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?

John Sterling and Coleridge

 

    John Sterling, by Sir Anthony Coningham Sterling; early 1840s. National Portrait Gallery.

John Sterling died in 1844 of tuberculosis. He was only thirty-eight. A man of promise who in the end didn't have time to realise that promise, he's more famous now for the book his friend Thomas Carlyle wrote about him than for his own writings. And indeed, The Life of John Sterling (1851) is one of Carlyle's best books, though it is much more about Carlyle and his opinions than it is an account of the life of his friend. For example, and of relevance to this blog, it contains Carlyle's memories of visiting Coleridge during his late ‘Sage of Highgate’ phase: very entertainingly written if far from flattering:

To sit as a passive bucket and be pumped into, whether you consent or not, can in the long-run be exhilarating to no creature; how eloquent soever the flood of utterance that is descending. But if it be withal a confused unintelligible flood of utterance, threatening to submerge all known landmarks of thought, and drown the world and you!—I have heard Coleridge talk, with eager musical energy, two stricken hours, his face radiant and moist, and communicate no meaning whatsoever to any individual of his hearers,—certain of whom, I for one, still kept eagerly listening in hope; the most had long before given up, and formed (if the room were large enough) secondary humming groups of their own. He began anywhere: you put some question to him, made some suggestive observation: instead of answering this, or decidedly setting out towards answer of it, he would accumulate formidable apparatus, logical swim-bladders, transcendental life-preservers and other precautionary and vehiculatory gear, for setting out.

His talk, alas, was distinguished, like himself, by irresolution: it disliked to be troubled with conditions, abstinences, definite fulfilments;—loved to wander at its own sweet will, and make its auditor and his claims and humble wishes a mere passive bucket for itself. He had knowledge about many things and topics, much curious reading; but generally all topics led him, after a pass or two, into the high seas of theosophic philosophy, the hazy infinitude of Kantean transcendentalism, with its “sum-m-mjects” and “om-m-mjects.” Sad enough; for with such indolent impatience of the claims and ignorances of others, he had not the least talent for explaining this or anything unknown to them; and you swam and fluttered in the mistiest wide unintelligible deluge of things

Harsh! 

Sterling also visited the elderly Coleridge, and was much more favourably struck than was his fellow Scotsman. As a twenty-year old student at Cambridge Sterling wrote to a friend: ‘I scarcely hold fast by anything but Shakespeare, Milton, and Coleridge and I have nothing serious to say to any one but to read the Aids to Reflection on the formation of a Manly character—a book the more necessary now to us all because except in England I do not see that there is a chance of any men being produced anywhere.’ Richard Holmes takes up the story:

When he came down to visit Coleridge at Highgate in 1828 [aged 22], sometimes accompanied by J S Mill, his impressions took on yet more apocalyptic tones. Coleridge looked “as if he belonged not so much to this, or to any other age, as to history.” They talked of everything, from landscape gardening to Pantheism to the missionary preaching of Edward Irving. But what remained with Sterling was something more unsettling, the sense of a man who had been through some great personal and historical storm. “It is painful to observe in Coleridge that, with all the kindness and glorious far-seeing intelligence of his eye, there is a glare in it, a light half unearthly, half morbid. It is the glittering eye of the Ancient Mariner. His cheek too shows a flush of over-excitement, the red of a storm cloud at sunset. When he dies, another of the greatest of their race, will join the few Immortals, the ill understood and ill requited, who have walked the earth.” [Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Darker Reflections (HarperCollins 1998), 549]

Sterling himself embarked upon a career as an essayist and journalist. He published one novel: the 1885 Dictionary of National Biography entry talks of ‘his suggestive but unsatisfying novel of Arthur Coningsby’ and adds ‘another novel, Fitzgeorge, brought out by the publisher of Arthur Coningsby in 1832, has been attributed to Sterling, but it is impossible that he should have written it’, which is rather tantalising (since I've not read the latter book I can't speak to this judgment). Sterling was also a poet. Not a very good poet, but a poet nonetheless. Here, from Poems (1839), its rhyming-couplets clanking as it stomps along like a knight in ill-fitting armour, is his tribute to STC, simply entitled ‘Coleridge’:

