English Critical Essays Part 28

And in some such activity as that, varied as his wide learning, in a many-sided dramatic kind of poetry, a.s.signing its place and value to every mode of the inward life, seems to have been for Coleridge the original path of artistic success. But in order to follow that path one must hold ideas loosely in the relative spirit, not seek to stereotype any one of the many modes of that life; one must acknowledge that the mind is ever greater than its own products, devote ideas to the service of art rather than of ???s??, not disquiet oneself about the absolute. Perhaps Coleridge is more interesting because he did not follow this path. Repressing his artistic interest and voluntarily discolouring his own work, he turned to console and strengthen the human mind, vulgarized or dejected, as he believed, by the acquisition of new knowledge about itself in the _eclairciss.e.m.e.nt_ of the eighteenth century.

What the reader of our own generation will least find in Coleridge's prose writings is the excitement of the literary sense. And yet in those grey volumes we have the production of one who made way ever by a charm, the charm of voice, of aspect, of language, above all, by the intellectual charm of new, moving, luminous ideas. Perhaps the chief offence in Coleridge is an excess of seriousness, a seriousness that arises not from any moral principle, but from a misconception of the perfect manner. There is a certain shade of levity and unconcern, the perfect manner of the eighteenth century, which marks complete culture in the handling of abstract questions. The humanist, he who possesses that complete culture, does not 'weep' over the failure of 'a theory of the quantification of the predicate', nor 'shriek' over the fall of a philosophical formula. A kind of humour is one of the conditions of the true mental att.i.tude in the criticism of past stages of thought. Humanity cannot afford to be too serious about them, any more than a man of good sense can afford to be too serious in looking back upon his own childhood. Plato, whom Coleridge claims as the first of his spiritual ancestors, Plato, as we remember him, a true humanist, with Petrarch and Goethe and M. Renan, holds his theories lightly, glances with a blithe and nave inconsequence from one view to another, not antic.i.p.ating the burden of meaning 'views' will one day have for humanity. In reading him one feels how lately it was that Croesus thought it a paradox to say that external prosperity was not necessarily happiness. But on Coleridge lies the whole weight of the sad reflection that has since come into the world, with which for us the air is full, which the children in the market-place repeat to each other. Even his language is forced and broken, lest some saving formula should be lost--'distinct.i.ties', 'enucleation', 'pentad of operative Christianity'--he has a whole vocabulary of such phrases, and expects to turn the tide of human thought by fixing the sense of such expressions as 'reason', 'understanding', 'idea'.

Again, he has not the jealousy of the true artist in excluding all a.s.sociations that have no charm or colour or gladness in them; everywhere he allows the impress of an inferior theological literature; he is often prolix and importunate about most indifferent heroes--Sir Alexander Ball, Dr. Bell, even Dr. Bowyer, the coa.r.s.e pedant of the Blue-coat School. And the source of all this is closely connected with the source of his literary activity. For Coleridge had chosen as the mark of his literary egotism a kind of intellectual _tour de force_--to found a religious philosophy, to do something with the 'idea' in spite of the essential nature of the 'idea'. And therefore all is fict.i.tious from the beginning. He had determined, that which is humdrum, insipid, which the human spirit has done with, shall yet stimulate and inspire. What he produced symbolizes this purpose--the ma.s.s of it _ennuyant_, depressing: the _Aids to Reflection_, for instance, with Archbishop Leighton's vague pieties all twisted into the jargon of a spiritualistic philosophy. But sometimes 'the pulse of the G.o.d's blood' does trans.m.u.te it, kindling here and there a spot that begins to live; as in that beautiful fragment at the end of the _Church and State_, or in the distilled and concentrated beauty of such a pa.s.sage as this:

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 mult.i.tude below these vapours appear now as the dark haunts of terrific agents, on which none may intrude with impunity; and now all a-glow, with colours 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 furthest 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 nor the surrounding mountains contained or could supply.

_Biographia Literaria._

'I was driven from life in motion to life in thought and sensation.'

