The Λόγος in the Logic

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As early as 1803 Coleridge told people he was planning a book-length treatise on logic, although it wasn't until the 1820s that he actually began drafting the work. What he produced was based on a set of Thursday evening classes, or discussion sessions, he ran for a group of eager young (male) acolytes 1822-23. By dictating his thoughts to a number of different amanuenses most of a book emerged. Coleridge offered this, in a more or less desultory way, to several publishers in the later 1820s, none of whom were interested, and it seems that without the pressure of a publication deadline he couldn't summon the impetus actually to finish the whole. He planned a four-part work comprising: a lengthy introduction on the topic of logic as such, a section on the syllogism and structures of logic; a section on ‘the Criterion or Dialectic’ and a final section on what Coleridge calls ‘Noetic’ logic, covering after a fashion the practical application of logic, logic-in-action, logic-in-actual-thought (νόος). This last section remained unwritten, and the three-quarters we have, since STC never actually readied them for publication, make for clogged and difficult reading.

Not to beat around the bush, Logic is by far the most boring thing Coleridge ever wrote: repetitious, very often obscure, digressive, interminable. It doesn't help that the text comes to us, as it were, pre-motheaten: full of holes where his amanuenses (one of whom at least doesn't seem to have had Greek—quite the problem if one is taking dictation from Coleridge) didn't understand or feel confident about a word, a technical term or a phrase and so just left a gap. Modern editors have made educated guesses to fill some, but not all, of these. And, yes: Coleridge's actual history of publication makes it look naive of me to imply that revising all this for publication would have involved him smoothing out all obscurity and digression. The triumph of scholarly hope over experience, that. Still: the work as have it is a more-or-less indigestible lump.

After his death the manuscript of the Logic seems to have simply nonplussed his literary executor, Joseph Henry Green, who made no effort to publish it. At the end of the century Charles Ward, working for Macmillan, heard rumours that a book-length unpublished Coleridge manuscript was knocking around, acquired it and sent it to Oxford for a report on how to ready it for possible publication. He later recollected that the MS came back to him after three months ‘without a single word of comment from anybody, either combative or appreciative’ [‘Coleridge’, Athenaeum, 26 October 1895]. A whole other century passed before the work actually saw the light of day, as part of the Bollingen edition of the complete Coleridge in 1981, edited by J R de J Jackson. Excitement in Coleridge circles about a brand new book-length STC work finally seeing the light of day quickly became disappointment at just how turgid and baffling the Logic actually is.

And there's one more problem. Having myself now waded all the way across this river of treacle I can confirm what previously scholars have already noted: almost all of the Logic is just Kant, either summaries of, or lengthy passages translated directly from, the Critique of Pure Reason and the Prolegomena, titivated only a very little by the addition of occasional illustrative examples from STC's own ambit. Perhaps Coleridge believed such summary and excerpting useful in their own right (Francis Haywood's first English translation of the Critique did not appear until 1838, after all) but it renders the book superfluous to any reader who knows Kant, and the summaries are neither systematically laid-out or, it has to be said, attributed. This latter point is the old problem of whether we're dealing with sloppiness or conscious plagiary on Coleridge's part, a problem never very far away where this author is concerned. ‘There is a danger,’ J R Jackson says with a nice dryness of tone, ‘that readers unfamiliar with his sources may mistake vintage Kant for vintage Coleridge’ [Jackson, lvi]. Reader, beware.

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For a number of reasons, Murray J Evans brackets the Logic with another of Coleridge's unfinished big, late-career books, the Opus Maximum (also sometimes called the Logosophia):

First, they are roughly contemporaneous, with Logic likely written across the 1820s and most of Opus Maximum in the period 1819-23. Second, both texts were draft texts, not published in Coleridge's lifetime; both only first appeared in the Bollingen editions in the last thirty years, Logic in 1981 and Opus Maximum in 2002. Finally, judging by the sparse extant scholarship, the texts have attracted very few modern readers, relative to readers of the Biographia Literaria for example. This is only partly for reasons of late publication, since they are both difficult texts. The Logic is an apparently dry treatise on an apparently unimaginative topic, and Opus Maximum resists wholistic reading. [Evans, ‘Coleridge as Thinker: Logic and Opus Maximum’, in Frederick Burwick (ed), The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Oxford University Press 2009), 323]

Evans—author of the world's only monograph on the Opus Maximum, the fascinating Sublime Coleridge: the Opus Maximum (Palgrave 2012)—naturally spends much more of his essay here on that other work. The Logic he reads as a preliminary to the Opus Maximum: ‘OM largely jumps off from what would have been Logic's missing Part 3 on the Noetic’ [326]. On the Logic itself, he agrees with Jackson, who insists that there is nothing new in the book at all. ‘The philosophical arguments of the Logic are often complex and subtle,’ is how Jackson puts it, but ‘the complexity and the subtlety are Kant's. Coleridge is a faithful interpreter of his master in the field of logic, and he does not at any point attempt to revise, refute or refine. He comments and explains, and he paraphrases and selects, but he does not offer new arguments’ [Jackson, lxii].

I don't think that's right, actually. Which is to say: whilst Coleridge certainly does spend most of his time here paraphrasing, commenting on and explaining Kant, he also argues something new; or, if that is perhaps a stretch, he at least gestures towards such an argument. It's not in the book's Part 2, which really is nothing more than summarised Kant; and it's not in Part 1 either, which is a rather confusingly assembled bundle of sections about what Coleridge calls ‘Pure Logic’ or ‘the Canon’. This Part 1 swamps, rather, what you might expect a book on logic to cover in a welter of discussion of other things. So for example: although Coleridge does include some discussion of the syllogistic forms (‘All men are mortal; Caius is a man; therefore Caius is mortal’ is one example he offers [1.1.4(a)]), he buries this in a lengthy discussion of how elements are separated off from the universal into the particular, calling the apprehension of the former ‘the act of clusion’ and the latter ‘the act of seclusion’ [1.2.2]. And he's very interested in the idea that the subject and object of a sentence are always separate things, except in the single instance of the utterance I am, where the subjective ‘I’ and the objective ‘am’ unite into a single form. Which is all very interesting I'm sure.

Really, STC's emphasis here reflects the fact that he just wasn't very interested in the forms of the syllogism. In a conversation recorded in the Table Talk [23 Sept 1830] he scoffed at those logicians who could ‘spin ... ten or a dozen pages’ out of the varieties of syllogistic logic (‘all those absurd forms of syllogism are one half pure sophisms, and the other half mere forms of rhetoric’). The Logic itself copies a few illustrative syllogisms out of Kant, and touches on the importance of avoiding post hoc ergo propter hoc thinking, but otherwise this is a book that considers the formal structures of logical thinking more-or-less simple and self-evident. The clusion/seculsion thing, on the other hand, speaks more directly to Coleridge's concerns, because he is so fascinated, as a poet as well as a thinker, by the relation of the particular experience to the whole:—the relationship, that is, of individual subjectivity to the collective and to the divine. The One and the Many. This relationship is dialectical in that it runs in mutually engaging ways. On the one hand, Coleridge insists that logic is exclusively concerned with what he calls ‘derived’ perception: the way our minds combine and coalesce variegated perceptions into a mental unity. On the other hand, Coleridge again reverts to one of his perennial concerns: the fragmentary and isolated individual consciousness and its relationship to (divine) unity. This (if I'm reading the Logic right) has its formal-logical aspect, because syllogisms require the separation of individuated particulars—as it might be, our friend Caius, aforementioned—from generalities—‘all men’, or ‘mankind’ or whatever—such that logical syllogisms formally embody the division of the individuality of separate subjectivity from the unity of collective existence.

