Coleridge in Malta

 

Here's an anecdote about Coleridge in Malta that I don't think anybody has noticed (it's buried in the middle of an 1862 Macmillan's Magazine review, by one ‘A Wilson’, of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poems; not the kind of place one might expect to find a story about Coleridge). The most detailed and thorough account of Coleridge's year and a half in Malta is Donald Sultana's Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Malta and Italy (Oxford: Blackwell 1969), and he nowhere mentions this little incident.

It's interesting because it cleaves to the popular prejudice about Coleridge as a dreamy-eyed poet unsuited to practical matters. This, it must be said, is really not the portrait of STC in Malta that emerges from Sultana's book (or from Richard Holmes's biography, which draws heavily on Sultana for its Malta sections). There the emphasis is on how hard Coleridge worked, and how effective an administrator he proved, passing a wide range of bandi (legislative proclamations), sitting-in on Sir Alexander Ball's cabinet meetings, attending court, overseeing oaths and sorting-out disagreements between locals, colonial officials, disputes between ships docked at the port and so on. This Macmillan's Magazine account has a ‘print the legend’ vibe about it, doesn't it. Although if, as he claims he did, ‘A Wilson’ heard it verbatim from somebody who had actually worked with Ball and Coleridge in Malta 1804-05, it might be true. (Although surely the peacock's feather pen is an embellishment? Or were they really a thing?)

Whose Marginalia Are These?

 

Hmm. Anyway: the story so far—I was chasing-up something pursuant to Coleridge's reading of Bishop Joseph Butler, the eighteenth-century Anglican theologian and moral philosopher. We know Coleridge read Butler; he several times refers to him, and George Whalley's multi-volume edition of STC's Marginalia records some notes he made in a copy of Butler's The Analogy of Religion (1736), perhaps (Whalley suggests) between 1808 and 1815 [CC 12:1, 867-9]. Whalley notes that the actual volume into which the notes were made is ‘not located’ and prints the three marginalia from his own ‘Lost List’ (a handlist Whalley prepared of ‘books known to have been annotated by Coleridge but not located at the time this edition went to press’; mostly these are marginalia copied-out from STC's books by others in other places).

So: for instance, Coleridge annotated this passage, in the first chapter of Butler's book (‘Of a Future Life’):

All presumption of death’s being the destruction of living beings, must go upon supposition that they are compounded; and so, discerptible. But since consciousness is a single and indivisible power, it should seem that the subject in which it resides must be so too. For were the motion of any particle of matter absolutely one and indivisible, so as that it should imply a contradiction to suppose part of this motion to exist, and part not to exist, i.e. part of this matter to move, and part to be at rest, then its power of motion would be indivisible; and so also would the subject in which the power inheres, namely, the particle of matter: for if this could be divided into two, one part might be moved and the other at rest, which is contrary to the supposition. In like manner it has been argued, and, for any thing appearing to the contrary, justly, that since the perception or consciousness, which we have of our own existence, is indivisible, so as that it is a contradiction to suppose one part of it should be here and the other there; the perceptive power, or the power of consciousness, is indivisible too: and consequently the subject in which it resides, i.e. the conscious Being.

This is what STC wrote:

Is the motion of a bullet from a gun divisible? If not, here is an indivisible action of a discerptible substance. I note this to shew the folly and danger of drawing arguments respecting the mind from the observed properties of matter—but (or/ and) in strict logic the whole must end in a paralogism, or idem pro alio [‘the same [term] for a different thing’] for what do we know of motion but as an act of our own consciousness—but as our consciousness so modified.

Now: Google have scanned various nineteenth-century editions of Butler's Analogy of Religion into Google Books (that excellent resource), including the London 1829 edition whose title page is at the head of this post, which I happened to be reading. Its first portion is quite extensively annotated, although (a) no name is written anywhere that might identify by whom, and (b) alas, most of the marginalia have been rendered too faint to read by the scanning process, perhaps because they were originally written in pencil (STC annotated books in pencil and pen, depending on what he had to hand). Click to embiggen, though it won't do you much good.

