No Such Book As Ulricus Rinovius's "De Controversiis" (1590)

‘Essay IV’ in The Friend sets out the principles to which Coleridge declares he will adhere in the essays that follow. He won't, he says, be constantly I-ing his prose (he promises ‘solicitude’, though not ‘excessive solicitude’ when it comes to avoiding ‘the use of our first personal pronoun’), he'll try not to be too obscure, he'll do his research and support what he says with evidence, and above all he promises to do his very best to avoid ‘Arrogance’ and ‘Presumption’. Those latter qualities are the real focus of the essay, in fact. ‘The word, Presumption, I appropriate to the internal feeling [of superiority], and arrogance to the way and manner of outwardly expressing ourselves’ [Friend, 1:27]. Coleridge discusses several varieties of this arrogance as it appears in other writers, with some tart examples, and the essay ends with this lengthy sentence:

As long therefore as I obtrude no unsupported assertions on my readers; and as long as I state my opinions and the evidence which induced or compelled me to adopt them, with calmness and that diffidence in myself, which is by no means incompatible with a firm belief in the justness of the opinions themselves; while I attack no man's private life from any cause, and detract from no man's honours in his public character, from the truth of his doctrines, or the merits of his compositions, without detailing all my reasons and resting the result solely on the arguments adduced; while I moreover explain fully the motives of duty, which influenced me in resolving to institute such investigation; while I confine all asperity of censure, and all expressions of contempt, to gross violations of truth, honour, and decency, to the base corrupter and the detected slanderer; while I write on no subject, which I have not studied with my best attention, on no subject which my education and acquirements have incapacitated me from properly understanding; and above all while I approve myself, alike in praise and in blame, in close reasoning and in impassioned declamation, a steady FRIEND to the two best and surest friends of all men, TRUTH and HONESTY; I will not fear an accusation of either Presumption or Arrogance from the good and the wise, I shall pity it from the weak, and despise it from the wicked. [Friend CC 4.1: 32-33]

Wordsworth specifically praised this one sentence for its ‘architecture.’ And you can see why he liked it: it's a lovely bit of writing, constructed with enough syntactic and expressive aplomb that the reader never loses her way, but building to a very cleverly, rhetorically-weighted conclusion.

Now: this essay starts, as you can see above, with a Latin epigraph:

Si modo quæ natura et ratione concessa sint, assumpserimus, PRÆSUMPTIONIS suspicio a nobis quam longissime abesse debet. Multa Antiquitati, nobismet nihil, arrogamus. Nihilne vos? Nihil mehercule, nisi quod omnia omni animo Veritati arrogamus Sanctimoniæ. ULR. RINOV. De Controversiis

(Translation.)—If we assume only what Nature and Reason have granted, with no shadow of right can we be suspected of Presumption. To Antiquity we arrogate many things, to ourselves nothing. Nothing? Aye nothing: unless indeed it be, that with all our strength we Arrogate all things to Truth and Moral Purity. [Friend CC 4.1: 25. This is the 1818 version of this quotation and its translation; a variant text from the 1837 version edited by Henry Nelson Coleridge is screenshotted above]

Barbara Rooke, whose Bollingen edition of The Friend I'm using, annotates this passage drily: ‘source untraced’. Because in fact it's a made-up quotation (Rooke's footnote adds ‘as early as Poems (1797) C confessed that when he did not find “a suitable motto” he “invented one”’). There's no such person as Ulr. Rinov., and non-he never wrote the words attributed to him here. Coleridge concocted this Latin for the 1818 edition (this epigraph isn't part of the original 1809 text).

Still, made-up though it be, we can intuit certain things about this bit of faux-Latin, and those things shed an, I think, interesting light on Coleridge's essay, and indeed his larger project in The Friend. Ulricus Rinovius wasn't a person, but there was a 16th-century German priest and historian called Petrus Rinovius; which enables us to deduce that Ulricus was German, and to speculate that Peter might be his relative. And though no book called De Controversiis was authored by any Rinovius, there was a famous book that had that title. This one, in fact:

This is Robert Bellarmine's extremely influential defence of the legitimacy of Papal authority: Disputationes de Controversiis Christianae Fidei adversus hujus temporis Haereticos (3 vols 1581-93). So important, indeed, has this book proved to Catholicism that Pope Pius XI canonised Bellarmine in 1930 and made him a Doctor of the Church a year later. The De Controversiis remains one of the prime documents of the counter-Reformation.

