Coleridge On Imagination V 6

John Constable, I. A. Richards

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781136351167
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Literature
• Categoría: Literary Criticism

In the sixth volume of his Selected Works, I. A. Richards focuses on the writings ofSamuel Taylor Coleridge.

Chapter One The First Range of Hills

DOI: 10.4324/9781315010878-1

Though I might find numerous precedents, I shall not desire the reader to strip his mind of all prejudices, or to keep all prior systems out of view during his examination of the present. For in truth, such requests appear to me not much unlike the advice given to hypochondriacal patients in Dr Buchan’s domestic medicine; videlicet, to preserve themselves uniformly tranquil and in good spirits.

Biographia Literaria

‘At the same time that we were studying the Greek Tragic Poets, he (Bowyer, Head Master of the Grammar School, Christ’s Hospital) made us read Shakespeare and Milton as lessons: and they were the lessons, too, which required most time and trouble to bring up so as to escape his censure. I learnt from him, that Poetry, even that of the loftiest and, seemingly, that of the wildest odes, had a logic of its own, as severe as that of science; and more difficult, because more subtle, more complex, and dependent upon more, and more fugitive, causes.’ Coleridge’s studies in this severe logic, his enquiry into these multiple and fugitive causes occupied the best years of his life. The methods he employed and the results that he reached are the subject of this Essay. To neither, in spite of the large literature that has accumulated about him, has justice been done.

He was naturally a psychologist, abnormally aware of and curious about the happenings in his own mind, with a delight in and a talent for systematic thinking that are as uncommon. He had, moreover, a mind which gave him, in its incessant activity, more remarkable material to enquire into than is ordinarily combined with such a capacity to enquire. He lived at a time when a deep and general change was occurring in man’s conceptions of himself and of his world, and he spent his powers upon the elaboration of a speculative apparatus that would be a kind of microscope with which to study this change and others. It is not an easy instrument to use, it needs adjustment and perhaps some redesigning, I am not, in what follows, very much concerned to present Coleridge’s theory in the exact form in which he built it. We can show, I think, more respect for his achievement and for the importance of the purposes to which he gave so much of his life by using his drafts and sketches to construct a derived instrument. But the principle will be his, and where terms, distinctions and other technical devices are being used that have developed since Coleridge, the departures will be easily pointed out.

He had been a preternaturally reflective schoolboy, in his early teens ‘delving into the unwholesome quicksilver mines of metaphysic depths’. From ‘this preposterous pursuit’ he was rescued, he tells us twenty-nine years later, ‘partly indeed by an accidental introduction to an amiable family, chiefly however by the genial influence’ of Bowles’ sonnets. Defending these at Cambridge and later, he constantly appealed to ‘Truth, Nature, Logic and the Laws of Universal Grammar’, still very much in Capital Letters. ‘Actuated, too, by my former passion for metaphysical investigations; I laboured at a solid foundation, on which permanently to ground my opinions, in the component faculties of the human mind itself, and their comparative dignity and importance. According to the faculty or source, from which the pleasure given by any poem or passage was derived, I estimated the merit of such poem or passage’. Labour upon this foundation went on for a while under the guidance of Hartley:

he of mortal kind

Wisest, he first who marked the ideal tribes

Up the fine fibres through the sentient brain.

I shall try later (Chapter Three) to show why Coleridge at the crisis of his speculative life turned away from Hartley, from whom he had learnt so much – whose doctrines, whether we derive them from Hartley or not, must be borne in mind if we are to reconstruct Coleridge’s thought. But I must delay first for a few pages to complain of the very common and rather lazy assumption that intellectual labour will not help the critic. I will quote from Mr Eliot an example of what has become a general custom among literary men in discussing Coleridge. ‘Nor am I sure’, he says, ‘that Coleridge learned so much from German philosophers, or earlier from Hartley, as he thought he did; what is best in his criticism seems to come from his own delicacy and subtlety of insight as he reflected upon his own experience of writing poetry’ (The Use of Poetry, p. 80). Yes. But is it an accident that this very peculiar kind of insight is found in Coleridge? His philosophic preoccupations cannot be separated from it. The speculations and the insight incessantly prompt one another. The insight was the stimulus to the speculation and the speculation the instrument of the insight. ‘By meditation, rather than by observation? And by the latter in consequence of the former? As eyes, for which the former has predetermined their field of vision, and to which, as to its organ, it communicates a microscopic power’ (Biographia Literaria, II, 64. Shawcross’ Edition). No one who is aware of Coleridge’s problems or of the delicacy and subtlety with which he explored them will suppose that he could avoid these dealings with philosophy. He might, perhaps, have halted in his system-building sooner than he did (say about 1808). Yet can we blame him for continuing? What he had already extracted from ‘vain Philosophy’s aye-babbling spring’ was enough to make anyone go on in hope of more.