Like some full tree that bends with fruit and leaves,
While gentle wind a quivering descant weaves,
He met the gaze; with sibyl eyes, and brow
By age snow-clad, yet bright with summer's glow;
His cheek was youthful, and his features played
Like lights and shadows in a flowery glade.
Around him flowed with many a varied fall
And depth of voice ’mid smiles most musical,
Words like the Seraph's when in Paradise
He vainly strove to make his hearers wise.
In sore disease I saw him laid, — a shrine
Half-ruined, and all tottering, still divine.
'Mid broken arch and shattered cloister hung
The ivy's green, and wreaths of blossom clung;
Through mingling vine and bay the sunshine fell
Or winds and moonbeams sported round the cell;
But o'er the altar burnt that heavenly flame
Whose life no damps of earth availed to tame.
And there have I swift hours a watcher been,
Heard mystic spells, and sights prophetic seen,
Till all beyond appeared a vast Inane,
Yet all with deeper life revived again;
And Nature woke in Wisdom's light, and grew
Instinct with lore that else she never knew,
Expanding spirits filled her countless forms,
And Truth beamed calmly through chaotic storms,
Till shapes, hues, symbols, felt the wizard's rod,
And while they sank in silence there was God.
O! Heart that like a fount with freshness ran,
O! Thought beyond the stature given to man,
Although thy page had blots on many a line,
Yet Faith remedial made the tale divine.
With all the poet's fusing, kindling blaze,
And sage's skill to thread each tangled maze,
Thy fair expressive image meets the view,
Bearing the sunlike torch, and subtle clew;
Yet more than these for thee the Christian's crown
By Faith and Peace outvalued all renown.
This wearing, enter yon supernal dome,
And reach at last thy calm ideal home!
Enough for us to follow from afar,
And joyous track thy clear emerging Star.

Appeared a vast Inane indeed. Eventually Sterling, deciding literature was not working out for him career-wise, embarked upon a life in the Church (when he died he was curate at the parish of Herstmonceux in Sussex); so it shouldn't surprise us that he presses the Christian Redemption of a Troubled Genius line in this poem.

Sterling also wrote a mildly comic epic called The Election; a Poem in Seven Books (1841). A parochial English borough loses its MP, and the bye-election is contested by Frank Vane (Sterling himself), and the blockheaded Peter Mogg. Campaigining gives Sterling the opportunity to sketch various types, but in the course of the poem Frank falls in love with Ann and decides to leave politics, in effect gifting the constituency to Mogg. My interest here is less in the Mudfog-esque satire of 1840s electoral practice and (considering under which bloggy aegis this post appears) more with glimpses of Coleridge. Here, for instance, from Book 5: the heroine Ann, having got herself ready for bed, and prayed, contemplates the cosmos in unschooled yet intuitively Coleridgean ways.

So mused the girl, with thoughts obscure though grand,
Whose worth she felt, but could not understand,
Nor heeded whence they came: for aught she knew,
From some hot, black, unearthly Timbuctoo,
Or danger-teeming doubt-infected land,
The soil of tenets marked as contraband.
For she nor sceptics read, nor dogmatists,
Nor knew how sophists bait theosophists;
Nor e'er had learnt, while sipping thought with tea,
To talk of Plato, Kant, and Koong-foo-tse.
She would have liked a fairy tale far more
Than Hegel's nay than Bentham's deepest lore;
Nor cared a scrap of curling-paper, if
Vorstellung is or is not mere Begriff;
Nor knew that virtue is but pleasure dressed
In what disguise opinion holds the best.
But she, though young, had been impelled to think
Without much help from printer's magic ink;
And her quick heart and sleepless fancy caught
Some wildfire sparks of philosophic thought;
And made her feel, not knowing why nor whence,
Nor finding words, although she had the sense,
That metaphysics, help they us or hurt,
Are nearer much to all than shift or shirt.

