The "Dear C" Letter in Chapter 13 of the "Biographia Literaria"

I enjoyed this blogpost by Jennifer Reeves, Abigail Thompson, and Ben Koshy on an annotated edition of Coleridge's Biographia owned, now, by the Armstrong Browning Library in Texas: ‘The Ghost Annotators of Coleridge’s First Edition of Biographia Literaria Explained?’ They argue that the various marginalia added to the edition in their possession are by Fanny, or Frances, Scroope (1794-1858). Coleridge and she had not, so far as I can tell, ever met; so her comments (listed in the article) elucidating or explaining STC's references and meaning must be either her pure speculation, or else must rely on some other source of info. 

The Biographia was published in two vols in 1817: chapters 1-13 occupying vol 1, and chapter 14-24 vol 2. The second volume is mostly given over to ‘practical criticism’, lots of close-reading of poetry (by Shakespeare, Wordsworth and others) followed by some various bits and bobs, letters from Coleridge's trip into Germany, a review of a contemporary play and so on. The first volume is notoriously tricky: its first four chapters give us a few sketches from Coleridge's early life and reading, meeting Southey and Wordsworth, writing his first poetry, and chapter 4 concludes with STC's celebrated distinction between ‘fancy’ and ‘imagination’, or at least the first intimation of a definition. Then the argument veers in an unexpected direction: chapters 5 through 12 go into immense and sometimes baffling detail on metaphysical questions to do with the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness, the ground of subjectivity, the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity, Hartley, Leibniz, Kant, Schelling and various others. Finally in chapter 13 Coleridge returns to fancy vs imagination, now styled as the culimation of the detailed philosophical work of the previous chapters. 

He opens the chapter with a paragraph plagiarised from Schelling, spends a little while praising Kant, readying himself to explain the imagination/fancy distinction in a thoroughly philosophically grounded manner and then ... he doesn't. There's a little line of asterisks, and then an interjection: ‘Thus far had the work been transcribed for the press, when I received the following letter from a friend, whose practical judgment I have had ample reason to estimate and revere, and whose taste and sensibility preclude all the excuses which my self-love might possibly have prompted me to set up in plea against the decision of advisers of equal good sense, but with less tact and feeling.’ Coleridge then quotes the letter, its beginning:

Dear C.

You ask my opinion concerning your Chapter on the Imagination, both as to the impressions it made on myself, and as to those which I think it will make on the Public, i.e. that part of the public, who, from the title of the work and from its forming a sort of introduction to a volume of poems, are likely to constitute the great majority of your readers.

And on, through many paragraphs, to its end:

All success attend you, for if hard thinking and hard reading are merits, you have deserved it.

Your affectionate, &c.

The drift of the letter is: I know, because I have seen it, that you have written a lengthy philosophical account of the difference between the imagination and the fancy (manuscript ‘which cannot, when it is printed, amount to so little as an hundred pages’), but you would be best advised not to include it here, since it would weary your readers and add to the expense of producing the book. Better to reserve that to your forthcoming Logosophia, which will explain everything about everything. So, Coleridge says, yielding to the advice of this, my friend: ‘I shall content myself for the present with stating the main result of the chapter, which I have reserved for that future publication, a detailed prospectus of which the reader will find at the close of the second volume.’ The summary ‘main result’ follows:

The IMAGINATION then I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary IMAGINATION I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate: or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead. FANCY, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites. The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space; while it is blended with, and modified by that empirical phaenomenon of the will, which we express by the word Choice. But equally with the ordinary memory the Fancy must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association.

And a thousand academic disputations were launched.

From whom was this letter? You can see Ms Scroope's guess at the head of this post: she presumed it had been written by Robert Southey. It makes sense. Southey was, Wordsworth aside, Coleridge's most publically eminent friend (Wordsworth and Coleridge's friendship had suffered a breach, although there's no way Scroope could have known that; but the criticism, negative and positive, Coleridge lavishes upon Wordsworth in the Biographia itself rules him out as the author of such a letter. A decade earlier Coleridge had actually solicited a letter from Southey that he might publish in The Friend (although in the event he confected his own letter, addressed tantalisingly to a certain ‘R.L.’, whoever that might be).

This (I mean, Ms Scroope's assumption) is interesting to me. I hadn't really given much thought to what contemporaries made of this letter, because I knew what is now well known: Coleridge wrote it himself. As he wrote to his friend Thomas Curtis [29 April 1817; Collected Letters 4:728] that letter ‘addressed to myself as from a friend at the close of the first volume of the Literary Life was written without taking my pen off the paper except to dip it in the inkstand.’  