It's tantalising. Now, its very possible these notes were not written by STC, but it's not impossible they were, and it would be nice to be more sure. In one instance only (I think I'm right in saying) the Google Books scan actually captures a legible marginalium. It is, interestingly, attached to the same passage Whalley records STC as engaging with, which I quote above. Here's the whole page. You'll see an illegible pencil marginalium on the left, and a clearer, ink one at the bottom.

The left-hand marginalium is not, I think, long enough to be the passage Whalley records above (and indeed: though he doesn't have the actual volume, Whalley calculates it must be a 1788 or 1791, not an 1829, edition of Butler's work). But STC very often annotated the same book in different editions at different times, so that wouldn't disqualify this, on its own, from being Coleridge's. Here's a closer view of the bottom note:

So far as I can make it out, this says: ‘we find in old age the mental faculties almost invariably failing with the corporeal, not with reception of new ideas, which would be accommodated by weakness of the means of sensation’. Does that look like Coleridge's handwriting to you?

I'm honestly not sure. It's certainly a Coleridgean sentiment: Whalley records a later marginalium, annotating a passage in which Taylor argues: ‘Further, there are instances of mortal diseases, which do not at all affect our present intellectual powers; and this affords a presumption, that those diseases will not destroy these present powers. Indeed it appears that there is no presumption that the dissolution of the body is the destruction of the living agent. By the same reasoning, it must appear too, that there is no presumption, from their mutually affecting each other, that the dissolution of the body is the destruction of our present reflecting powers: indeed instances of their not affecting each other, afford a presumption of the contrary.’ To which Coleridge objected:

This is surely a sophism. We do not imagine that the lungs are instruments of thought or of love—but of breathing—but we now that breathing is a necessary condition of tyhe motion & proper warmth of the blood—& these of the proper functions of the brain. What wonder then if a man's brain should remain a fit instrument for thinking, while the lungs continue to permit breathing, tho' in pain. But let the disorder or a bullet destroy the lungs, the thought-organ is soon rendered useless. Butler ought to have shewn instances of diseases attacking the probable organs of thought, such as inflammations or palsies of the brain, that left the reflective powers in full vigor. This he could not do, & less than this is Legerdemain. [CC 12:1, 868]

Coleridge annotated thousands of volumes over the course of his life, and it's possible that these marginalia are his, and that this volume happened to be the one Google selected to digitise. It's also possible this is some quite other geezer.  What do you think?

‘Poem: Address on W. Allston's Large Landscape Sent by Sea to England’ (1806)

Here's another idea for a poem that Coleridge never got around to writing. This is from his notebooks [CN 2:2813], and perhaps dates to April 1806:

Poem. Address on W. Alston's large Landscape sent by sea to England/ threnic on the perishability by accident as well as time, & the narrow Sphere of action of Picture/Printing yet even MSS, Homer &c &c &c — but Apelles, Protogenes, ah where?—Spenser's Faery Queen, VI, Last Books, & his Comedies/but on what authority does this rest?—

Coleridge had befriended the American painter Washington Allston in Rome. He praisingly mentions the ‘large Landscape’ Allston had recently completed several times in the notebooks, often under the title ‘Swiss Landskip’, though Allston actually exhibited it under the title ‘Landscape, Diana on a Chase.’ Coleridge's notebook entry 2831, quoted at length below, is a detailed verbal description of the canvas. 

Before I get to that, you can see the image for yourself, reproduced at the head of this post. Or perhaps you can't see it, or at least can't see the canvas that Coleridge saw. After painting it in Rome in 1805 (from sketches Allston had made whilst travelling through Switzerland) the artist had it shipped to England. The canvas was damaged in transit. Allston himsef left Italy for America and marriage with Ann Channing in 1808; he and his new wife came to England in 1811 and stayed for many years. Allston was irked by the damage to his canvas, and further irked by what he regarded as incompetent restoration. In the words of the catalogue of the Fogg Museum (in Cambridge MA, where the painting is currently located) Allston later ‘disavowed authorship of the painting, claiming that an aggressive cleaning had ruined his original conception’.

