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': 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.

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

philosophy: even as for Wordsworth it might symbolize the distinction of two kinds of poetry, the poetry of nature and of artifice. But in the facts themselves, in the experiences which set them thinking, their diverse points of view found a common ground. And of these facts the most salient were nature's immutable appeal to man and man's ever-varying response to nature. 'My own conclusions on the subject,' says Coleridge, 'were made more lucid by Mr. Wordsworth by many happy instances drawn from the operation of natural objects on the mind."1 From the cast or state of mind, to which such objects make no appeal except as mere objects of experience,2 through the intermediate stage in which they move us by the suggestion of incidental resemblances, up to the highest mode of their operation, in which they take the impress of human emotion and thought-for the due appreciation of these diverse attitudes of the mind to nature Coleridge was indebted to Wordsworth and Wordsworth's sister, whose eye was ever 'watchful in minutest observance of nature'. The various problems thus forced upon his mind contributed to heighten the general state of spiritual unrest which possessed him on the eve of his departure for Germany. But for a while at least he was able to forget his speculations in the distraction of foreign travel.

II. GERMANY.

'Our object,' wrote Wordsworth of the projected visit to Germany, 'is to furnish ourselves with a tolerable stock of information in natural science.' But Coleridge anticipated something more valuable. 'A more thorough revolution (he tells us) in my philosophical principles, and a deeper

1 Biog. Lit. i. 64.

2

A primrose by a river's brim

A yellow primrose was to him,

And it was nothing more.-Peter Bell, Pt. I.

3 Biog. Lit. i. 137.

insight into my heart, were still wanting'; and it was doubtless the sense of these deficiencies which turned his thoughts to Germany. In August 1798 he writes to Poole, 'I look upon the realization of the German scheme as of great importance to my intellectual activity, and, of course, to my moral happiness.' Whether or not it is to be regretted that Coleridge should ever have become acquainted with German philosophy, is matter of opinion: but it seems at least necessary to insist upon two important facts in connexion with this supposed crisis in his mental life. The first is, that he was a metaphysician long before he studied the German philosophers; and the second, that it was in obedience to, and not in defiance of, his better instincts that he first devoted himself to that study. The first outcome, however, of his sojourn in Germany was a more or less entire abandonment of his speculations. 'Instead of troubling others with my own crude notions ... I was thenceforward better employed in attempting to store my own head with the wisdom of others.' His earliest efforts, 'after acquiring a tolerable sufficiency in the German language,' were directed towards a grounded knowledge of German philology and literature. For this purpose he studied carefully the elder writers of the language, and their successors up to the period of Lessing. To his actual contemporaries Coleridge seems to have devoted less attention. Goethe, now nearing the height of his fame, was practically neglected by him: even for Schiller his enthusiasm must have been on the wane, for his subsequent translation of Wallenstein, as he himself was careful to point out, by no means implied an admiration of this or any other product of the German drama. Lessing's genius, however, Coleridge at once recognized; and he was so far impressed by it that he conceived, and for some time prosecuted with all earnestness, the plan of a biography of the great critic. For this purpose he made an extensive

collection of material and imbibed the spirit of Lessing's critical doctrines. To these doctrines Coleridge's own obligation has-especially as regards Shakespeare—in all probability been overestimated, at least in Lessing's own country. It cannot indeed be doubted that both as a mental discipline and as a training in critical method, the study of Lessing was of the highest value to Coleridge. To some extent Lessing may be said to have carried on the work which Boyer had begun. But all that Coleridge had to learn from Lessing was quickly learnt; and the abandonment of the projected life was probably not more due to vacillation of purpose than to his loss of interest in the subject itself.

Although during his residence in Germany Coleridge was chiefly occupied in the accumulation of material for future use, his mind was not, even then, wholly unexercised in original thought. Indeed, his later letters home show that he could rarely hold himself for long from speculation on his favourite topics. Discussions, too, there were no doubt in plenty. In Göttingen Coleridge argued with the rationalizing Eichorn on Christian evidences, until the latter 'dreaded his arguments and his presence'; and his friends in Germany 'lamented the too abstruse nature of his ordinary speculations'. But as yet, although visions of a magnum opus were already floating before his mind, he postponed deliberately any attempt to systematize his theories. At the end of his visit he writes to Josiah Wedgwood, 'I shall have bought thirty pounds worth of books, chiefly metaphysics, and with a view to the one work to which I hope to dedicate in silence the prime of my life.' These books were dispatched to England, to be there perused as opportunity allowed. And the opportunity did not come at once. With the works of the German philosophers, according to the Biographia Literaria, Coleridge 'for the greater part became familiar at a far