So Coleridge sums up his childhood with its delicacy, its sensitiveness, and pa.s.sion. From his tenth to his eighteenth year he was at a rough school in London. Speaking of this time, he says:

When I was first plucked up and transplanted from my birthplace and family, Providence, it has often occurred to me, gave me the first intimation that it was my lot, and that it was best for me, to make or find my way of life a detached individual, a _terrae filius_, who was to ask love or service of no one on any more specific relation than that of being a man, and as such to take my chance for the free charities of humanity.[38]

[38] Biographical Supplement to _Biographia Literaria_, chap.

ii.

Even his fine external nature was for years repressed, wronged, driven inward--'at fourteen I was in a continual state of low fever.' He becomes a dreamer, an eager student, but without ambition.

This depressed boy is nevertheless, on the spiritual side, the child of a n.o.ble house. At twenty-five he is exercising a wonderful charm, and has defined for himself a peculiar line of intellectual activity.

He had left Cambridge without a degree, a Unitarian. Unable to take orders, he determined through Southey's influence to devote himself to literature. When he left Cambridge there was a prejudice against him which has given occasion to certain suspicions. Those who knew him best discredit these suspicions. What is certain is that he was subject to fits of violent, sometimes fantastic, despondency. He retired to Stowey, in Somersets.h.i.+re, to study poetry and philosophy.

In 1797 his poetical gift was in full flower; he wrote _Kubla Khan_, the first part of _Christabel_, and _The Ancient Mariner_. His literary success grew in spite of opposition. He had a strange attractive gift of conversation, or rather of monologue, as De Stael said, full of _bizarrerie_, with the rapid alternations of a dream, and here and there a sudden summons into a world strange to the hearer, abounding with images drawn from a sort of divided, imperfect life, as of one to whom the external world penetrated only in part, and, blended with all this, pa.s.sages of the deepest obscurity, precious only for their musical cadence, the echo in Coleridge of the eloquence of the older English writers, of whom he was so ardent a lover. All through this brilliant course we may discern the power of the Asiatic temperament, of that voluptuousness which is perhaps connected with his appreciation of the intimacy, the almost mystical _rapport_, between man and nature. 'I am much better', he writes, 'and my new and tender health is all over me like a voluptuous feeling.'

And whatever fame, or charm, or life-inspiring gift he has had is the vibration of the interest he excited then, the propulsion into years that clouded his early promise of that first buoyant, irresistible self-a.s.sertion: so great is even the indirect power of a sincere effort towards the ideal life, of even a temporary escape of the spirit from routine. Perhaps the surest sign of his election--that he was indeed, on the spiritual side, the child of a n.o.ble house--is that story of the Pantisocratic scheme, which at this distance looks so grotesque. In his enthusiasm for the French Revolution, the old communistic dream with its appeal to nature (perhaps a little theatrical), touched him, as it had touched Rousseau, Saint-Pierre, and Chateaubriand. He had married one, his affection for whom seems to have been only a pa.s.sing feeling; with her and a few friends he was to found a communistic settlement on the banks of the Susquehannah--'the name was pretty and metrical.' It was one of Coleridge's lightest dreams; but also one which could only have pa.s.sed through the liberal air of his earlier life. The later years of the French Revolution, which for us have discredited all such dreams, deprived him of that youthfulness which is the preservative element in a literary talent.

In 1798, he visited Germany. A beautiful fragment of this period remains, describing a spring excursion to the Brocken. His excitement still vibrates in it. Love, all joyful states of mind, are self-expressive; they loosen the tongue, they fill the thoughts with sensuous images, they harmonize one with the world of sight. We hear of the 'rich graciousness and courtesy' of Coleridge's manner, of the white and delicate skin, the abundant black hair, the full, almost animal lips, that whole physiognomy of the dreamer already touched with fanaticism. One says of the text of one of his Unitarian sermons, 'his voice rose like a stream of rich distilled perfumes'; another, 'he talks like an angel, and does--nothing.'

Meantime, he had designed an intellectual novelty in the shape of a religious philosophy. Socinian theology and the philosophy of Hartley had become distasteful. 'Whatever is against right reason, that no faith can oblige us to believe.' Coleridge quotes these words from Jeremy Taylor. And yet ever since the dawn of the Renaissance, had subsisted a conflict between reason and faith. From the first, indeed, the Christian religion had affirmed the existence of such a conflict, and had even based its plea upon its own weakness in it. In face of the cla.s.sical culture, with its deep wide-struck roots in the world as it permanently exists, St. Paul a.s.serted the claims of that which could not appeal with success to any genuinely human principle.