That ruination, to whatever degree it damaged the original, was the point that Coleridge planned to highlight in his poem, of course. According to the notebook entry I've already quoted he was going to do so by comparing what happened to Allston's painting to Homer (the loss of whose comic epic Margites, to stand alongside the martial epic of the Iliad and the peripatetic epic of the Odyssey, has been widely deplored), to the near-total loss of the work of the in-their-time much-praised classical artists Apelles and Protogenes, and to the fact that Spenser only wrote half of the projected twelve books of his Fairie Queene, as well as the story that he wrote nine comic plays, none of which survive today (a letter to Spenser from his friend Gabriel Harvey mentions ‘your nine Englishe Commoedies, and your Latine Stemmata Dudleiana’, although there seems to be some scholarly doubt on whether these nine ever actually existed). Coleridge's theme, evidently, would have been the precarity of art, written or painted. 

The painting, incompetently restored though it may have been, looks fine to me. Here is Coleridge's stroke-by-stroke description of it, written at length into his notebook, perhaps soon after that earlier entry. It looks to me very much as though Coleridge is sketching out ideas for his poem.

 

Mr Allston's Landscape—— // Lefthand of the Foreground/ Side of a Rock, steep as a wall, of purplish hue, naked all but one patch of Bushage, breaking the Line of the Edge about a yard from the ground, and another much smaller and thinner a little above it/ & here and there a moss-stain. Up the rock, a regular-shaped Pine, like its own Shadow, as I have observed in Nature/ at the foot of the Pine & next the {Side} frame a bush with trodden Ferns at its feet, which almost hide a small Cleft or Fissure in the rock, beautiful purple-crimson mosses on the other side of the fissure and slopes down to the bottom, fissure with ferns & mosses & naked purple rock last/ the small Cleft touches the junction of the side & bottom frame/ & three spans from thence commences the great chasm, & dark, bridged over by the weedy tree, but slimy, the bark half-scathed & jagged/ oer a perilous bridge/ take care, for heaven's sake/ it begins smooth scathed and sattiny, mouldring, barkless, knotty/ red Flowers growing up beside it/ well, here rises the forked old Trunk, its left Fork scathed and sattiny and seeming almost to correspond with the bridge-tree Perilous ground between this Trunk and that noble Tree which with its graceful Lines of motion exhales up into the sky/ for when I look at it, it rises indeed, even as smoke in calm weather, always the same height & shape, & yet you see it move/ who has cut down its twin bough, its brother?—Well—do not blame it/ for it has made such a sweet Stool at the bottom of the Tree, with and the high top with its umbrella cloud of Foliage is over your head—behind this and the Trunk is that red spot, scarlet moss-cups or a lichen stain.—from this Tree, bushes and a most lovely pine tree {one of} the boundaries of the left forground that, & a high brown bush behind, & the great Bowder stone on its left, which at its bottom half touches the edge of the purple cloak and I must climb over it to get to the prospect of the far valley hidden by the Stone & the Rock, and a Tree all Foliage, growing behind the great stone & between it and the triangular Interspace between the Rock/ and in this vale, dim seen, field & wood & sunshine shaft is distanced by the snowy Mountain/  

This is the left hand of the Picture/the middle the sunshiny mountain all jagged and precipitous, in smooth plates of rock, yet the whole all rough from their relative positions to each other/its scales of armour, behemoth/the Lake with filmy Light, the bushy Island, the tree on its sloping bank, so steep! and shewing its steepness by its own incumbency/ observe its slim trunk seen through its vapour-cloud of Foliage/and then the dog with its two hind feet of higher ground/But the right hand of the Picture, the tree with its cavern making roots stretching out to some faintly purplish Stones that connect the right extremity with the purple rock on the left extremity (—N.B. the color is really grey-paint, but in appearance & so call it, it is grey-blue faintly purplish)—& how by small stones, scattered at irregular distances along the foreground even to one in the very centre or bisection of the foreground, which seems to balance & hold even all the tints of the whole picture, the keystone of its colors—so aided by the bare earth breaking in & making an irregular road to the Lake on which that faery figure shoots along as one does in certain Dreams, only that it touches the earth which yet it seems to have no occasion to touch/ but the delicate black & o how delicate grey-white Greyhound, whose two colors amalgamated make exactly the grey-blue of the larger & the 12 small stones behind & around them & even the halo (still with a purplish grey) of the crescent carries on the harmony, & with its bright white crescent forms a transition to the bright left-hand thick body-branch & trunk of the largest tree/What a delicious trail of ivy garlands the old thin snaggy tree broken off one third from its summit, almost a pole or a huge stake/rotten & half hollow at the bottom/—but the three Goddesses, for them I must trust to the moment of inspiration/the Sky & Perspective of the Clouds—the many many newly picturesque weeds. [Notebooks, 2:2831].