One index of its influence was the ferocity with which it was attacked by Protestant thinkers. Indeed, attacking Bellarmine became for a while something of an industry: specific university chairs were endowed in England and Germany for scholars to disseminate Protestant counter-arguments to Bellarmine's work. The De Controversiis was attacked, as Gordon Campbell notes, ‘by Protestants of all persuasions: in England attacks were mounted by Alexander Cooke, William Whitaker, Francis Bunny, John Rainolds, Matthew Sutcliffe, and Joseph Hall; on the continent [by] Johannes Piscator, Amandus Polanus, and Francis Junius’ and Campbell thinks Milton himself prepared a rebuttal to the De Controversiis, now lost [Campbell, ‘Milton's Index Theologicus and Bellarmine's Disputationes De Controversiis’, Milton Quarterly 11 (1977), 13].

The controversiae to which the book's title refers are those points of faith in dispute between Catholicism and Protestantism. Specifically, Bellarmine discusses the question of faith versus good works, the need or otherwise for extreme unction, the status of the Pope (controversially enough he insists the Pope is not the antichrist prophesied in the Revelation of St John), issues of grace and free-will and, as you'd expect, the nature of the eucharist. He engages with the writing of various Protestant theologians, concentrating particularly on Calvin and Luther, quoting and interrogating their works. Robert Richgels calls De Controversiis ‘massive anti-Protestant summa’ (‘Bellarmine goes directly into the works of his foes, noting carefully their views and arguments on the issues and then providing the Catholic response to each point in turn’ [Richgels, ‘Scholasticism Meets Humanism in the Counter-Reformation the Clash of Cultures in Robert Bellarmine's Use of Calvin in the Controversies’, The Sixteenth Century Journal 6:1 (1975), 54].)

Coleridge's imaginary addition to the extensive body of anti-Bellarmine tracts (written by a German and therefore a Protestant it would of course be an anti-Bellarmite work) does two quite interesting things in its context, here. One is that, without leaning too heavily on the reader, it connects what follows—Coleridge's discussion of the proper way of writing literary and moral essays—with the larger theological questions of the whole Reformation. It's not hard to extrapolate what the larger argument of ‘Ulricus Rinovius’ must be: that instead of blindly trusting to the authority of the (ancient) Roman Church, we must orient ourselves to God by means of our individual truth and moral purity. By appropriating this confected book to his argument, Coleridge is tacitly aligning what he does with religion; in much the same way that he'd styled thoughts on the role of the statesman in society ‘Lay Sermons’ in 1816-17. It's not belle lettres; its much more godly and important than that.

The other thing STC is doing in this made-up quotation is an etymological unpacking of the words ‘arrogance’ and ‘presumption’. By inventing a Latin quotation that actually uses the words, he picks out the way the English arrogance, ‘an extreme and foolish pride, a sense of superiority to others’ derives from the Latin arrogo, which means ‘to claim as one's own, arrogate to oneself, assume’ and so is connected with assumo (‘to take to or with one's self, to take up, receive, adopt, accept, take’). He is saying, in other words, that arrogance is a matter of unchallenged assumptions, which in turn devolves on where we ground our beliefs. If we assume (si assumpserimus), if we take up, what ‘natura et ratione’ offer us, then we cannot be accused of præsumptio, presumption; but if we instead take up the offerings of tradition, ‘antiquitas’, then we move from assumption to arrogation and thence to the outward form of presumption, arrogance. Instead of the antique, we should take up what veritas and sanctimonia proffer.

The question is how far Coleridge is aligning Catholicism with arrogance and Protestantism with assumption. Essay 4 isn't specifically about religious faith, or doctrinal affiliation, but still: his examples do seem to divide along sectarian lines. So those doughty Protestants Newton and Locke are praised, ‘despite being assailed with a full cry for [their] presumption in having deserted the philosophical system at that time generally received by the universities of Europe’ [Friend 1:28] because their genius grounded their assertions in nature. On the other hand Coleridge contrasts a Jesuitical counter-example: ‘I have,’ says Coleridge, ‘looked into a ponderous review of the corpuscular philosophy by a Sicilian Jesuit, in which the acrimonious Father frequently expresses his doubt, whether he should pronounce Boyle or Newton more impious than presumptuous, or more presumptuous than impious. They had both attacked the reigning opinions on most important subjects, opinions sanctioned by the greatest names of antiquity, and by the general suffrage of their learned contemporaries or immediate predecessors.’ This is presumably a reference to Fr Ruggerio Giuseppe Boscovich (though Croatian rather than Sicilian, he published under the Italian version of his forenames, and d'Alembert was one of many contemporaries who thought him Italian—Boscovich wrote back politely to correct his misapprehension—so STC can be forgiven for getting this wrong). Historians of science today mostly argue that Boscovich's atomic theory position him a scientist and thinker of the same stature of a Leibniz or a Locke (perhaps not quite the statue of a Newton: but then, who is?) Coleridge isn't having that, though: any Jesuit investigator into the atomic or corpuscular philosophy’ must be in the sense that Coleridge means it presumptious, because, Coleridge thinks, as a Jesuit he is bound to situate his belief in the authority of the Church rather than in reason and nature.

