1

use of the term 'faculty'. It is, perhaps, natural to conclude that because this term was so much on his lips he consciously committed himself to all the implications of the so-called 'faculty-psychology'; and no doubt his loose mode of speaking of the reason, the understanding, or the imagination, as alone active in this or that kind of knowledge or apprehension, lends countenance to such a conclusion. It is necessary, therefore, to realize, first, that Coleridge did not believe in any such detached activity of the various faculties, as a physiological or psychological fact. Secondly, that although he could conceive of the mind as limiting itself, by its own free act, to a partial aspect of reality and to a partial self-activity, he saw that such an act, where it was not consciously recognized as an act of limitation, might be a fruitful source of error. 'As every faculty,' he wrote in 1818, 'with even the minutest organ of our nature, owes its whole reality and comprehensibility to an existence incomprehensible and groundless, because the ground of all comprehension; not without the union of all that is essential in all the functions of our spirit, not without an emotion tranquil from its very intensity, shall we worthily contemplate in the magnitude and integrity of the world that life-ebullient stream which breaks through every momentary embankment, again, indeed, and evermore to embank itself, but within no banks to stagnate and be imprisoned.' And the distinction of reason and understanding, of imagination and fancy, is not the distinction of more or less perfect instruments of knowledge, existing in mysterious detachment from one another, but of a more or less complete activity of the self by which these faculties are informed. This activity is reason in the highest sense of the word, 'the integral spirit of the regenerated man.' Without its presence reason

1 Cp. Table Talk, July 29, 1830.

2 The Friend. Coleridge's Work, ed. Shedd., II.

itself becomes understanding, and imagination degenerates into fancy, 'whose objects are essentially fixed and dead'.1

In thus insisting on the solidarity of the higher functions of intelligence, Coleridge is protesting at once against a philosophy which makes intellect the measure of all things, and a religion which divorces itself from reason and imagination. The vague emotionalism of the evangelist, with its distrust of philosophy and art, seemed no less than the dogmatism of the rationalist or materialist, a denial of fundamental facts of spiritual experience. In his reaction against these partial attitudes to truth there might seem a danger that Coleridge should have been forced into an attitude equally partial: that he should have constructed a religion of the beautiful, and made the imagination its supreme interpreter. But the same insight which detected the inadequacy of the views that he attacked protected Coleridge from a like one-sidedness in his own. The means to human salvation must, he saw, be a common possession of humanity. Its attainment must demand the exercise, not of this or that isolated faculty, but of the real and undivided self, whose presence or absence in the operations of the various faculties renders them either fruitful or barren of truth.

The recognition of this vital fact it is which constitutes the philosophical significance of Coleridge's theory of imagination, and especially of his distinction of imagination from fancy. But his theory is equally significant in the narrower domain of art and artistic criticism, though the want of system and completeness in its presentation may make the student apt to underrate its significance.

For by his lifelong vindication of the truth, that the activity of imagination is determined subjectively by the laws of our common reason, and objectively by the truth of

1 See The Statesman's Manual, Appendix C (Bohn's Library, P. 343).

things, and thus differs essentially from the accidental and seemingly capricious' combinations of fancy, Coleridge rendered an invaluable service to the cause of criticism, both in his own day and for all time. The anarchy of taste which followed the shattering of the old idols was even a more dangerous enemy to art than they had been. The critics of Coleridge's day, having emancipated themselves from the 'classical' tradition, were forced by a natural reaction into the opposite extreme of lawlessness. While, on the other hand, they tended to regard every work of art as something entirely peculiar and generis sui, unrelated and selfcomplete on the other they looked upon their personal likes and dislikes as carrying their own authority, and therefore as adequate criteria of appreciation. For the irresponsible dogmatism of such a standpoint Coleridge substituted a truly critical criticism—that is, a criticism based on principles whose ground is our common nature, whose organ is 'universal reason, the true common sense of mankind'.

It is instructive in this connexion to compare Cole. ridge's aesthetic position with that of German romanticism, which finds its most characteristic exposition in the writings of Friedrich von Schlegel. From Schlegel's Discourse of Poetry (1800) we learn that 'as every man has his own nature and his own love, so does he carry his own poetry in himself'; and further, 'the opinion of every man (as regards poetry) is true and good, in so far as it is itself poetry.' Finally, we read further on that 'it is the beginning of all poetry to abolish the laws and methods of the rationally proceeding reason, and to plunge us once more into the ravishing confusions of fantasy, the original chaos of human nature'.2

1 Not that the operations of fancy are actually lawless: they are individually necessary, but universally they are contingent. 2 See Tomaschek, Schiller u. die Wissenschaft. Compare with this Coleridge's aphorism of 1804 (Anima Poetae, p. 96):

Here we have, indeed, the culminating expression of the anarchy of revolt, and nothing could illustrate better the wide difference between the principles of English and German romanticism than a comparison of Coleridge's attitude with that of Schlegel. If, indeed, we would seek a true parallel to Coleridge among German contemporaries, we must seek it neither in the Schlegels, nor Fichte, nor yet in Schelling, but rather in the poet Schiller.1 The conviction around which Schiller's aesthetic theories centred, and which brought him into antagonism with the doctrinaire of the romantic school, is the same which (as we saw) lay nearest also to Coleridge's heart: the conviction that 'not kind of imagination can be called truly artistic, save such as proceeds according to objective and universally valid laws'. And Coleridge's teacher had been Schiller's also. On Kantean foundations they had builded, each after his own fashion; and if, in completeness and consistency, Coleridge's achievement cannot compare with that of Schiller's, yet, viewed in relation to the public which he addressed, it is, perhaps, of even greater significance. Not, indeed, that its significance is historical merely. Coleridge's message is not one which any age is likely to find irrelevant or superfluous: and the critic or artist who runs counter to its spirit will do so at his own peril.

Idly talk they who speak of poets as indulgers of fancy, imagination, superstition, &c. They are the bridlers by delight, the purifiers; they that combine all these with reason and order -the true protoplasts-Gods of Love who tame the chaos.'

Coleridge had no doubt made some acquaintance with Schiller's principal aesthetical works; but I cannot discover evidence of a real familiarity with the leading ideas of Schiller's aesthetic.

XC

SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE ON THE GENESIS BIOGRAPHIA

AND PURPOSE OF THE

LITERARIA

THE genesis of the Biographia Literaria is a matter of some obscurity, but the following facts may help to illuminate it. In March, 1815, Coleridge wrote to Cottle1 that he had 'collected his scattered and manuscript poems, sufficient to make one volume'. He spoke nothing, however, of a preface. But in May of the same year, in a letter to Wordsworth, he remarks incidentally, 'I have only to finish a preface, which I shall have done in two, or at farthest three days.' What the contents of this preface may have been (whether critical, or autobiographical, or both) cannot be determined; but in it lay the germ of the Biographia.

This is the first stage. Two months later, we find Coleridge writing to Dr. Brabant that he has been kept to his study by the necessity of enlarging what originally was intended 'as a preface to an "Autobiographia Literaria, Sketches of my Literary Life and Opinions", so far as poetry and poetical criticisms are concerned.' From this it appears that the original preface was either conceived as a literary autobiography, or very soon took that form : and that this biography itself came to demand a preface. In extending this preface Coleridge's object was to include a full account (raisonné) of the controversy concerning Wordsworth's poems and theory', and some part at least of 'a disquisition on the powers of association . . . and on the generic difference between the Fancy and the Imagination'. But the preface, thus augmented, proved too long to serve as a preface, and had to be incorporated 2 See Westm. Review, Apr. 1870.

2

1 Cottle, Rem., p. 387.