Coleridge's friendship with Allston survived a quite fiery period during the latter's time in England. Two things in particular seem to have provoked Coleridge's ire: first Allston's self-identification as an American (Britain was, of course, at war with the US 1812-15, and in 1814 we burnt the White House down) and second Allston's uxoriousness. In July 1814 STC wrote indignantly to John J. Morgan:

The same game in Bristol as in London—A. can visit me; but his own House and real feelings belong as exclusively Property to his ‘Countrymen,’ as he called one of the Beasts last Night: when to Wade's great delight I gave him a justly complimentary, but from that very cause a most severe Reproof. ‘Countryman?’ (said I) ‘Live the age of Methusalem, and you may have a right to say that, Allston.—At present, either the World is your Country, and England with all its faults your home, inasmuch as it contains the largest number of those who are capable of feeling your Fame before the idle Many, (the same in kind in all places but better (even these) in degree here, than in any other part of the world) have learnt to give you Reputation, or you are morally not worthy of your high Gifts, which as a Painter give you a praeternational Privilege, even beyond the greatest Poet, by the universality of your Language: and you prefer the accident of Place, naked Place , unenriched by any of the associations of Law, Religion, or intellectual Fountaincy, to the essential grandeur of God in Man.’

Pretty pompous! Coleridge went on to deplore Mrs. Allston, calling her ‘the little Hydatid’ and blaming her for Allston's spending so much time with other Americans. In case you need the reference explained, a hydatid (Greek ὑδατίς, “watery vesicle”) is ‘a cyst due to infection by larvae of some species of the tapeworm Echinococcus.’ Nice!

Good Heavens! that such a man with such a Heart and such Genius should be—not an American, but downright American , and I do believe 9 parts in 10 owing to the little Hydatid. О that (if only his Health could have been preserved) instead of being a good little Hydatid she had been an absolute Sarah + Mary + Eliza—Fricker (Christ! what a name for Coleridge to be transferred to!) with all the discontent, and miserableness of the Angel of the Race, self-nibbling Martha!—Then perhaps he might have hated her and been a fine fellow.

If only Ann Allston had been so obnoxious as to drive him away, all would have been well! But alas she has encysted her adoring husband! These were hard years for Coleridge, emotionally and physically, although I'm not sure how far we want to invoke that to justify such hyperbolic nastiness. The two men's friendship did weather the tempest, though: Allston was a frequent visitor to Coleridge when he was finally parked in Highgate, sometimes even staying the night with the Gillmans; and for all its quarrels 1814 was also the year of Allstone's famous portrait of Coleridge, now in the National Portrait Gallery

So what if we took seriously the idea that STC's lengthy notebook entry quoted above, describing Allston's ‘Landscape, Diana on a Chase’, constituted the first prose draft of a poem about the canvas, and the precarity of art? The passage seems to me to shake out, with a surprisingly small amount of adjustment and consolidation, into blank verse. Was this what Coleridge planned? A poem somewhat after the manner of the landscape descriptions of ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’ maybe, although in this case describing not a real west-country scene but rather as-it-were walking around the landscape of Allston's painting?

If so, and absent what I assume would be an opening section setting the poem up, and a closing section drawing the poem's moral with respect to the transitory and precarious nature of art, then ‘Address on W. Allston's Large Landscape Sent by Sea to England’ might have read something like this:  

Left-hand, beside a rock steep as a wall
Of purplish hue, naked all but one patch
Stands bushage, breaking the line of the edge
And here and there a moss-stain. Up the rock,
A well-shaped pine-tree stands, like its own shadow;
And at its base a shrub with trodden ferns,
Which almost hide a small cleft in the rock.
Beautiful purple-crimson mosses coat
The fissure's other side, which slopes down to
Ferns, mosses and bare purple rock at last.