Coleridge is especially interested in the way this separation relates to the semantic structures of ‘subject’ and ‘object’ as they manifest in both sentences and in our mental structures for understanding the universe. The fullest subject, for Coleridge, is a whole human subjectivity, and the fullest object is the entire universe; and the structures of language depend upon the separation of subject from object. This, Coleridge seems to be arguing in Part 1 of the Logic, has to do with the way syllogism and clusion/seclusion invoke opposition as a structuring principle of syllogistic logic. I'm not sure about my reading here, though I think it's right. I think it underlies, for instance, passages like these:

In the first act [of perception] we have seen that a principle of unity is contributed by the mind itself. But if there be a uniting power, there must be that which is to be the subject or matter of the union, and by what name shall we designate this latter? The opposite to one is the many ... the external, the immediately sensuous, the supposed impressions from external agents are comprised under the common term of ‘the many’, ‘the manifold’, or ‘multeity’, or ‘the indistinguishable’ (to which we may add the phrases adopted by symbolical writers or mystics, viz. ‘chaos’, ‘the waters’, etc etc) [Logic, 1.2.19]

If you are tempted, as I was on reading this, to say: ‘but why should the opposite to one be the many? Mightn't it be the none?’ then Coleridge is ahead of you. He insists several times in the Logic that ‘opposita semper unigena: there is no opposition between heterogeneous subjects’ [1.2.7], or at greater length: ‘opposita semper unigena; in omni oppositione datur suppositum in quo (seu, tenus quod) opposita unum sunt. Thesis = antithesis in aliqua prothesi’ [2.12.2], which means ‘oppositions are always of the same genera; in every opposition a supposition is given in which (or insofar as which) opposites are unified. Thesis = antithesis in some prothesis’. Coleridge himself glosses his own Latin thus: ‘terms that can be rightly opposed to each other’ (earlier he gives the example ‘north’ and ‘south’) ‘in their evolution of a truth must be identical in the root, that is, radically one. These are different ways of expressing the same principle, a principle of paramount importance in philosophy no less than in logic’ [2.12.2].

Now, none of this is original to Coleridge: it's from Kant's Prolegomena (and therefore ultimately from his Critique of Pure Reason), all except for the examples from ‘symbolical writers’, which give us some sense as to how Coleridge grasps his Kantian concepts: ‘chaos’, ‘the waters’, etc etc. But those examples are significant, I think. From Moses Mendelssohn's 1790 Morgenstunden oder Vorlesungen über das Dasein Gottes (‘all legitimate syllogisms are grounded on a just analysis of conceptions’ [1.1.7]) Coleridge borrows the symbol of a tree, in order to illustrate the division of concepts into smaller constitutive concepts:

The total sum of human knowledge may be represented under the image of a tree, so as to convey in a just and lively manner the princple on which all formal logic rests. The outward points meet in sprays; these under in twigs; the twigs in boughs; the boughs in branches; and the branches in one common trunk. [Logic, 1.1.7]

But though it ends with this second-hand image, this chapters opens with an original Coleridgean portrait of the non-specific observing poet as a young man:

There are few who cannot recollect or place themselves in that state of mind in which their eye has rested either on a cloudless sky or the general aspect of the starry heavens or on a wide common bounded only by the horizon without consciously attending to any particular object or portion of the scene. There will be many too, I doubt not, not unwilling to confess that they have been sometimes in that state of mind which they could perhaps describe by no other term than that of thinking, and yet if questioned of what they were thinking about must answer nothing. Nay this is a state which not seldom takes place when the mind is preparing itself for the highest efforts of thought and even during such efforts the energy continuing during the momentary occultations of the part objects of the consciousness, as we continue the act of gazing in the brief intervals of the flashes at night in a storm of thunder and lightning. [Logic, 1.1.1]

Similarly, by way of illustrating Kant's conception that length and the lines that mark it are artefacts of our consciousness rather than objective elements ‘out there’ in the real world, here is Coleridge on flies, or ‘ephemerae’:

It was length without any necessity of abstracting from breadth or depth; in other words, it was a self-conscious act snatched away as is it were from the product of that act. The most exact but assuredly the most amusing mode of conveying what I mean, I have seen in the ephemerae and other minute and half-transparent insects who by the exceeding velocity of motion actually present to our eyes a symbol of what Plotinus meant when, speaking of the geometricians and the of Nature of acting geometrically, he says Θεωρουσα Θεωρηματα ποιει, her contemplative act is creative and is one with the product of their contemplation. [Logic, 1.2.15, quoting Enneads 3.8.4]

Coleridge then quotes accounts of swarms of emphemerae (‘emphemerae in jointed and articulated triangles of silver light’) by Réaumur, Kirby and Spence before adding:

I can add that I have twice seen the ascent of the ephemerae in strong moonlight, the beams passing through an opening in a branching tree that overhung the water on which the moonlight formed a small island in deepest shade, and here by intensely watching the phenomenon I satisfied myself that the different spiral figures were each produced by the image of motion which the single insect left on the eye; each of which overtook the preceding before the impression had ceased. [Logic, 1.2.16]

Nowadays we all know the technical term for this particular perceptual effect: the persistence of vision—and we know it because precisely this effect underpins the whole edifice of our visual culture from cinema to television and video gaming. There's no doubt in my mind that Coleridge, had he been born two centuries later than he was, would have been profoundly engaged by the domination of our cultural discourse by screen-displayed visual texts. The Logic includes a fascinating account of the way the kaleidoscope (brand-new tech this, invented by David Brewster in 1818) generates aesthetic beauty from ‘fragments, bits of coloured glass, a steel filing or two, ends of thread’. Put these elements in a ‘dice box’ and toss them on the table, Coleridge says, and you could ‘waste an hour or a week’ never forming any kind of beautiful figure; but put them in a kaleidoscopic tube and every twist of the end produces ‘some new and distinct form of beauty in endless succession, the number inexhaustible and all beautiful, though not all equally delightful’ [2.4.11(b)]. (Coleridge thinks the beauty comes from the addition of symmetry to these objects. I wonder if there's more to it than that).

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In all this, through Parts 1 and 2 of the incomplete Logic, Coleridge presents other people's ideas, and by ‘other people’ I mean Kant, mostly. But the Logic is not all Kant; and the bit that most substantively adds something new to Coleridge's Kantian summary is the Introduction.

This Intro is in two chapters, the first called ‘Sketch of the History of Logic’ (a chapter which in no way sketches the history of Logic) and the second titled ‘Chapter 1’, which suggests to me that Coleridge had decided on a do-over. In this latter chapter Coleridge derives the word, but also the concept, of logic from its Greek root in a way that is simultaneously perfectly conventional and  frankly eccentric-to-the-point-of-bonkers. Conventional, because after all, the word does indeed come via the Latin logica from the Ancient Greek λογικός (logikós ‘of or pertaining to speech or reason or reasoning, rational, reasonable’), and so from λόγος (lógos, ‘speech, reason’). But eccentric, because nobody before Coleridge, so far as I can see (and certainly not Kant) argued that logic is the formal manifestation in the sensible forms of our worldly intuition of the Johannine λόγος, that is Christ in the world and God substanding it and some spiritually holy third thing as well. But that's what we have here. This is how the second chapter of the introduction of the Logic, titled ‘Chapter 1’:

Logic from the Greek λέγω. The absolute etymon of this word, by which I mean the particular visual image, or other sensuous impression, which is at the root of its proper constitutive syllable, is far beyond historic research. [Logic, ‘Introduction’ 2:1]

He gives it a go, though, for eighteen dense pages, starting with the theory that ‘the initial λ’ of the word embodies ‘the sense of additional force, whether in consequence of a single energy or of the same energy repeated’, and a pendant dismissal of the theories of lexicographers that λ-words in Ancient Greek tended to express ‘feelings of disgust and hatred’ in favour of his own theory that λ represents ‘continuity and the absence of resistance’ [‘Intro’ 2.4]. From here, he goes via a etymological tracing of the meanings of λόγοι, ‘things weighed or considered’, ‘considerate, well-weighed, deliberate words’, to truthful and considered ‘histories’, as distinguished from the ἔπος (épos, ‘song, epic’) and ποιητής (poiētḗs, ‘creator, maker, author, poet’), since the latter invented rather than accurately recorded. ‘Thus,’ says Coleridge, ‘the derivatives from λόγος are now appropriated to men of superior knowledge, the highly informed, the men of understanding’ [‘Intro’ 2.15]. From here Coleridge leaves the lexicographers far behind to propose a triad of meanings. λόγος came to exist, he argues,

in a threefold relation: first it signified the logical faculty, the reasoning power, in short the understanding including the judgment, in distinction from the νοῦς or reason. Secondly it signified the understanding as a discursive faculty, or that which employed itself on the conceptions of the mind and the general terms representing them, in distinction from the intuition, or intuitive power of the mind, as employed on the forms of perception in time and space, that is, number and figure ... Thirdly λόγος was used in a somewhat larger sense as the mind or intellective power abstractedly from the νοῦς, or pure reason, as the supposed identity of the intellectio and the intelligibile; from the reason, I say, as at once the light of the mind and its highest object. [Logic, ‘Intro’ 2.20]

None of this is in Kant; it's all, so far as I can read it, Coleridge more-or-less tortuously bending the etymology of the word ‘logic’ round to fit it to his trinitarian conception of the λόγος of John 1.1. The identity of the intellectio, or intellect, with the intelligibile, or intelligible reality, happens (Coleridge argues) in one place only, the ‘I am’ that unites subject and object in one objective subjectivity, and which in the Biographia and elsewhere (though not here) he connects to the pronouncement God makes to Moses in Exodus 3:14: I AM THAT I AM. That's an absolutely central Biblical text to Coleridge's thought, that one. And this threefold definition of logic gives us (1) a structuring principle of the individual subjectivity, (2) the form of our engagement with the outside world (time and space) and therefore a structuring principle for our intersubjectivity, and (3) the ground of all such structures and subjectivities, the ‘highest object’ that provides the foundation for all particular iterations of mind, what he a little later calls ‘the sum of all the subjective comprehended in the name of mind or intelligence’ [‘Intro, 2.25’].

