Hartley Coleridge: Clockwork Boy

Coleridge's son Hartley was christened 8th November 1803. The run-up to this event clearly preyed, in some small way, on Coleridge's mind, for on the morning of the 28th October 1803 he recorded the following dream in his notebook.

Frid. Morn. 5 oclock—Dosing, dreamt of Hartley as at his Christening—how as he was asked who redeemed him, & was to say, God the Son/he went on, humming and hawing, in one hum & haw, like a boy who knows a thing & will not make the effort to recollect it—so as to irritate me greatly. Awakening «gradually I found I was able compleatly to detect, that» it was the Ticking of my Watch which lay in the Pen Place in my Desk on the round Table close by my Ear, & which in the nervous diseased State of my Nerves had fretted on my Ears—I caught the fact while it Hartley’s Face & moving Lips were yet before my Eyes, & his Hum & Ha, & the Ticking of the Watch were each the other, as often happens in the passing off of Sleep—that curious modification of Ideas by each other, which is the Element of Bulls.—I arose instantly, & wrote it down—it is now 10 minutes past 5. [Notebooks, 1:1620]

There's something wonderful about this, I think, in part because of its familiarity. It speaks to an experience we have, surely, all had: where sense data from the wideawake world seep into our half- or quarter-conscious dreaming mind. An Irish bull is a ludicrous, incongruent or comically absurd line, designated ‘Irish’ either because of the longstanding and racist belief held by some Englishpeople that the Irish are prone to speaking foolish nonsense, or else because of the Irish MP Sir Boyle Roche, sometimes called ‘the father of the Irish Bull’, who once asked Parliament ‘Why should we put ourselves out of our way to do anything for posterity, for what has posterity ever done for us?’ Coleridge was fascinated by ‘bulls’ (there's quite a lot of discussion of them in the Biographia Literaria) And whilst we're on the subject, isn't ‘dosing’ an interesting spelling of the word ‘dozing’ for a man who so notoriously had the habit of dosing himself with a tincture of heroin in alcohol? Not least because, as famously was the case with ‘Kubla Khan’ such dosing often led directly to dozing.

But the heart of this entry is its charmingly steampunk iteration of Hartley as a clockwork boy, his gears whirring hum and ha. Evidently Coleridge's imagination was preoccupied on some level by the difference between a proper human being and a complicated automaton, a Dennettian machine-being of interconnected inputs and reactions, or ‘associations’ and ‘vibrations’, of the sort David Hartley (1705–57) hypothesised was the secret truth of homo sapiens. That same Hartley that Coleridge named his son after. Then again, it's worth stressing that Hartley was no more an ur-Dennettian atheist-materialist than was Coleridge himself. Alhough volume one of Hartley's 1749 Observations on Man, his Frame, his Duty, and his Expectations elaborated his mechanistic, associationist theory of human existence, volume two was devoted to pious Christian observations, something Hartley considered compatible with the rest of his theory because (in a nutshell) God can do anything. Still, Coleridge did eventually grow out of his Hartleyan affiliation, a spiritual as much as an intellectual evolution he related at some length in the Biographia. What's the problem with this fundamentally mechanistic theory of the human animal? Coleridge thinks something is missing from it, and that the missing thing is precisely: a Christian soul, that very thing that is sacramentally affirmed during baptism.

But hold on a moment. Describing this dream as being about a clockwork boy is me letting my sciencefictional imagination run away with me. If I look at it again I can see it's not at all about that. The boy in the dream is the real, living-breathing Hartley. We can tell that dream-Hartley is not a machine because he manifests precisely those qualities of which a machine is incapable: indolence, or perhaps willed repugnance to command: a boy ‘who knows a thing & will not make the effort to recollect it—so as to irritate me greatly’. Kids, however much we love them, can indeed be irritating; but as Spielberg's Kubrickian project A.I. shows it is in their resistance that they prove themselves actually alive and therefore worthy of love; a perfectly compliant child would be a kind of elaborate toy, and, unlike an actual child, would be liable to being discarded once we'd finished our game—which is what happens to the mecha David in the A.I. movie. Soul means that we can move in ways that an automaton or (Coleridge's own example, from the Biographia, this) a weathercock cannot: by our own volition.

