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Coleridge's Marginal Method in the Biographia Literaria

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Jerome C. Christensen
Jerome C. Christensen*
Affiliation:
Purdue University West Lafayette, Indiana
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Abstract

Coleridge's mode of composition in the Biographia Literaria is best considered as marginal discourse, and here the chapters on Hartleian association are analyzed from this point of view. Coleridge's previous attempts to refute Hartley depended on a proof of the free will, a proof that he did not complete and that, for moral purposes, he does not hazard in the Biographia. Instead, Coleridge proffers a subsidiary criticism that he had formed years before, affixing his comments to borrowed arguments. Although Coleridge's marginal rhetoric persuades that Hartley's model is insufficient, it also illustrates that there is no coherent alternative principle. The text vanishes beneath the burden of its marginalia. Coleridge's criticism subverts a partial truth only to substitute a rhetoric partial to the demands of a desire too restless to abide in any principle or text.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 92 , Issue 5 , October 1977 , pp. 928 - 940
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1977

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References

Notes

1 See Walter Jackson Bate, Coleridge (1968; rpt. New York: Collier Books, 1973), pp. 131–38; Norman Fruman, Coleridge, the Damaged Archangel (New York: Braziller, 1971); Thomas McFarland, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 1–52.

2 The most complete discussion of the evidence of Coleridge's interest in Hartleian association is in J.A. Appleyard's Coleridge's Philosophy of Literature (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 22–42. Appleyard's skepticism regarding the strength of Coleridge's attraction must be modified, however, in the light of the evidence furnished by the publication of Coleridge's “Lectures on Revealed Religion,” in Lectures 1795 on Politics and Religion, ed. Lewis Patton and Peter Mann, Vol. I of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Collected Works, ed. Kathleen Coburn (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1971). One must agree with Peter Mann that these lectures make it “diffcult now to over-emphasise the importance of Hartley's system to Coleridge during the formative years 1794–6” (p. lix).

3 Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs (Oxford: Clarendon, 1956–59), I, 398. Hereafter cited as CL.

4 See A.O. Lovejoy, “Coleridge and Kant's Two Worlds,” in Essays in the History of Ideas (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1948), pp. 254–76, which remains unsurpassed in its insight into the reasons for Coleridge's break with associationism and in its formulation of the difficulties that beset his projected refutation.

5 The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn, Vols. I & ii (New York: Pantheon, 1957, 1961); Vol. iii (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1973), 3559. Hereafter cited as CN, followed by the volume number and the number of the entry.

6 Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. J. Shawcross (1907; rpt. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967), I, 66. Hereafter cited as BL.

7 These facts are best presented in the notes to the edition of the Biographia Literaria prepared by Henry Nelson Coleridge and completed and published by Sara Coleridge in 1847. This edition forms the third volume of The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. W.G.T. Shedd (New York: Harper, 1884).

8 In the letter Coleridge does not specifically attribute the comparison to Mackintosh.

9 The contempt is well documented. In May of 1800 Coleridge writes to William Godwin of “the great Dungfly Mackintosh”; in October of that year he concludes a scurrilous verse satire (part of the Skeletoniad) on the Scotchman in a letter to Humphry Davy; in October of 1801 he writes that, “as to his [Mackintosh's] conversation, it was all uncommonly well-worded: but not a thought in it worthy of having been worded at all” (CL, i, 588, 633; ii, 771).

10 Joseph Addison, Critical Essays from the Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970), Spectator 420, p. 204. Addison uses the phrase to describe the matter that the imagination or fancy requires to prevent its loss in “a kind of chasm.”

11 Selection from these marginalia are reproduced in Sara Coleridge's Biographia, pp. 214–15, nn.

12 Coleridge's only mention of “Maass” in his notebooks is in a puzzling 1809 entry, where he is referred to as a source for a projected ode on the dream vision of Galileo (CN, iii, 3585).

13 This is the position taken by J.A. Appleyard in his discussion of the passage in Coleridge's Philosophy of Literature, p. 58.

14 For example: “Talked a great deal of Nonsense about judgment & used a most false example of a Parent's Love to a worthless Infant—might as well have talked of the love to unroasted meat” (CN, i, 634).

15 The quotation from W. Schrickx is in “Coleridge and Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi,” Revue Belge de Philologie et d'Histoire, 36 (1958), 841.

16 As Shawcross notes, Coleridge's remark that “our whole life would be divided between the despotism of outward impressions and that of senseless and passive memory” is taken directly from Coleridge's marginal notes on Maass. Cf. Sara Coleridge, BL, p. 228, n.