Paradox as it was, that was the strength of the new spirit; for how much is there at all times in humanity which cannot appeal with success for encouragement or tolerance to any genuinely human principle. In the Middle Ages it might seem that faith had reconciled itself to philosophy; the Catholic church was the leader of the world's life as well as of the spirit's. Looking closer we see that the conflict is still latent there; the supremacy of faith is only a part of the wors.h.i.+p of sorrow and weakness which marks the age. The weak are no longer merely a majority, they are all Europe. It is not that faith has become one with reason; but a strange winter, a strange suspension of life, has pa.s.sed over the cla.s.sical culture which is only the human reason in its most trenchant form. Glimpse after glimpse, as that pagan culture awoke to life, the conflict was felt once more. It is at the court of Frederick II that the Renaissance first becomes discernible as an actual power in European society. How definite and unmistakable is the att.i.tude of faith towards that! Ever since the Reformation all phases of theology had been imperfect philosophies--that is, in which there was a religious _arriere pensee_; philosophies which could never be in the ascendant in a sincerely scientific sphere. The two elements had never really mixed.

Writers so different as Locke and Taylor have each his liberal philosophy, and each has his defence of the orthodox belief; but, also, each has a divided mind; we wonder how the two elements could have existed side by side; brought together in a single mind, but unable to fuse in it, they reveal their radical contrariety. The Catholic church and humanity are two powers that divide the intellect and spirit of man. On the Catholic side is faith, rigidly logical as Ultramontanism, with a proportion of the facts of life, that is, all that is despairing in life coming naturally under its formula. On the side of humanity is all that is desirable in the world, all that is sympathetic with its laws, and succeeds through that sympathy.

Doubtless, for the individual, there are a thousand intermediate shades of opinion, a thousand resting-places for the religious spirit; still, t? d?????e?? ??? ?st? t?? p?????, fine distinctions are not for the majority; and this makes time eventually a dogmatist, working out the opposition in its most trenchant form, and fixing the horns of the dilemma; until, in the present day, we have on one side Pius IX, the true descendant of the fisherman, issuing the Encyclical, pleading the old promise against the world with a special kind of justice; and on the other side, the irresistible modern culture, which, as religious men often remind us, is only Christian accidentally.

The peculiar temper of Coleridge's intellect made the idea of reconciling this conflict very seductive. With a true speculative talent he united a false kind of subtlety and the full share of vanity. A dexterous intellectual _tour de force_ has always an independent charm; and therefore it is well for the cause of truth that the directness, sincerity, and naturalness of things are beyond a certain limit sacrificed in vain to a fact.i.tious interest. A method so forced as that of Coleridge's religious philosophy is from the first doomed to be insipid, so soon as the temporary interest or taste or curiosity it was designed to meet has pa.s.sed away. Then, as to the manner of such books as the _Aids to Reflection_, or _The Friend_:--These books came from one whose vocation was in the world of art; and yet, perhaps, of all books that have been influential in modern times, they are farthest from the cla.s.sical form--bundles of notes--the original matter inseparably mixed up with that borrowed from others--the whole, just that mere preparation for an artistic effect which the finished artist would be careful one day to destroy.

Here, again, we have a trait profoundly characteristic of Coleridge.

He often attempts to reduce a phase of thought, subtle and exquisite, to conditions too rough for it. He uses a purely speculative gift in direct moral edification. Scientific truth is something fugitive, relative, full of fine gradations; he tries to fix it in absolute formulas. The _Aids to Reflection_, or _The Friend_, is an effort to propagate the volatile spirit of conversation into the less ethereal fabric of a written book; and it is only here and there that the poorer matter becomes vibrant, is really lifted by the spirit.

At forty-two, we find Coleridge saying in a letter:

I feel with an intensity unfathomable by words my utter nothingness, impotence, and worthlessness in and for myself.