Jonathan Rée notes that ‘Descartes had a special fondness for clockwork’:

He possessed a fine wall-clock of his own. He greatly admired the ornate clock at Strasbourg with its automatic crowing cockerel, and when he explored the hypothesis that ‘the body is nothing but a statue or an earthenware machine’ in his early manuscript On Man, his main conclusion was that human actions are, from a physical point of view, no more mysterious than the workings of an intricate clock. He saw no reason, as he put it in the Discourse on Method in 1637, to think that the human body had any powers beyond those of the marvellous ‘self-moving machines or automata that can be made by human ingenuity’. The late treatise on the Passions rests entirely on the assumption that the body is a ‘machine’. Even the truculent hero of the Meditations will emerge from his week of arduous self-examination as a convert to the idea that a healthy human body functions like a ‘well-made clock’. The main point of all this business about clockwork and physiology was to shake up the practice of medicine by suggesting that there is no disease of the human body that cannot be fixed by timely mechanical repair.

Coleridge was no Descartian, and one, little noticed, sense in which that was true is the way he repeatedly conceptualised his own many illnesses, from rheumatic fevers and neuralgic pains, through frequent bouts of constipation (and occasional diarrheoa) up to and including his lifelong addiction to opium, not as malfunctions in the machinery of his body but as diseases of his will. It occurs up again and again in the notebooks—you can see it in the entry above when ‘nervous’ is struck through as STC is writing and replaced by ‘diseased State of my Nerve’. It always carries the same self-lacerating implication: if only I had stronger willpower I wouldn't be ill.

We tend not to think of illness that way nowadays of course, and indeed the pendulum has swung away from diseases of the will even where matters like drug-addiction and alcoholism are concerned. Willpower may be a fine thing, but it on its own deters neither germs nor viruses. But saying so I'm struck by another aspect to the dream STC reports. He dreams his boy (his boy) humming and haing, refusing irritatingly to do what he is told to do—which is, in a nutshell, to sign up to eternal life. Then he wakes to find the humming and haing was the whirring of his watch. The child has become a timepiece, and the metamorphosis has the rightness of a well-chosen poetic image. Because, of course, that's what kids are. In a very large sense that is the point of kids. We have them to supersede us. No worse fate imaginable than our children predeceasing us. This is also a problem, though, and the problem is the brute fact that our children will be living, laughing and drinking wine in the sunshine when we ourselves are cold and dead in the ground. That's both a consumation devoutly to be wished and a profoundly unheimlich Halloween story. A little child is the very rebus of life, but he or she means, amongst other things, that we who are old are dying. The tick and tock of our children's existence measures out our own pilgrimage towards our inevitable deaths. Hum and haw indeed.

Coleridge and Plato's Luminous Gloom

Coleridge wrote this luminously gloomy line not once but twice in his Notebooks: first in November 1799 [1:528] and then again, almost identically save for the capitalisation of ‘Gloom’ (and an extra comma) in October 1803 [1:1558]. Critics have been, by and large, rather struck by it. Elliott B. Gose, Jr. [‘Coleridge and the Luminous Gloom: An Analysis of the “Symbolical Language” in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, PMLA 75:3 (1960), 238-44] thinks the phrase unlocks the mysteries of the Rime. More proportionately, James Vigus, in his powerful study Platonic Coleridge (Leeds: LEGENDA 2009), sees the line as indicative of ‘Coleridge’s characterization of Plato as a mystic’:

The polarity of nonsense and truth, ‘dark with excessive bright’ is reflected in the [luminous gloom] image, which was so adhesive to Coleridge’s mind that he uses identical expressions in Notebook entries separated by years. [Vigus, 21]

Vigus stresses that if STC thought Plato wrote ‘nonsense’ it was at least ‘dear gorgeous nonsense, worth unravelling’; and he points out that the November 1799 notebook entry is followed by the following bit of drafted (unpublished) Coleridgean verse:

Mist as from a volcano—
Waterfall rolled after long looking at like a segment of a Wheel
—the rock gleaming thro’ it—
Amid the roar a noise as of innumerable grasshoppers or of spinning wheels [Notebooks 1:529]

Vigus goes on to pick out several related images from Coleridge's writing: a description of the religious mystic Jacob Boehme as one who ‘contemplated Truth and the forms of Nature thro’ a luminous Mist, the vaporous darkness rising from his Ignorance and accidental peculiarities of fancy and sensation, but the Light streaming into it from his inmost Soul’ and the ‘fair luminous mist’ of Dejection; an Ode. [Vigus, 22], amongst others. We could add many other examples. In 1802, for instance, he records in that Statius's nec caret umbra Deo (Thebiad 4:425) is ‘obscure indeed, but certainly profound’. The Latin means: ‘nor even the shadows lack Divinity’ [Notebooks 1:1179].

