Appreciations, With An Essay on Style

W >> Walter Horatio Pater >> Appreciations, With An Essay on Style

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15

De Quincey said of him that "he wanted better bread than can be made
with wheat:" Lamb, that from childhood he had "hungered for
eternity." Yet the faintness, the continuous dissolution, whatever
its cause, which soon supplanted the buoyancy of his first wonderful
years, had its own consumptive refinements, and even brought, as to
the "Beautiful Soul" in Wilhelm Meister, a faint religious ecstasy--
that "singing in the sails" which is not of the breeze. Here again
is one of his occasional notes:--

"In looking at objects of nature while I am thinking, as at yonder
moon, dim-glimmering through the window-pane, I seem rather to be
seeking, as it were asking, a symbolical language for something
within me, that already and for ever exists, than observing anything
new. Even when the latter is the case, yet still I have always an
obscure feeling, as if that new phenomenon were the dim awaking of a
forgotten or hidden truth of my inner nature. While I was preparing
the pen to make this remark, I lost the train of thought which had
led me to it."

What a distemper of the eye of the mind! What an almost bodily
distemper there is in that!

Coleridge's intellectual sorrows were many; [74] but he had one
singular intellectual happiness. With an inborn taste for
transcendental philosophy, he lived just at the time when that
philosophy took an immense spring in Germany, and connected itself
with an impressive literary movement. He had the good luck to light
upon it in its freshness, and introduce it to his countrymen. What
an opportunity for one reared on the colourless analytic English
philosophies of the last century, but who feels an irresistible
attraction towards bold metaphysical synthesis! How rare are such
occasions of intellectual contentment! This transcendental
philosophy, chiefly as systematised by the mystic Schelling,
Coleridge applied with an eager, unwearied subtlety, to the questions
of theology, and poetic or artistic criticism. It is in his theory
of poetry, of art, that he comes nearest to principles of permanent
truth and importance: that is the least fugitive part of his prose
work. What, then, is the essence of his philosophy of art--of
imaginative production?

Generally, it may be described as an attempt to reclaim the world of
art as a world of fixed laws, to show that the creative activity of
genius and the simplest act of thought are but higher and lower
products of the laws of a universal logic. Criticism, feeling its
own inadequacy in dealing with the greater works of art, is sometimes
tempted to make too much of those dark and capricious suggestions of
genius, which even [75] the intellect possessed by them is unable to
explain or recall. It has seemed due to the half-sacred character of
those works to ignore all analogy between the productive process by
which they had their birth, and the simpler processes of mind.
Coleridge, on the other hand, assumes that the highest phases of
thought must be more, not less, than the lower, subject to law.