All this does at least explain, or it seems to me to do so, why STC's book on logic has so little truck with maths, syllogisms and, well, logic as the term is currently understood. The purpose of the exercise for him is not drily mathematical, but is rather the laying out of what he takes to be the divine structure of living consciousness, something (for him) in no way merely mechanical or material. It is the grammar of reality as such, and that grammar is divine. As Coleridge wrote elsewhere, probably in the late 18-teens, ‘the language of nature is a subordinate Logos, that was in the beginning, and was with the thing it represented, and was the thing represented’ [quoted in Prickett, Words and The Word (1986), 133]. Stephen Prickett is only one of a great many critics to note how core this λόγος is to Coleridge's aesthetics and metaphysics.

For Coleridge, the ‘Word’ is itself redolent of the hidden powers of meaning, at once latent and ‘living’ through tension with other apparently dissimilar notions ... The word [is] ‘bi-focal’. What is at one level operating below the threshold of consciousness in every act of perception, is also the power by which we create our ‘internal’ worlds. We perceive nature and create fictions by essentially the same process. But the languages of nature and of fiction interact ... The subordinate logos of nature is a repetition in the finite human mind of God's eternal act of creation. [Prickett, Words and The Word (1986), 143-44]

This is why Coleridge's Logic is such a strange work. Although all this commitment of the spiritual importance of the λόγος as the foundation of logic as such is not Kantian, Coleridge does believe that Kant is right about the way reality as such is structured by our apperceptions, which means that any Coleridgean Logic must entail a detailed summary of those Kantian ideas. There's no doubt in my mind that if Coleridge had gotten around to writing his final Part 3, it would have explored the action of the imagination, both secondary and primary, and would have had nothing to say about mathematically watertight sequential syllogisms.

This in turn explains a couple of the odder features of the Logic as they present to a modern-day reader. For one thing Coleridge throughout prioritises geometry over mathematics. Since nowadays both logic and geometry are seen as branches of what we nowadays tend to call, simply, mathematics, that might seem strange. In part this is just a matter of historical context. The Ancient Greeks had discovered lengths in geometry that they could not express as simple, or what are called ‘rational’, numbers, or even as the ratios of rational numbers: the length of the hypotenuse on a right-triangle where the other two sides are one unit long, for instance; or the relationship between a circle's diameter and its circumference. These lengths the Greeks called ‘irrational’, and on account of them they believed geometry and mathematics (which is to say, arithmetic) to be two quite different disciplines.

That was still, more or less, the intellectual world in which Coleridge was working. It wasn't until 1872 that Richard Dedekind showed that irrational numbers could indeed be defined in terms of rational numbers, and so in effect unified geometry and arithmetic; and it wasn't until 1910-13 that Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica proved that logic itself is mathematical and so brought all three disciplines under one umbrella. We can't blame Coleridge for not anticipating these giant steps of professional mathematicians, of course, although we may still be puzzled by his fondness for geometrical diagrams. Here, for instance, he illustrates his argument that ‘the verb substantive (“am”, sum, εἰμί) expresses the identity or coinherence of being and act’:

In this, ‘A = the point of identity’, which is, Coleridge assures us, generated by ‘perpetual eradiation [of] the line BC, the pole B representing being in its greatest predominance, and the pole C action in like manner’, while ‘a’ expresses ‘the indifference of being and action, of substantive and verb’ and ‘A’ is ‘the point of identity, is the verb and substantive in one and as one’ [‘Intro’, 1.20]. Clear? No? Try this one then:

The Λ there stands for λόγος and the Θ for θεωρία (theōría, ‘contemplation, speculation, a looking at, things looked at’, from θεωρέω ‘I look at, view, consider, examine’; Coleridge uses the word as shorthand for the perceptual understanding by which we engage with the world). N represents νοῦς, or pure reason, and E is the Eye, ‘as determining the chord connecting Λ and Θ; and we will also suppose that the eye is directed upward, from the chord to the centre’. Coleridge then glosses the diagram at exhausting, though not exhaustive, length: ‘the extracircumferential E, the power of acting on or from without, and the chord ΛΘ serve at once as the common boundary and medium of communication. Thus we have a view of the powers from which the sciences derive their name and character ... [with] N as representing the indemonstrable, because the ground of all demonstration, or the absolute, that is irrelative, because the ground of all relation (the consideration of which, as the primary truths—aeternae veritates—independent of all time and place and in which the reason itself consists’ [‘Intro’, 2.23(a)].

It's not entirely allergic of comprehension, all this, but more than the content of these quasi-mystical rebuses is their form. STC is explaining the structure of his whole book, Part 1 of which will cover Λ, Part 2 will cover Θ (via Kant) and the unwritten Part 3 would have covered N, as the ground of all relation. I suppose these diagrams don't exactly make things clearer for the general; although one thing they do is suggest strongly that Coleridge is pattern-making after the prototype of the Christian trinity. All these triangles. All these tripartite unities of ground, derivative and abstract, or reality, perception and unified-reality-perception, or Being, Action and Identity, or Father, Son and Spirit. What are they really about? They are Coleridge saying, as Kant nowhere does, that the logic according to which the world coheres and makes sense is just another name for God.

If we take the Johannine λόγος as Christ specifically (and I know, this is a very complicated topic, chewed-over by many generations of theologians, but for the sake of argument) then Coleridge's position here has some striking implications. Talking about the logic of Christ, or of Christ as the manifestation of logic in the world, might seem counterintuitive to the theological status of Christ as intercessor, the embodiment of forgiveness, redemption and so on. Does it make sense to describe Christ, as Coleridge does Logic, as ‘the science of the permanent relations in conceptions’ [‘Intro’ 2.23(a)]. I suppose that positing Christ as the underlying coherence and structure of reality is a way of saying that reality is fundamentally man-shaped. Not in terms of arms and legs, but in terms of love and lack, of care and connection, will and hope. The unwritten Part 3 might have made this plainer, and the Opus Maximum, with its addition of a divine Will to the conventional Christian trinity, perhaps goes some way towards following-through on all this.

Notebook Scatology

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One of the (many) things Coleridge used his notebooks for was jotting down obscenity. He loved playing with ruderies of various kinds, and was fascinated by ribald, off-colour, scatological or sexual observations. Or at least, he was fascinated with these things in the decent privacy of writing never intended for publication. In public, his respectable morality shaded into something more like actual prudishness. Read, for example, the ‘Critique of Bertram’ included as Chapter 23 of the Biographia Literaria (1817), in which he clutches his pearls at the way Maturin's play portrays adultery not as deplorable moral turpitude but rather in terms of a tragically-doomed and heroic love affair: ‘O! the mingled horror and disgust with which I witnessed it’, he gasps. ‘The very fact then present to our senses, that a British audience could remain passive under such an insult to common decency, nay, receive with a thunder of applause, a human being supposed to have come reeking from the consummation of this complex foulness and baseness, these and the like reflections so pressed as with the weight of lead upon my heart...’ And so on. In the private textual spaces of his notebooks, though, he permitted himself much more licence.

What follows is not a comprehensive survey of such moments: that would take a very long time. But it is a more or less representative sample, assembled in order, in part 2 of this blogpost, to make a larger and, I think, important point about Coleridge's imagination.