It seems nobody has noted that ‘luminous gloom’ is not Coleridge's coinage. He is quoting Dionysius the Areopagite, or as scholars now insist on calling him, pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (a much cooler name, I think: as if he wasn't a human being who happened to be called Dionysius like various other famous men, but was some kind of synthetic man or android). Anyway: Dionysius's Περὶ μυστικῆς θεολογίας (‘On Mystical Theology’, which probably dates to the early 6th century, but which Coleridge may have thought was a 1st-century work) ponders how we can view God, since God Himself is ‘viewless’, or invisible. The work argues that we approach God's brilliance and light through a mystic darkness, and that the mystery of the Trinity abides in a ὑπέρ-φωτον γνόφον, a ‘hyper-luminous gloom’. This little phrase is a famous bit of pseudo-Dionysius's work, actually (it occurs at the beginning of the opening prayer of the On Mystical Theology) and fairly widely known.

It's possible that Coleridge wasn't actually reading an edition of Dionysius at this time, but he was certainly reading the ninth-century theological writer John Scotus Erigena (in July 1803 STC wrote to Southey telling him ‘I have received great delight & instruction from Scotus Erigena’, and he often copied out bits of Scotus's Latin into his notebooks at this time) and Scotus very often quotes Dionysius—indeed, Scotus's contemporary fame, in an age when few scholars knew Greek, derived from the fact that he translated Dionysius and wrote a commentary upon him. The key thing is that Scotus used Dionysius to revive a neo-Platonic mode of Christian theology that was to go on to have a vast influence across medieval Europe. An 1803 Coleridgean notebook entry quotes Jonannes Scotus quoting Dionysius:

ipse omnium essentia est qui solus vere est, ut ait Dionysius Ariopagita. Esse, inquit, omnium superesse Divinitatis. ‘[He] who alone is the essence of things, truly is, as Dionysius the Areopagite put it: Being, he says, in all things [comes from] the over-being Divinity’ [Notebooks 1:1369]

Here's my working theory, for which I need a little more (or, you know: any, at all) evidence: over the years 1799-1803 Coleridge was planning a poem, perhaps to be called ‘On Mystical Theology’, in which he versified and explored some of these Dionysian and Scotus-Ergenan neo-Platonic ideas in poetry. The line at the head of this post, provided we take luminous as a disyllable (‘lum’nous’), is a feminine-ending pentameter, after all. So, it might be that the concrete imagery of a poem like 1802's ‘Hymn before Sunrise, in the Vale of Chamouni’ (partly plagiarised from German poets though that poem was) might have provided the launch-point for some Neo-Platonic philosophical-poetizing. What is Mont Blanc, in that poem, if not luminously gloomy?

Deep is the air and dark, substantial, black,
An ebon mass: methinks thou piercest it,
As with a wedge! But when I look again,
It is thine own calm home, thy crystal shrine,
Thy habitation from eternity!
O dread and silent Mount! I gazed upon thee,
Till thou, still present to the bodily sense,
Didst vanish from my thought: entranced in prayer
I worshipped the Invisible alone.

It's the divine inversion of Milton's ‘Darkness Visible’—‘Visibility Engloomed’ perhaps. Vigus quotes Ernst Cassirer (‘to poeticize philosophy and to philosophize poetry—such was the highest aim of all romantic thinkers’) before qualifying:

Those English and German Romantics who pursued this aim, including Coleridge, often looked naturally to Plato as a precedent or model. Nevertheless, a contrary model loomed larger still: Kant, who in an essay of 1796 attacked contemporary poetic, Platonizing philosophers as merely decking out their presumptuous, ungrounded assertion. ‘Philosophy is fundamentally prosaic,’ insisted Kant, who pointed to Plato as this vain tendency in philosophical writing. [Vigus, 6]

‘This censure,’ Vigus adds, ‘is consistent with the restriction Kant places on speculative Reason. Unlike Coleridge (and much of Plato) Kant denies that human Reason can have access to the noumenal realm.’ Coleridge, in point of fact, was caught between his desire to see poetry's luminous gloom shine darkly through the noumenal truths of God, and his belief that he might, if he tried to capture this, do nothing more than throw chaff in the readers' eyes. Hence, perhaps, his repeated badgering of Wordsworth to write the great philosophical poem of the age: simultaneously an expression of his belief that such a poem could be written, and an admission that he didn't believe he could write such a poem. It's even possible he considered using this the sunny mist, the lum'nous gloom of Plato line as part of ‘Hymn before Sunrise, in the Vale of Chamouni’, which is certainly a poem as much about the mystic interpenetration of light and shadow, or blindness and vision, of materiality and spirit, as it is about anything. It might explain why that poem breaks off so abruptly.