Coleridge isn't named here, obviously; but the reference to Kant and the use of those two Kantian terms, so important to Coleridge, surely give the game away. Kung Fu-tse (or as we now generally anglicise his name, Confucius) is an interesting referent in an 1841 poem, I think.

Carlyle had a low opinion of Sterling's novel Arthur Coningsby (1833):

The general impression it left on me, which has never since been renewed by a second reading in whole or in part, was the certain prefigurement to myself, more or less distinct, of an opulent, genial and sunny mind, but misdirected, disappointed, experienced in misery;—nay crude and hasty; mistaking for a solid outcome from its woes what was only to me a gilded vacuity. The hero an ardent youth, representing Sterling himself, plunges into life such as we now have it in these anarchic times, with the radical, utilitarian, or mutinous heathen theory, which is the readiest for inquiring souls; finds, by various courses of adventure, utter shipwreck in this; lies broken, very wretched: that is the tragic nodus, or apogee of his life-course. In this mood of mind, he clutches desperately towards some new method (recognizable as Coleridge's) of laying hand again on the old Church, which has hitherto been extraneous and as if non-extant to his way of thought; makes out, by some Coleridgean legedermain, that there actually is still a Church for him; that this extant Church, which he long took for an extinct shadow, is not such, but a substance; upon which he can anchor himself amid the storms of fate;—and he does so, even taking orders in it, I think. Such could by no means seem to me the true or tenable solution. Here clearly, struggling amid the tumults, was a lovable young fellow-soul; who had by no means yet got to land; but of whom much might be hoped, if he ever did. Some of the delineations are highly pictorial, flooded with a deep ruddy effulgence; betokening much wealth, in the crude or the ripe state. The hope of perhaps, one day, knowing Sterling, was welcome and interesting to me. Arthur Coningsby, struggling imperfectly in a sphere high above circulating-library novels, gained no notice whatever in that quarter; gained, I suppose in a few scattered heads, some such recognition as the above; and there rested. Sterling never mentioned the name of it in my hearing, or would hear it mentioned.

To be fair, it's a pretty bad novel. At the beginning of the story Arthur, an English gentleman of means, is a passionate radical, looking forward to the revolution that will right the wrongs of the world. His political views get in the way of his love for English rose, Isabel. For most of the book Arthur wanders about, moons after his girl and meets various people who tell their, sometimes lengthy stories. My favourite of these involves a Frenchman called Dumond. Having served as a soldier in Canada Dumond recalls how he become ‘indifferent to life’, since ‘rations were bad, and we had no claret in Canada’. His patrol is surprised by Indians:

After having killed thirteen of them with my own hand, I was taken prisoner. To avenge the death of their comrades, they resolved to inflict on me the most exquisite tortures; and to render their triumph the more signal, they carried me to the summit of a hill, at the distance of two leagues from the fortress in the garrison of which I had been the most distinguished soldier. An old chief offered to save me, if I would become his adopted son and marry his daughter. But my religion, my country, my fidelity to my mistress forbade it; and I indignantly refused. They tied me to the stake, and crowded round me, brandishing their knives and torches. [Sterling, Arthur Coningsby (1833), 3:34-35]

Things are looking grim, until, glancing up, Dumond sees ‘a small black body in the sky.’ It is a cannon-shell, fired from the fort, which ordnance has the following fortuitous effect: ‘the whole tribe of Indians was destroyed by the bursting of the shell, which lifted me into the air, and I fell at the feet of the colonel's lady, on one of the bastions of the fort.’ 

True story, bro.

The novel isn't all as bizarre as this, although it certainly takes its time, as fiction, getting started. Eventually Arthur travels to Paris just as the French Revolution is kicking off, the experience of which cures him of his earlier moon-headed radicalism. At one point Arthur encounters a crowd on the street: ‘squalid, blood-stained, and many of them intoxicated, they clashed their pikes and sabres to the music of the murderous Hymn of the Revolution.’ [3:70] Oh no!