I've already blogged about the four-line poem Coleridge wrote in 1809 on the topic of tribadism, or sexual frottage, which (I speculate) was provoked by his jealous suspicion that Wordsworth was, in addition to his wife, also sleeping with his wife's sister Sara Hutchinson, whom Coleridge himself loved with a desperate, unreciprocated love. My take was that Coleridge doodled some rather bitter verse about his hurt feelings, speculating that Wordsworth and Sara were engaged in mutual sexual rubbing and cunnilingus (to avoid the risk of pregnancy), writing in English but using the Greek alphabet to disguise what he was doing:

Oυῑφ σιστηρ ὕσβανδ—ὕσβανδ σιστηρ oυῑφ
Γυνανδριαν ἰνσεστ ὕνιον, νατυρς στρεῑφ.
Σολυτιον ὀφ θέ ριδδελ θοῦ το σηκ
Tρι-βαδ ἰς συκσες … θάτ νῆρ συκσηδ!

Wife sister husband—husband sister wife
Gynandrian incest's union, nature's strife
Solution of the riddle thou to read:
Tri-bad success, the sort that ne'er sucks seed!

(The reason my transliteration differs in minor ways from the Greek is explained at the link to the original post) In this case, Coleridge hides an English poem behind the obscurity of the Greek alphabet. In other cases, he cloaked his rudery in Latin. In both cases the assumption is that a person who has acquired enough Classical education to be able to understand the obscenity would have sufficient character not to be corrupted by it: a belief, howsoever odd, common enough in the nineteenth-century, marinated as that era was in both classism and sexism. The Loeb Greek library used to have a policy where editors would translate everything into facing-page English except for material deemed obscene, which would be translated into Latin. And talking of Latin, here's a four line poem of Coleridge's own, from 1811 or 1812:

Infelix, ah plusquam infelicissimus Ille,
Semivir in thalamum qui duxit Sesqui-puellam,
Mutumque ossitiens, tantique voraginem hiatüs
Vix rigidi tubuli lacrymoso röre lacessit! [Notebooks 4108]

Unlucky, ah more than unlucky he,
That half-man who beds a woman half-as-much again,
And into her silent, thirsty, wide-open cavern
Weeps a little dew from his tiny, rigid tube.

Kathleen Coburn thinks this is about John Morgan, the diminutive friend with whom Coleridge lived for several years in the eighteen-teens and who sometimes acted as amanuensis. Did Morgan (married, but perhaps not faithful to his rather dominating wife) confess sexual incapacity, perhaps aspermia or premature ejaculation or maybe a less specific erotic inadequacy, with a larger, enthusiastic but unsatisfied woman? Coburn speculates whether ‘the relationship’ between Morgan and Coleridge ‘was a more sympathetic and important one than our ignorance of John Morgan's life has allowed us to surmise’. Maybe so.

Here are two jokes about bodily functions that amused Coleridge enough in 1810 for him to jot them down.

The one advantage of p—— one's breeches.
   The two Judges on Horseback in a hard rain—Nares proposed to dismount, micturus—the other told him—to keep his seat &c—You can't be wetter, and you may be warmer.—
   The crooked Lady whose crepitus had all the effect of a french horn—the same that swallowed a nail, & it came out a cork-screw. [Notebooks, 3942]

Nares is George Nares, a once-famous judge. The old joke about the crooked lady has lasted into the modern age. Field Marshall Gerald Templer once told Lord Mountbatten, ‘Dickie, you're so crooked that if you ate a nail you'd shit a corkscrew’.

Talking of shitting, here's a four-line poem about flies and merde:

Sit alba, sit fusca
(Ni res est absurda)
Quod fuit Merda in Muscă
Jacet Merda in Merdà

Tricky to translate and preserve the joke. The notebook entry of which this poem is a part [Notebooks 4:4710] includes jocular speculation on what it calls the ‘grave’ problem of whether the uptake of excrement by shit-eating flies is equalled by the shit those same flies excrete—we might translate: ‘whether white or black-dye/(Unless it's absurd)/What was shit in the fly/Lies as turd in-turd’. And here is a little doodle from 1817.

The Greek means ‘old woman who collects things’; as does the Latin. It was a usage noted by Heyschius and other grammarians, and is cited, with its Latin equivalent, in lots of places, so we can't be sure where Coleridge chanced upon it. Here it is, for example, in the notes to a contemporary (to Coleridge) edition of Aulus Gellius:

Coburn thinks that little doodle is a broom (I suppose she's thinking of an old woman sweeping lots of things into one heap). I don't think it's a broom. My imagination lives more in the gutter than Coburn's, evidently. You see, whilst anus does mean old woman, it also means ... well, anus. And I think Coleridge was tickled at the idea of a collecting, rather than emitting, arsehole, which he has sketched there at the end of that little crease.

And here, from August 1811, is a bit of fake Homer on the topic of Achilles taking a dump.

Achillis cӕna hesterna,
distichon nunc primo a MSS. omnium Codicum homericarum aperte vetustissimo

Πώγον υποκτείνων πετρας ἀπο σκληροκιρυγδοῦς
שλιששλoשιται Aχιλεύς φλoשβoש ἐπί ρωoριμoίo  [Notebooks, 4102]

The first bit in Latin, there, means ‘Achilles's Yesterday's Meal: a distich, now first printed from what is evidently the oldest of all Homeric codices’. πώγων, the first word of the Greek, means ‘beard’, but was also used, for instance by Aristophanes, to refer to the hairy pubic area—here, it clearly means arse. Also: the second line of the Greek incorporates the Hebrew letter shin, a ‘sh’ sound, into two of its words. This gives us:

Extending his arse beyond the hard rock
Achilles hurriedly shlishshlosh-es over the floshbosh

[I'm not sure about ρωoριμoίo, but presume its a variant of ῥώoμαί, ‘to move with speed’; Coburn's transcription has ρωαριμoίo, which so far as I can see isn't any kind of word, and which I'm assuming is a slip]. What I find particularly interesting here is the way the excremental expresses what is, surely, a grammatological point of entry: because the Greek alphabet has no sh sound, which makes it hard to write suitably onomatopoeic verse in Greek about shitting into rivers. Conceivably Coleridge is even toying with the idea that very early Greek, Graecus primus, had such a letter, perhaps akin to the Hebrew ש, but that like the digamma it disappeared. What gives this an interesting extra layer is that ש was one Coleridge's ciphers for Sarah Hutchinson, his Asra (SH, you see). And that's not an arbitrary reference either, I think.

:2:

At this point, in a manner more or less, and I daresay less, likely to convince you, I aim to turn this blogpost around. Because the more of these examples I pile up from the notebooks (and there are very many more), the less I see it as merely lavatorial humour, or occasional ribaldry, and the more I find myself thinking we're touching on something quite profound and important to Coleridge's poetic and philosophical imagination. That looks unlikely, I concede; but bear with me for a moment and I'll try to argue the case.

I'm going to segue into my larger point with two more notebook entries, neither of them merely jokey. Here is Coleridge considering a bowl of piss:

What a beautiful Thing Urine is, in a Pot, brown yellow, transpicuous, the Image, diamond shaped of the of the [sic] Candle in it, especially, as it now appeared, I having emptied the Snuffers into it, & the Snuff floating about, & painting all-shaped Shadows on the Bottom. [Dec. 1803, Notebooks 1:1766]

This is the very essence of the Coleridgean notebooks, and one of the things aficionados love about them (Seamus Perry calls the notebooks ‘the unacknowledged prose masterpiece of the age ... a work, by turns, of philosophical profundity, descriptive beauty, verbal brilliance and human comedy—and sometimes tragicomedy, and sometimes tragedy’, and I agree with him). That STC could spin such a beautifully vivid and expressive paragraph about something so apparently unpromising as the contents of his pisspot seems to me a marvellous thing. It might have been merely pretentious, but somehow it isn't: rather it reverts our attention back onto something we have been acculturated to consider abject and untouchable to bring out its aureate loveliness.

Transpicuous means transparent, but Coleridge is surely thinking of Milton (‘that light/Sent from her through the wide transpicuous air,/To the terrestrial Moon to be as a star’, Paradise Lost 8:140-142), which positions the piss less as a fluid and more as a medium, as, indeed, a kind of lens through which we see certain things more clearly. It is a candlelit colour, warm and precious, and those little slips of the pen (‘the of the’) run the risk of distracting us from how exquisitely this little section of prose plays with language. At the risk of sounding like Malvolio pulling the cs, us and ts from his lady's letter: look at how prolific this passage is with ‘p’s and ‘i’s and ‘s’s of piss: pot, appeared, painting, is-in-in-it-it-I-into-it, transspicuous shaped especially as snuffers snuff shaped shadows. Or again, look how rapidly Coleridge's imagination skips from association to association in what amounts to a chain of Latin punnery, consciously framed as such or otherwise: urine in Latin is urina; pot in Latin urna; burnt-colour (brown, yellow) uro; ‘to plunge into water’, like a diver (or like an dicarded snuffer) is urino. And shadow (umbra) isn't that far away. Coleridge isn't piddling around here: he is shaping a verbal text that captures beauty in the unmentionable, the discarded, the impolite.