Coleridge's ‘Imagination’ and Hooker

I write this in a mood somewhere between bogglement and sheepishness. After all: I've been working on Coleridge for many years, have published scholarly work and many blogposts about him, and am in the early stages of planning a monograph on him. It's late in the day to realise, for the first time, something that strikes me as so central to my author's imaginative and intellectual praxis, something that means one of his most famous and influential ideas suddenly slots into a new focus (as an optician clicks down lens after lens into the ungainly face-worn frame until suddenly, bingo, there's the chart in all its clarity). Long story short: I should have known this long before. It is but small exculpation to note that nobody else seems to have noticed it either. Unless they have and I've missed that? Or unless nobody has because there's nothing there and I've lost my mind? That's possible too, I suppose.

It has to do with Coleridge's concept of the imagination, surely his most famous idea, and something he wrote about in various places, most famously in the Biographia Literaria (1817). There Coleridge makes the distinction between ‘imagination’, which is genuinely creative, and ‘fancy’ which is merely imitative:—a process of pastiche of more imaginative writers, the shuffling around of pre-existing counters rather than the poetic or artistic bodying-forth of something new and meaningful. Towards the end of chapter 4 of the Biographia, Coleridge says:

Repeated meditations led me first to suspect,—(and a more intimate analysis of the human faculties, their appropriate marks, functions, and effects matured my conjecture into full conviction,)—that Fancy and Imagination were two distinct and widely different faculties, instead of being, according to the general belief, either two names with one meaning, or, at furthest, the lower and higher degree of one and the same power. ... Milton had a highly imaginative, Cowley a very fanciful mind. If therefore I should succeed in establishing the actual existence of two faculties generally different, the nomenclature would be at once determined. To the faculty by which I had characterized Milton, we should confine the term imagination; while the other would be contra-distinguished as fancy. [The] division is no less grounded in nature than that of delirium from mania, or Otway's

Lutes, laurels, seas of milk, and ships of amber,

from Shakespeare's

What! have his daughters brought him to this pass?

Otway thinks, fancifully, the way to capture madness is to have his character babble random things because madness is a kind of randomness, or a sort of babble. Shakespeare knows better, that madness is actually that which bends sanity around the lines of force of its obsession. Fair enough. Then, in what now strikes me as a dead giveaway, and by way of concluding chapter 4, Coleridge goes from this passage to a lengthy quotation from Hooker's Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity—I mean, it really is right there. The thing is that then, in characteristic Coleridgean style, he gets distracted and instead of developing this idea he embarks on a massive metaphysical and theological detour, one which occupies the whole of chapters 6-13. Finally, right at the end of his long thirteenth chapter, Coleridge returns to imagination and fancy with this often-cited, rarely-understood definition:

The IMAGINATION then I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary Imagination I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate: or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.

FANCY, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites. The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space; while it is blended with, and modified by that empirical phaenomenon of the will, which we express by the word CHOICE. But equally with the ordinary memory the Fancy must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association.

So, [1] God makes the world, including our souls; [2] the true artist makes a little world in his/her art, in a finite imitation of the infinite primary creativity of God, and [3] the crappy artist merely copies-and-pastes (we can compare Tolkien's subcreation, and its relationship to divine creation). With that, Vol 1 of the Biographia ends. Vol 2 starts an entirely new enterprise, largely pursuing practical criticism of Wordsworth's poetry, amongst others. There's one more wrinkle: according to his daughter, Coleridge crossed out ‘as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM’ in his own copy of the Biographia.

I knew of course that Coleridge read the celebrated Elizabethan theologian Richard Hooker—that's him, at the top of this post, with a seagull on his loaf—in detail and with sympathy. It's something all Coleridgeans know. Volume 2 of the Bollingen Marginalia prints forty, count ’em, pages of close-written marginal annotations Coleridge scribbled on his edition of Hooker's complete works (these actually date from 1824-26, which is too late for my purposes here—though Coleridge was reading Hooker all his life).

Of course, some scholars have engaged with this vector of influence, usually in the service of unpacking Coleridge's religious and political thought: Nicholas Sagovsky (2014) on Coleridge's ideas of Church and State for instance, or Luke Wright's patchy but interesting Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Anglican Church (Notre Dame, 2010). But nobody, so far as I know, has ever made the point I'm about to make in the remainder of this blogpost, even though it does seem to me, occuring to me late in the day though it do, both a vital gloss on Coleridge's theory of the imagination and also just, well, obvious when it's pointed out.

It comes about because, even though I knew how important Hooker was to Coleridge, I was content to let my knowledge of the eminent theologian rest at second hand. I had the sense of Hooker as a famous prose stylist who argued against the excesses of the Puritans and defended the legitimacy of the Anglican church; which is, kind-of, what he was (although he nowhere uses the phrase Anglican, it turns out). But then I read some Hooker. And then I slapped the palm of my hand to my brow, Wallace-and-Gromit style.