He's arrested, released, and, utterly disillusioned of all his earlier political hope, pursued by ‘Disappointment, Grief, Remorse, Doubt, and, following behind, the darkest of all, Despair’, goes to live with a beautiful Frenchwoman called Victoria. The final third of the novel devolves into a series of lengthy extracts from Arthur's memorandum book, as the two lovers swap lecturettes on topics such as ‘Infinity’, ‘Human Perfectibility’ and ‘Hamlet’. Victoria sickens and dies of a Mystery Ailment, hanging-on just long enough to bestow upon Arthur several-hundred-pages-worth of her life story before she goes. He wanders Europe grief-stricken and finally returns to England, resolved to withdraw from society: ‘I would not utter a syllable or stir a finger to become as celebrated as Sesostris or Mahomet ... a man can propose to himself but one of two objects,—the world without and the world within. I have almost equal contempt for both.’ [3:371]

What, then, shall I do? Whither shall I betake myself? This was the question which I asked some months ago when I first came to this retreat. It stands but a few yards from the sea which I have always so much loved. I was born upon the shore and an Englishman has almost an innate propensity to delight and exult in the presence of his national element. In childhood I thought of it as a watery garden of God. Its birds, its winds, its never-ceasing melody, the innumerable colours born of its depths or reflected on its surface, all seemed to me divine. I have lived for days and nights alone in my own small skiff on the waste of waves, and been elevated by the conception of that unbounded elemental power, on whose breast I felt myself no more than a bubble of its spray. I have seen, on a sudden, through the enormous portals of a range of mountains, the ocean barrier rising solid and blacky as if from earth's foundations to the stars. ... in hours of vacuity and dejection, I have seen in the ocean a symbol of a blind, impersonal, eternal, self-existent, godless nature, in whose abysses man might lose his perplexed individual being, and find a fitting and final consummation to his despair.

These waves are now no more than so much brine, — a mighty piece of hydrostatic mechanism, splendid to the eye, astonishing to the intellect. Yet I have a certain dim and mournful pleasure, arising probably from the remembrance of former feelings, in walking along the sands on which the billows break, and catching the murmurs which are borne on the night-breeze through my chamber windows; or when morning opens on the waters. I still love to watch the spreading foam which brightens the sands into a mirror of the various heaven, and, fast disappearing, leaves them again a momentary blank. [Arthur Coningsby, 3:379-83]

The novel ends with Arthur living beside the sea (he calls it ‘this vast and mysterious girdle of the globe’ [3:381]; I wonder if Arnold read this novel prior to writing ‘Dover Beach’?) in a ruined castle, resolving to quit Europe and go live in a cabin in the middle of the American wilderness somewhere. I certainly don't find in it the passage from gloom through Coleridge towards a reconciliation with the Church of England that Carlyle implies is the novel's throughline: Arthur discovering ‘there actually is still a Church for him’ and ‘taking orders in it’, as Carlyle says in his summary simply doesn't describe the novel. Perhaps he never finished reading it.

Pantisocracy

 

It's a word that is, as you can see from this screenshot (click to embiggen), in the OED now: ‘a form of social organization in which all members are equal in social position and responsibility, usually also having property in common; a political doctrine advocating this. Chiefly with reference to the political ideas of a group of writers and intellectuals of the 1790s, including Robert Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.’ 

So, yes: Coleridge and Southey planned for a time to establish a Pantisocratic, utopian community in Kentucky: twelve married couples, clearing an area of land and living thereupon with all labour and possessions in common. Later they pinned their hopes upon the Susquehanna River in Maryland/ Pennsylvania. Coleridge wrote to Southey [6th September 1794] with the calculation that ‘£2000 will do’, that ‘we shall buy the land a great deal cheaper when we arrive in America than we could do in England.’ He added, rather over-optimistically, ‘that twelve men may easily clear 300 acres in four or five months’, adding that he had been speaking to an agent who ‘recommends the Susquehannah for its excessive beauty and its security from hostile Indians.’ Finally, as the project recoiled from its encounter with the Reality Principle, not least in financial terms, Southey proposed moving themselves and their wives instead to Wales, a downgrading of ambition that disappointed Coleridge muchly. In the end it all came to nothing.