And finally here is a notebook entry from a few years later, about a hawk in flight: unpublished in Coleridge's lifetime, but to me a piece worthy to stand with Shelley's ‘To A Skylark’:

The soil that fell from the Hawk poised at the extreme boundary of Sight thro' a column of sunshine—a falling star, a gem, the fixation, & chrystal, of substantial Light, again dissolving & elongating like a liquid Drop—how altogether lovely this is to the Eye, and to the Mind too while it remained its own self, all & only its very Self—. What a wretched Frenchman would not he be, who could shout out—charming Hawk's Turd!—[Sept 1808; Notebooks, 3:3401]

This seems to me gorgeous writing, but I have to concede those critics who have deigned to notice it haven't taken it so seriously as I do. John Worthen, for instance, notes the ‘rapturous’ tone of the paragraph, but swiftly qualifies his judgement: Coleridge, he says, ‘also knew such language teetered on the edge of absurdity’ [Worthen, The Cambridge Introduction to Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Cambridge Univ Press 2010), 76]. I'm not sure he did know that, because I'm not sure that such language does, actually. 'Frenchman' is a generic insult, of course; but the entry is saying: don't be that Frenchman. Delight in the hawk's turd! It is, in its own specific way, a miracle of flight (turdus in Latin is a variety of bird—it means thrush, of course); and as such becomes a rebus for the spiritually transcendent beauty of all created things, poetry not the least. This particular notebook entry continues:

O many, many are the seeings, hearings & tactual Impressions of pure Love, that have a Being of their own—& to call them by the names of things unsouled and debased below even their own lowest nature by Associations accidental, and of vicious accidents, is blasphemy—What seest thou yonder? X.—The lovely countenance of a lovely Maiden, fervid yet awe-suffering, with devotion—her face resigned to Bliss or Bale, &c &c.—Y. A Bit of Flesh.
That which cannot be seen unless by him whose very seeing is more than an act of mere sight. ... The Polyclete that created the Ἀφροδίτη Καλλίπυγος thought in acts, not words—energy divinely languageless—(ο λογος εκ θεῳ και συν θεῳ θεος)—δια τον Λογον, oυ συν επεσι—thro' the word, not with words.

The Greek glosses the famous Johannine phrase, and means ‘the word from God and with God, God—via the Word not with words’. Nor is it irrelevant that it is the famous sculpture ‘Aphrodite of the Beautiful Buttocks’ (‘Aphrodite Cute-Arse’) that enters into Coleridge's thought as an embodiment of the expression of non-verbal beauty: this sexualised bottom balances the implied functional shitting bottom, as a way of dignifying sexual desire and bodily functions, rather than dragging classical sculpture into the gutter. This is not the edge of any absurdity, unless we want to expand that word to encompass the leap of faith as such. It is Coleridge saying that the dropping turd of the hawk in flight is beautiful, as the backside of Aphrodite is beautiful: transcendentally so. To treat it as vulgar, either for comic or lustful purposes, is actually blasphemous. This, to appropriate Blake's famous phrase, is Coleridge seeing Heaven in a grain of shit.

Coleridge's notional interlocutors, X and Y, do not see the same thing when they see a woman. For the latter she is only flesh to be lusted over; but the former really sees her, sees her for what she is, and that means he sees that something spiritually fine has been erected out of a universally excremental material. Dickens, a generation later, makes a similar play with the word dust: the ‘dust-heaps’ that are the source of the Boffins' fortune in Our Mutual Friend are collections of all the rubbish of London, and contain waste matter wet as well as dry, faecal as well as functional (indeed, the ‘night soil’ men of London made good money repurposing human and animal shit as fertilizer; for though not every crop can be safely grown in the former waste, some, like tomatoes, can). Behind the social reportage of an actual feature of 19th-century London life is a spiritual insight, as is often the case with Dickens. In this case, the whole novel is haunted by one of the most famous of Biblical verse: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. We may sanitize this mortal verse (Genesis 3:19) by thinking of something powdery and dry, but human corruption is rather wetter than drier, rather more excremental than powdery—and so, after all, is human conception. We don't produce a clean dry pollen like the plants of the field, after all. Indeed, whilst I'm no connoisseur of modern porn (I know: they all say that ...) I've often been struck that one of the most pathological aspects of that ubiquitous form of contemporary cultural production is now weirdly clean it all is: how washed and buffed, how depilated and teeth-bleached and plastic the players all are; how all human dirtiness and shoddiness and ordinary inadequacy has been banished from the whole performance. In that, Coleridge's X and Y mini-conversation seems to me still to have real relevance.

I don't want to stray from the Coleridgean point, for I do think these sorts of questions genuinely engaged him. Read his autobiography, and you can't help but be struck by how much grief his own bowels gave him. Severe constipation is one of the side-effects of opium (that is, heroin) addiction, and STC often had to endure what he understandably enough saw as the demeaning indignity of repeated enemas: clyster pipes inserted into his anus by an old female nurse (it would take a more disciplined critic than I to hold back from mentioning the anus collectrix here) for the purpose of forcably irrigating out his compacted shit.

For STC constipation was more than a mere physical inconvenience. He took it as symptomatic of a more *clears throat* fundamental spiritual problem: a blockage of the soul, an inability to work through and move healthfully on in his life and his work that Coleridge autodiagnosed as a pathology of the will. Being helpless in the grip of opium addiction will tend to do that to a person, I suppose. Nowadays we are less inclined to blame addicts. But Coleridge certainly blamed himself, vehemently and often self-laceratingly. In July 1808, prompted by stabbing stomach pains from a prolonged constipated episode so severe that he actually thought he might die, he wrote in his notebook: ‘O misery! when the occasion of premature Death is that which makes Death terrible! Savage Stab! that transpierces at once Health and Conscience! Body and Spirit!—ΩΠΜ’ [Notebooks, 3:3352] Those last three Greek letters, that Oh, Pee, Em, indicate the root of the issue. A drug like heroin takes away the shittiness of the world, and therein lies precisely its problem. That it takes away the actual, normal passage of excrement is almost too apposite.

Here, I think, we touch upon one of the great, if almost entirely overlooked, themes of Coleridge's intellectual and imaginative life. A book like Edward Kessler's Coleridge's Metaphor's of Being (Princeton Univ. Press 1979) does solid critical work isolating a series of focus-points for Coleridge's core poetic ideas: what Kessler calls ‘the Eddy-Rose’ (a sort of composite metaphor that combines eddies, whirlpools and the like with the patterns of petals of a beautiful flower); phantom life; Limbo and so on. But Kessler doesn't talk about the turd, in part because respectable published-in-his-lifetime Coleridge, critic and poet, doesn't bring turds into his work very often. But the notebooks are full of it, and as metaphors of being go it is, I think, hugely important. I understand why critics have generally avoided writing about it; but it does seem to me distorting.

The whole process of eating, drawing sustenance, and shitting out waste is an organic through-line that iterates the dream of health, both physical and more importantly spiritual, as far as Coleridge is concerned. His greatest poetic achievements are potent dramatisations of the breakdown of that healthful flow. The subterranean river in ‘Kubla Khan’ flows not out into the open ocean, but round and down in a turbid eddy that loses itself somewhere hidden and sunless. The Ancient Mariner's cursed, blocked voyage replicates a whole string of nightmare-death-in-life constipations (until, at least, a mystic Christian blessedness and forgiveness intervene: but even there the Mariner is caught in a recurring cycle of obsessive-compulsive retellings of his tale). ‘Christabel’ can't even (if you'll excuse me) shit out its own ending, so trapped it is in its recirculation of blocked and morbid desire. For Coleridge, shit, like the beauteous airborne turd of the flying falcon, is a symbol of health, of through-flow and freedom.