With this interest, in the Biographia Literaria, he refines
Schelling's "Philosophy of Nature" into a theory of art. "There can
be no plagiarism in philosophy," says Heine:--Es giebt kein Plagiat
in der Philosophie, in reference to the charge brought against
Schelling of unacknowledged borrowing from Bruno; and certainly that
which is common to Coleridge and Schelling and Bruno alike is of far
earlier origin than any of them. Schellingism, the "Philosophy of
Nature," is indeed a constant tradition in the history of thought: it
embodies a permanent type of the speculative temper. That mode of
conceiving nature as a mirror or reflex of the intelligence of man
may be traced up to the first beginnings of Greek speculation. There
are two ways of envisaging those aspects of nature which seem to bear
the impress of reason or intelligence. There is the deist's way,
which regards them merely as marks of design, which separates the
informing mind from its result in nature, as the mechanist from the
machine; and there is the pantheistic way, which identifies the two,
which [76] regards nature itself as the living energy of an
intelligence of the same kind as though vaster in scope than the
human. Partly through the influence of mythology, the Greek mind
became early possessed with the conception of nature as living,
thinking, almost speaking to the mind of man. This unfixed poetical
prepossession, reduced to an abstract form, petrified into an idea,
is the force which gives unity of aim to Greek philosophy. Little by
little, it works out the substance of the Hegelian formula: "Whatever
is, is according to reason: whatever is according to reason, that
is." Experience, which has gradually saddened the earth's colours
for us, stiffened its motions, withdrawn from it some blithe and
debonair presence, has quite changed the character of the science of
nature, as we understand it. The "positive" method, in truth, makes
very little account of marks of intelligence in nature: in its wider
view of phenomena, it sees that those instances are a minority, and
may rank as happy coincidences: it absorbs them in the larger
conception of universal mechanical law. But the suspicion of a mind
latent in nature, struggling for release, and intercourse with the
intellect of man through true ideas, has never ceased to haunt a
certain class of minds. Started again and again in successive
periods by enthusiasts on the antique pattern, in each case the
thought may have seemed paler and more fantastic amid the growing
[77] consistency and sharpness of outline of other and more positive
forms of knowledge. Still, wherever the speculative instinct has
been united with a certain poetic inwardness of temperament, as in
Bruno, in Schelling, there that old Greek conception, like some seed
floating in the air, has taken root and sprung up anew. Coleridge,
thrust inward upon himself, driven from "life in thought and
sensation" to life in thought only, feels already, in his dark London
school, a thread of the Greek mind on this matter vibrating strongly
in him. At fifteen he is discoursing on Plotinus, as in later years
he reflects from Schelling that flitting intellectual tradition. He
supposes a subtle, sympathetic co-ordination between the ideas of the
human reason and the laws of the natural world. Science, the real
knowledge of that natural world, is to be attained, not by
observation, experiment, analysis, patient generalisation, but by the
evolution or recovery of those ideas directly from within, by a sort
of Platonic "recollection"; every group of observed facts remaining
an enigma until the appropriate idea is struck upon them from the
mind of a Newton, or a Cuvier, the genius in whom sympathy with the
universal reason becomes entire. In the next place, he conceives
that this reason or intelligence in nature becomes reflective, or
self-conscious. He fancies he can trace, through all the simpler
forms of life, fragments of an eloquent prophecy about the [78] human
mind. The whole of nature he regards as a development of higher
forms out of the lower, through shade after shade of systematic
change. The dim stir of chemical atoms towards the axis of crystal
form, the trance-like life of plants, the animal troubled by strange
irritabilities, are stages which anticipate consciousness. All
through the ever-increasing movement of life that was shaping itself;
every successive phase of life, in its unsatisfied susceptibilities,
seeming to be drawn out of its own limits by the more pronounced
current of life on its confines, the "shadow of approaching humanity"
gradually deepening, the latent intelligence winning a way to the
surface. And at this point the law of development does not lose
itself in caprice: rather it becomes more constraining and incisive.
From the lowest to the very highest acts of the conscious
intelligence, there is another series of refining shades. Gradually
the mind concentrates itself, frees itself from the limitations of
the particular, the individual, attains a strange power of modifying
and centralising what it receives from without, according to the
pattern of an inward ideal. At last, in imaginative genius, ideas
become effective: the intelligence of nature, all its discursive
elements now connected and justified, is clearly reflected; the
interpretation of its latent purposes being embodied in the great
central products of creative art. The secret of creative [79] genius
would be an exquisitely purged sympathy with nature, with the
reasonable soul antecedent there. Those associative conceptions of
the imagination, those eternally fixed types of action and passion,
would come, not so much from the conscious invention of the artist,
as from his self-surrender to the suggestions of an abstract reason
or ideality in things: they would be evolved by the stir of nature
itself, realising the highest reach of its dormant reason: they would
have a kind of prevenient necessity to rise at some time to the
surface of the human mind.

It is natural that Shakespeare should be the favourite illustration
of such criticism, whether in England or Germany. The first
suggestion in Shakespeare is that of capricious detail, of a
waywardness that plays with the parts careless of the impression of
the whole; what supervenes is the constraining unity of effect, the
ineffaceable impression, of Hamlet or Macbeth. His hand moving
freely is curved round as if by some law of gravitation from within:
an energetic unity or identity makes itself visible amid an abounding
variety. This unity or identity Coleridge exaggerates into something
like the identity of a natural organism, and the associative act
which effected it into something closely akin to the primitive power
of nature itself. "In the Shakespearian drama," he says, "there is a
vitality which grows and evolves itself from within."

[80] Again--

He, too, worked in the spirit of nature, by evolving the germ
from within, by the imaginative power, according to the idea.
For as the power of seeing is to light, so is an idea in mind
to a law in nature. They are correlatives which suppose
each other.