The OED entry at the head of this post cites Southey as the first to use the word in print, but it was Coleridge's coinage: the root of the word being the Greek ἰσοκρατία. So: as democracy is rule by the demos, or people; as oligarchy is rule by the oligos or few, and as aristocracy is rule by the aristos or best (supposedly), so isocracy is rule by equals (as an isoscles triangle is one whose two longest sides are of equal length). Coleridge adds in the παντ-, or παν-, pan-, meaning all, to show not only that all will rule but that all will rule as equals. As Michael Murphy notes:

Ian Wylie argues that Pantisocracy was modelled on ‘the early Christian communities of the first centuries’; Kelvin Everest views the scheme as ‘a means of escape from the hostility of anti-jacobin England’ (influenced by Hartley’s Unitarianism); J. A. Appleyard reads Pantisocracy in terms of the philosophical systems of Hartley, Priestley, and Godwin; Peter Kitson examines the influence of Harrington and Puritan utopias; Leonard Deen focuses on the influence of Godwin, the Bible, and Hartley; Robert Sayre notes the coexisting traditions of the French Revolution and Romantic Utopianism; Stuart Andrews identifies a utopianism that has its roots in the American Revolution; and E. Logan explores Coleridge’s use of American travel accounts.

Godwin and Priestly were certainly the most immediate inspirations, at least so far as Coleridge was concerned. Writing to Southey [21st October 1794] he announced that ‘in the book of Pantisocracy I hope to have comprised all that is good in Godwin’ [Collected Letters 1:115] ... ‘all that was good’ being Coleridge's way of announcing that he was jettisoning the humanist and atheistical ‘bad’. In other letters he added to Godwinian thought Hartley’s system of association, from The Observations on Man (1749), extrapolating from principles of mental and perceptual connection of ideas, feelings and sensations to social connections of fellowship, ethics and benevolence: ‘the ardour of private Attachments makes Philanthropy a necessary habit of the Soul. I love my Friend—such as he is, all mankind are or might be! The deduction is evident. Philanthropy (and indeed every other Virtue) is a thing of Concretion—Some home-born Feeling is the centre of the Ball, that, rolling on thro’ Life collects and assimilates every congenial Affection. [Collected Letters 1:86].

There's been a lot written on Coleridge's concept of Pantisocracy, but less on its origins as a piece of terminology. What was in Coleridge's mind as he coined the word? There are two possible answers I think. One is that he was reading-up ancient history. The crucial thing here is that various Greek city-states had various ideas of governance, democracy (as at Athens) being only one among many. There were other (as we might say) ‘democratic’ social models in the larger environment. And, to be specific, the word ἰσοκρατία, meaning a social system of ‘equal power’, is a word only used, in this political sense, by Herodotus. He uses it to describe not a Greek polis but a people in Asia Minor: the Issedones. Interestingly, their radical equality of social distribution was a specifically gendered matter: δὲ δίκαιοι καὶ οὗτοι λέγονται εἶναι, ἰσοκρατέες δὲ ὁμοίως αἱ γυναῖκες τοῖσι ἀνδράσι ‘these are said to be a law-abiding people, too, and the women to have equal power [ἰσοκρατέες] with the men’ [Herodotus 2:26.2]. In other words, if democracy is the rule by the demos excluding women, foreigners and slaves, isocracy is the rule by men and women. Is that what Coleridge had in mind?