Three spans from thence commences a great chasm,
Dark and bridged-o'er by a weedy tree,
But slimy, bark half-scathed and jaggéd o'er—
A perilous bridge! Take care, for heaven's sake!
Where it begins, smooth-scathed and sattiny,
Mouldering, barkless, knotty, red flowers
Grow, and the antique forkéd Trunk puts out
Its left horn scathed and smooth beside the bridge.
A dang'rous ground between that Trunk and yon
High noble Tree which with in graceful Lines
Almost of motion exhales itself up
Into the sky, rising even as smoke
In calm weather, of equal height and shape,
And yet you see it move!

Who has cut down that twin bough, its brother?
Well—do not blame them, for it has made such
A sweet stool at the bottom of the Tree,
Neath the high top and its umbrella cloud
Of foliage to shade you oer your head—
Behind are scarlet moss-cups, lichen stains,
A high brown bush and mighty bowder stone
Which I must over-climb to reach the prospect
Of the far valley hidden by the rock:
And in this vale, dim seen, are field and wood,
A sunshine-shaft by snowy Mountain peak
All jagged and precipitous, smooth plates
Of rock—scales of a behemoth's armour!

The Lake with filmy light, the bushy island,
The tree upon its sloping bank, so steep!
Shewing how steep by its incumbency
Observe its slim trunk through its vapour-cloud
Of foliage, and standing to its right
A dog, with its hind feet on higher ground.

Consider now the right hand of the Picture:
A tree stands, with its cavern-making roots
Stretching out to small, grey-purplish stones
Scattered at irregular distances,
Bare earth breaking in, an irregular road
To the Lake oer which a faery figure
Shoots along as one might in a dream!

Touching the earth which yet it seems to have
No occasion to touch, black delicate
And grey-white a Greyhound stands, whose twinned hues
Amalgamated match exactly the
Grey-blue of the twelve smaller stones behind
Even the halo (still a purplish grey)
Of the crescent carries on the harmony:
Its bright whiteness forms a transition to
The bright left-hand thick body-branch and trunk
Of the scene's largest tree.

What a delicious trail of ivy garlands
The old thin snaggy tree, top broken off
One third from its summit, more like a pole
Or huge and rotten stake half hollow at
The bottom—here stand the three Goddesses!
For them I must trust to inspiration!
The sky perspective of the clouds above,
The many many weeds, new picturesque!

Conceivably the opening would have been a verse-paragraph saying something like ‘How well I yet recall that painting by/My friend the genius of the visual art etc’; and the poem would have ended with a rather longer passage, regretting the damage the painting had suffered in transit, and a meditation on how often great art falls prey to accident and destruction. And perhaps there would have been a twist at the end, whereby STC's ability imaginatively to reconstruct Allston's image (evidenced in this passage) offers the consolation of the esemplastic powers of that faculty.

What we have, I'd say, is a pretty good passage of extended Coleridgean descriptive blank-verse; still quite rough, in the form I've blocked it out here, but on it's way to somewhere quite interesting. 

An Angel in the Clouds, Fiddling

 

Coleridge visited Rome in January 1806, stopping off on his journey from Malta to England (he finally reached home in August). Whilst there he visited the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore, the largest Catholic Marian church in the city. This is what he jotted into his notebook:

5 Jan 1806——Santa Maria Maggiore/glorious [...] in the right hand colonnade a picture of a Hermit ascetic with his Hand resting on a book holding a Death's Head, & an angel in the Clouds fiddling to him./  [Coburn (ed) Coleridge Collected Notebooks (5 vols Princeton 1961-2002), 2: 2786]

I was curious about this artwork, so I checked. It's still there, as you can see from the image at the head of this post. The artist is not known, although STC's ‘hermit’ is actually Saint Francis of Assisi. It's perhaps surprising Coleridge didn't recognise that (you think he'd at least notice that the figure is dressed in Franciscan robes), although it presumably only speaks to his principled Protestant ignorance about the finer points of Catholicism. Coleridge finds the notion of an angel ‘fiddling’ to the saint a comical one, but in fact Saint Francis hearing visionary music is an important episode in his hagiography. 