American critic Alan Jacobs has coined the phrase “excresacramental” for a particular sort of art, a Swiftian cacography that articulates not only the expressivity but actually the holiness of the abject-physical. From the point of view of the Incarnation, God becoming man is not God becoming the bizarrely soap-washed, clean-linen, dazzling-bleached-smile icon of modern cleanliness that many images of Jesus peddle to modern-day believers, complete with cleaner-than-clean halo shine, like the gleam of newly rinsed glasses in the dishwasher. It is, rather, the non-material taking on flesh and all that flesh is heir to. It is God becoming dust, wet and foul-smelling as well as dry and smoky. The point is, as Coleridge might say, that unless you can truly see that the hawk shitting its load into a sunbeam is as beautiful and holy an image as the white dove flying over blue waters beneath a new rainbow, then you haven't actually seen what beauty in the world fully means. The paraclete is also un(para)clean. For Coleridge, an apprehension of that place where religious transcendence, pure love, sexual desire (for instance, desire for a well shaped set of buttocks) and the healthy bowel-movement all express one another is not a satirical denigration of love: there's nothing of Swift's ‘Celia Celia Celia shits’ horror in STC's writing. Rather it is a strangely, unusually, wonderfully expressive epitome of the central mystery of a genuinely religious writer: the spiritualisation of matter, the materialisation of spirit. Samuel Taylor Kakaleridge.

Coleridge reads Sepúlveda's "De Fato et Libero Arbitraria" (1526) in 1810

So, as I noted previously, we know that in May 1810 Coleridge was reading the 1780 four-volume collected edition of seventeenth-century Spanish Catholic humanist Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (1494-1573), or at least reading the fourth volume (title page above) of that edition. That vol collects together fourteen separate titles by Sepúlveda, concluding with De fato et libero arbitrio contra Lutherum libri tres (1526) and the Antapologia pro Alberto Pio, Principe Carpensi, in Erasmum Roterodamum (1531). The De Fato is an attack on Luther, and the Antapologia a more measured if still critical engagement with Erasmus, weighing in on the side of one of Erasmus's antagonists, Albert III of Carpi.

These are, it might seem, odd works for Coleridge to be reading. He generally wasn't particularly interested in Catholic theology, or the discourses of the Counter-Rreformation, and although he was not himself a Lutheran he had immense respect for Luther's writing, and praised him in the Biographia and elsewhere (according to E J Dahl ‘Luther was Coleridge's greatest hero and authority, and Coleridge considered that he had taken up his mantle as reformer and theologian’). Still: we know Coleridge was reading these two anti-Lutheran books, because in his Notebook for May 1810 he writes:

How interesting to read Sepulveda (Op. Vol 4 p.470) in a style worthy of Cicero, nay, more manly, yet equally elegantly, attribute all the miseries of Germany, their vices, infidelity, Lutheranism, to the Study, the pernicious study, of Eloquence & Belles Lettres—Item—his abuse of Erasmus for translating Lucian, & leaving the oddments of Aristotle untranslated or in barbarous Latin / Item / what great Mathematicians &c &c &c Germany produced before the restoration of Letters.!!!!!!—nothing since — [Kathleen Coburn (ed), The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (5 vols: London: Routledge 1973) 3: 3809]

Here's page 470 of vol 4 (it's the third page of the De Fato, so STC didn't need to read very far into that volume to come across it):

Here's the relevant bit:

III. Sed antequam de iis rebus dico, quae propriae causae hujus esse videntur, non erit alienum, qui fons tantorum malorum, et quasi caput exstiterit, aperire, et de moribus et flagitiosis artibus Lutheri pauca breviter commemorare, ut a quibus initiis profecta nefaria scelestissimi hominis molitio vires paulatim sumendo processerit, intelligatur. Quo in loco illud pro comperto dicefe audeo et constanter affirmare, quod mirum cuipiam fortasse videbitur, studium eloquentiae humaniorumque litterarum Germanis hanc perniciosissimam pestem invexisse. ... Quamdiu enim Germania more patrio gravioribus disciplinis intenta, rebus rerumque solidae cognitioni, non verborum inani garrulitati ac sermonis lenociniis studebat, proveniebant in ea acutissimi mathematici, perspicaces philosophi, theologi gravissimi, honestissimi, religiosissimi: ut non modo sana doctrina, sed etiam optimis moribus ac exemplis ad homines instituendos, et vera religione imbuendos essent instructi. Postea vero quam his optimis disciplinis relictis, coeptum est a leviculis quibusdam hominibus Latini Graecique sermonis cognitioni, ac dicendi facultati accuratius indulgeri, provenere malo pravoque ingenio quidam, qui maledicorum impiorumque scriptorum commercio facile omnem impietatem caninamque maledicentiam imbiberent, seque ad morum pessima quaeque vitia multo etiam magis, quam ad eloquentiae virtutes dociles exhiberent. Itaque non hominum tantum, sed etiam Dei contemtores effecti, quantulamcumque dicendi facultatem comparaverant, hac ad omnem religionem tollendam abuti coeperunt: quorum partim jactatae voces, partim scripta sic Germanae juventuti latitans venenum infundebant, ut paulatim corruptos animos ad scelus impietatis concipiendum commodissime praeparaverint.

Which means:

But before I speak of these matters, and of their proper cause and relevance, it will not be off the point to mention he who was the source and fountainhead of so many evils; to outline, that is, the character and criminal practices of Luther, so that it can be clearly understood how, from small beginnings, his nefarious criminal enterprise was able gradually to grow in strength. At this point in my argument I dare to affirm what will, perhaps, seem extraordinary to some people, that this same pernicious plague was brought upon the Germans by the introduction into their culture of the Literae Humaniores and the study of eloquence [studium eloquentiae humaniorumque litterarum]. ... For as long as Germany followed her sober, native learning, studying the knowledge of true things, rather than the empty garrulousness of vain words and a shameless pimping-up of scholarship, then she produced the very sharpest mathematicians, the most clear-sighted philosophers, the most serious, honourable and religious theologians. They not only explored sound doctrine, but by the best customs and the best examples were able to educate people and instill in them true religion. Soon enough, however, the best of disciplines were abandoned, and this was because certain trivial men wanted to indulge in close study of Latin and Greek, after which there then emerged certain more evil and depraved people who by commerce with disreputable and evil books demonstrated how easily men can absorb all manner of impiety and rabid wickednesses, going from bad vices to worse ones much more than ever they learned the virtues that learning might have brought with it. And so they became contemptuous not only of men, but of God, and turned their small powers of eloquence to the utter destruction of every form of religion: partly just for the satisfaction of hearing the sound of their own voices, and partly to corrupt German youth with their writings, in which lay concealed the poison they were administering.

‘Pimping-up of scholarship’ looks like me being slangy, but it's literally what lenocinium means. So as STC notes, with amused astonishment: Sepúlveda straightforwardly says that the introduction of classical learning to Germany corrupted the nation and so led to Luther and Protestantism.

The reference to Erasmus, in the middle, is less to a specific passage, and more to criticisms Sepúlveda (himself a translator of Aristotle into Latin) makes several times: that Erasmus piddled around translating Lucian when he could have been adding to the glory of God by translating Aristotle. Here's a passage from early in the Antapologia (it's page 549 of the volume Coleridge was reading):

Primum, quod homo Graeca interpretandi studio deditus, Luciani fabellas, quarum cognitione Latini et theologi et philosophi sine ulla religionis aut morum jactura carere poterant, Latine expresseris diligenter, Aristotelis ne verbum quidem converteris, cum essent non pauca illius viri divini opera de philosophia, quae partim perperam, partim barbare conversa, Latinam orationem desiderabant.

Firstly, though you are a man learned in Greek, yet you give your time to the silly stories of Lucian, and diligently render them into Latin, when theologians and philosophers could perfectly well do without those, and yet you translate not one word of Aristotle into Latin, when no small number of that divine man's philosophical works remain untranslated or are only rendered into barbarous Latin.

We can't be certain as to why Coleridge was reading Sepúlveda in 1810, although it's surely likely that having wound-up The Friend in 1809, and starting to think of lecturing again to earn money, he was exploring Aristotle, and reading around the topic. Still, it was the Lutheran jibes that struck him, and it may be this strange little passage, in part, that led to Coleridge stressing in the Biographia how innately German, in language and thought, Luther's achievement was. As to whether Sepúlveda's Latin was at once more elegant and more manly than Cicero's: that you can judge for yourself.

Io. Genesii Sepuluedae

I've been following-up a rather obscure strand of Coleridgean reading, which I'll probably blog about in a day or two (to get it off my chest). But I wanted to stop for a moment to note how pretty this title page is. Don't you think?