There's another possibility, which is that Coleridge came upon the word not in Herodotus but Galen. This second-century Greek physician used the word in a physiological rather than a political sense: a well-balanced individual enjoyed health, he argued, on account of his or her inner ἰσο-κράτεια [‘equilibrium, equivalence’; Galen Historia Philogia, 126]. This makes more sense to me, as a source for Coleridge's neologism: that all (pan) should be in equilibrium for a perfect society. And if it's where Coleridge found the word it's interesting because it suggests he was reading Galen quite early in the 1790s Searching his corpus I can only find much later, occasional Galenic references, usually where Galen is (for instance) quoted in ‘Sennertus’, the 17th-century German physician Daniel Sennert. So that would be interesting.

Which is more likely, do you think? That Coleridge was extrapolating Heorodotian ideas of social democracy into the modern 1790s? Or that he was thinking of social equality in physiological terms? 

Coca-Coleridge

 

"The Safety of the Country" (1807): A New Coleridge Poem?

 

New in the sense of hitherto unnoticed. This is only speculative, but on balance I'd say these verses are by Coleridge. See what you think.

So, my starting point was this eight-line political squib, which certainly is by Coleridge: ‘The Taste of the Times’:

Some whim or fancy pleases every age;
For talents premature ’tis now the rage.
In Music how great Handel would have smil'd
T' have seen whole crowds enraptur'd with a child!
A Garrick we have had in little Betty,
And now, we're told, we have a Pitt in Petty.
All must allow, since thus it is decreed.
He is a very Petty Pitt indeed.

J. C. C. Mays in his edition of the Poetical Works has this as #384, and records in the headnote that ‘the only known text of the poem is a transcript by John Taylor Coleridge in his Commonplace book, subscribed “S.T.C.”’ 

The joke here concerns the extreme youth of Lord Henry Petty, who, though only 25, was Chancellor of the Exchequer in Greville's ‘Ministry of All the Talents’, the government which succeeded the death of Pitt in January 1806. Coleridge returned to England from Malta on the 17th August that year and presumably wrote the poem thereafter. Mays adds, shrewdly, ‘it is likely that the poem was copied from a contemporary newspaper which has not been traced.’

Being curious I checked, and Mays is right: this poem appeared in the Morning Post 25th February 1807. I wasn’t able to find an actual copy of the paper, short of paying a hefty subscription for full access to the British Newspaper Archives database, but I did find a copy of the anthology The Spirit of the Public Journals 1807: Being an Impartial Selection of the Most Ingenious Essays and Jeux D'Espirit That Appear in the Newspapers and Other Publications, Volume 11 (1808), a publication which selected and reprinted choice verse and prose from a range of British papers. And there is Coleridge’s poem, subscripted ‘From the Morning Post’, and with a few variants from the version Mays, following JTC, prints:

Some whim or fancy pleases every age;
And talents premature are now the rage.
In music how great Handel would have smil'd
T' have seen whole crowds in raptures with a child!
A Garrick we have had in little Betty,
And now, we're told, we have a Pitt in Petty.
All must allow, since thus it is decreed.
He is a very Petty Pitt indeed.

The child singer famous for performing Handel was Maria Poole, later Mrs Dickons, who was only six years old when she started performing, and who, engaged by Covent Garden in the 1790s, drew large crowds. The reference to ‘Betty’ is to a famous child actor who first trod the boards in December 1804 at the age of 13: William Henry West Betty (1791 -1874), known as ‘the Young Roscius’. Betty's father auditioned the boy before Michael Atkins, manager of the Belfast Theatre, who said ‘I never dared to indulge in the hope of seeing another Garrick, but I have seen an infant Garrick in Betty.’   

So far so trivial: nice to trace the poem (though it is a very minor piece of Coleridge), and to have a text closer, even if only in small ways, to what STC actually wrote. 

But here's the kicker: because, as you can see from the screenshot at the head of this post, The Spirit of the Public Journals prints ‘The Taste of the Times’ as a twofer, together with a similarly light-hearted political squib, ‘The Safety of the Country’:

                    — — Non deficit alter Aureus;
                 et simili frondescit virga metallo.