I have learned what a sin is against an infinite, imperishable being such as is the soul of man. The consolations, at least the sensible sweetness of hope, I do not possess. On the contrary, the temptation which I have constantly to fight up against is a fear that, if annihilation and the possibility of heaven were offered to my choice, I should choose the former.

What was the cause of this change? That is precisely the point on which, after all the gossip there has been, we are still ignorant. At times Coleridge's opium excesses were great; but what led to those excesses must not be left out of account. From boyhood he had a tendency to low fever, betrayed by his constant appet.i.te for bathing and swimming, which he indulged even when a physician had opposed it.

In 1803, he went to Malta as secretary to the English Governor. His daughter suspects that the source of the evil was there, that for one of his const.i.tution the climate of Malta was deadly. At all events, when he returned, the charm of those five wonderful years had failed at the source.

De Quincey said of him, 'he wanted better bread than can be made with wheat.' Lamb said of him that from boyhood he had 'hungered for eternity'. Henceforth those are the two notes of his life. From this time we must look for no more true literary talent in him. His style becomes greyer and greyer, his thoughts _outre_, exaggerated, a kind of credulity or superst.i.tion exercised upon abstract words. Like Clifford, in Hawthorne's beautiful romance--the born Epicurean, who by some strange wrong has pa.s.sed the best of his days in a prison--he is the victim of a division of the will, often showing itself in trivial things: he could never choose on which side of the garden path he would walk. In 1803, he wrote a poem on 'The Pains of Sleep'. That unrest increased. Mr. Gillman tells us 'he had long been greatly afflicted with nightmare, and when residing with us was frequently aroused from this painful sleep by any one of the family who might hear him'.

That faintness and continual dissolution had its own consumptive refinements, and even brought, as to the 'Beautiful Soul' in _Wilhelm Meister_, a faint religious ecstasy--that 'singing in the sails' which is not of the breeze. Here, again, is a note of Coleridge's:

'In looking at objects of nature while I am thinking, as at yonder moon, dim-glimmering through the window-pane, I seem rather to be seeking, as it were asking, a symbolical language for something within me that already and for ever exists, than observing anything new. Even when that latter is the case, yet still I have always an obscure feeling, as if that new phenomenon were the dim awaking of a forgotten or hidden truth of my inner nature.' Then, 'while I was preparing the pen to write this remark, I lost the train of thought which had led me to it.'

What a distemper of the eye of the mind! What an almost bodily distemper there is in that!

Coleridge's intellectual sorrows were many; but he had one singular intellectual happiness. With an inborn taste for transcendental philosophy he lived just at the time when that philosophy took an immense spring in Germany, and connected itself with a brilliant literary movement. He had the luck to light upon it in its freshness, and introduce it to his countrymen. What an opportunity for one reared on the colourless English philosophies, but who feels an irresistible attraction towards metaphysical synthesis! How rare are such occasions of intellectual contentment! This transcendental philosophy, chiefly as systematized by Sch.e.l.ling, Coleridge applies, with an eager, unwearied subtlety, to the questions of theology and art-criticism. It is in his theory of art-criticism that he comes nearest to true and important principles; that is the least fugitive part of his work. Let us take this first; here we shall most clearly apprehend his main principle.

What, then, is the essence of this criticism? On the whole it may be described as an attempt to reclaim the world of art as a world of fixed laws--to show that the creative activity of genius and the simplest act of thought are but higher and lower products of the laws of a universal logic. Criticism, feeling its own unsuccess in dealing with the greater works of art, has sometimes made too much of those dark and capricious suggestions of genius which even the intellect possessed by them is unable to track or recall. It has seemed due to their half-sacred character to look for no link between the process by which they were produced and the slighter processes of the mind.

Coleridge a.s.sumes that the highest phases of thought must be more, not less, than the lower, subjects of law.