It's something STC read (though not in this 1526 first edition; he read a later 4-vol collected ed from 1780), by Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (1494-1573), famous Spanish Renaissance humanist, theologian and translator of Aristotle into Latin. The ‘Io. Genesii Sepuluedae’ is the Latinization of Sepúlveda's name, ‘Cordubensis artem et theologiae doctoris’ means that he's a Doctor of Arts and Theology of the University of Córdoba in Andalusia, and finally we get to  the title of the volume: De Fato et Libero Arbitrio Libri Tres, ‘On Fate and Free-Will, in Three Books’. It's Sepúlveda's attempt to refute Luther's opinions on fate and Christian theology, part of the broader discourse of the Counter Reformation. That Coleridge read it at all is fairly interesting, and it was something concerning which he has Thoughts, but for now I only note how lovely the design is, here.

Coleridge's Claudian Marginalium

:1:

Coleridge owned an edition of Claudian's poems, and it may have been the one pictured above. Which is to say: it was either that 1677 edition, or an earlier 1650 one, both texts edited by Nicolaas Heinsius. We can't be sure, because Coleridge's actual copy has been lost, but Mrs J H Green who saw the book when compiling her Handlist of Coleridge's Books (1863) says it was the 1677 edition. Then again, Thomas Arnold (son of the famous headmaster, father of Mrs Humphrey Ward and grandfather of Aldous Huxley) actually owned the copy for a time, and he says this:

I have in my possession a very interesting memorial of the intimacy between Coleridge & Southey. It is an Elzevir edition 1650 of Claudianus having on the front fly leaf in schoolboy hand ‘E. Libris R Southey / Regiae Scholae Westminest. / AD 1788’ and below this ‘S.T.Coleridge / from Robert Southey / June 10. 1810’ in Southey's handwriting. [Letter to Ernest Hartley Coleridge, 12 December 1884]

The text of the 1650 edition is the same as that of the 1677; but I dilate upon this seemingly trivial point because the frontispieces were different. The 1677 has the bare-buttocked, racy image above, where the 1650 has this much worthier, duller illustration:

There is a point in all this pettifogging, and I'll come back to it in a minute. But first, the meat of my post.

:2:

So: the rest of Arnold's letter explains that ‘the book was purchased some years ago at a booksellers in London’ and that it contains a handwritten comment by Coleridge ‘at the end’ (so, presumably, on the back flyleaf)—‘I have verified the handwriting at the M.S. room in British Museum’, he says. Arnold then copies out Coleridge's comment:

She sate as square and solemn as an empty chair when you look at it in a half dreamy Mood—. On the reproach of shedding tears, for a Lady in Pain? Loss of Fortune? Any other cause respecting myself principally? Immediate peril of death? No! never—but treachery unkindness unmerited & implying want of believed goodness, in an instantaneous impression of [?others/those/their] sufferings which my imagination could not limit [?to] a noble act...a Sunset &c &c &c

This is quoted from George Whalley's edition of Coleridge's Marginalia [2:45]. I haven't seen the actual letter (it's at the University of Texas), but Whalley notes that ‘the writing of the original is somewhat difficult to decipher’.

Whalley thinks this is a personal expression of Coleridgean anguish. He notes that STC, in his more despairing moods, accused Sara Hutchinson of ‘unkindness unmerited’ and general ‘unresponsiveness’, and speculates that this might be another little iteration of his hopeless love for Asra. Why, you ask, would he scribble such a thing in the back of the copy of Claudian his friend Southey had given him? The answer is: there's no reason why he would, except that he did sometimes jot odd and unrelated things in books he had to hand (though it should be said, the vast majority of his marginalia relates to the specific works in which they are written). At any rate, Whalley tentatively flexes the metaphorical muscles of his idea.

‘She’ may recall the letter ש‬ (shin) the initial letter of C's anagram of ‘Hutchinson’, which he sometimes used alone as her name ... ‘She’ could be a disguise for Coleridge himself. Yet it is also possible that this agitated note does not record any actual or personal incident, but may rather be a sketch for a poem, or for a dramatic episode. [Whalley, Coleridge Marginalia (Routledge/Princeton U P 1984), 2:45]

I'm going to bump Whalley's ‘yet it is also possible that’ to ‘it is much more likely that’, and indulge in a little speculation of my own. Of course we cannot be sure what the marginalium means, but I wonder if this is Coleridge starting to tinker with the notion of a poem inspired by, or perhaps even a continuation of, Claudian's most famous work, the unfinished epic de raptu Proserpinae, ‘The Rape of Prosperpine’ (AD 395-97).

Claudian's poem a retelling of the myth of Pluto's abduction of the beautiful Proserpina, the Roman version of the Greek myth in which Hades abducts Persephone. Book 1 is set in the underworld, Pluto raging that he has been left wifeless for so long. He demands that Jove provide one, and Jove chooses Prosperina, daughter of Ceres (the goddess of agriculture, fertility and motherhood), instructing Venus to tempt the girl away from her house so that Pluto can nab her. Book 2 starts with Venus, and the two virgin goddesses Diana and Pallas, leading Prosperina into sunny meads to gather flowers. A huge cleft (‘hiatus immensus’ [2:187]) opens abruptly in the earth, Pluto rides through in his chariot, snatches Proserpina and hurtles away. The two virgin goddesses were not expecting this, and try to stop it—Pallas bangs Pluto's chariot with her shield—but there's nothing they can do. Proserpina is understandably distraught.

Interea volucri fertur Proserpina curru
caesariem diffusa Noto planctuque lacertos
verberat et questus ad nubila tendit inanes:
... ‘o fortunatas alii quascumque tulere
raptores ! saltem communi sole fruuntur.
sed mihi virginitas pariter caelumque negatur,
eripitur cum luce pudor, terrisque relictis
servitum Stygio ducor captiva tyranno.’ [2:247-64]

Proserpine is carried off away in the flying chariot, her hair blown back by the wind, beating her arms in grief and calling in vain remonstrance to the clouds: ... ‘How fortunate are those girls seized by other rapists; for they at least can still enjoy the broad light of day, while I, together with my virginity, relinquish the very air of heaven; both innocence and daylight are stolen from me. I have no choice but to leave this world behind me and be carried a captive bride to serve the tyrant of Stygius.’

Pluto is moved to tears by her lament, and wipes his eyes with his ‘rusty cloak’ (‘ferrugineus amictus’ [2:275]). Not that he lets her go, mind. No: the chariot rides on into Tartarus, where Pluto marries the poor girl. Book 2 closes with them in their bridal chamber together.

In Book 3 Ceres dreams of her daughter, miserable and rebuking her for her abandonment, and wakes in terror. She hurries to Prosperina's house and discovers it empty, spiders'-webs covering her daughter's loom.

Ut domus excubiis incustodita remotis
et resupinati neglecto cardine postes
flebilis et tacitae species adparuit aulae ...,
haeserunt lacrimae; nec vox aut spiritus oris
redditur, atque imis vibrat tremor ossa medullis;
succidui titubant gressus; foribusque reclusis,
dum vacuas sedes et desolata pererravit
atria. [3:146-55]

When she she saw the unguarded house, its gatekeepers gone, the rusted hinges, the doorposts knocked flat, and the sad state of the silent halls ... she could not weep, nor speak, nor even breathe; a trembling shook the very marrow of her bones; her faltering steps stumbled. She threw open the doors and wandered through the empty rooms and deserted halls.

That description makes me think not just that Tennyson knew this poem (he'd studied Claudian at school, and translated portions of his verse before he was fourteen), but that he was specifically alluding to it in ‘Mariana’ (1830). But I don't want to get distracted. In the poem: Ceres finds an old nurse who relates what happened to Proserpina, and then, like a Hyrcan tiger [3:263], goes raging along the flanks of Mount Olympus demanding that her daughter be restored to her. That's where the poem ends.

:3:

Clearly, Claudian planned a longer work: presumably a six-book epic (maybe a twelve-book epic, although it might have been a stretch filling out so many hexameters with what remains to be told). The rest of the story is well-known: Ceres, heartbroken, refuses to let cereal crops grow, and the people starve, until Jove resolves to restore her daughter to her. Pluto reluctantly gives his bride up, but tricks her by giving her twelve pomegranate seeds to eat. Having eaten the food of the Underworld Proserpina is compelled to return there, but because she only eats six of the seeds she only returns for half the year. None of that is in Claudian's unfinished poem.

So let's return to Coleridge's Claudian marginalium.