It is easy for us now – when some fragments of his results in corrupted forms have passed into the general current of thought – to pretend that the toil which produced them was superfluous. But we shall not realize what we might gain from Coleridge without some equivalent trouble. We can neither recapture what his insight gave him nor develop it further, unless, in new terms perhaps, we make a similar effort of thought. The chief weakness of our best criticism today is the pretence that fundamental matters can be profitably discussed without prolonged and technical thinking. What has been done by people who have found themselves discussing Coleridge has been, usually I think, to put a ring-fence round a very small part of his thought, and say, ‘We will keep inside this and leave the transcendental and the analytic discussions to someone else’. But this practice results in what is essentially a fraud. The thought so fenced off ceases to be Coleridge’s and becomes something much less interesting. It will therefore be well for me to state that I propose here to take all the parts of Coleridge’s thinking that seem to me relevant to his criticism, and to treat them as an exercise ground for interpretation. I assume that Coleridge’s great merit as a critic – a merit unique among English critics – is the strenuous persistence with which he reflected philosophically upon criticism. Is there not something a little ridiculous in saying, ‘What a fine critic! What a pity he thought so hard about Poetry!’?

He had, it is true, extraordinary gifts as a poet and a reader. But these gifts would not have produced what he has given us if he had not gone on, from his fourteenth year, thinking about poetry with an assiduity and enterprise that cannot be matched in the biography of another critic. The result is that his remarks have often a definite charge of elaborate meaning which we will pass by if we read him as we might quite properly read others. For example: In Chapter Fifteen of the Biographia he comments upon the ‘perfect sweetness of the versification in the “Venus and Adonis” as a characteristic of original poetic genius’. ‘The sense of musical delight’, he remarks, ‘with the power of producing it is a gift of the imagination.’ If someone else had said that, we might be quite justified in passing it by as just the right sort of thing to be said. We might have agreed that it seemed generally true and gone on our way satisfied that none of our notions need be disturbed.

But, since it is Coleridge who is speaking, we shall find, if we look into it and really ask what he is saying, that it is as far from being a commonplace as anything could be. We shall find that it is an application of two startling and fundamental theories – one (under the heading of ‘imagination’) about nothing less than the nature of consciousness itself; the other (‘the power of producing it’) about the conditions of communication between minds.¹

1 Cf. B.L., I, 168.

I shall be coming back to linger with these theories – so let us not delay with them here.

It will be well, however, to say something more against the view that Coleridge’s philosophy can in some way be separated from his thinking. Those who have supposed so have been numerous, and they persist. Some even will quote Coleridge himself in their support. ‘It is time to tell the truth’, he wrote, ‘though it requires some courage to avow it in an age and country, in which disquisitions on all subjects, not privileged to adopt technical terms or scientific symbols, must be addressed to the public. I say then, that it is neither possible or necessary for all men, or for many, to be philosophers’ (B.L., I, p. 164). No more, under present social and economic conditions, is it possible for all men, or for many, to know anything about poetry. But this does not show either that such a state of affairs is tolerable to those who are aware that it can be changed, or that knowledge about poetry can be gained without ‘a philosophic (and inasmuch as it is actualized by an effort of freedom, an artificial) consciousness, which lies beneath or (as it were) behind the spontaneous consciousness natural to all reflective beings’.