When Richmond's great Duke long ago sallied forth,
He entrench’d the whole country—south, east, west, and north;
For he held that this mis’rable nation of ours
Must be sav'd by mud walls, palisadoes, and towers.
Next Windham, with projects and crotchets quite new,
Comes forward (for he will be Quixotting too)
And with Crawfurd, as Sancho and Dapple to back him,
He defies all the windmills on earth to attack him;
Our army, which cost us such trouble to train,
He begs to set free, to enlist them again;
Our militia, he thinks, to our strength may conduce,
If, to make them more strong, you their numbers reduce;
While the poor volunteers, those unfortunate elves!
He dresses in green—to be kill'd by themselves:
And their leaders—whom fortune and rank may make prouder,
He mentions as proper provision for powder.
Jack Tar, who has heard them these projects discuss,
Exclaims— “Let them leave but the ocean to us;
We care not a jot what these lubbers are a’ter—
They shall find that the land shall be sav’d by the water.”
             MILITARIS

Is this Coleridge too? JTC didn't think it worth copying-out into his memorandum book (perhaps it was too long; or perhaps he just didn't like it. It's not as witty as ‘The Taste of the Times’, I think). The target of this satire is William Windham, a member, like Petty, of the the Ministry of All the Talents in 1806–7. As Secretary for War and the Colonies, Windham undertook various reforms of the army (specifically, he abolished the ballot for the militia to ensure that it was staffed with volunteers rather than impressed men, and he limited service in the Army to seven years, hoping thereby to attract more recruits. This poem, clearly, thinks both measures bad ones.) The Latin epigraph is from Vergil, Aeneid 6:144-45 ‘[when the first bough is torn off], a second also of gold soon follows, and a new twig shoots forth leaves of the same metal.’ Though, as you can see, the poet has added a non to the start of this quotation, negating it: so once the first twig is torn off, no golden bough succeeds.

The pseudonym ‘Militaris’ is not one that Coleridge uses elsewhere, but so far as I can see neither did anyone else. I've searched for other poems by ‘Militaris’ and can't find any, either in the Morning Post (which can be searched at the British Newspaper Archives, although if you actually want to access the results of your search you need to pay them a subscription fee), or in any other publication of the period. And STC did use a variety of pseudonyms. It doesn't seem impossible to me that he might pick this name for a squib directed at the Secretary of State for War.

My main point is that the approach of both poems is the same: pick a member of the Ministry of All the Talents, then make fun of them by riffing on their name. In the first poem, it's ‘Petty’, as ‘petty’, ‘Pitt-y’ and ‘Betty’; in the second one ‘Windham’, as ‘Windmill’ and so to ‘Tilting at Windmills’, Don Quixote and all the rest (‘Dapple’, mentioned, is Sancho Panza's mule; Colonel Crawfurd was an MP and soldier who backed Windham's reforms in the House). What's funny about Petty is that he is so young. What's funny about Windham is that he's so Quixotic.

It really does seem that these two poems go together. So if the first is by Coleridge, then isn't it possible the second is too?

Astounding Novel by John Coleridge!

 John Coleridge? Any relation, I wonder? Alas, no.

‘John Coleridge’ was one of the pseudonyms used by the US author brothers Earl Andrew Binder (1904-1966), who was born in Austria-Hungary and came to the US in 1910, and Otto Oscar Binder (1911-1975), who was the more active (and ultimately better known) of the two; after approximately 1934, when Earl became inactive as a writer, Otto continued to sign himself Eando Binder, so that some Eando Binder books – they were all published after 1940; several contain pre-1935 material – are collaborative and some by Otto alone. Together the brothers wrote eleven stories as John Coleridge and one as Dean D O'Brien, while Otto alone also wrote as Gordon A Giles and, later, as Ione Frances (or Ian Francis) Turek (forms of his wife's maiden name), did some work under the name Will Garth, and finally published a couple of novels under his own name. A third brother, Jack Binder was an illustrator who did much of the early drawing for Captain Marvel, which was regularly scripted by Otto. The brothers all retained the German pronunciation of their surname, with a short i.

Still: STC was certainly interested in ‘the life beyond ...’  