Because it turns out the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity is about rather more than just refuting Puritan opposition to the established church. It is a comprehensive attempt to establish the idea of polity, the legal establishment of social and religious law, authority and order, from first principles. Hooker's proximate objective is indeed to make a particular case, contra Puritanism, about the polity of the Church, but his larger aim is to describe the structure of polity as such: what the law is, under what circumstances it might be changed to meet changing circumstances, and why we should all follow it. Hooker chooses the word polity deliberately: he might have written about Ecclesiastical Discipline or Ecclesiastical Government, but the former term had been too effectively colonised by the Puritans, and the latter he thought people would associate with ‘the exercise of superiority peculiar unto Rulers and Guides of others’ [LEP, 3.1.4]. Polity, he thinks, is the best expression of the collective assent to Law as such, grounded ultimately but not directly (which is to say, not divine-right-of-kingishly) in God. So the first book of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity sets out to define Law as such, and to that end Hooker insists that there are two Laws, which we can call primary and secondary. The primary is the ‘First Eternal Law’ [1.3.1]; ‘that Law which giveth life unto all the rest’ [1.1.3], ‘that order which God before all ages hath set down with Himself to Himself to do all things’ [1.2.6]. Himself to Himself, or I AM THAT I AM—this latter one of Coleridge's favourite Biblical moments, of course. Of this Primary Law, Hooker says:

The Being of God is a kind of Law to His Working: for that Perfection which God is, giveth Perfection to that He doth. [LEP, 1.2.2]

Hooker also describes this Law as ‘that order with which Himself God hath set down as expedient to be kept by all His Creatures, according to the several conditions wherewith He hath endued them’ [1.3.1]. This is, if you like, the iteration of the infinite divine Law in the finite realm, and manifests in, for instance, what we would today call the laws of physics, as well as in the law that governs angels and so on. But Hooker's focus, as you'd expect, is on ‘the Law of Men, a Law of continual progress to that Perfection which is in God alone’ [5.1.2.]. The eight books of the Ecclesiastical Polity explore many facets of this, from questions of duty and ethics to the ‘Law Politic’, and especially the linked categories ‘Laws made by a Body Politic which is civilly united’ and ‘Laws made by a Body Politic which is spiritually joined, and makes such a Body as we call the Church’ [1.10.11]. And the important thing for my purposes is that Hooker insists that this secondary law manifests in two distinct ways: ‘within each’ of the disciplines of human law ‘there is a distinction between Primary and Secondary Laws; the one grounded upon sincere, the other built upon depraved, Nature’ [1.10.13]

Now, in the Biographia Coleridge devotes a good deal of space not just to explicating Kant's ideas but to stressing the impact reading Kant's Critique of Pure Reason had upon his younger self: Kant ‘took possession of me as with a giant's hand’ is how he phrases it. But although the Biographia does quote Hooker, there's no equivalent passage describing Hooker's giant hand on Coleridge's shoulder, perhaps because STC never got around to it, or perhaps because it seemed to him so much more obvious (nobody was reading Kant in Britain in the early 19th-century because he hadn't been translated into English; but everyone knew about Hooker, one of the greats of English prose—so maybe Coleridge figured Kant needed to be explained in a way that he assumed wasn't true of Hooker). Anyway, it came home to me with sudden force that this is what Coleridge was doing in the Biographia, or at least this is what he set out to do before his work diverticulated to such an extent that he ends-up promising he'll explain the real meat of his argument in his forthcoming Logosophia.

What is he doing? I think he's setting his own fundamentally aesthetic-psychological theory of the imagination calculatedly alongside the theories of those two other great thinkers: one, Kant's distinction between Understanding and Reason—which Coleridge interpreted in his own, particular way, identifying a human but also a divine Reason and associating the latter with the Logos—and two, Hooker's distinction between divine Law, human-primary Law and human-secondary Law. In other words: the Biographia Literaria presents a coherent theory of aesthetic creation and appreciation that posits human poetry (in the broadest, ποίησις sense of the word) as something with a pure and an impure form, the former mimicking the primary creative-imaginative ποίησις of God Himself; and Coleridge does so in order to parallel this with the Kantian distinction between Divine Reason, Human Reason and Human Understanding on the one hand, and the Hooker-ian distinction between the First Eternal Law of God, the Second Law of (sincere) Men and the lesser Law of (depraved) men on the other. That, to be plain, Coleridge sees all three of these as versions of the same thing, rooted in the same Divine origin and sanction, and expressing in the three overlapping realms, art, mind and law, the same fundamental logic. It would be a very Coleridgean thing to argue, and it makes such sense of the Coleridgean distinctions of the primary imagination/secondary imagination/fancy thing that I'm sheepishly boggled that, until this weekend, it had honestly never occurred to me.

