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The Doctrine of Coleridge's Dejection and Its Relation To Wordsworth's Philosophy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Newton Phelps Stallknecht
Newton Phelps Stallknecht*
Affiliation:
Bowdoin College
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Extract

The early thinking of both Wordsworth and Coleridge centered about one idea which was, if not the psychological origin, at least the logical culmination of their humanitarian, esthetic, and religious doctrines. This notion we may designate as the theory of imaginative love. We find this hidden in the allegory of the Ancient Mariner and more clearly stated in the philosophical passages of The Prelude. It contains the explanation which Wordsworth offers of the spiritual efficacy of “natural piety” and of his mystical love of beauty. It is, in short, the keystone of that heroic system of natural religion which the two poets constructed during the period of mutually inspiring companionship when they walked together upon “Quantock's airy ridge.” They believed that creative and appreciative imagination engenders a love of nature and a love of man, and they did not hesitate to affirm that this love is a profoundly religious experience which owes its power to the mystical communion with a cosmic spirit. This last belief was essentially a faith in an animate Nature and it served them both as the justification of their worship of woodlands and hillsides from which they drew such spiritual strength. This idea, however, was not by any means a mere doctrine with which they defended their peculiar religious position; it hovered over their thinking, “a master o'er a slave,” and found expression again and again in their most successful utterances.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 49 , Issue 1 , March 1934 , pp. 196 - 207
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1934

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References

1 See “The Moral of the Ancient Mariner,” PMLA, xlvii, 2 (June, 1932), pp. 559–569.

2 George M. Harper, Wordsworth, (N. Y. 1929), p. 446.

3 Ibid.

4 For an account of Wordsworth's Spinozism see my article “Wordsworth and Philosophy,” PMLA, xliv, 4 (Dec., 1929), pp. 1116–1143. Also below Note 13.

5 But see my “Wordsworth and Philosophy,” pp. 1140–1141, where Wordsworth's later attitude toward reason is mentioned.

6 The Prelude (1805 version, De Selincourt's edition), xiii, 185 ff. Joy is mentioned in The Prelude (1805), i, 585; ii, 465.

7 The Prelude (1805 version), xiii, 108 ff.—Whom is capitalized in the 1850 version, xiv, 114 ff.

8 “Essays on the Fine Arts,” No. 3 in Felix Farley's Journal. August 1814, quoted from Cottle's Early Recollections Appendix, v, ii, pp. 201–240.

9 Enn. i, lib. vi, Ch. 3. The translation is Taylor's. Coleridge quotes in the Greek.

10 It is interesting to notice that Coleridge seems to have attempted, years after writing Dejection, to explain Wordsworth's Ode upon epistemological grounds. At least, he quotes the poem as if he believed that it expressed the principles of a theory of knowledge. It may seem surprising that his suggestion is really helpful toward understanding a difficult passage. Wordsworth's magnificent phrases “the fountain light of all our day” and “a master light of all our seeing” may be rescued from obscurity by consideration of Coleridge's use of a selection from the Intimations Ode in Essay xi of the second section of The Friend. Here Coleridge writes of the “one principle of permanence and identity, the rock of strength and refuge, to which the soul may cling amid the fleeting, surge-like objects of the senses.” When he quotes the Ode, Coleridge is discussing the origin of the principle of logical stability, the One of Platonic and Neo-Platonic thought. This principle may be immediately manifest to the soul and it may be thought of as Schelling's unity of subject and object. Thus Coleridge tries to cast an epistemological interpretation upon the Ode, for even in later life, years after he wrote Dejection, Coleridge continued to find the mysticism of the poem unsatisfactory, doubting (in Biographia Literaria, chapter 22) that children are ever “seers blest.” He admits however in the same chapter that to those who are acquainted with the “ twilight realms of consciousness” the meaning of the poem is sufficiently plain and, he seems also to suggest, its validity apparent. If this interpretation is correct, the “recollections” of the Ode are similar to Plato's reminiscence in that they lie at the very foundations of knowledge, at the ground work of rational certainty, which would be impossible without them, as logic is impossible without the principles of contradiction and identity, recognition of which comprises the permanence of thought as opposed to the flowing inconstancy of the senses. Now in so far as the phrases “the fountain-light of all our day” and “a master light of all our seeing” are concerned, it is very probable that Wordsworth attached some such meaning to his poem. Certainly the lines are otherwise wholly obscure. But, of course, Wordsworth could not have limited the meaning of the Ode to any such notion. The “imperial palace” and the “clouds of glory” are more than a speculative justification of the laws of logic!

10a With the possible exception of The Prelude (1805), xi, 326 ff.

11 The Prelude (1805), xiii, 84 et circa. See also iii, 191.

12 The Prelude (1805), xiii, 114 fi.

13 It is important to notice that here also Wordsworth includes reason as a compatible element in the life of imaginative love. … “endless occupation for the soul Whether dissive or intuitive.” (ll. 112–113) For a fuller treatment of reason, and imagination, or intuition, see my article Wordsworth and Philosophy,“ note 4 above. Wordsworths' theory of imagination has recently been discussed by Prof. Rader in Presiding Ideas in Wordsworth's Poetry (University of Washington Press: Seattle, 1931). With his account I find myself in general agreement. I am in the heartiest accord with this author's insistence upon Wordsworth's opposition to sensationalist doctrines and also with the emphasis upon Wordsworth's general tendency toward idealism and mysticism. Furthermore, I find Prof. Rader's treatment of the Intimations Ode (pp. 149–152) in harmony with my own views in so far as he has decided that the Platonic notion of personal pre-existence is not the essential point that Wordsworth wishes to make (see my Wordsworth and Philosophy p. 1135). The only point in Prof. Rader's careful interpretation which I see the slightest reason to question is the tentative suggestion that Wordsworth's view of imagination has an affinity with Kant's transcendental synthesis (pp. 167–169). There is, to be sure, some similarity, for both theories are opposed to sensationalism; but in so far as Wordsworth's doctrine has any source aside from his own meditations and those of his companion, Coleridge, I am inclined to believe that the origin is to be found in Spinoza's doctrine of intuition. I have elsewhere stated the considerable evidence, internal and external, for this theory. I do not find such evidence in favor of Prof. Rader's suggestion, which he himself admits is merely inferential and tentative. In fact, I think that Prof. Rader has himself stated the most telling argument against the view which he has suggested when he justly asserts that Wordsworth gave the theory of imagination a ”decidedly religious coloring.“ Religious insight is certainly not a feature of Kant's doctrine of transcendental synthesis, whereas Spinoza's intellectual love of God is inseparable from his intuition. This attempt to connect Wordsworth's doctrine of imagination with Kantian thought has not, however, obscured Prof. Rader's understanding of Wordsworth's experience. The passage (p. 168) from which the above brief quotation is taken is itself a just statement of Wordsworth's mysticism. But the intimate and immediate connection between imagination and ”communion with the invisible world“ is something which Wordsworth could not have found explained in the writings of Kant—nor would he have used the term ”intellectual love“ had he drawn his doctrines from the German philosopher.

14 The Prelude (1805), xiii, 185 ff. Also xi, 333.

15 The Prelude (1805), xiii, 105.

16 The Excursion, Bk. iv.