 Publisher: Unwin Hyman; (April 1983) Excerpt from the dust jacket: Biographia Literaria is a major document in Western literary inquiry, but its intricacies have baffled and infuriated generations of readers. In this boldly conceived study, C. M. Wallace proposes a theory of Coleridge's habits as a writer that successfully "explain[s] his explanation." Her painstaking analysis of the Biographia's organizing structure distinguishes with great subtlety between the daring conception and the often inept execution of Coleridge's idea of critical discourse. Wallace argues that Coleridge's autobiographical format presents a richly metaphorical "self" whose literary life has led to the now-famous doctrine of secondary imagination. In its proper context within the whole Biographia, this doctrine anchors Coleridge's attempt to reconcile traditional ideas about literature's cultural and moral value with post-Kantean beliefs in the mind's dynamic powers. Despite claims made in his name, Wallace argues, Coleridge advocated neither an "autonomous" imagination nor an isolationist literary aesthetic. Wallace's command of recent Coleridge scholarship is brought to bear in ways that illuminate the Biographia for specialists and nonspecialists alike. Her own fluid prose and lucid, pragmatic design will help anyone discover how passages of special interest fit into the Biographia both conceptually and structurally. from the Preface [note: Parenthetical references to the Biographia refer to Shawcross's 1907 edition from Oxford UP. Other references are to works in the Princeton U Press Collected Coleridge, except as noted.] Arthur Symons said it best: Biographia Literaria is the greatest book of criticism in English, and one of the most annoying in any language. Many have agreed that Coleridge's brilliance comes shrouded in an obscure, infuriating intricacy. In order to analyze that intricacy, and yet not to write a book as labyrinthine as the Biographia itself, I have 'at all times endeavoured to look steadily at my subject': the order and relation of parts that I call 'design.' I occasionally discuss Coleridge's plagiarisms and his misquotations, but only when they create or solve interesting rhetorical problems. I discuss Coleridge's personal history only when such details reveal particularly well how he creates a 'literary life.' I discuss Wordsworth in somewhat greater detail, but I am not centrally concerned with illuminating that friendship and its theoretical disputes. Wordsworth appears in Biographia Literaria partly as an individual, but more centrally as the ideal philosophic poet--and in all instances as Coleridge's idea of him. I step outside that conception only when recourse to Wordsworth's criticism proves requisite to the full understanding of how Coleridge designs his counter-argument. None the less, the Wordsworth portrayed on my pages remains the Biographia's image of him. Major work needs to be done on each of these issues. In evaluating Biographia Literaria as a discourse, I do not commonly engage philosophic 'first questions' in my own right: I am not a philosopher. I do point out how Coleridge's conclusions depend upon assumptions usually drawn from Christianity. I also describe how the coherence of his theory depends not only on the validity of these assumptions, but also upon the ways in which they modify and restrict each other. But in my own analyses I ordinarily grant the validity of these starting-points. And it should be admitted from the start that I have thoroughly enjoyed the puzzles that Coleridge's discourse presents. One day a colleague commented ruefully to me that one must be a true 'Coleridgean' to love the Biographia. Perhaps so. But it is also true that one who becomes fond of bitter tastes never calls them sweet. I regularly distinguish between the intricacy that derives from the sophistication of Coleridge's thinking, and the obscurity that derives from the manner of his composing. Yet both his errors and his intricacies reflect consistent habits: comprehending the design as the work of both a genius and an exhausted, troubled man can render more easily accessible what is permanently valuable in Biographia Literaria. This book is intended for three general kinds of readers. First, of course, sworn 'Coleridgeans.' For them, the crucial issue will be my argument about how Coleridge composed--an argument tested against the Biographia because it is so crucial among his works. Secondly, those interested in the Biographia only in parts. Biographia Literaria is, alas, usually read only in parts except by the most determined; and so I allowed a certain pragmatism to prevail in my own design. This book is written so that one can discover how