17 One is tempted to call this rhetorical maneuver the fallacy of the distinct image, or perhaps even the fallacy of clarity. Coleridge refers to it when he describes those “individuals (Laodiceans in spirit, Minims in faith, and nominalists in philosophy) who mistake outlines for substance and distinct images for clear conceptions …” (The Statesman's Manual, ed. R.J. White, Collected Works, Vol. vi, Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1972, Appendix D, p. 93). A criticism of the same fallacy from a different point of view appears in one of Ludwig Wittgenstein's comments on the concept of “game”: “One might say that the concept ‘game’ is a concept with blurred edges.—‘But is a blurred concept a concept at all?‘—Is an indistinct photograph a picture of a person at all? Is it even always an advantage to replace an indistinct picture by a sharp one? Isn't the indistinct one often exactly what we need?” (Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, 3rd ed., New York: Macmillan, 1968, Vol. I, Entry 71). In this case the distinctness of the “outline” of Coleridge's image blurs the clarity of the concept that it has been invented to affirm.

18 The trope most appropriate to this deconstitutive origin is the chiasmus, which is fabricated on the shadow of its own collapse: the interruption of necessity, the necessity of interruption; or, as Coleridge puts it: “the still rising Desire still baffling the bitter Experience, the bitter Experience still following the gratified Desire” (CN, I, 1456).

19 The Bible would seem to have special status within such a catalog of texts, but, as E.S. Shaffer has shown in her book “Kubla Khan” and The Fall of Jerusalem (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1975), Coleridge's energies in biblical criticism were mainly directed toward removing the Bible from its place of privilege as the sacred text. In a complex argument, Shaffer persuades us that Coleridge was an early and sophisticated practitioner of the higher criticism of the Bible, one who subscribed to that movement's aim of rigorous rational scrutiny and who applied its literary approach. The consequence of that method was “a new apologetics of free-thinking theism which was to salvage Christianity until very near the end of the Victorian era” (p. 63). For Coleridge the consequence was an insistence, on the one hand, that the evidences of inspiration and revelation are fundamentally subordinate to a core of doctrine and, on the other, that new conceptions of history as myth and of the prophet as visionary could be used to bridge “that epic gap between ‘fact’ and ‘sacred story’ that so plagued the Enlightenment” (p. 53), to expand the sacred subject to the entire human community, and to furnish a secular, historical speaker who, inspired by the mythic concept of man, would periodically reconstruct the primordial spiritual experience for the participation of later men. One of the most nearly perfect examples of that visionary ideal is, according to Shaffer, Coleridge's lyrical ballad “Kubla Khan.”

The response of the fundamentalist Christian to such criticism—with its mobility of reference, its rationalist insistence on inconsistencies, and its embrace of a wide range of Asiatic religions—might very well be that the commentary has destroyed the text. But such a response depends on just that naïve, untenable notion of the sacred text as holy book that the higher criticism sought to correct. On that level, Shaffer is certainly entitled to her dialectic: the book is destroyed to preserve a sacred, transcendent text. Yet from a specifically Coleridgean perspective the function of the commentary seems less benign than Shaffer would have it, the progress of the dialectic less assured. For one thing, Coleridge remained committed to a core of Christian doctrine (including the concept of free will), which he “abstracted” from the books of the Bible (see CN, iii, 3754) and which forms a part not easily integrated with the transcendent whole. For another, the concept of a participation in the vision of the poet-prophet depends on a translucency of symbolic language that is highly problematic in the “Ancient Mariner” and “Kubla Khan,” the poems that Shaffer uses as her foundations. She is least satisfactory in her account of the preface to “Kubla,” and she does not discuss the gloss to the “Ancient Mariner”—both marginal commentaries, both added at about the time of the writing of the Biographia, and both demonstrations of the limits of the reader's (or, indeed, the teller's) authentic participation in a “visionary” experience. Not poems that communicate the experience of the Edenic dream, they are discourses that compel us to confront what Geoffrey Hartman has called “the dream of communication.”

20 David Hartley, Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations (1749; rpt. New York: Garland, 1971), I, 277.

21 Coleridge uses Schelling in the Biographia in much the same way as he uses Maass and Mackintosh. Schelling's words furnish plausible certainties that are the pretexts for the annotator's own desired certainties. At one point in Thesis vu Coleridge uses Schelling's argument as an authority for freedom of the will, but then he extends that authority in his own remarks to privilege the will before and beyond philosophy: “The self-conscious spirit therefore is a will; and freedom must be assumed as a ground of philosophy, and can never be deduced from it” (BL, i, 185). Although Coleridge considers the will only to remove it from consideration, it is nonetheless rendered equivocal. That peremptory and gnomic assertion would serve as well for a harmless corollary to Hartley's model, which similarly privileges a similarly absent divinity, as it would for a confutation of it. And in an addition to Schelling in Thesis ix, Coleridge furnishes a summation that could have been written by Hartley, or Coleridge during his Hartleian period: “We begin with the i know myself, in order to lose and find all self in god” (BL, i, 186). That just such a process had been “demonstrated by Hartley” was the stimulus to Coleridge's rhapsody in the 1796 “Religious Musings” (Poetical Works, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge [Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1912], ll. 39–45 and pp. 110–11, n.).

22 Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage-Random, 1966), p. 10.

23 The Victorian Sage (1953; rpt. New York: Norton, 1965), p. 4.

24 The Friend (1818), ed. Barbara Rooke (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1969), The Collected Works, iv, Pt. 1, 148, Coleridge's note.