Again--

The organic form is innate: it shapes, as it develops, itself from
within, and the fulness of its development is one and the same with
the perfection of its outward form. Such as the life is, such is the
form. Nature, the prime, genial artist, inexhaustible in diverse
powers, is equally inexhaustible in forms: each exterior is the
physiognomy of the being within, and even such is the appropriate
excellence of Shakespeare, himself a nature humanised, a genial
understanding, directing self-consciously a power and an implicit
wisdom deeper even than our consciousness.+

In this late age we are become so familiarised with the greater works
of art as to be little sensitive of the act of creation in them: they
do not impress us as a new presence in the world. Only sometimes, in
productions which realise immediately a profound influence and
enforce a change in taste, we are actual witnesses of the moulding of
an unforeseen type by some new principle of association; and to that
phenomenon Coleridge wisely recalls our attention. What makes his
view a one-sided one is, that in it the artist has become almost a
mechanical agent: instead of the most luminous and self-possessed
phase of consciousness, the associative act in art or poetry is made
to look like some blindly organic process of assimilation. The work
of art is likened to a living organism. That expresses [81] truly
the sense of a self-delighting, independent life which the finished
work of art gives us: it hardly figures the process by which such
work was produced. Here there is no blind ferment of lifeless
elements towards the realisation of a type. By exquisite analysis
the artist attains clearness of idea; then, through many stages of
refining, clearness of expression. He moves slowly over his work,
calculating the tenderest tone, and restraining the subtlest curve,
never letting hand or fancy move at large, gradually enforcing
flaccid spaces to the higher degree of expressiveness. The
philosophic critic, at least, will value, even in works of
imagination, seemingly the most intuitive, the power of the
understanding in them, their logical process of construction, the
spectacle of a supreme intellectual dexterity which they afford.

Coleridge's prose writings on philosophy, politics, religion, and
criticism, were, in truth, but one element in a whole lifetime of
endeavours to present the then recent metaphysics of Germany to
English readers, as a legitimate expansion of the older, classical
and native masters of what has been variously called the a priori, or
absolute, or spiritual, or Platonic, view of things. His criticism,
his challenge for recognition in the concrete, visible, finite work
of art, of the dim, unseen, comparatively infinite, soul or power of
the artist, may well be [82] remembered as part of the long pleading
of German culture for the things "behind the veil." To introduce
that spiritual philosophy, as represented by the more transcendental
parts of Kant, and by Schelling, into all subjects, as a system of
reason in them, one and ever identical with itself, however various
the matter through which it was diffused, became with him the motive
of an unflagging enthusiasm, which seems to have been the one thread
of continuity in a life otherwise singularly wanting in unity of
purpose, and in which he was certainly far from uniformly at his
best. Fragmentary and obscure, but often eloquent, and always at
once earnest and ingenious, those writings, supplementing his
remarkable gift of conversation, were directly and indirectly
influential, even on some the furthest removed from Coleridge's own
masters; on John Stuart Mill, for instance, and some of the earlier
writers of the "high-church" school. Like his verse, they display
him also in two other characters--as a student of words, and as a
psychologist, that is, as a more minute observer or student than
other men of the phenomena of mind. To note the recondite
associations of words, old or new; to expound the logic, the
reasonable soul, of their various uses; to recover the interest of
older writers who had had a phraseology of their own--this was a vein
of inquiry allied to his undoubted gift of tracking out and analysing
curious modes of thought. A [83] quaint fragment of verse on Human
Life might serve to illustrate his study of the earlier English
philosophical poetry. The latter gift, that power of the "subtle-
souled psychologist," as Shelley calls him, seems to have been
connected with some tendency to disease in the physical temperament,
something of a morbid want of balance in those parts where the
physical and intellectual elements mix most closely together, with a
kind of languid visionariness, deep-seated in the very constitution
of the "narcotist," who had quite a gift for "plucking the poisons of
self-harm," and which the actual habit of taking opium, accidentally
acquired, did but reinforce. This morbid languor of nature,
connected both with his fitfulness of purpose and his rich delicate
dreaminess, qualifies Coleridge's poetic composition even more than
his prose; his verse, with the exception of his avowedly political
poems, being, unlike that of the "Lake School," to which in some
respects he belongs, singularly unaffected by any moral, or
professional, or personal effort or ambition,--"written," as he says,
"after the more violent emotions of sorrow, to give him pleasure,
when perhaps nothing else could;" but coming thus, indeed, very close
to his own most intimately personal characteristics, and having a
certain languidly soothing grace or cadence, for its most fixed
quality, from first to last. After some Platonic soliloquy on a
flower opening on a fine day in February, he goes on-- [84]