the "interesting" parts fit into the whole structurally, conceptually, and rhetorically. Biographers, philosophers, Wordsworthians, literary theorists and historians, and students of poetry can each the select the chapters that pertain to the parts of the Biographia that matter to them. My third set are those whom Coleridge himself addressed--not literary professionals of any ilk, but that wider group of people who care about literature, who value its contributions to human culture, and who seek reasonable principles of critical judgment. Accommodating the needs of these readers has at times required that I verge upon an old but useful format, the so-called 'commentary.' Coleridgeans will recognize, I trust, a certain familiar irony in this: just a few comments, the right comments, can illuminate much. . . . from Chapter 1: The Chamois Hunter (pp. 1-3) "The musician may tune his instrument in private, ere his audience have yet assembled; the architect conceals the foundation of his building beneath the superstructure. But an author's harp must be tuned in the hearing of those, who are to understand its after harmonies; the foundation stones of his edifice must lie open to common view, or his friends will hesitate to trust themselves beneath the roof." The Friend, vol. 1., p. 14. "A man's principles . . . are the life of his life." The Friend, I, 97. In this half of the century, the familiar portrait has been redrawn: we no longer see Samuel Taylor Coleridge as a genius helplessly mired in addictions, neuroses, and morbid Christianity. Growing numbers of scholars have demonstrated the depth and subtlety of Coleridge's thought. His originality has been re-evaluated; his reputation has grown. Biographia Literaria deserves a new look as well. Like Coleridge himself, it is not a rambling, foggy, inconsistent traveler toward isolated, cryptic insights. It is a formal and rhetorical whole designed to engage the reader not simply as a philosopher-critic, but as a person, as a union of intellectual, emotional and moral powers. Its design reveals a coherent and genuinely imaginative vision of the necessary character of modern discourse. Yet it is a difficult book. At first glance, there is ample evidence that Biographia Literaria is a fragmented disaster whose difficulties can neither be resolved nor understood: the 'missing' transcendental construction in chapter XII, the incorporations from Schelling; its origin as a preface to Sibylline Leaves. Such evidence appears to justify Carlyle's malefic description: ". . . instead of answering [a question], or decidedly setting out towards an answer of it, he would accumulate formidable apparatus, logical swim-bladders, transcendental life-preservers and other precautionary and vehiculatory gear, for setting out; perhaps did at last get under way,--but was swiftly solicited, and turned aside by the glance of some radiant new game on this hand or that, into new courses; and ever into new; and before long into all the Universe." 1 'Solicited' is the central word here: seduced, enticed, led astray. The Victorians said that Coleridge lacked 'will power'; the moderns that he was hopelessly 'neurotic'. 2 Yet the principle remains the same: the formal disorder of the works reflects the personal disorder of the man. But the evidence for Biographia Literaria's formal disorder shrivels abruptly if examined in strong light. The infamous chapter XIII, for example, culminates an extensive pattern of reference to the intellectual powers of Englishmen; it is an elaborately planned appeal to the philosophic reader. Philosophic readers have been appropriately disappointed: the strategy succeeds at least in part. But such readers err in judging this chapter a neurotic break, or a failure of nerve, or a change in plan literally unexpected by its author. There is substantial evidence to the contrary. 3 In a parallel way, the Biographia's origin as a preface reflects no reprehensible spontaneity on Coleridge's part: one finds plans for the Biographia in letters and notebook entries dating back at least to the autumn of 1803. 4 The plagiarisms from Schelling have been evaluated in general by Thomas McFarland and in painstaking detail by Elinor Stoneman Shaffer, both of whom conclude that the literal appearance of plagiarism is misleading. 