It's an interesting if rather stretched reading of the nature of arrogance, this, seeing it not only as a matter of pride but of from whence its assertions are taken. It would, surely, be more conventional to ground presumptious arrogance more straightforwardly in egoism and self-love. ‘Pride, simply considered,’ as Samuel Johnson famously remarked ‘is an immoderate degree of self-esteem, or an overvalue set upon a man by himself ... he that overvalues himself will undervalue others; and he that undervalues others will oppress them’ [Johnson Sermons (1688)] And, as you'd expect, Coleridge talks about pride as an underlying arrogant display: arrogance manifests in a ‘proud or petulant omission of proof or argument’ [1.29], something he promises to avoid in his own writing.

But it is more than just ego. STC diagnoses an immoderate self-esteem in the writing of the radical Thomas Paine (‘the illiterate perpetrator of the Age of Reason,’ Coleridge scoffs, ‘must have had his very conscience stupified by the habitual intoxication of presumptuous arrogance, and his common-sense over-clouded by the vapours from his heart’ [1:32]). It is in its deliberate repudiation of Christianity that The Age of Reason embodies its arrogance. Paine's radicalism ‘takes up’ a set of deist-materialist premises that lead it not into mere error but into the arrogant elevation of a hostile and destructive political faux-superiority over the status quo. The notional Jesuit, on the other hand, presumably goes too far the other way, elevating an exploded and superseded past over the necessities of the present.

One, to me, odd aspect of this argument is that Coleridge associates arrogance with both ignorance and plagiarism:

Lastly, it must be admitted as a just imputation of presumption when an individual obtrudes on the public eye, with all the high pretensions of originality, opinions and observations, in regard to which he must plead wilful ignorance in order to be acquitted of dishonest plagiarism. On the same seat must the writer be placed, who in a disquisition on any important subject proves, by falsehoods either of omission or of positive error, that he has neglected to possess himself, not only of the information requisite for this particular subject; but even of those acquirements, and that general knowledge, which could alone authorize him to commence a public instructor. This is an office which cannot be procured gratis. The industry, necessary for the due exercise of its functions, is its purchase-money; and the absence or insufficiency of the same is so far a species of dishonesty, and implies a Presumption in the literal as well as the ordinary sense of the word. He has taken a thing before he had acquired any right or title thereto.

Given the notoriety of Coleridge's own dabblings with plagiary, this rather looks like a self-own.

Coleridge in this essay is not promising he will avoid controversies in The Friend. Quite otherwise: De Controversiis Protestanticorum would be a serviceable alternate title for this whole enterprise, actually. But we'll get onto more specifically religious-themed essays a little later on.

What's going on here, I think, speaks to the heart of Coleridge's ambition to establish the project of The Friend (and, indeed, much of his output as a writer of critical prose) as the articulation of the principles upon which morals, art and life should be founded. In her excellent book-length study of The Friend, Deirdre Coleman explores the ‘unresolved conflicts’ that structure what Coleridge is doing inThe Friend: ‘This striving for absolutes or principles, and its accompanying rhetorical expansiveness, coexists with a more cautious rhetoric, and an intense dislike of abstractions’ [Coleman, Coleridge and The Friend (1809-1810) (Oxford: Clarendon 1988), 17] The more I dig into this work the more convinced I become that the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the draw towards tradition and authority on the one hand and change and spiritual refreshment on the other, is one of the main ones here. The Catholic may be prone to socially-sanctioned arrogance, with all the pomp and performative superiority of his or her Church heirarchy around them; but the Protestant needs to watch out that s/he doesn't become puffed-up with presumption, believing him/herself inwardly better than those poor benighted others.

'Schlaget du mit Schwert und Munde' (?1808) Traced

In late 1808, or perhaps in 1809 (in either case, around the time he was directing all his energy into the early stages of The Friend) Coleridge wrote the four lines above into his notebook. Kathleen Coburn [(ed) The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Volume 3 1808-1819 (London: Routledge 1973), 3:2, 3425] says: ‘in ink. Source not traced’ and translates as follows:

If you strike with words and steel
True, such wounds will often heal:
But we keep the scar and smart
On our skin and in our heart.