Dim similitudes
Weaving in mortal strains, I've stolen one hour
From anxious self, life's cruel taskmaster!
And the warm wooings of this sunny day
Tremble along my frame and harmonise
The attempered organ, that even saddest thoughts
Mix with some sweet sensations, like harsh tunes
Played deftly on a sweet-toned instrument.

The expression of two opposed, yet allied, elements of sensibility in
these lines, is very true to Coleridge:--the grievous agitation, the
grievous listlessness, almost never entirely relieved, together with
a certain physical voluptuousness. He has spoken several times of
the scent of the bean-field in the air:--the tropical touches in a
chilly climate; his is a nature that will make the most of these,
which finds a sort of caress in such things. Kubla Khan, the
fragment of a poem actually composed in some certainly not quite
healthy sleep, is perhaps chiefly of interest as showing, by the mode
of its composition, how physical, how much of a diseased or
valetudinarian temperament, in its moments of relief, Coleridge's
happiest gift really was; and side by side with Kubla Khan should be
read, as Coleridge placed it, the Pains of Sleep, to illustrate that
retarding physical burden in his temperament, that "unimpassioned
grief," the source of which lay so near the source of those
pleasures. Connected also with this, and again in contrast with
Wordsworth, is the limited quantity of his poetical performance, as
he himself [85] regrets so eloquently in the lines addressed to
Wordsworth after his recitation of The Prelude. It is like some
exotic plant, just managing to blossom a little in the somewhat un-
english air of Coleridge's own south-western birthplace, but never
quite well there.

In 1798 he joined Wordsworth in the composition of a volume of poems-
-the Lyrical Ballads. What Wordsworth then wrote already vibrates
with that blithe impulse which carried him to final happiness and
self-possession. In Coleridge we feel already that faintness and
obscure dejection which clung like some contagious damp to all his
work. Wordsworth was to be distinguished by a joyful and penetrative
conviction of the existence of certain latent affinities between
nature and the human mind, which reciprocally gild the mind and
nature with a kind of "heavenly alchemy."

My voice proclaims
How exquisitely the individual mind
(And the progressive powers, perhaps, no less
Of the whole species) to the external world
Is fitted; and how exquisitely, too,
The external world is fitted to the mind;
And the creation, by no lower name
Can it be called, which they with blended might
Accomplish.

In Wordsworth this took the form of an unbroken dreaming over the
aspects and transitions of nature--a reflective, though altogether
unformulated, analysis of them.

[86] There are in Coleridge's poems expressions of this conviction as
deep as Wordsworth's. But Coleridge could never have abandoned
himself to the dream, the vision, as Wordsworth did, because the
first condition of such abandonment must be an unvexed quietness of
heart. No one can read the Lines composed above Tintern without
feeling how potent the physical element was among the conditions of
Wordsworth's genius--"felt in the blood and felt along the heart."

My whole life I have lived in quiet thought!

The stimulus which most artists require of nature he can renounce.
He leaves the ready-made glory of the Swiss mountains that he may
reflect glory on a mouldering leaf. He loves best to watch the
floating thistledown, because of its hint at an unseen life in the
air. Coleridge's temperament, aei en sphodra orexei,+ with its
faintness, its grieved dejection, could never have been like that.

My genial spirits fail;
And what can these avail
To lift the smothering weight from off my breast?
It were a vain endeavour,
Though I should gaze for ever
On that green light that lingers in the west
I may not hope from outward forms to win
The passion and the life whose fountains are within.

Wordsworth's flawless temperament, his fine mountain atmosphere of
mind, that calm, sabbatic, mystic, wellbeing which De Quincey, [87] a
little cynically, connected with worldly (that is to say, pecuniary)
good fortune, kept his conviction of a latent intelligence in nature
within the limits of sentiment or instinct, and confined it to those
delicate and subdued shades of expression which alone perfect art
allows. In Coleridge's sadder, more purely intellectual, cast of
genius, what with Wordsworth was sentiment or instinct became a
philosophical idea, or philosophical formula, developed, as much as
possible, after the abstract and metaphysical fashion of the
transcendental schools of Germany.