This passage comes just before the celebrated allegory:

The first range of hills, that encircles the scanty vale of human life, is the horizon for the majority of its inhabitants. On its ridges the common sun is born and departs. From them the stars rise, and touching them they vanish. By the many, even this range, the natural limit and bulwark of the vale, is but imperfectly known. Its higher ascents are too often hidden by mists and clouds from uncultivated swamps, which few have courage or curiosity to penetrate. To the multitude below these vapors appear, now as the dark haunts of terrific agents, on which none may intrude with impunity; and now all a-glow, with colors not their own, they are gazed at as the splendid palaces of happiness and power. But in all ages there have been a few, who measuring and sounding the rivers of the vale at the feet of their farthest inaccessible falls have learned, that the sources must be far higher and far inward; a few, who even in the level streams have detected elements, which neither the vale itself or the surrounding mountains contained or could supply. How and whence to these thoughts, these strong probabilities, the ascertaining vision, the intuitive knowledge may finally supervene, can be learnt only by the fact.²

2 B.L., I, 164–166.

Many have enjoyed this passage; few have ventured seriously toward the test of the fact. Among these was Coleridge; on those ridges or in those mists and swamps, his waking life was spent; and it is our custom to scorn him for his ‘selfish philosophizing’, or to pity him for ‘the dissipation and stupefaction of his powers’. If he had spent his time stamp-collecting or twiddling his thumbs instead, he would have escaped not a little abuse.

And here I have to dissent – with the least possible pugnacity – from some remarks of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch in his introduction to Mr Sampson’s volume of Selected Passages from Wordsworth and Coleridge.

He tells us there to ‘cast back on our memories and to think that next to spring hats and parlour games, systems of philosophy are perhaps the most fugacious of all human toys? To those who listened once and eagerly, how far and faint already sound the echoes of Mansel, and Hegel plus Lewes plus T. H. Green; counterchiming against Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer and Comte as interpreted by the Positivists; Nietzsche, Bergson, James have followed; and have passed, or are passing; even Croce they tell me is in process of being supplanted – “where are the snows of yesteryear?”’(p. xxxi.)

‘The most fugacious of all human toys’ – ‘after spring hats and parlour games’. Yes! if we take them as ‘lines of talk’ to be acquired by those who will be intellectually in the fashion as such, the amusement of these toys wanes fast and it is to be wished that they were more fugacious. As haberdashery for the mental arriviste, gesture-suits for up-to-date talkers, they are just as fugacious as fashions in poetry. It takes no longer to learn to manipulate a philosophy than to learn to admire a kind of poetry. And there need be no more insight into the philosophy than understanding of the poetry. A little practice with the philosophy, a little habituation to the poetry, are all that are needed.

But we may regard philosophers in another way; and then they will not seem so fugacious. No careful, acute and resolute piece of thinking ever loses its value – its power to be of use to mankind. (It is the same with poetry; a good poem may lose its public for generations – they being interested otherwise – but not its value for readers with the relevant equipment.) It will perhaps have been noticed that Sir Arthur did not mention Plato and Aristotle among his fugacious philosophers. But every good philosopher stands with Plato and Aristotle; his work remains permanently as an aid in exploring the possibilities of our meanings. And often the very mistakes he made will be a large part of his value.

Coleridge was not, I suppose, a good philosopher;³he made too many mistakes of the wrong kind. He mixed with his philosophy too many things which did not belong to it, he let accidental and inessential prejudices too much interfere. In spite of them he took the psychology of the theory of poetry to a new level. For causes whose force will be experienced by anyone who follows Coleridge with any closeness he could not help adding into and developing again out of this relevant psychology a huge ill-assorted fabric of philosophic and theological beliefs which is not, I think, a relevant part of it. But it is, as I see it, an elaborated, transformed symbol of some parts of the psychology. And here is the modern reader’s difficulty with Coleridge; that neither as theology (supposing him to admit such a subject as more than a study of symbolisms) nor as symbol, is this fabric satisfactory, or even intelligible, to him. Coleridge constantly presents it as though it were the matrix out of which he obtained his critical theories. But the critical theories can be obtained from the psychology without initial complication with the philosophical matter. They can be given all the powers that Coleridge found for them, without the use either literally, or symbolically, of the other doctrines. The psychology⁴and the metaphysics (and theology) are independent. For Coleridge’s own thought, they were not; they probably could not be; to a later reader they may, and, as a rule, will be. The way to prevent the irrelevant matter from becoming at the outset an obstacle to an understanding of the psychology is to remember that special historical circumstances, temporary local conditions, shaped Coleridge’s thought.

3 See René Wellek, Immanuel Kant in England, Chapter iii, ‘Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Kant’, pp. 66...