She sate as square and solemn as an empty chair when you look at it in a half dreamy Mood—. On the reproach of shedding tears, for a Lady in Pain? Loss of Fortune? Any other cause respecting myself principally? Immediate peril of death? No! never—but treachery unkindness unmerited & implying want of believed goodness, in an instantaneous impression of [?others/those/their] sufferings which my imagination could not limit [?to] a noble act...a Sunset &c &c &c

Let's imagine that these are the first, very tentative thoughts for a continuation of De Raptu Proserpinae. ‘She’, here, would be Ceres, hollowed out with grief by the loss of her daughter. The empty chair would be the one mentioned in Claudian's poem, unoccupied before Proserpina's loom. We might even take an extra step of imagining that Coleridge is doodling a little verse-doggerel, much as he did with a couple of lines of the Iliad. That would give us:

She sate as square
And solemn as
An empty chair
When you look at
In a half dreamy Mood—

...which is the kind of thing easy to spin-on:

She sate as square
And solemn as
An empty chair
Look'd all on as
In half dreamy Mood
Bereft of her brood
Virginal and fair
All stol'n chicks
Beyond the Styx
Voided by her despairs
As empty chairs ...

and so on. But this isn't the direction in which Coleridge goes.

Instead (to continue my speculation) the thought of Ceres cast-down and weeping leads Coleridge to ponder a tearful woman as a topic for a poem. He jots down a possible title: ‘On the Reproach of Shedding Tears, for a Lady in Pain’. From that title we'd imagine a poem repudiating reproach. But why is the woman in this poem crying? Has she been threatened with death? But STC refuses to believe a true lady would ever weep for such a selfish reason (‘No! never’), so instead he tabulates a few of the things that might make the lady cry: the treachery of others; unmerited unkindness; an undeserved loss of reputation (‘implying want of believed goodness’). The first of these might be carrying on the Proserpina/Ceres story, as might the second, although less pointedly (though the third moves us in a different direction). Then there's a slightly obscure fourth reason for possible grief: ‘an instantaneous impression of those sufferings which [my] imagination could not limit to a noble act’—something to do with empathy with the sufferings of others (let's say: her daughter), which is a perfectly good reason to cry, although I'm not sure to what the noble act might refer.

But it's actually the final open-ended reference to ‘...a Sunset &c &c &c’ that seals the deal for me. Because at the unfinished end of De Raptu Proserpina, Ceres demands to know why she is weeping, and promises to roam the world broadcasting her grief:

Largis tunc imbribus ora madescunt.
‘quid ? tantum dignum fieri dignumque taceri?
hei mihi, discedunt omnes. quid vana moraris
ulterius? non bella palam caelestia sentis?
quin potius natam pelago terrisque requiris? ...
non Rheni glacies, non me Riphaea tenebunt
frigora; non dubio Syrtis cunctabitur aestu.
stat finem penetrare Noti Boreaeque nivalem
vestigare domum; primo calcabitur Atlas
occasu facibusque meis lucebit Hydaspes.’ [3:311-25]

Copious tears then fell like rain down her cheeks. ‘Why these tears?’ [she asked herself], ‘why this silence? Woe is me; everyone else has abandoned me. Why do you stay here to no purpose? Can't you see it is open war between you and heaven now? Wouldn't it be better to search sea and land for your daughter? ... Neither the glacier-clogged Rhine nor Alpine frosts shall prevent me; the dubious tides of Syrtes shall not hold me back. I am determined to penetrate the fastnesses of the South, and to explore the snowy home of Boreas, the North Wind. I will climb Mount Atlas on the brink of sunset and illuminate Hydaspes’ stream with my torches.

That's Ceres saying: I shall go to the extreme south and the extreme north, to the extreme west (the sunset on Atlas) and the extreme east (The Hydaspes river was where Alexander the Great enjoyed his last victory, annexing the Punjab to his empire) to search for my daughter. I'm speculating that Coleridge reading these lines, began to think about continuing them, or writing something inspired by them: tears—Sunset—&c &c &c

Which brings me back to the pettifogging note on which I opened this blogpost. Does it matter which edition Coleridge owned? Of course not, except that the 1650 edition presents a dully respectable face to the world, where the 1677 dramatically and indeed rather lubriciously represents the moment of Proserpina's abduction, the trauma that leads to the empty chair, the grief of the mother and the resolution to search as far as the sunset to recover her. Might it not have been a prompt to Coleridge's imagination, howsoever abbreviated?

Coleridge Blog Reanimation

Last year was a period of latency for this blog, pretty much. After a number of years of fairly intensive mining of the Cole Ridge, I spent 2017 working on other things. But there are glimmers of life in the blog again now. You see, having put a couple of other projects to bed, I'm revving up to work on a funded research project to do with Coleridge's Latin. That means I'm going to start blogging here again, testing ideas, jotting things down, writing posts. If the archive of material on this blog constitutes a string of often heroically abstruse and reader-unfriendly lucubrations, I can promise that what's going to follow will be considerably more abstruse and rebarbative. Few people are interested in Coleridge nowadays; many fewer have any interest in neo-Latin culture (especially this late in the day—I mean, the day of neo-Latin culture: the nineteenth-century was the last gasp of any serious European Latinity). And the crossover between those two groups is minuscule. And that's the target audience I'm going for with these posts. Onward!

Cameron's Christabel (1866)

This is Julia Margaret Cameron's famous photograph (more precisely: it's an albumen silver print from a glass negative) of Coleridge's 'Christabel'. The model is Cameron's own niece, May Prinsep, who quite a bit later became Alfred Tennyson's son Hallam's second wife. The image is from the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, which has, rather sportingly, made 325,000 of its artworks and images available online free of copyright, for anybody to download, reproduce, remix and share. The Met reckons the image is supposed to show Christabel before her 'corruption' by Geraldine. I have my doubts about that. Eye of the beholder, I suppose.

Things I like about this image include: its straightforwardness, the blankness of Prinsep's expression, the aesthetic balance of its lit top-left and shadowy bottom-right, the way this pulls into sharper focus the triangular shape formed by the hair, framing the face. It is a reticent image, which suits its source text, since whatever else it is, 'Christabel' is a poem that refuses to disclose the secret in its heart, and has managed to keep that secret for two centuries now. Cameron's photo makes a rather refreshing change from the more outré images that latter day sensibilities have tended to supply when illustrating what people like to call 'the Prototypical Lesbian Vampire Story'. I mean this sort of thing:

I don't mean to hate-on that image, but it seems to me to misunderstand something crucial about sexual allure—to miss, that is, the way desire tends to fasten on what is withheld rather than what is conspicuously proffered. The way desire is always, to an extent, perverse, in the sense that it grounds itself in the hidden and taboo and strange. This 21st-century image, we might say, understands that desire is perverse, but wears the semiotics of its transgression all on the surface, almost as if it wants to placate perversity, to get it out of the way, so that we can get on with the clean healthy fucking. Coleridge's poem doesn't present desire that way.

Prinsep, in Cameron's photo, looks young because she was young: she had just turned thirteen when the image was taken. And if her expression is, shall we say, unforthcoming then that is part of the logic of (to use an anachronistic term) teenagerdom. But it works beautifully for this image. I'm not denying that 'Christabel' is a poem about awakening sexuality and same-sex desire and transgression and all that; and I have no problem with Queer appropriation of the text as a ground for the uninhibited performance and display of gay identity. But the poem itself is much more ambiguous than this, and not only because it is unfinished. It is a work that says: sex, especially when we first become aware of it as a force in our lives, is as much a secret inwardness as a mode of outward being-in-the-world. Sex is something structurally 'about' connecting with other people, of course, but it comes into our adolescent existence in the first case as something that seals us away from other people (something, through embarassment and convention, we hide from family and others), something difficult, balanced between thrilling and alarming, a mode of possibility that is also a mode of guilty frustration. Sexual desire, at the beginning, is a mode of truancy from family and society.

Coleridge's poem dramatises that through Christabel's secrecy and its flavours of shame, deceit and disguise: creeping around outside after dark, bringing Geraldine back to her bed without her father knowing and so on. Cameron's photo, I think, internalises that drama (for many adolescents, because sex starts as fantasy unanchored to experience, such fantasy tends to veer into unrealistic directions, more melodramatic and wild and Goth than 'real life'), and Prinsep's expression, her lack of affective engagement with the camera, neatly captures a sense of something occluded. Compare, for example, this image from 1870, again by Cameron. Here Prinsep is seventeen, but she is now inhabiting her sense of own physical allure, and it generates a completely different vibe.

Or, from four years later, 'Elaine the Lily maid of Astolat' (from Tennyson's Idylls, of course), where a killing wistfulness and posed conventionalised longing has entered the composition:

Better by far is the cool blankness of the thirteen-year-old Prinsep's gaze. That gets at something really crucial in Coleridge's text.