The period of Coleridge's residence at Nether Stowey, 1797-1798, was
for him the annus mirabilis. Nearly all the chief works by which his
poetic fame will live were then composed or planned. What shapes
itself for criticism as the main phenomenon of Coleridge's poetic
life, is not, as with most true poets, the gradual development of a
poetic gift, determined, enriched, retarded, by the actual
circumstances of the poet's life, but the sudden blossoming, through
one short season, of such a gift already perfect in its kind, which
thereafter deteriorates as suddenly, with something like premature
old age. Connecting this phenomenon with the leading motive of his
prose writings, we might note it as the deterioration of a productive
or creative power into one merely metaphysical or discursive. In his
unambitious conception of his function as a poet, and in the very
limited quantity of his [88] poetical performance, as I have said, he
was a contrast to his friend Wordsworth. That friendship with
Wordsworth, the chief "developing" circumstance of his poetic life,
comprehended a very close intellectual sympathy; and in such
association chiefly, lies whatever truth there may be in the popular
classification of Coleridge as a member of what is called the "Lake
School." Coleridge's philosophical speculations do really turn on
the ideas which underlay Wordsworth's poetical practice. His prose
works are one long explanation of all that is involved in that famous
distinction between the Fancy and the Imagination. Of what is
understood by both writers as the imaginative quality in the use
of poetic figures, we may take some words of Shakespeare as an
example.--

My cousin Suffolk,
My soul shall thine keep company to heaven
Tarry, sweet soul, for mine, then fly abreast.

The complete infusion here of the figure into the thought, so vividly
realised, that, though birds are not actually mentioned, yet the
sense of their flight, conveyed to us by the single word "abreast,"
comes to be more than half of the thought itself:--this, as the
expression of exalted feeling, is an instance of what Coleridge meant
by Imagination. And this sort of identification of the poet's
thought, of himself, with the image or figure which serves him, is
the secret, sometimes, [89] of a singularly entire realisation of
that image, such as makes these lines of Coleridge, for instance,
"imaginative"--

Amid the howl of more than wintry storms,
The halcyon hears the voice of vernal hours
Already on the wing.

There are many such figures both in Coleridge's verse and prose. He
has, too, his passages of that sort of impassioned contemplation on
the permanent and elementary conditions of nature and humanity, which
Wordsworth held to be the essence of a poet; as it would be his
proper function to awaken such contemplation in other men--those
"moments," as Coleridge says, addressing him--

Moments awful,
Now in thy inner life, and now abroad,
When power streamed from thee, and thy soul received
The light reflected, as a light bestowed.

The entire poem from which these lines are taken, "composed on the
night after Wordsworth's recitation of a poem on the growth of an
individual mind," is, in its high-pitched strain of meditation, and
in the combined justice and elevation of its philosophical
expression--

high and passionate thoughts
To their own music chanted;

wholly sympathetic with The Prelude which it celebrates, and of
which the subject is, in effect, the generation of the spirit of
the "Lake poetry." [90] The Lines to Joseph Cottle have the same
philosophically imaginative character; the Ode to Dejection being
Coleridge's most sustained effort of this kind.

It is in a highly sensitive apprehension of the aspects of external
nature that Coleridge identifies himself most closely with one of the
main tendencies of the "Lake School"; a tendency instinctive, and no
mere matter of theory, in him as in Wordsworth. That record of the

green light
Which lingers in the west,

and again, of

the western sky,
And its peculiar tint of yellow green,

which Byron found ludicrously untrue, but which surely needs no
defence, is a characteristic example of a singular watchfulness for
the minute fact and expression of natural scenery pervading all he
wrote--a closeness to the exact physiognomy of nature, having
something to do with that idealistic philosophy which sees in the
external world no mere concurrence of mechanical agencies, but an
animated body, informed and made expressive, like the body of man, by
an indwelling intelligence. It was a tendency, doubtless, in the
air, for Shelley too is affected by it, and Turner, with the school
of landscape which followed him. "I had found," Coleridge tells us,

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15