You'll be pleased to hear the source is now traced. It's a four-line poem called ‘Verwundungen’ (‘Wounds’) by Adam Olearius (1599-1671; his German, rather than his Latin, name was Adam Ölschläger). Coleridge came across it in Christian Wernicke's Überschriften, nebst Opitzens, Tschernings, Andreas Gryphius und Adam Olearius: Epigrammatischen Gedichten (Leipzig 1780) where it appears on p.480. Coleridge owned this book, and indeed translated quote a few of Wernicke's epigrammatic poems out of it [see J C C Mays' Poetical Works, the poems numbered 305-319 inclusive].

Coleridge's translations were all published in the Morning Post in 1802 and some of them were reprinted in The Friend, which suggests that Coleridge re-opened his old copy of Wenecke as he began readying material for the journal.

Coleridge, "The Friend" and Polygamy: the Thelyphthora Connection

:1:

Sometimes pedantically taking the trouble to track down the source of an obscure Latin quotation in one of Coleridge's prose works can pay unexpected dividends. Not often, of course; but sometimes. And this, I think, is one such time.

So: a couple of days ago I posted about the start of my read-through of The Friend, the magazine Coleridge edited, wrote (almost entirely) and published intermittently 1809-10. The first essay of this miscellany ends with Coleridge quoting some Erasmus (in the later 1818 rifacimento the first essay ends with a cue to this passage, which is then printed as the epigraph to the second essay). Its placement in either case shows that it was important to Coleridge's sense of the larger project.

Nobody had tracked down where that passage came from, so I did; and you can read the exciting results of that enterprise here. Long story short: it's a passage from Erasmus's introduction to his famous 1516 Latin-and-Greek edition of the New Testament. This one, in fact:

But something about it didn't feel quite right to me. Coleridge wasn't a great reader of Erasmus (though he read Luther avidly), and whilst it was certainly possible he was picking his way through the hundreds of close-printed pages of Latin that constitute the introduction to the Novum Instrumentum omne, in one or other of the hefty, expensive and rare editions published between 1516 and 1536, and this passage just leapt out at him, this didn't strike me as very likely, really. Did Wordsworth (with whom Coleridge was staying at this time) even own a copy of this rare book? Something was off.

So I went back to the quoted text and did some more rummaging around. Long story short: I don't think Coleridge found this passage in the original Erasmus. I think he found it here:

Those, as you can see, are pages xxxiii and xxiv from the introduction to the book whose title-page heads this blog: Martin Madan's Thelyphthora, or A Treatise on Female Ruin (1780). In that once-notorious work Madan, a barrister and Methodist clergyman, advocated Biblically-sanctioned polygamy as the remedy for the evils of social and sexual immorality. The unusual title is Madan's Greek coinage: the suffix Θηλ- refers to women—θηλυκός means ‘female’ and τὼ θηλᾱ́ are a woman's breasts—and φθορά means ‘ruin, death’ but also ‘seduction’ and ‘rape’. Here's Madan, and his English translation:

What Erasmus wrote on the treatment which he met with from many quarters on account of his publication deserves our notice …

‘Sic oportet ad librum legendum accedere lectorem, ut solet ad convivium conviva civilis. Convivator annititur omnibus satisfacere: & tamen siquid apponitur, quod hujus aut illius palato non respondeat, urbane vel dissimulant, vel probant etiam, ne quid contristent convivatorem. Quis enim eum convivam ferat, qui tantum hoc animo veniat ad mensam, ut carpens quæ apponuntur, ne vescatur ipse, nec alios vesci sinat?

Et tamen his quoque reperias inciviliores, qui palam, qui sine fine damnent ac lacerent opus, quod nunquam legerint. Atque hoc sane faciunt quidam, qui se Christiana pietatis doctores profitentur, & religionis antistites; cum sit plus quam sycophaticum, damnare quod nescias.’

As I have too much reason to think that some of the unlearned, as well as the learned, stand much in need of being acquainted with the above, I will give it in English.