The story goes that, having established the Franciscan order, the now elderly Francis resigned from its leadership to go into the wilderness for prayer and contemplation. He had a series of visions, including one in which an angel marked him with Christ's stigmata. The musical miracle is first recorded in Bonaventure's Life of Saint Francis (1261): Francis, alone, exhausted and suffering from the illness that would eventually kill him (hence the death's head in the Santa Maria Maggiore painting), desired that his spirits be lifted with some music. Since his solitude made this impossible an angel was sent to play for him. When Francis heard the heavenly music, he looked up and saw the musical angel, who advanced from and retreated into the clouds depending on the intensity of his (her? its?) playing. ‘The angel's music was so sweetly ethereal that it filled Francis with the Holy Spirit, and he felt as if he had already ascended into heaven.’ A violin is not specified in Bonaventure's Vita, but is the instrument often represented in devotional art. Here's an etching by Franceso Vanni (c.1600):

And here's an early 17th-C canvas by Guercino:

It isn't always a fiddle, though. Here's a painting by Francisco Ribalta (c.1620):

And here, the image still carrying its Matthieson Gallery watermark, is a photograph of a wooden bas relief by the Garcia brothers (pre 1619): 

It's interesting how, being innocent of this context, Coleridge can only see the image as ridiculous. Context matters, evidently. Music was very important to him, after all: his ode to Wordsworth praises his friend's poems as ‘an Orphic song indeed,/A song divine of high and passionate thoughts/To their own music chaunted!’ And towards the end of his life, in 1832, he divided poetry into two classes: one corresponding to ‘poetry’ the other to ‘music’, adding ‘if I belong to any class of poets it is most preeminently the latter.’ But this image of St Francis in Rome clearly struck him for its bathos, not its poetic elevation.

And now the STORM-BLAST came, and he/Was tyrannous and strong

 

Who coined the phrase ‘tyrannous and strong’ to describe the wind? Was it Coleridge? Or Wordsworth?

The phrase's most famous appearance is in the Ancient Mariner, but only in the 1834 version of the poem (which is to say, it's not in the 1798 version).

And now the STORM-BLAST came, and he
Was tyrannous and strong:
He struck with his o'ertaking wings,
And chased us south along.

With sloping masts and dipping prow,
As who pursued with yell and blow
Still treads the shadow of his foe,
And forward bends his head,
The ship drove fast, loud roared the blast,
And southward aye we fled. [Ancient Mariner, lines 41-50]

The phrase also appears in Wordsworth's ‘The Waterfall and the Eglantine’ (in Lyrical Ballads, 1800). In that poem a thunderous waterfall mocks a tiny briar-rose, vowing to wash it away despite the plant's pitiable pleas for mercy. The key stanza is:

“Dost thou presume my course to block?
Off, off! or, puny Thing!
I'll hurl thee headlong with the rock
To which thy fibres cling.”
The Flood was tyrannous and strong;
The patient Briar suffered long,
Nor did he utter groan or sigh,
Hoping the danger would be past.

But here's Coleridge's ‘A Thought Suggested by a View of Saddleback in Cumberland’, a poem jotted into his notebook some time around 1800, though not published (in The Amulet) until 1833.

On stern Blencartha's perilous height
The winds are tyrannous and strong;
And flashing forth unsteady light
From stern Blencartha's skiey height,
As loud the torrents throng!
Beneath the moon in gentle weather,
They bind earth and sky together.
But oh! the sky and all its forms, how quiet!
The things that seek the earth, how full of noise and riot!

Coleridge first mentions Blencartha (also known as Saddleback; one of the most northerly hills in the English Lake District) in November 1799, and first climbed it in August 1800, so it's likely he wrote this short verse sometime around those dates. 

