning the publication of The Friend. Of this work Dorothy Wordsworth wrote, 'I have little doubt that it will be well executed if his health does not fail him; but on that score ... I have many fears.' These fears were unhappily only too well-founded. Of the subjects proposed for discussion in the Prospectus, that which has most value for our purpose, 'The principles common to the Fine Arts,' was never dealt with. Moreover the aim of the publication, as the title indicates, was didactic rather than speculative, and we should look in vain for a definite statement of aesthetic or philosophic doctrine. The influence of Kant is evident throughout; but the distinction of reason and understanding is extended by Coleridge in accordance with his own preconceptions. Reason is the supreme faculty, the organ of the highest and the most certain knowledge. The ultimate ground of this certainty lies, it is true, in our moral being, but its significance is not therefore merely ethical; for the ideas of reason have speculative, as well as practical, validity.*

1 See letter printed in Sara Coleridge's edition of the Notes and Lectures on Shakespeare, Appendix.

2 See Biog. Lit. ch. x., and notes.

Reason and conscience are practically identified in The Friend. Conscience 'commands us to attribute Reality and actual Existence, to those Ideas, and those only, without which the conscience itself would be baseless and contradictory'. And Reason is itself called 'the Mother of Conscience, of Language, of Tears and of Smiles'. The Friend, Nos. 5 and 9. Cp. The Excursion, iv. 236.

Coleridge condemned the rigid distinction of practical and speculative reason as 'arbitrary, and a hypostasizing of mere

It is much to be regretted that these conclusions were not applied in The Friend to a philosophy of art. Coleridge's theory of the imagination, however, is illuminated by a passage descriptive of genius.1 Of this power it is the peculiar characteristic to find no contradiction in the union of old and new': 'to carry on the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood'; 'to combine the child's sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances which every day for perhaps forty years have rendered familiar.' The virtue here assigned to genius is, in effect, that imaginative interpretation of things which suggests but never discloses the mysterious ground of their being. And the distinction of genius and talent, made in the same passage, is analogous to the former one of imagination and fancy. For in genius we see 'the marks of a mind that feels the riddle of the world, and may help to solve it'; but talent (like fancy) is powerless to bring us closer to the truth of things.

While The Friend abounds in the fruits of Kant's teaching, there is nothing in it which we are justified in ascribing to the influence of the German idealists. Yet Coleridge must by this period have become familiar with their writings. The following year (1810), which saw him back in London, marks the commencement of his intimacy with Crabb Robinson; and on the occasion of one of their earliest meetings,' Coleridge delivered his sentiments on Kant and post-Kantean philosophy. While of Kant himself he spoke in terms of the warmest approbation and gratitude, Fichte and Schelling were both convicted of logical entities' (marginal note in Tenneman's Geschichte der Philosophie, directed against the post-Kanteans). In estimating Coleridge's debt to Kant, his previous acquaintance with the Cambridge Platonists must be taken into account. See note to Biog. Lit. i. 109.

1 See Biog. Lit. i. 59, where this passage is quoted.

2 Nov. 15, 1810.

COLERIDGE I

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error where they had departed from Kant's teaching. At another meeting and many subsequent ones, there was much discussion of religious questions; and later Crabb Robinson records that he is altogether unable to reconcile his (C.'s) metaphysical and empirico-religious opinions'.1

This same year 1810 gave birth to a fragmentary 'Essay on Taste', in which the resemblance to Kant's treatment of the subject shows how far Coleridge was from an independent standpoint in aesthetic. That he left the essay in an unfinished state possibly bears witness to the same fact. During the ensuing years his occupation as a lecturer on literature, and his study of German idealism (particularly of Fichte, Schelling, and Jean Paul), must have stimulated his interest in questions of aesthetic, and led him to probe more deeply the real significance of imaginative experience. Meantime the old distinction of fancy and imagination is still exercising his thoughts. Fancy is described to C. Robinson, in 1810, as 'the arbitrary bringing together of things that lie remote, and forming them into a unity'; it 'acts by a sort of juxtaposition'. The imagination, 'on the other hand, under excitement, generates and produces a form of its own.' 2 To unify and to create are thus conceived as its most characteristic powers.

At the end of 1811 Coleridge, resuming his rôle of lecturer, delivered lectures on Shakespeare and Milton, 'in illustration of the Principles of Poetry,' &c. Unfortu nately, the fragmentary record of these lectures contributes little to a definite knowledge of Coleridge's theory. In the fourth lecture Coleridge speaks of the imagination as one of the three essential qualities of the poet, the other two being the power of association and sensibility. His

3

4

1 C. Robinson, Diary, &c., Dec. 11, 1811.

2 Ib., Nov. 15, 1810.

3 See the record of these lectures in T. Ashe's Lectures, &c. of S. T. Coleridge, p. 57 (Bohn's Library).

* Crabb Robinson reported on these lectures in the Times