With this interest, in the _Biographia Literaria_, he refines Sch.e.l.ling's 'Philosophy of Nature' into a theory of art. 'Es giebt kein Plagiat in der Philosophie' says Heine, alluding to the charge brought against Sch.e.l.ling of unacknowledged borrowing from Bruno, and certainly that which is common to Coleridge and Sch.e.l.ling is of far earlier origin than the Renaissance. Sch.e.l.lingism, the 'Philosophy of Nature', is indeed a constant tradition in the history of thought; it embodies a permanent type of the speculative temper. That mode of conceiving nature as a mirror or reflex of the intelligence of man may be traced up to the first beginnings of Greek speculation. There are two ways of envisaging those aspects of nature which appear to bear the impress of reason or intelligence. There is the deist's way, which regards them merely as marks of design, which separates the informing mind from nature, as the mechanist from the machine; and there is the pantheistic way, which identifies the two, which regards nature itself as the living energy of an intelligence of the same kind as, but vaster than, the human. Greek philosophy, finding indications of mind everywhere, dwelling exclusively in its observations on that which is general or formal, on that which modern criticism regards as the modification of things by the mind of the observer, adopts the latter, or pantheistic way, through the influence of the previous mythological period. Mythology begins in the early necessities of language, of which it is a kind of accident. But at a later period its essence changes; it becomes what it was not at its birth, the servant of a genuine poetic interest, a kind of _vivification_ of nature. Played upon by those accidents of language, the Greek mind becomes possessed by the conception of nature as living, thinking, almost speaking to the mind of man. This unfixed poetical prepossession, reduced to an abstract form, petrified into an idea, is the conception which gives a unity of aim to Greek philosophy. Step by step it works out the substance of the Hegelian formula: 'Was ist, das ist vernunftig; was vernunftig ist, das ist'--'Whatever is, is according to reason; whatever is according to reason, that is.' A science of which that could be the formula is still but an intellectual aspiration; the formula of true science is different. Experience, which has gradually saddened the earth's colour, stiffened its motions, withdrawn from it some blithe and debonair presence, has moderated our demands upon science. The positive method makes very little account of marks of intelligence in nature; in its wider view of phenomena it sees that those incidents are a minority, and may rank as happy coincidences; it absorbs them in the simpler conception of law. But the suspicion of a mind latent in nature, struggling for release and intercourse with the intellect of man through true ideas, has never ceased to haunt a certain cla.s.s of minds. Started again and again in successive periods by enthusiasts on the antique pattern, in each case the thought has seemed paler and more evanescent amidst the growing consistency and sharpness of outline of other and more positive forms of knowledge.

Still, wherever a speculative instinct has been united with extreme inwardness of temperament, as in Jakob Bohme, there the old Greek conception, like some seed floating in the air, has taken root and sprung up anew. Coleridge, thrust inward upon himself, driven from 'life in thought and sensation' to life in thought only, feels in that dark London school a thread of the Greek mind vibrating strangely in him. At fifteen he is discoursing on Plotinus, and has translated the hymns of Synesius. So in later years he reflects from Sch.e.l.ling the flitting tradition. He conceives a subtle co-ordination between the ideas of the mind and the laws of the natural world. Science is to be attained, not by observation, a.n.a.lysis, generalization, but by the evolution or recovery of those ideas from within, by a sort of ?????s??, every group of observed facts remaining an enigma until the appropriate idea is struck upon them from the mind of Newton or Cuvier, the genius in whom sympathy with the universal reason is entire. Next he supposes that this reason or intelligence in nature gradually becomes reflective--self-conscious. He fancies he can track through all the simpler orders of life fragments of an eloquent prophecy about the human mind. He regards the whole of nature as a development of higher forms out of the lower, through shade after shade of systematic change. The dim stir of chemical atoms towards the axes of a crystal form, the trance-like life of plants, the animal troubled by strange irritabilities, are stages which antic.i.p.ate consciousness. All through that increasing stir of life this was forming itself; each stage in its unsatisfied susceptibilities seeming to be drawn out of its own limits by the more p.r.o.nounced current of life on its confines, the 'shadow of approaching humanity' gradually deepening, the latent intelligence working to the surface. At this point the law of development does not lose itself in caprice; rather it becomes more constraining and incisive. From the lowest to the highest acts of intelligence, there is another range of refining shades. Gradually the mind concentrates itself, frees itself from the limits of the particular, the individual, attains a strange power of modifying and centralizing what it receives from without according to an inward ideal. At last, in imaginative genius, ideas become effective; the intelligence of nature, with all its elements connected and justified, is clearly reflected; and the interpretation of its latent purposes is fixed in works of art.