‘Blest in the Happy Marriage of Sweet Words’

I know a lot of these source-hunting posts are pretty dry and indigestible, but this one's a fraction more interesting than usual (or else I'm finally going Stockholm Syndrome on all this dryasdust pedantry). Anyway. In the early 1800s Coleridge, estranged from his wife, fell deeply in love with Sara Hutchinson, the unmarried sister of Wordsworth's wife Mary, who lived with the Wordsworths at Grasmere. Sara H., though a good friend to Coleridge in many ways, rejected his advances, leading to a deal of anguished scribbling in his notebooks and a number of heartbroken poems addressed to Sara under the paper-thin pseudonym ‘Asra’. Then something traumatic happened—something he referred to in his Notebook as the ‘EPOCH’. We can't be sure exactly what this was, although it brought Coleridge close to breakdown. Probably what happened was that, in December 1806, Coleridge discovered Wordsworth in bed with Sara Hutchinson. He was devastated by this, although Wordsworth tried to convince him the whole thing was just a hallucination he had experienced. Indeed Coleridge seems to have come to believe this, or at least seems to have wanted to believe it (not the same thing, of course). At any rate he continued staying with the Wordsworths, and therefore with Sara Hutchinson, after the December 1806 events of the EPOCH, only finally leaving for London in April 1807.

He spent the rest of that year in London, Bristol and a few other places and then in February 1808 he wrote to Sara Hutchinson, making her a present of some books, including a copy of Chapman's Odyssey, together with a covering letter. Henry Nelson Coleridge, assembling the Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge for posthumous publication (it came out 1836), thought the sentiments in this letter interesting enough to include, although to evade even the whiff of indecency he pretended it had been sent to Wordsworth rather than to Sara H.

Chapman I have sent in order that you might read the Odyssey/ the Iliad is fine, but less equal in the Translation, as well as less interesting in itself. What is stupidly said of Shakspeare, is really true & appropriate of Chapman—“mighty faults counterpoised by mighty Beauties.” Excepting his quaint epithets which he affects to render literally from the Greek, a language above all others “blest in the happy marriage of sweet words”, and which in our language are mere Printer's compound Epithets—such as—quaff’d divine Joy-in-the-heart-of-man-infusing Wine/ the undermark’d is to be one word, because one sweet mellifluous Word expresses it in Homer—excepting this, it has no look, no air, of a translation. It is as truly an original poem as the Faery Queen—it will give you small idea of Homer, tho’ yet a far truer one than from Pope's Epigrams, or Cowper's cumbersome most anti-homeric Miltoniad—for Chapman writes & feels a Poet,—as Homer might have written had he lived in England in the reign of Queen Elizabeth/ In short, it is an exquisite poem, spite of its frequent & perverse quaintnesses and harshnesses, which are however amply repaid by almost unexampled sweetness & beauty of language, all over spirit & feeling, in the main/ it is an English Heroic Poem, the tale of which is borrowed from the Greek—& I anticipate pleasure in your enjoyment of it. [Marginalia 2:1120]

The phrasing is interesting there, I think: I anticipate pleasure in your enjoyment of it presumably means ‘I anticipate that you will derive pleasure from it and enjoy it’; but what Coleridge has actually written is: ‘I look forward to me deriving pleasure from the fact that you will enjoy this’. A very different sentiment! And the choice of gift looks rather freighted, don't you think? A poem about a storm-tossed hero, forced to weary peregrinations, but always hoping to return to his true love, in her Ithaca. Like an 1808 version of giving a mix-tape to a girl you have a crush on.

The single Homeric word that gets translated, in STC's letter, by that English multiply-hyphenated monster is μελίφρονα [eg Odyssey 7:182; it actually occurs a dozen times in the poem], which means ‘sweet-to-the-mind’, via the Greek μέλι, ‘honey’: Chapman calls this ‘one sweet mellifluous word’ and actually translates it as ‘honey-sweet-to-the-mind’. The shift from that to Coleridge's misremembering ‘joy-in-the-heart-of-man-infusing’ is the distance between a broader somatic pleasure to the yearning of a man who still, in his emotionally bruised and hopeless way, yearns for one particular woman to fuse her heart with his. It was a hope destined to remain unfulfilled. Although Coleridge returned to the Wordsworths in Sept 1808, and enjoyed physical propinquity with Sara H as she acted as his amanuensis on The Friend through 1809, at the beginning of 1810 she left Grasmere to live with her brothers on a farm in Wales. Coleridge felt personally betrayed by this departure, unreasonably enough. Penelope, after all, is supposed to wait patiently at home for her Odysseus to work his way, eventually, back to her.