So did Coleridge coin ‘tyrannous and strong’ and Wordsworth appropriated it for his poem? Or was it the other way around? Paul Magnuson notes: ‘it is difficult to determine whether Coleridge or Wordsworth was the first to use the phrase.’

Let's come at it another way. Though he's unknown nowadays. James Hurdis was once a famous poet, praised by his contemporaries as the heir of Cowper, and appointed Oxford Professor of Poetry in 1793. He married in 1799, and died suddenly in 1801. His reputation faded quickly thereafter. Writing a quarter century after his death, Southey insisted that Hurdis did not deserve to be forgotten, ‘for his poems, though ill conceived and carelessly composed, abound with images from nature, which show the eye of a poet, and with strains of natural feeling, which could only have proceeded from the heart of one. He was, indeed, a most amiable man, of the best and kindliest feelings’ [Southey, Quarterly Review 35 (1827) 201]. The 1790s were the high-point of Hurdis's reputation, and in 1795 he published a poem looking forward to the marriage of the Prince of Wales to his cousin Princess Caroline of Brunswick (they were married on 8 April 1795, after which, of course, things went spectacularly wrong betweem them, though Hurdis wasn't to know that).  

It's not a bad poem, actually, though it is obseqiously royalist. And it's an interesting gesture (more the kind of thing the Poet Laureate would do than the Oxford Professor of Poetry). It was certainly noticed: reviewed positively, with long passages quoted, in the Analytic Review, the Critical Review and elsewhere. STC and/or Wordsworth might have read those reviews, or might even have read the actual poem. It opens with a description of an Oxfordshire winter:

Season of darkness and contracted day,
Inclement Winter, whose approaching foot
Treads on the heel of Autumn, pause; nor strew
With thy rude gust the ill-surviving leaf
Which hangs discoloured upon hill and vale. [Hurdis, Prospect of the Marriage, line 1-5]

This, though, is the bit that struck me: the poet orders the ‘Impending Season’, to ‘Bid thy strong gale’ traverse the landscape.

Elsewhere be tyrannous, but gentle here:
Here smile serene; and let incautious Spring,
Decoyed or e’er her season, on thy brow
An odorous chaplet place of early buds,
And deck with blossoms thy snow-sprinkled crown. [21-25]

Is that too tenuous a connection? Hurdis's gale is strong and tyrannous; Coleridge's tyrannous and strong.

Maybe this is too close to home. We could suggest that either Wordsworth or Coleridge, or even Hurdis, took the idea of a tyrannous wind from John Donne's linked poems ‘The Storme’/‘The Calme’ (probably written in the early 1600s), addressed ‘to Christopher Brook, from the Island Voyage with the Earl of Essex’ (Donne's second poem opens with the line: ‘our storm is past, and that storm's tyrannous rage’). Or we could go further, to Erasmus's famous colloquy Naufragium (‘The Shipwreck’, 1518), upon which Donne drew.

Or we could go further back still, all the way to Hesiod, and his vivid account of Zeus overthrowing the Titan Typhoeus (sometimes called Typhon): ‘when Zeus had conquered him and lashed him with strokes, Typhoeus was hurled down, a maimed wreck, so that the huge earth groaned. And flame shot forth from the thunderstricken lord in the dim rugged glens of the mount, when he was smitten. A great part of huge earth was scorched by the terrible vapor and melted as tin melts when heated by men's art in channelled crucibles; or as iron, which is hardest of all things, is shortened by glowing fire ... even so, then, the earth melted in the glow of the blazing fire. And in the bitterness of his anger Zeus cast him into wide Tartarus’. From this downfall, says Hesiod, were born the great winds that have ever since blown over the world:

ἐκ δὲ Τυφωέος ἔστ᾽ ἀνέμων μένος ὑγρὸν ἀέντων,
νόσφι Νότου Βορέω τε καὶ ἀργέστεω Ζεφύροιο:
οἵ γε μὲν ἐκ θεόφιν γενεή, θνητοῖς μέγ᾽ ὄνειαρ:
οἱ δ᾽ ἄλλοι μαψαῦραι ἐπιπνείουσι θάλασσαν:
αἳ δή τοι πίπτουσαι ἐς ἠεροειδέα πόντον,
πῆμα μέγα θνητοῖσι, κακῇ θυίουσιν ἀέλλῃ:
ἄλλοτε δ᾽ ἄλλαι ἄεισι διασκιδνᾶσί τε νῆας
ναύτας τε φθείρουσι: κακοῦ δ᾽ οὐ γίγνεται ἀλκὴ
ἀνδράσιν, οἳ κείνῃσι συνάντωνται κατὰ πόντον: [Theogony, 869-77]