In this fanciful and bizarre attempt to rationalize art, to range it under the dominion of law, there is still a gap to be filled up. What is that common law of the mind, of which a work of art and the slighter acts of thought are alike products? Here Coleridge weaves in Kant's fine-spun theory of the transformation of sense into perception. What every theory of perception has to explain is that a.s.sociative power which gathers isolated sensible qualities into the objects of the world about us. Sense, without an a.s.sociative power, would be only a threadlike stream of colours, sounds, odours--each struck upon one for a moment, and then withdrawn. The basis of this a.s.sociation may be represented as a material one, a kind of many-coloured 'etching' on the brain. Hartley has dexterously handled this hypothesis. The charm of his 'theory of vibrations' is the vivid image it presents to the fancy. How large an element in a speculative talent is the command of these happy images! Coleridge, by a finer effort of the same kind, a greater delicacy of fancy, detects all sorts of slips, transitions, breaks of continuity in Hartley's glancing cobweb. Coleridge, with Kant, regards all a.s.sociation as effected by a power within, to which he gives a fanciful Greek name.[39] In an act of perception there is the matter which sense presents, colour, tone, feeling; but also a form or mould, such as s.p.a.ce, unity, causation, suggested from within. In these forms we arrest and frame the many attributes of sense. It is like that simple chemical phenomenon where two colourless fluids uniting reflect a full colour. Neither matter nor form can be perceived asunder; they unite into the many-coloured image of life. This theory has not been able to bear a loyal induction. Even if it were true, how little it would tell us; how it attenuates fact! There, again, the charm is all in the clear image; the image of the artist combining a few elementary colours, curves, sounds into a new whole. Well, this power of a.s.sociation, of concentrating many elements of sense in an object of perception, is refined and deepened into the creative acts of imagination.

[39] Esemplastic.

We of the modern ages have become so familiarized with the greater works of art that we are little sensitive of the act of creation in them; they do not impress us as a new presence in the world. Only sometimes in productions which realize immediately a profound emotion and enforce a change in taste, such as _Werther_ or _Emile_, we are actual witnesses of the moulding of an unforeseen type by some new principle of a.s.sociation. By imagination, the distinction between which and fancy is so thrust upon his readers, Coleridge means a vigorous act of a.s.sociation, which, by simplifying and restraining their natural expression to an artificial order, refines and perfects the types of human pa.s.sion. It represents the excitements of the human kind, but reflected in a new manner, 'excitement itself imitating order.' 'Originally the offspring of pa.s.sion,' he somewhere says, 'but now the adopted children of power.' So far there is nothing new or distinctive; every one who can receive from a poem or picture a total impression will admit so much. What makes the view distinctive in Coleridge are the Sch.e.l.lingistic a.s.sociations with which he colours it, that faint glamour of the philosophy of nature which was ever influencing his thoughts. That suggested the idea of a subtly winding parallel, a 'rapport' in every detail, between the human mind and the world without it, laws of nature being so many transformed ideas.

Conversely, the ideas of the human mind would be only transformed laws. Genius would be in a literal sense an exquisitely purged sympathy with nature. Those a.s.sociative conceptions of the imagination, those unforeseen types of pa.s.sion, would come, not so much of the artifice and invention of the understanding, as from self-surrender to the suggestions of nature; they would be evolved by the stir of nature itself realizing the highest reach of its latent intelligence; they would have a kind of antecedent necessity to rise at some time to the surface of the human mind.

It is natural that Shakespeare should be the idol of all such criticism, whether in England or Germany. The first effect in Shakespeare is that of capricious detail, of the waywardness that plays with the parts careless of the impression of the whole. But beyond there is the constraining unity of effect, the uneffaceable impression, of _Hamlet_ or _Macbeth_. His hand moving freely is curved round by some law of gravitation from within; that is, there is the most constraining unity in the most abundant variety. Coleridge exaggerates this unity into something like the unity of a natural organism, the a.s.sociative act that effected it into something closely akin to the primitive power of nature itself. 'In the Shakespearian drama', he says, 'there is a vitality which grows and evolves itself from within.' Again:

He, too, worked in the spirit of nature, by evolving the germ from within by the imaginative power according to the idea. For as the power of seeing is to light, so is an idea in mind to a law in nature. They are correlatives which suppose each other.