‘A reader should come to the perusal of a book, as a courteous guest comes to a feast, The giver of the feast does his endeavour to satisfy all; yet, if any thing be brought to table, which may not be agreeable to the palate of this or that person, they politely dissemble their dislike, or even approve, rather than grieve him who has invited them. For who could bear with that guest, who comes to the table only with a disposition to find fault, and neither to partake himself, nor suffer others to partake of the entertainment? Yet you may find others more uncivil than these, who openly, and without end, will condemn and tear a work to pieces, which they have never red. And some do this, who profess themselves teachers of Christian piety, and eminent professors of religion. Whereas, to condemn that of which you are ignorant, is beyond the baseness of the basest informer.’

The Latin Coleridge quotes starts and ends exactly where Madan's passage does. And compare Madan's English above with Coleridge's, here:

A reader should sit down to a book, especially of the miscellaneous kind, as a well-behaved visitor does to a banquet. The master of the feast exerts himself to satisfy all his guests; but if after all his care and pains there should still be something or other put on the table that does not suit this or that person's taste, they politely pass it over without noticing the circumstance, and commend other dishes, that they may not distress their kind host, or throw any damp on his spirits. For who could tolerate a guest that accepted an invitation to your table with no other purpose but that of finding fault with every thing put before him, neither eating himself, or suffering others to eat in comfort. And yet you may fall in with a still worse set than even these, with churls that in all companies and without stop or stay, will condemn and pull to pieces a work which they had never read. But this sinks below the baseness of an Informer, yea, though he were a false witness to boot! The man, who abuses a thing of which he is utterly ignorant, unites the infamy of both—and in addition to this, makes himself the pander and sycophant of his own and other men's envy and malignity.

In my earlier post I noted puzzlement that, having translated sycophantes as ‘sycophant’, Coleridge also made reference to ‘the baseness of an Informer,’ something which I simply couldn't find in the original Latin. But if we work with the theory that Coleridge found the passage in the Thelyphthora here, then the puzzle goes away: since Madan translates ‘sycophantes’ into English precisely as ‘the basest informer’. It was much more likely that Wordsworth would own Madan's book than an old copy of Erasmus's bilingual New Testament. Madan, who had died only a few years earlier in 1790, was the cousin of William Cowper, a poet whom Coleridge admired immensely, and whose blank verse directly influenced Wordsworth's own. And it was a famous, or at any rate a notorious, book; it's very possible Wordsworth had a copy.

:2:

The thing is: this apparently small datum unpacks in quite significant ways in terms of reading The Friend. It is really quite interesting that, as he started writing the essays that would constitute this magazine, Coleridge was reading a book that made the earnest argument that men ought be allowed to marry more than one woman. Quite interesting in terms of the intellectual context out of which this text was produced, and very interesting in terms of the emotional context.

In 1806 Coleridge had finally separated from his wife, Sara Fricker. He continued to support her financially as she raised their children, but the marriage was dead. One cause of this separation was their evident mutual incompatibility, but another more pressing one was that, in 1799, STC had met and fallen in love with Sara Hutchinson, the younger sister of Wordsworth's wife Mary Hutchinson. This was a desperate, unreciprocated passion that wrenched Coleridge. He poured his misery into entries in his notebook and sometimes into poems, disguising her identity under the flimsy anagram ‘Asra’. Sara H was in many ways a good friend to Coleridge, but she did not love him, and even if marriage between them had been a legal possibility (which it wasn't: the Matrimonial Causes Act was half a century away) it's very hard to believe she would have accepted his proposal, however passionate he was about her. And boy was he smitten.

There were long stretches of tantalising physical proximity through the first few years of the 1800s, and then in 1804 Coleridge moved to Malta, in part as a deliberate break with Sara H and an attempt to cauterise his infatuation. It doesn't seem to have helped. On his return from the Mediterranean Coleridge several times visited the Wordsworths, and therefore Sara, who was living with them, and found himself still as smitten. In December 1806 Coleridge and his ten-year-old son Hartley arrived at Coleorton to spend Christmas with the Wordsworths. During this visit something happened, the traumatic something which Coleridge notated in his Notebook as ‘the EPOCH’. It looks as though, one morning, Coleridge blundered into Sara's room to find her in bed with Wordsworth. It's hard to be sure, in part because Coleridge spent years trying to talk himself into believing that whatever he had seen that morning had just been a kind of hallucination (a ‘morbid Day-Dream’, ‘a mere phantasm and yet what anguish, what gnawings of despair, what throbbings and lancinations of positive Jealousy!’)

Then came the Friend. The point to remember about Coleridge's praxis in writing was that he dictated and relied upon amanuenses to write up what he said; and in the case of the Friend that amanuensis was Sara Hutchinson. ‘Coleridge was dictating every issue directly to Sara Hutchinson, closeted in his study,’ notes Richard Holmes, adding, in striking phrase: ‘so that if the mouth was his the hand was Asra's’.