5 In light of recent scholarship, this prima facie evidence loses its impressive appearance. But the reputation of Biographia Literaria has also rested on the experience of many attentive and informed readers. For a text so often described as unreadable, it has been read more often and valued more highly than quite makes sense. The paradox is revealing: there is no frustration quite the equal of intuiting a coherence that refuses to emerge into the full daylight of objectifying comprehension. There are, in fact, many brief descriptions of the Biographia's general thematic unity. Shawcross is exemplary. He attributes 'the miscellaneous character of the book' to the poor state of Coleridge's 'health and spirits', but goes on to say: "It is with this end in view ['the desire . . . to state clearly, and defend adequately, his own poetic creed'] that, in the autobiographical portion of the book, he describes the growth of his own literary convictions; that, in the philosophical, he seeks to refer them to first principles; and that, in the criticism of Wordsworth's poetry and poetic theory, he emphasizes the differences which, as he imagines, exist between Wordsworth and himself." (BL, I, xcii). 6 Coleridge's complaint seems to the point: "Now surely a [work] the contents and purposes of which are capable of being faithfully and compleatly enumerated in a sentence of 7 or 8 lines, and where all the points treated of tend to a common result, cannot justly be regarded as a motley Patch-work, or a Farrago of heterogenous Effusions!" (Lay Sermons, 114n). This general thematic unity is seldom denied. 7 Yet it is one thing for an attentive reader to perceive the relations among the topics Coleridge discusses; it is something altogether different to perceive that Coleridge so manages his discourse as to define exactly how 'all points treated of tend to a common result'. A sympathetic reader can link the parts to a postulated common result, but this does not prove that Biographia Literaria, as a discourse, generally succeeds in establishing these relations through various formal and rhetorical strategies. Such strategies comprise what I call 'design': the blueprint of the whole, regarded both as a governing structure, and as the intent or governing idea implicit in and enacted by this structure. The generations of scholars and critics succeeding Shawcross have explicated Coleridge's 'literary convictions' and his 'first principles' to reveal a thinker known to very few in 1907: a Coleridge who is erudite, philosophically acute, and humanly profound. As we have more and more fully seen how his intricacy of mind engages complex human questions, it becomes less possible to believe that so great a thinker could have been so fundamentally incompetent a writer. Common sense questions whether such extraordinary powers of concentration and synthesis could have been so entirely suspended when he sat down to compose. He himself often insisted that genius and command of language vary together. His books are not perfectly written--whose are?--but their difficulty resides primarily in the complexity of his ideas, and in the complexity of design these ideas require for their intelligible presentation. Coleridge knew he would be charged with obscurity; he often tried both to defend himself, and to preclude the charge through elaborate explanations of his principles in writing. Understanding these principles alleviates much of the confusion and frustration that so many readers experience. . . . ~ ~ ~ regarding the infamous "break" in chapter XIII: from Chapter 5: Imagination, Philosophic Consciousness and the 'True and Original Realism' (p. 81): The concluding paragraph of Thesis X sketches the 'interrupted' intent of chapter XIII: to abstract from self-consciousness a single power generating two polar forces, and from their interactions to evolve 'the fulness of human intelligence' (I. 188). We may rightly ask what relation this one force has to the God of the Scholium to [Thesis]VI. The answer would be that transcendental philosophy treats God [only] as [the philosophic first principle of] absolute knowing, not as a person, and not as a deity; natural philosophy, correspondingly, treats God [only] as [the philosophic first principle of] absolute being. Only the total philosophy (in which philosophy passes into religion) deals with God as a person, as a 'moral creator, and governor' (I. 133). That is a good and adequate answer, strictly speaking. But Biographia Literaria as a whole is not strictly transcendental philosophy. Coleridge veers repeatedly into the total philosophy, particularly in his arguments about moral responsibility in chapters V to IX, and in his discovery of the common ground of the personal God and things in themselves in chapter X. The actual gap in this book is between Thesis VI and its Scholium, between the one force or single ground and the personal triune God. Philosophical resolution of that gap is repeatedly deferred to the Logosophia. Autobiographical resolution takes its place 'temporarily': the speaker knows that the orthodox Christian God underlies his coherent