Again:

The organic form is innate; it shapes, as it develops, itself from within, and the fulness of its development is one and the same with the perfection of its outward form.

Such as the life is, such is the form. Nature, the prime genial artist, inexhaustible in diverse powers, is equally inexhaustible in forms; each exterior is the physiognomy of the being within, and even such is the appropriate excellence of Shakespeare, himself a nature humanized, a genial understanding, directing self-consciously a power and an implicit wisdom deeper even than our consciousness.

There 'the absolute' has been affirmed in the sphere of art; and thought begins to congeal. Coleridge has not only overstrained the elasticity of his hypothesis, but has also obscured the true interest of art. For, after all, the artist has become something almost mechanical; instead of being the most luminous and self-possessed phase of consciousness, the a.s.sociative act itself looks like some organic process of a.s.similation. The work of art is sometimes likened to the living organism. That expresses the impression of a self-delighting, independent life which a finished work of art gives us; it does not express the process by which that work was produced.

Here there is no blind ferment of lifeless elements to realize a type.

By exquisite a.n.a.lysis the artist attains clearness of idea, then, by many stages of refining, clearness of expression. He moves slowly over his work, calculating the tenderest tone, and restraining the subtlest curve, never letting his hand or fancy move at large, gradually refining flaccid s.p.a.ces to the higher degree of expressiveness.

Culture, at least, values even in transcendent works of art the power of the understanding in them, their logical process of construction, the spectacle of supreme intellectual dexterity which they afford.

Coleridge's criticism may well be remembered as part of the long pleading of German culture for the things 'behind the veil'. It recalls us from the work of art to the mind of the artist; and, after all, this is what is infinitely precious, and the work of art only as the index of it. Still, that is only the narrower side of a complete criticism. Perhaps it is true, as some one says in Lessing's _Emilie Galotti_, that, if Michael Angelo had been born without hands, he would still have been the greatest of artists. But we must admit the truth also of an opposite view: 'In morals as in art', says M. Renan, 'the word is nothing--the fact is everything. The idea which lurks under a picture of Raphael is a slight matter; it is the picture itself only that counts.'

What const.i.tutes an artistic gift is, first of all, a natural susceptibility to moments of strange excitement, in which the colours freshen upon our thread bare world, and the routine of things about us is broken by a novel and happier synthesis. These are moments into which other minds may be made to enter, but which they cannot originate. This susceptibility is the element of genius in an artistic gift. Secondly, there is what may be called the talent of projection, of throwing these happy moments into an external concrete form--a statue, or play, or picture. That projection is of all degrees of completeness; its facility and transparence are modified by the circ.u.mstances of the individual, his culture, and his age. When it is perfectly transparent, the work is cla.s.sical. Compare the power of projection in Mr. Browning's _Sordello_, with that power in the _Sorrows of Werther_. These two elements determine the two chief aims of criticism. First, it has to cla.s.sify those initiative moments according to the amount of interest excited in them, to estimate their comparative acceptability, their comparative power of giving joy to those who undergo them. Secondly, it has to test, by a study of the artistic product itself, in connexion with the intellectual and spiritual condition of its age, the completeness of the projection.

These two aims form the positive, or concrete, side of criticism; their direction is not towards a metaphysical definition of the universal element in an artistic effort, but towards a subtle gradation of the shades of difference between one artistic gift and another. This side of criticism is infinitely varied; and it is what French culture more often achieves than the German.

Coleridge has not achieved this side in an equal degree with the other; and this want is not supplied by the _Literary Remains_, which contain his studies on Shakespeare. There we have a repet.i.tion, not an application, of the absolute formula. Coleridge is like one who sees in a picture only the rules of perspective, and is always trying to simplify even those. Thus: 'Where there is no humour, but only wit, or the like, there is no growth from within.' 'What is beauty'? he asks. 'It is the unity of the manifold, the coalescence of the diverse.' So of Dante: 'There is a total impression of infinity; the wholeness is not in vision or conception, but in an inner feeling of totality and absolute being.' Again, of the _Paradise Lost_: 'It has the totality of the poem as distinguished from the _ab ovo_ birth and parentage or straight line of history.'