‘And from Typhoeus come boisterous winds which blow damply, except Notus and Boreas and clear Zephyr. These are a god-sent kind, and a great blessing to men; but the others blow fitfully upon the sea. Some rush upon the misty sea and work great havoc among men with their evil, raging blasts; for varying with the season they blow, scattering ships and destroying sailors. And men who meet these upon the sea have no help against the mischief’ [this is Hugh G. Evelyn-White's Loeb translation]

Boisterous winds here is ᾰ̓́νεμοι μένοι, and maybe Coleridge was thinking of this—thinking, that is, of linking tyranny with another Greek word: τό μένος, ‘might, force’, ‘strength, fierceness’, used in the Iliad of ‘soul, spirit, passion, the battlerage of men’ [Iliad 2.387] and, interestingly, used in Plotinus to mean ‘filled with spiritual exaltation’. Hesiod's personified wind comes as forcefully down upon his put-upon mariners as terribly as does Coleridge's personified storm-blast upon his. 

Typhon is the root, etymologically, of the English word typhoon; or more specifically, the English usage of this word bent its Chinese original (Mandarin dàfēng, Cantonese daai6 fung1, ‘Big Wind’) around the Greek name to produce the English word. The OED records the first English use in 1588, and it appears in Purchas's Pilgrimage (‘Tempests, Huricanos, Tufons, Water-spouts’ [I. i. vi. 20]) a book we know Coleridge read. 

That's enough about tyrannous-strong winds for now, I think.

 

At the head of the post: William Strang's fine etching, ‘And Now The Storm-Blast Came’ (1896), currently in the National Gallery of Scotland. Click to embiggen: it's worth it.

Epitaph (1833)

 

Mays notes: ‘the first version of C.’s epitaph’ consisted of the lines 3-6 only; but that the full version ‘may be dated from 27-8 Oct to 9 Nov 1833’, adding: ‘the poem was included in the Poetical Works (1834) as the last poem in the sequence, a position it occupies in many subsequent editions’. At the head of this post is a scan of that first appearance, on the volume's last page. 

Morton Paley considers it ‘the last important poem to be written by Coleridge … the culmination of a lifelong interest [in] epitaphs and epitaph-like poems, both for himself and for others.’ [Morton Paley, Coleridge’s Later Poetry (Oxford 1999) 114].

The opening phrase, ‘Stop, Christian Passer-by!’ is a standard opening for Latin funerary and epitaphic inscription: siste christiane viator! For example, here’s the first part of the epitaph in Paris of the Abbé de Chandenier (1646), the nephew of the Cardinal de la Rochefoucault:

Click to embiggen. You can see how conventional much of Coleridge's own epitaph is, with its emphasis on his humility, his salvation through Christ and so on. (‘An address to the presumed wayfarer, viator, is to be found in most of these epitaphs ... in some epitaphs, the wayfarer is addressed as viator Christiane’ [Iiro Kajanto, ‘Studies in the Latin Epitaphs of Medieval and Renaissance Rome’, Annales Academiae Scientiarum Fennicae series B (1980), 35]). 

The second part of the opening line may glance at Ovid, though, I think: ‘siste puer’ [Ovid Fasti 1:365]. The ‘death-in-life’ and ‘life-in-death’ will tend to make us think of the Ancient Mariner, but Paley suggests instead John 12:25, ‘He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal.’ This is certainly possible, although I think it's more likely Coleridge is thinking of the old Gregorian chant, Vita in morte media sumus, which of course works its way into the Book of Common Prayer: ‘in the midst of life we be in death: of whom may we seek for succor but of thee, O Lord?’

Some more, rather fanciful, speculations on this little epigraph here.

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?