experience of both an independent material reality and his own moral freedom. He urges orthodox values and perspectives at every turn. That strategy sharply limits--or attempts to limit--the range of implication and inference from transcendental philosophy that the reader will perceive as valid. Despite the logical appearance of pantheism in chapter XII, the dramatic autobiographical form of the whole work is to preclude our taking that appearance literally. The problem, as I noted with regard to chapter VIII, is that the reader's logical powers have been fully engaged by chapter XII's arguments. The speaker's orthodoxy lacks the rhetorical potence necessary to preclude the pantheist interpretation. Coleridge's deficient sense of audience becomes startlingly apparent--or, perhaps, his vulnerable openness in asking us to trust the orthodoxy of his morals and the powers of his mind. On such issues as these, the man and the speaker can be only theoretically distinct. the same topic continued, (pp. 87-88): [Late in chapter XIII, Coleridge offers a fictional letter dissuading him from publishing the final section of his densely technical philosophic construction of human knowing. Agreeing with this advisor, he offers to the Biographia's readers only the principal conclusion of this construction, his now-famous definitions of primary imagination (perception), secondary imagination (creativity), and fancy (the power of 'free' associating.) ] From the letter's relation to what has preceded, and its comprehensible (albeit peculiar) rhetorical purposes, one may conclude that--objectively regarded--it does no damage to the integrity or completeness of the work as a whole. Regarded subjectively, however, the letter poses a more difficult challenge, because it marks and symbolizes a highly problematic aspect of Coleridge's theory of the mind's functions. The theory is formally incomplete. . . . [That is,] Most of the first fourteen pages of chapter XII explain that the major principles of transcendental philosophy cannot be demonstrated. The mysteries of being and knowing, or the one and the many, would not have been converted to logically demonstrable propositions by the missing construction [the supposedly omitted sections of chapter XIII]. Does this comprise an intolerable break in the book's thematic or ideational unity? Critical or scholarly consensus here principally exerts a rhetorical and moral force: mystery is not made less mysterious by winning broad support. [Here is what Coleridge says on the subject:] "This then is the distinction of moral philosophy--not that I begin with one or more assumptions, for this is common to all science; but--that I assume a something [the reality of a personal God and of an objective world correspondent to sensory data], the proof of which no man can give to another, yet every man may find himself. . . . Omnia exeunt in mysterium, says a schoolman: that is, There is nothing, the absolute ground of which is not a mystery. The contrary were indeed a contradiction in terms: for how can that, which is to explain all things, be susceptible of an explanation? It would be to suppose the same thing first and second at the same time." (Aids to Reflection, 154-156.) 8 In its most fundamental terms, the issue here is whether or not one agrees that Omnia exeunt in mysterium. Those who absolutely agree live in a world fundamentally different from those who absolutely disagree, separated by a gulf across which arguments may carry, but to no useful purpose. But most of us, I suspect, float about somewhat eclectically, uneasy with this mysterious assumption that we know and can discourse about a real and coherent world, yet repulsed and unconvinced by the alternatives. Ultimately, one cannot absolutely and logically prove whether or not the abstract formal unity of Biographia Literaria is matched by a theoretical or ideational unity. But we conduct our lives in accord with many beliefs that we cannot absolutely establish. In reading and writing as in living, most of us rely on persuasive probabilities, and common sense, and on those graces of explanation and argument that make more easily accessible what 'every man may find for himself'. One who would reach beyond the currently fashionable nihilisms can only rely on some version of the Biographia's idea that discourse is an essentially creative act designed for a free agent who consciously chooses to accept some version of the true and original realism. A note from the author: I wrote this when I was 25 and at most 27 years old. That was half a lifetime ago. My book Motherhood in the Balance delineates my great struggles against settling down on the side of the great Mysterium. Since then, I