Perhaps the most famous in the entire Biographia, this thirteenth chapter both carries through the book's larger philosophical argument about the relationship of (immortal, spiritual) subjectivity to (finite, material) objectivity, and also picks up again the definition of ‘fancy’ and ‘imagination’ from Chapter 4. It brings both threads to a degree of argumentative conclusion, with a piece of creative conceptualisation that is genuinely original and suggestive and has proved very influential. It is rather surprising, therefore, that there is an almost complete consensus among the critics that Chapter 13 represents the point at which the larger project of the Biographia breaks down. Paul Hamilton, for instance, talks starkly about ‘Coleridge’s failure to achieve what he set out to do’, identifying the breach at this point in chapter 13 where the fake letter is inserted. ‘Deep in the heart of English critical theory, at the centre of Coleridge’s exposition of his own views on the relation which philosophy bears to a proper understanding of poetry, there is a disabling gap in the argument ... the two volumes of the Biographia slide inexorably apart ... The abstruse, technical discussion towards the end of the first volume becomes increasingly disreputable with the accumulation of more and more unacknowledged borrowings, mostly from German philosopher Schelling. With little warning, and for no apparent philosophical reason, the argument halts. On opening the second volume the reader is plunged into a lucid practical criticism of poetry.’ [Paul Hamilton, Coleridge’s Poetics (Blackwell, 1983), 8.]

‘Surprising’ is perhaps the wrong word. It is, actually, easy enough to see why critics believe the Biographia stumbles and falls here—it is because Coleridge, in effect, says that it does. Critics have generally entered into a strange double-think with respect to this fake letter. On the one hand, they doubt—with good cause—that Coleridge had amongst his papers a 100-page MS treatise on Ideal Realism, or even notes to that effect, that needed only to be set up in type. After all, the biographical record is of Coleridge desperately casting around for extra copy to fill up the blank pages in his book. The chapter breaks off, critics suggest, not because Coleridge is (as he claims in the letter) sparing the reader further abstruseness, nor because he is worried about the extra cost of printing. The truth is he has run out of steam, and reference to this supposed lucubration is at best playful, and at worse actively disingenuous—after all, he pretends this is a letter from a friend, but it is not even that! So critics refuse to take Coleridge at his word here. But at the same time, critics do take Coleridge at his word that these extra 100 pages are needful to complete the larger argumentative design of the Biographia. They believe him when he says that the Biographia crumbles to pieces, and does so precisely here. Why? I’m reminded of ‘Kubla Khan’, a poem widely taken as an incomplete fragment, but a poem nonetheless which (as several critics have argued) actually embodies a degree of formal completion and wholeness rare in any poetry. Why do we take it as an incomplete fragment? Because that’s what Coleridge, in his preliminary note to the poem, says it is. We are free to disagree with him on this, for ‘Kubla Khan’, and, I think, for the Biographia itself.

I am not suggesting that there is some higher, mystic unity to the whole of the Biographia Literaria. Much of the volume is diffuse and scattered, and a great deal of the larger compositional design was sacrificed to the exigencies of dictation, publishing and Coleridge’s state of mind. But the option is open to us to judge this chapter on what it contains rather than on the meta-textual games it plays. The ‘letter from a friend’ can of course be read (as many have read it) as an attempt to disguise Coleridge’s sheepish realisation that he had run out of copy and had neither the time nor the energy to generate more. On the other hand we can, if we choose, read it as a playful embodiment of one of the Biographia’s key themes: the capacity of subjectivity to objectivise itself.

This is because one of the things this letter does is to introduce a new mode of fictionalising the writer’s consciousness. Coleridge has already discussed his ability, which he shares with all of us, to imagine himself as an entity in the world, to think about his own modes of thinking. And, secondarily, he has set out in the book we are reading to write a version of himself as he used to be, a first person rendering into chronologically prior third-person character (reading Bowles, wandering the West Country with Wordsworth and so on). This secondary objectivisation of one’s subjectivity is limited to writers, rather than being a feature of all human consciousness; and for Coleridge the crucial thing about it is its fidelity. But here, with the ‘letter from a friend’, Coleridge introduces a third mode. One can objectivise oneself by thought, in the present; and by memory, in the past; but one can also generate a fictionalised version of oneself. Here Coleridge does just that by undertaking a kind of Gollum-strategy, talking about himself in the third person as if he were a separate individual – in fact by recreating himself as a fictional character, ‘a friend, whose practical judgement I have had ample reason to estimate and revere’.

It is almost too obvious to need adding: these three modes of objectivised subjectivity – Coleridge himself, Coleridge’s memory of how he used to be, and a sort of puppet-show fictionalised version of Coleridge that he has concocted—correspond directly to the primary imagination, secondary imagination and fancy. (I particularly like the way Coleridge begins the letter ‘Dear C’ and ends it ‘Your affectionate &c’; a strategy which strings the letter, written, after all, by Coleridge to Coleridge, between the actual ‘C.’ and the fictionalised ‘& C.’, this ‘and-C.’ emblematising a sort of secondary, supplemental echo of the original.) Otherwise what do we have, but a chapter that promises to define Imagination, and does so brilliantly? In what way does it makes sense to call this a fragment?