Water, Water Everywhere ...

 

Could these be Coleridge's most famous lines?

Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink. [Ancient Mariner (1834 version), lines 119-122]

Where did they come from? Out of Coleridge's pure imagination, perhaps. Still: ‘it is scarcely practicable for a man,’ as he once noted, ‘to write in the ornamented style on any subject without finding his poem, against his will and without his previous consciousness, a cento of lines that had pre-existed in other works’ [Griggs (ed), Coleridge: Collected Letters (1956-71), 3:469-70].

We know that Coleridge read Angelo Poliziano, or Politian (1454-94). He talks about him in Church and State [CC 10:64] and variously in the Marginalia and Notebooks [374, 1673, 2670]. And in the Biographia he mocks George Canning for plagiarising some Poliziano in his university prize-winning poem Iter ad Meccam, ‘The Pilgrimage to Mecca’:

‘In the Nutricia of Politian, there occurs this line:

“Pura coloratos interstrepit unda lapillos.”

Casting my eye on a University prize poem, I met this line:

“Lactea purpureos interstrepit unda lapillos.”

Now look out in the Gradus for purus, and you find, as the first synonyme, lacteus; for coloratus, and the first synonyme is purpureas. I mention this by way of elucidating one of the most ordinary processes in the ferrumination of these centos.’ [Biographia, ch 1]

Centos again. Coleridge's mind was running on questions of plagiary, advertent or inadvertent. The first line of Latin quoted there (it's from Poliziano’s Rustica rather than his Nutricia, but who's counting) means: ‘the pure stream goes murmuring over little coloured pebbles’. The plagiarised line means: ‘the milk-white stream goes murmuring over the little purple pebbles.’ Canning capped his time as a student at Oxford by winning the poetry prize in 1789. He went on, of course, to become Prime Minister. Here Coleridge pays back the ridicule Canning had subjected him to in his reactionary newspaper The Anti-Jacobin, by accusing the eminent statement of plagiary (‘ferrumination’ seals the joke: the Latin ferrumino means ‘to cement, solder, join’, and ‘soldering’ is, of course, the principle strategy involved in canning, a process patented in 1810). 

What does all this have to do with the Ancient Mariner? Well, here's one of Poliziano's more famous short poems, ‘In Amicam’ [Epigrammata, 64]:

Allicis, expellis, sequeris, fugis, es pia, et es trux;
   me vis, me non vis, me crucias, et amas.
promittis, promissa negas, spem mi eripis, et das.
   iam iam ego vel sortem Tantale malo tuam.
durum ferre sitim circum salientibus undis,
   durius in medio nectare ferre sitim.

P.'s ‘amica’ is the woman he loves, and her treatment of him is not consistent. Tricky to capture the compression of the Latin in English, mind. Here's a fairly slack version:

You lure me, you banish me; you follow, you flee; you're kind and are cruel;
   you want me, you don't want me; you torment me, you're in love.
You promise then deny your promise, you snatch away my hope and offer it.
   Right now I feel like Tantalus in wanting you:
how hard my thirst, surrounded by salty waves,
   how hard my thirst in the midst of such nectar!

Here's another version:

You tease, reject; follow, flee; are kind, cruel;
   want me, don't want; torment me, are loving.
You vow, break your vow, crush hope and give it.
   Right now I'm Tantalus in wanting you:
hard thirst surrounded by salty waves,
   hard in the midst of such nectar to thirst

That's probably a bit elliptical. At any rate, it strikes me that Coleridge's potent image of desperate thirst in the midst of salt water has an antecedent in Poliziano's little love poem. Then again, I'm not accusing him of Canning-like plagiary. These things register, sinking into the mulch of the creative imagination, and are reworked. By excerpting the image from Poliziano's mannered itinerary of erotic contrasts Coleridge frees it from its rather starchy wit and re-somatizes it as something universal, something indeed existential. Immature poets, as Eliot said, imitate, mature poets steal and good poets make what they take into something better.