What of that quoted phrase, the one that says Greek is ‘blest in the happy marriage of sweet words’? George Whalley appends the following footnote:

Hard to blame Whalley for not tracking this down, since it's another creative misrememberquoting by Coleridge. In fact it is from the allegorical play Lingua, or the Combat of the Tongue and the Five Senses for Superiority (published anonymously in 1607, scholars now generally attribute it to Thomas Tomkis). In the play, the beautiful young woman Lingua, the personification of language, offers a prize for the worthiest of man's five senses: Auditus (hearing); Visus (sight); Olfactus, Gustus, and Tactus): ‘He of the five that proves himself the best,/Shall have his temples with this coronet blest’. The five bicker and fight over who should win—eventually Visus does—and Lingua's demands to be received as the sixth sense are rejected. The relevant passage, in which Lingua berates Audita, is here:

LINGUA: O, horrible ingratitude! that thou,
That thou of all the rest should'st threaten me:
Who by my meanes conceiv'st as many tongues,
As Neptune closeth lands betwixt his armes:
The ancient Hebrew, clad with mysteries,
The learned Greeke, rich in fit epithites,
Blest in the lovely marriage of pure words,
The Caldy [ie Chaldean] wise, the Arabian physicall,
The Romane eloquent, the Tuscane grave,
The braving Spanish, and the smooth-tong'd French,
These precious jewels that adorne thine eares,
All from my mouthe's rich cabinet are stolne:
How oft hast thou beene chain'd writo my tongue?
Hang'd at my lips, and ravisht with my words,
So that a speech, faire feather'd, could not flie,
But thy eares' pit-fall caught it instantly.
But now, O, heavens! [Lingua, 1.1.55-70]

The subtle subconscuous pressures that lead to Coleridge inadvertently correcting ‘pure’ to the μελίφρον-ic ‘sweet’ (for who would want a pure love-match when you can have the more intimate consummation of a sweet one?) is the same force that slides the original lovely to STC's wished-for happy.

Weiblich τετραγραμματον

So: Notebooks 1:555. In September and October 1799 Coleridge, not long back from Germany, went off for a walking tour of the Lake District with Wordsworth. During the course of this the two of them visited Thomas Clarkson at Eusemere in Cumbria (I note without comment that ten years ago this house sold for £3 million), and there Coleridge jotted the above in his notebook.

The meaning is clear-enough, though it's a little, uh (not to clutch my pearls too tightly) surprisingly phrased. STC sees a hill shaped like half an arse (a ‘fat backside’). Reflected in the mirror-like clarity of lake this becomes a full arse, and the road running up between the two prominences resembles an ‘opening’—crossed out for being too suggestive—a ‘suture’ and finally the ‘Weiblich τετραγράμματον’. The adjective weiblich means ‘female’, and the Greek tetragrámmaton means ‘word comprised of four letters’. We don't need to know which particular word Coleridge had in mind (‘slit’? ‘cunt’?) to see what he's getting at.

What's odd here is that, although τετραγράμματον can mean any four-letter word, the Tetragrammaton refers to the four Hebrew letters יהוה‎ (in transliteration, YHWH or JHVH) used as the ineffable name of God in the Hebrew Bible, variously transliterated as Yahweh or Jehovah. Does it seem strange to you that a man as religiously devout as Coleridge would trifle with a piece of terminology so holy? Is he demeaning the holy name of God, or is he, in the privacy of his private notebook, elevating the vagina to Biblical ineffability? ‘I never saw so sweet an Image!!’ he says. Well, quite.

Several Thousand Words of German Copied into Coleridge's 1799 Notebook

This is ‘Notebook 3’ which, as Coburn speculates, was probably bought in Germany and which is about one-third full of German-related jottings, including this very lengthy passage of German prose—I'd estimate about 4000 words—printed in the Bollingen edition over several entries: 1:434-439. It's all copied out in what Coburn calls ‘a German hand’ (not Coleridge's) and the first three chunks of this new hand relate to the topography of the Harz region, in which is located the Brocken, which Coleridge visited. Entry 434 begins ‘Alle Gebürge des Harzes, die meistens Ganggebürge sind, werden durch einen hohen vom kleinen Brocken herab, gegen Abend ziehenden Bergrücken, den Bruchberg, fast nach einem rechten Winkel mit der Mittagslinie, in zwey ziemlich gleiche Theile abgesondert ...’ (‘All the mountains of the Harz, most of which are iron-ore mountains, are divided into two roughly equal parts by a fairly high mountain ridge, the Bruchbergh, which runs westwards down from the little Brocken almost at right angles to the meridian ...’) and continues to discuss the landscape and the susceptibility of the forests of the Harz to dry-rot. Two further entries prefer (438) direct to indirect religious revelation and discuss (439) the potential of new processes for deriving sugar from beet. With respect to this material Coburn notes: ‘the source has not been found’ although she does record that she has searched—one can almost smell her weary frustration—through long runs of the Jahrbücher der Preussischen Monarchie, the Denkwürdigkeiten der Mark Brandenburg ‘and other journals’. From this she concludes that ‘in the spring of 1799 a controversy was raging on the “important new discovery” of the sugar beet.’ Beet, it seems, was it. They told her don't you ever come around here/don't want to see your face, you better disappear. The feuer's in their eyes and their Wörter are really clear, so ...