have also decided that communicating back across that gulf--or up to those afloat mid-air-- is not pointless after all. I thought it was pointless in 1975 or 1976 because I could not imagine that anything would ever persuade me. I was wrong, but I was also young, and I had been in a university setting non-stop for ten years. I was thereby quite convinced that everything in life did or should make sense if only we will work hard enough to understand it. I think experience slowly teaches most people that life is quite a bit more than we will ever understand with stainless-steel certainty. Omnia exeunt in mysterium. References 1. Thomas Carlyle, Life of John Sterling, in Works of Thomas Carlyle (New York: Scribners, 1897), XI, p. 56 2. Among the Victorians, see, for instance: Matthew Arnold, The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 960-1977), Vol. III, p. 189, and Vol. IX, p. 237; Walter Pater, Appreciations, 3rd edn (London: Macmillan, 1901), pp. 65-104; John Ruskin, Ruskin as Literary Critic, ed. A. H. R. Ball (London: Cambridge University Press, 1928), pp. 267-268; Leslie Stephen, Hours in a Library (1909; reprinted London: John Murray, 1919), Vol. III, pp. 324, 331, and Stephen's entry on C in The Dictionary of National Biography, Vol. IV. C's influence on his century was substantial. See Graham Hough, 'Coleridge and the Vicitorians' in The English Mind: Studies in the English Moralists Presented to Basil Wiley, ed. D. H. Sykes and G. Watson (London: Cambridge University Press, 1964), pp. 175-192; and Philip C. Rule, S.J., 'Coleridge's Reputation as a Religious Thinker: 1816-1972', Harvard Theological Review, vol. 67 (1974), pp. 289-320. Thomas McFarland analyzes the history of C's reputation in the introduction and first chapter of Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969). 3. Discussed below, chapters 2 and 5. 4. These plans have been discussed by George Whalley, 'The Integrity of Biographia Literaria', Essays and Studies, n.s., vol. 6 (1953), pp. 87-101; and by Earl Leslie Griggs, editor of Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956-1959), III, xlvii-lii; and most recently by Kathleen Wheeler, Sources, Processes and Methods in Coleridge's 'Biographia Literaria' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981kl), pp. 8-28. See alsoo Daniel Mark Fogle, 'A Compositional History of the Biographia Literaria', Studies in Bibliography: Papers of the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, vol 30 (1977), pp. 219-234. On the original intention to write a preface, see Collected Letters, ed. Griggs, IV, pp. 584-5, 578-9. 5. Thomas McFarland, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969); Elinor Stoneman Shaffer, 'Studies in Coleridge's Aesthetics', Dissertation Abstracts, 28 (1967), p. 1409, col. A (Columbia University), esp. ch. 2 (pp. 18-70), which reappears in very condensed form as 'The "Postulates in Philosophy" in Biographia Literaria', Comparative Literature Studies, vol. 7 (1970), pp. 297-313. The issue is a complex one, as McFarland's history shows. Other views on the issue are discussed below, chapter 5, note 2. 6. The work referred to is Lay Sermons. C continues: "Before a just tribunal of criticism I could apply still more triumphantly the same test . . . to two distinct Treatises in the Literary Life, besides the Essay on Authorship as a Trade [chapter XI].' C would not have written "in" if he meant "comprising" or "constituting"; these two essays are probably chs I to X, and XIV to XXII. 7. This thematic unity has been defined most fully by George Whalley, 'The Integrity of Biographia Literaria" [see above, n.4]. George Watson extends one aspect of Whalley's argument in his introduction to Biographia Literaria, ed. George Watson, Everyman's Library (London: Dent, New York: Dutton, 1965). Very short summaries, less comprehensive than Shawcross's, are numerous. J. R. de J. Jackson defines another aspect of the Biographia's unity: its methodical basis and consistency. See his Method and Imagination in Coleridge's Criticism (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1969), esp. pp. 63-72. Most recently, Kathleen Wheeler (Sources, Processes, and Methods, see above n. 4) has argued that C uses a higher or Socratic irony to devise a work whose unity depends upon the reader's imaginative response to certain densely metaphoric passages that ultimately render the Biographia almost entirely self-reflexive. 8. Aids to Reflection, ed. Henry Nelson Coleridge, Kennikat Press Scholarly Reprints, senior ed. Ralph Adams Brown, facsimile reprint (Port Washington NY and London: Kennikat Press, 1971). Related works on this site:
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