That exaggerated inwardness is barren. Here, too, Coleridge's thoughts require to be thawed, to be set in motion. He is admirable in the detection, the a.n.a.lysis, and statement of a few of the highest general laws of art-production. But he withdraws us too far from what we can see, hear, and feel. Doubtless, the idea, the intellectual element, is the spirit and life of art. Still, art is the triumph of the senses and the emotions; and the senses and the emotions must not be cheated of their triumph after all. That strange and beautiful psychology which he employs, with its evanescent delicacies, has not sufficient corporeity. Again, one feels that the discussion about Hartley, meeting us in the way, throws a tone of insecurity over the critical theory which it introduces. Its only effect is to win for the terms in which that criticism is expressed, the a.s.sociations of one side in a metaphysical controversy.

The vagueness and fluidity of Coleridge's theological opinions have been exaggerated through an illusion, which has arisen from the occasional form in which they have reached us. Criticism, then, has to methodize and focus them. They may be arranged under three heads; the general principles of supernaturalism, orthodox dogmas, the interpretation of Scripture. With regard to the first and second, Coleridge ranks as a Conservative thinker; but his principles of Scriptural interpretation resemble Lessing's; they ent.i.tle him to be regarded as the founder of the modern liberal school of English theology. By supernaturalism is meant the theory of a divine person in immediate communication with the human mind, dealing with it out of that order of nature which includes man's body and his ordinary trains of thought, according to fixed laws, which the theologian sums up in the doctrines of 'grace' and 'sin'. Of this supernaturalism, the _Aids to Reflection_ attempts to give a metaphysical proof. The first necessity of the argument is to prove that religion, with its supposed experiences of grace and sin, and the realities of a world above the world of sense, is the fulfilment of the const.i.tution of every man, or, in the language of the 'philosophy of nature', is part of the 'idea' of man; so that, when those experiences are absent, all the rest of his nature is unexplained, like some enigmatical fragment, the construction and working of which we cannot surmise. According to Sch.e.l.ling's principle, the explanation of every phase of life is to be sought in that next above it. This axiom is applied to three supposed stages of man's reflective life: Prudence, Morality, Religion.

Prudence, by which Coleridge means something like Bentham's 'enlightened principle of self-preservation', is, he says, an inexplicable instinct, a blind motion in the dark, until it is expanded into morality. Morality, again, is but a groundless prepossession until transformed into a religious recognition of a spiritual world, until, as Coleridge says in his rich figurative language, 'like the main feeder into some majestic lake, rich with hidden springs of its own, it flows into, and becomes one with, the spiritual life.' A spiritual life, then, being the fulfilment of human nature, implied, if we see clearly, in those instincts which enable one to live on from day to day, is part of the 'idea' of man.

The second necessity of the argument is to prove that 'the idea', according to the principle of the 'philosophy of nature', is an infallible index of the actual condition of the world without us. Here Coleridge introduces an a.n.a.logy:

In the world, we see everywhere evidences of a unity, which the component parts are so far from explaining, that they necessarily presuppose it as the cause and condition of their existing as those parts, or even of their existing at all. This antecedent unity, or cause and principle of each union, it has, since the time of Bacon and Kepler, been customary to call a law. This crocus for instance; or any other flower the reader may have before his sight, or choose to bring before his fancy; that the root, stem, leaves, petals, &c., cohere to one plant is owing to an antecedent power or principle in the seed which existed before a single particle of the matters that const.i.tute the size and visibility of the crocus had been attracted from the surrounding soil, air, and moisture. Shall we turn to the seed? there, too, the same necessity meets us: an antecedent unity must here, too, be supposed. a.n.a.lyse the seeds with the finest tools, and let the solar microscope come in aid of your senses, what do you find?--means and instruments; a wondrous fairy tale of nature, magazines of food, stores of various sorts, pipes, spiracles, defences; a house of many chambers, and the owner and inhabitant invisible.

_Aids to Reflection._