Not to get distracted. It turns out that 435, 436 and 437 are from Christoph Wilhelm Jakob Gatterers' guidebook to the Harz region, Anleitung den Harz und andere Bergwerke mit Nuzen zu bereisen (2 vols 1786) 2:106f.

The text itself, or the start of it, is screenshotted at the head of this post.

1:437, beginning ‘Der Verf. will von mittelbarer Offenbarung nichts wissen und glaubt, was uns nicht so scheint, daß man diese nur darum angenommen habe ...’ (‘The author will have no truck wth indirect revelation and believes, though it is a belief we do not share, that it has been accepted because certain objections against direct revelation could not be answered ...’) is from Göttingische Anzeigen von gelehrten Sachen, Volume 1 (1799) 1:823 [dated 25th March 1799]

Finally 1:438, the entry on sugar-beet, beginning ‘Der Anbau der Runkel-Rüben, Beta vulgaris Linn. oder nach Beckmann Beta altessima, und daß solche gewöhnlich ...’ (‘The manner of cultivating sugar-beet, Beta vulgaris Linn, or according to Beckmann Beta altessima, is well-known ...’) is from the Salzburger Intelligenzblatt for the 15th June 1799.

So there you have it.

German Epigrams in Coleridge's Notebooks

Notebooks 1:432 is long, multi-item text. In Coburn's words, ‘most of the entries in this item are adaptations, or notes for adaptations, of epigrams from German authors.’ There are thirty entries in all. Coburn identifies the sources of most of these but three she couldn't trace are noted below.

1:

No mortal spirit yet had clomb so high
As Kepler, and his Country let saw him die
For very want! The Souls minds alone he fed
And so the Bodies left him without bread!

Coburn marks this as ‘Source not found’. In fact it's an epigram by German mathematician and astronomer Abraham Gotthelf Kästner (1719–1800):

So hoch war noch Kein sterblicher gestiegen,
Als Kepler stieg—und starb in Hungersnoth!
Er wusste nur die geister zu vergnügen,
Drum liessen ihn die Körper ohne brodt.

It was widely reprinted and quoted in the 18th-century, so there's no way of being sure where Coleridge found it.

3:

On Lucas Cranach's Grave-stone he is called Pictor celerrimus—a mistake of the Stone-cutter for celeberrimus. With some of our Poets the Public makes just the contrary blunder—& puts celeberrimus where celerrimus only is the Truth.

‘Source not found’ says Coburn. Well, it is indeed true that Cranach's monument does indeed describe him as ‘Pictor celerrimus’, ‘the fastest painter’, which most art-historians think merely reflects his reputation as a rapid craftsman. The idea that this was actually whatever-the-stone-cutter-equivalent-is-of-a-typo is something Coleridge saw in Christian Wilhelm Schneider's Samlungen zu der Geschichte Thüringens (1771) 1:121: ‘Denn obgleich “Lucas Cranach” auch “Pictor celerrimus” gewesen:—so sieht man doch gar wohl, daß er hier “celeberrimus” hat sollen genennt werden’. Coleridge's application of the notional blunder to poetic reputation seems to be his own addition.


17:

Ein jeder sieht mit Lust diess schöne Bildniss an—
Ich nicht: weil ich nur noch diess Bildniss sehen kann

This is actually the last two lines of a quatrain by Andreas Gryphius entitled ‘Über das Bildniss der Hippolyta’, ‘On a Portrait of Hippolyta’:

So schien Hippolyta, der Ausbund ihrer Zeit,
Der Tugend Ebenbild, die holde Freundlichkeit.
Ein jeder sieht mit Lust diess schöne Bildniss an;
Ich nicht: weil ich nur noch diess Bildniss sehen kann.

‘So Hippolyta: the epitome of her time/the picture of kindness, the grace of kindness/Everyone looks upon her picture with pleasure/But I don't—because it is only a picture!’ [Christian Wernikens Überschriften: nebst Opitzens, Tschernings, Andreas Gryphius und Adam Olearius Epigrammatischen Gedichten (1780), 397]