Coleridge on Metrical Invention: an Untraced Quotation from the 1799 Notebook

Notebooks 1:387 is a short quotation in German marked ‘source not traced’ by Coburn.

Was im eigentlichsten und schärfsten Verstande erfunden wird, ist für die menschliche Gesellschaft nur selten wirklich nützlich.

In its day, this small thing generated a deal of bad-tempered heat in the narrow world of Coleridgean scholarship. Coburn's account of the entry notes that ‘without context it is not absolutely certain whether Verstand here means understanding, intelligence in the Kantian use of it, or simply sense (ie meaning)’. Accordingly she proposes two possible translations: ‘whatever is invented by the pure, and most acute, intelligence is but rarely of real use to human society’ and ‘whatever is invented in the most literal and exact sense [of the word invented] is but rarely of real use to human society’. Then she adds the following:

Since the above was written, a sharp controversy involving four correspondents and four translations of Coleridge's quotation has raged in the Listener, 2 April-7 May 1953. The argument turned partly on the two interpretations above: whether the word Verstand means a mental power, or the sense or meaning of a word; but it also turned on whether erfunden means invented, or discovered. As none of the controversialists identified the source of the quotation we are not much better off. The main point—Coleridge's reason for being interested in the passage, and whether he was impressed by it or noted it to refute it—remains obscure. If it be read according to (1) above, it reflects a position familiar to readers of Coleridge's later prose, and the quotation becomes a reference in support of his view of the limited use of conceptual understanding. But in the light of other entries in these early notebooks, and in view of eighteenth-century interest in the nature of erfinden and Erfindungen, reading (2) seems the more likely one, and the reading of erfunden as discovered suggested by correspondents to the Listener, unlikely. [Coburn (ed) Notebooks 1.ii: 386]

It is illuminating, then, to be able finally to locate the source of this quotation. It's by the German grammarian and philologist Johann Christoph Adelung and comes from Magazin für die deutsche Sprache, Volume 1 (1783), p. 147. It is, in fact, not a Kantian speculation on the nature of Understanding versus Intelligence, but speculation about the origin of poetic metre.

The sentence occurs in an essay titled ‘Noch ettwas über Deutsche sprache und Litteratur auf Veranlassung der Berlinischen Monathsschrift’; ‘Another reply to the Berlin Monthly on the topic of German language and literature’. The Berlinische Monatsschrift was a monthly magazine published by Johann Erich Biester and Friedrich Gedike, most famous nowadays because it published Immanuel Kant’s celebrated ‘What is Enlightenment?’ essay. The immediate context for the passage Coleridge copied into his notebook is some speculation about the provenance of German poetic metres: ‘Ob unsere Litteratur eine Einheit hat,’ Adelung wonders ‘wenn bald morgenländische, bald Laplädische Schwünge des Geistes, bald fremde Sylbenmaße ...’: whether our Literature possesses a unity, [and if so] when Eastern influences became apparent, when a Lapland spirit first animated it, when foreign metres first appeared. At this point Adelung adds a lengthy footnote that begins:

“Attiker,” sagt Herr Biester, “erfanden neue Sylbenmaße,—aber Rammler soll das nicht!” Ich antworte: 1. Erfunden wird in der menschlichen Gesellschaft eigentlich nichton sondern herrschen, kurz wenn unsere schönen Schriftsteller angegeben hatten, mit klarent Bewußtseyn heraus gehoben, und der Absicht bequemer und angemessener gemacht. Was im eigentlichsten und schärfsten Verstande erfunden wird, ist für die menschliche Gesellschaft nur selten wirklich nützlich. 2. Weder Pindar noch Attiker haben wohl in diesem schärfsten Verstande Sylbenmaße erfunden, sondern was schon in der Sprache, dem Tone, den Tonmaße conventionellen Begriffe des Wohlklanges dunkel lag, herausgehoben näher bestimmt, und mit Bestimmtheit angewandt.

“Attic,” says Mr. Biester, “invented new metres—but Rammler should not!” I answer: 1. In human society, such invention is not actually inventing but a process of codifying, in brief, taking that which our most beautiful writers have expressed and extracting metre from the clarity of their poetic awareness with the intention of making a more convenient and suitable account. What is actually and literally invented is seldom of real use to human society. 2. Surely neither Pindar nor any Attic speaker invented metres in this narrow sense, but rather took what was already hidden in the language, the tone, the measures of  lovely-sounding conventional terms, and emphasized these more precisely, and applied them with more sureness.

Here's the bottom of p.146:

... and here's the top of p.147.

‘Rammler’ is the poet Karl Wilhelm Ramler, and ‘Biester’ the Berlin Professor Johann Erich Biester. In other words, the reason this sentence caught Coleridge's eye is precisely because it insists that what is called invention is actually discovery (except in a few, artificial and unimportant cases). But the specific context of this quotation had to do not with Kantian thought or human consciousness more generally but the narrower question of poetic metre. Which is pretty interesting, actually.