Coleridge now had that daily, and even nightly, intimacy with Asra that he had so long and so passionately desired. But it was not easy for either of them. The shared pressure, and even excitement, of their literary work (often witnessed by Asra's breathless notes to Brown the printer, reporting on progress) hid far deeper emotions and conflicts. [Holmes, Darker Visions (1998), 176].

It was hardest on Coleridge himself: his notebooks ‘ranged back obsessively’ over his memories of Asra, and he debated with himself whether to write an essay for the Friend on what he considered to be the two models of falling in love, one a passive ‘irresistible’ passion and the other a more controlled ‘act of will’. But, as Holmes says, ‘he could not dictate such an essay to Asra, and it was only written long after ... indeed, perhaps because of their very physical proximity, Coleridge could never speak openly to Asra of his feelings’.

In this context, the fact that Coleridge—married to one woman, desperately in love with another woman—was reading a book that used scripture to justify polygamy is remarkable. Though piously-intended, Madan's Thelyphthora quickly became one of the more notorious books of the later eighteenth-century. The scandal occasioned by its main argument was kept alive by Madan's habit of responding with articles and pamphlets to the many published attacks on his work: at least nineteen separate titles critiqued Madan's book in the 1780s alone, including an Anti-Thelyphthora by Madan's own cousin William Cowper.

In fact the sexual element of polygamy, though the thought of it inevitably tickles our lubriciousnesses, plays little part in Madan's argument. Instead he is exercised by a more strictly theological question: did the coming of Christ entirely overthrow the old Mosaic law (under which, of course, men could marry more than one woman) or not? Madan argued it did not. Indeed, he called the orthodox view that Christ set up a new law, more pure and holy, in opposition to the law of the Old Testament, ‘a doctrine ... replete with folly and blasphemy’ [Thelyphthora, 1:326-27].

By God's express command from Mount Sinai, where the laws concerning moral good and evil, were eternally and unalterably fixed, no man could take a virgin and then abandon her. ‘He shall surely endow her to be his wife’ Exod. xxii.16. And again Deut. xxii. 29. ‘She shall be his wife; BECAUSE HE HAS HUMBLED HER, he may not put her away all his days.’ [Thelyphthora, 1:10]

E B Murray summarises the through-line argument of Madan's book:

In practice Madan interpreted this [Biblical text] to mean that any man who seduced a virgin, even if he was already married, had, in effect, wed her and should be so held accountable to her for all his days. While the system of human contrivance that found Madan comprehensively opposed to his Biblical sanctions was civil marriage, with its insistence on monogamy, his immediate object was (as his full title indicates) the repeal of the so called Marriage Act of 1753, which prohibited clandestine marriages. [E B Murray, ‘Thel, Thelyphthora, and the Daughters of Albion’, Studies in Romanticism 20:3 (1981), 275-76]

When Coleridge wasn't dictating the Friend to Asra, he was using his notebooks to explore the tantalising idea that she might be his wife after all, if only he could get himself off opium:

Again: as Mother of my children—how utterly improbable dared I hope it: How impossible for me (most pure indeed are my heart & fancy from such a thought) even to think of it, much less desire it! and yet at the encouraging prospect of emancipation from narcotics, of health & activity of mind & body, worthy of the unutterably [in cipher: dear one], it is felt within me like an ordinance of adamantine Destiny! [Notebooks, 3: 3547]

Perhaps Coleridge found in Madan a justification for this daydream: he was married, true; but by falling so deeply in love with Asra had he not, in some spiritual sense, already married another woman? Might scripture not sanction such heart-polygamy?

In other words, the Friend was all bound up with Asra, and Coleridge's feelings for Asra. Why did Coleridge decide on The Friend as title for his magazine? He was advised against it: people who didn't know better, he was told, would assume it to be a Quaker journal, which might limit circulation. But Coleridge was adamant. His previous attempt as a magazine had been The Watchmen, and his eighteenth-century prototype for the entire enterprise was expressly the Spectator: in 1804 Coleridge wrote in his Notebook that ‘I should like to dare look forward to the Time when Wordsworth & I with contributions from Lamb and Southey—& from a few others should publish a Spectator’ [Notebooks, 2:2074]. But merely spectating, or even watching as a guardian might, no longer chimed with what Coleridge wanted. He was looking now for a friend: in Latin amicus or amica (has anybody wondered what the gender of Coleridge's magazine's title is?) a word hovering between the more distant friend and the more intimate lover—its root is amo, I love, after all (the Greek φίλος similarly balances between friend and lover in meaning).

It seems that Coleridge had had enough of spectating, or of being spectated. At exactly the time, in the last months of 1808, that he was formalising The Friend with a detailed prospectus to be distributed to possible subscribers he was also writing Wordsworth a long letter of passionate accusation expressive of his heart-sickness with respect to Asra. We no longer have that letter but we do have a draft of Wordsworth's reply, which, to quote Richard Holmes again, ‘by trying to refute Coleridge's accusations point by point’ thus gives us ‘some idea of what Coleridge had actually written to him’:

It is a series of most intimate reproaches: they had supervised Asra's letters; they had regarded his influence as ‘poison entering into her mind’; they had told Asra that she was ‘the cause’ of all his misery. It's clear that Wordsworth was shocked ... Coleridge's accusations [he replied] were made ‘in a lamentably insane state of mind’. His obsession with Asra, and suspicions over Wordsworth's own conduct towards her, his ‘transports of passion’, were all ‘unmanly and ungentlemanly’ and the product of a perverted sexual imagination. [Holmes, Coleridge: Darker Reflections, 139]

Coleridge clearly felt that he was being unfairly surveiled, even spied upon (it would make sense, I think, to date Coleridge's ‘Verecundia’ poem to the end of 1808: it's also about this fevered mood)

To return to his expansive translation of the Erasmus passage in this context is to be struck by the way he renders the one word sycophantes not once but into four separate terms: once as ‘sycophant’, then again by picking up Madan's ‘Informer’ and expanding it into ‘the baseness of an Informer [and] a false witness to boot!’ and finally by doubling up ‘sycophant’ with ‘pander’. Something in this plain-seeming paragraph from Erasmus touched a tender spot in Coleridge's subconscious, and it has more to do with than just its ostensible content of exhorting his readers to keep an open mind. Pander, with its sexual meaning, mingles with the sense of a spy in the house, an informer against him, a general dishonesty, all connected intimately with Coleridge's friend-who-is-more-than-a-friend.

Friend Erasmus

I'm going to spend the next few weeks properly reading The Friend, Coleridge's fascinating if, in the end, abortive attempt at a magazine that ran between 1809 and 1810. It was supposed to be an intellectual and cultural weekly, but since Coleridge not only wrote all the content (pretty much) but undertook much of the labour of publishing it as well, and since he, not particularly reliable at the best of times, was undergoing a series of personal and emotional crises during this period, this schedule was only spottily adhered to. I've previously dipped into the Friend of course, and I have read its most famous essays, but I've never sat down and read the whole thing from cover to cover, an omission I intend now to rectify.

The options are: to read the original series of 1809-10 issues in order, or to read the 1818 three-volume collection of the same material, which Coleridge himself called a rifacciamento (more orthodox spellers would call this a rifacimento), a term originally from architecture now applied to any literary work or musical composition recast to adapt it to a change in the circumstances of the time. The 1818 three-volume reissue includes myriad revisions, small and not so small, selection, rearrangement and so on; but it also represents Coleridge's last wishes for the material comprising the Friend as such, and that's the one I'm going to read. Of course, the true Friendphile—a tautology if ever I saw one—needs to keep both versions in view when it comes to closer analysis of what STC is doing.

One small note before I plunge in. At the very end of the very first issue of the magazine (Thursday June 1st 1809)—a passage moved in the 1818 edition so as to be the epigraph of the second essay—Coleridge quotes ‘the words of one, who was himself at once a great Critic and a great Genius’. He means Erasmus:

Sic oportet ad librum, presertim miscellanei generis, legendum accedere lectorem, ut solet ad convivium conviva civilis. Convivator annititur omnibus satisfacere: et tamen si quid apponitur, quod hujus aut illius palato non respondeat, et hic et ille urbane dissimulant, et alia fercula probant, ne quid contristent convivatorem. Quis enim eum convivam ferat, qui tantum hoc animo veniat ad mensam, ut carpens quae apponuntur nec vescatur ipse, nec alias vesci sinat? et tamen his quoque reperias inciviliores, qui palam, qui sine fine damnent ac lacerent opus, quod nunquam legerint. Ast hoc plusquam sycophanticum est damnare quod nescias. ERASMUS

It's a small example of the way the 1818 shapes its material, this: because in that later version of the material the last line of Essay 1 (‘And yet—and yet—but it will be time to be serious, when my visitors have sat down’) leads directly into this epigraph to Essay 2, which means, in Coleridge's own translation:

A reader should sit down to a book, especially of the miscellaneous kind, as a well-behaved visitor does to a banquet. The master of the feast exerts himself to satisfy all his guests; but if after all his care and pains there should still be something or other put on the table that does not suit this or that person's taste, they politely pass it over without noticing the circumstance, and commend other dishes, that they may not distress their kind host, or throw any damp on his spirits. For who could tolerate a guest that accepted an invitation to your table with no other purpose but that of finding fault with every thing put before him, neither eating himself, or suffering others to eat in comfort. And yet you may fall in with a still worse set than even these, with churls that in all companies and without stop or stay, will condemn and pull to pieces a work which they had never read. But this sinks below the baseness of an Informer, yea, though he were a false witness to boot! The man, who abuses a thing of which he is utterly ignorant, unites the infamy of both—and in addition to this, makes himself the pander and sycophant of his own and other men's envy and malignity.

Accedere doesn't really mean ‘sit down’ so much as ‘approach’, ‘join’ or ‘enter’; but the simile of the banquet allows a certain latitude in the rendering, I think. On the other hand the reference to the Informer, a very Napoleonic-Wars touch, is not in the Latin at all. We take the general point, though.

The standard scholarly edition of The Friend is Barbara E Rooke's Princeton/Routledge Bollingen one from 1969. Of this passage Rooke annotates: ‘source untraced’ [Friend, 1:14]. In fact it's from the introduction to Erasmus's celebrated edition of the New Testament (five versions of which were issued between 1516 and 1536).

The actual text (a screenshot from the 1536 edition, as it happens) heads this post. Source untraced no longer!

Tracking this down is more than a matter of mere pedantry, though. The quoted passage was important enough to Coleridge's sense of the larger project to stand, in effect, at the head of it: actually so in the 1809 version of the work (this quotation is the last thing cited in that first issue, as a kind of climactic summing up), effectively so in the 1818 rifacimento, where the first essay is a whimsical prelude that ends by telling the read to sit down and pay attention, before segueing straight into this quotation.

Two things immediately strike me. One is that Erasmus is not talking about sitting down properly to read any old book. He's talking about the Bible. Is Coleridge, by appropriating the passage, finding a way of cannily elevating the importance of his own writing (the 1818 subtitle describes the project as ‘a series of essays in three volumes to aid in the formation of fixed principles in politics, morals and religion with literary amusements interspersed’) without explicitly making the blasphemous comparison? Maybe not. Consider the changes Coleridge makes in quoting it. This, as you can see from the screenshot above, is what Erasmus actually wrote:

Sic oportet ad librum legendum accedere lectorem, ut solet ad convivium conviva civilis. Convivator annititur omnibus satisfacere: et tamen si quid apponitur, quod hujus aut illius palato non respondeat, urbane vel dissimulant convivae vel probant etiam, ne quid contristent convivatorem. Quis enim eum convivam ferat, qui tantum hoc animo veniat ad mensam, ut carpens quae apponuntur nec vescatur ipse, nec alias vesci sinat? et tamen his quoque reperias inciviliores, qui palam, qui sine fine damnent ac lacerent opus, quod nunquam legerint. Atque hoc sane faciunt quidam qui se Christianae pietatis doctors profitentum et religionis antistites; quum sit plusquam sycophanticum damnare quod nescias.

There are a couple of little changes here (for instance, Coleridge adds the Latin presertim miscellanei generis, ‘especially [books] of the miscellaneous kind’ into the first sentence; it would make no sense in the Erasmus), and one bigger change: namely that Coleridge has omitted a whole Erasmian sentence regarding the doctors of the church: atque hoc sane faciunt quidam qui se Christianae pietatis doctors profitentum et religionis antistites; quum sit plusquam sycophanticum damnare quod nescias; ‘and indeed there is the supposed piety of those among the Christian doctors themselves, who professed themselves the only true overseers of religious matters’ (antistites, ‘overseer’, also means: ‘high priest’, ‘somebody who has mastered an art or skill’ and sometimes ‘bishop’). These two things together tend to repurpose Erasmus's original sentiment, downplaying its original, specifically Biblical context and expanding it to apply to all literature, or at least all serious literature. Is this a kind of religious superstition on Coleridge's part, as if he doesn't want to over-reach his claims for his own magazine? Or is it a more active reconfiguration, consonant with a sense that the best secular literature merits the sort of attentiveness previously reserved for scripture and theology?

The Λόγος in the Logic

:1:

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.

:2:

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).

:3:

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

:1:

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.