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The Early Coleridge: His “Rage for Metaphysics”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 August 2011

Lucyle Werkmeister
Lucyle Werkmeister
Affiliation:
Los Angeles, California
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Extract

In 1797–98 Coleridge wrote a series of five autobiographical letters in which he presumably recounted everything which he remembered or had been told regarding the period from his birth (21 October, 1772) to his departure from Christ's Hospital in 1791. As it turned out, these first recollections were only a beginning, for Coleridge continued to add to them for the greater part of his life, the most notable additions being contained in the Biographia Literaria and in the biographical notes which he gave to James Gillman. When all of the recollections are assembled, they present an account of the boy Coleridge which would seem hardly creditable even if it were consistent, and it has seemed much less creditable when it is compared with the account furnished by the juvenilia. For this reason, perhaps, the account given by the recollections has presented a problem to biographers. Some of them have dismissed it altogether as a creation of Coleridge's over-active imagination; others have respected it by ignoring the juvenilia or by dealing with the recollections and the juvenilia separately, as if they related to two different persons. In no instance has anyone attempted to reconcile the two accounts. It has seemed to me that such a reconciliation ought to be attempted; for, to the extent that the recollections are dependable, they should provide an invaluable clue, not only to an understanding of Coleridge's early writings, but, more importantly, to an understanding of the basis and direction of his mature thought.

Type
Research Article
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 54 , Issue 2 , April 1961 , pp. 99 - 123
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1961

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References

1 Of the biographers, Brandl perhaps has the greatest respect for Coleridge's recollections, especially for his recollections regarding Plotinus. See Alois Brandl, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the English Romantic School (London, 1887), pp. 21–23. But, assuming for a reason which is not clear to me that Coleridge could not have read the Enneads in Greek, Brandl limits Coleridge's acquaintance with that work to the doctrine of the beautiful, as it was presented in English by William Taylor, and he makes no attempt to reconcile this doctrine with the juvenilia. As it happens, the doctrine of the beautiful is the one aspect of Plotinian thought which Coleridge disregarded.

2 See Werkmeister, , “Coleridge, Bowles, and ‘Feelings of the Heart,’” Anglia, LXXVII(1960), 55–73Google Scholar.

3 Gillman, James, The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (London, 1838), I, 10Google Scholar.

4 Unpublished Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs (London, 1932), II, 262. The similarity between this recollection and a passage from the Enneads, which Coleridge quotes in the Biographia, is not without significance. See Biographia Literaria. By Coleridge, S. T., ed. Shawcross, John (London, 1907), I, 80Google Scholar.

5 Gillman, I, 20, 34.

6 Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs (Oxford, 1956), I, 347–348.

7 Gillman, I, 20. It might be mentioned that, when Boyer first inquired about him, he was told that Coleridge was “a dull and inapt scholar, and that he could not be made to repeat a single rule of syntax, although he would give a rule in his own way” (Gillman, I, 19).

8 Collected Letters, I, 388.

9 Gillman, I, 21.

10 Collected Letters, I, 312.

11 Collected Letters, I, 347. Coleridge later indicated that he did not read Robinson Crusoe until he was fourteen (Gillman, I, 20).

12 Letters of Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (London, 1895), I, 11, noteGoogle Scholar.

13 Collected Letters, I, 354.

14 Gillman, I, 17.

15 Collected Letters, I, 388.

16 Gillman, I, 17, 20.

17 Gillman, I, 23.

18 Collected Letters, I, 814.

19 Biographia, I, 9–10.

20 Gilman, I, 23.

21 Biographia, I, 94.

22 Charles Lamb, “Christ's Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago.” But see Coleridge's statement that Lamb's essay was “chiefly compiled from recollections of what he had heard from me” (Unpublished Letters, II, 274).

23 Biographia, I, 10, 14.

24 See Lord, Coleridge K. C., The Story of a Devonshire House (London, 1905)Google Scholar.

25 Collected Letters, I, i. Luke was still recommending this work two years later, even offering to make Coleridge a gift of it (see Collected Letters, I, 2–3).

26 Collected Letters, I, 2, 3.

27 “Cato” is a pseudonym for John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, whose Letters originally formed part of the controversy between Samuel Clarke and Anthony Collins. “Cato” was defending Collins.

28 Cato's Letters (London, 1723–24), III, 11, 145; IV, 174–190, 295.

29 It is clear from the continuation of this quotation that by conception Coleridge means imaginative insight or what he was later to call the “sense of certainty.” Thus he goes on to say, “Those who have been led to the same truths step by step thro' the constant testimony of their senses, seem to me to want a sense which I possess. … – It is true, that the mind may become credulous & prone to superstition by [reliance upon this intuitive sense] — but are not the Experimentalists credulous even to madness in believing any absurdity, rather than believe the grandest truths, if they have not the testimony of their own senses in their favor?” (Collected Letters, I, 354).

30 “Absence / A Farewell Ode on Quitting School for Jesus College, Cambridge.”

31 “Sonnet on Quitting School for College.”

32 “Progress of Vice,” lines 5–8.

33 Voltaire himself was of course a deist, not an “infidel.”

34 It is true that after 1789 Coleridge agreed with Proclus, Jamblichus, and the Renaissance group in limiting man's moral freedom, but his arguments are totally different from theirs, and it is therefore doubtful that he was influenced by them. By this time he had reached an impasse in his own thinking which was bound to result in scepticism without any assistance from the “metaphysicians.”

35 See Enneads, I, ii, i, 5; I, iv, 4–8, 12, 15; III, ii, 4–7; IV, iii, 16. Although Coleridge later doubted that virtue is attainable, he continued to believe that the good do not suffer. See, for example, “Dejection: An Ode,” lines 76–83.

36 “Happiness,” lines 1–2; but see the whole poem, and see also “Dura Navis” and “Nil Pejus est Caelibe Vita.” Cf. Enneads, I, ii, 5; I, iv, 5, 12, 14; IV, iv, 21, 44; IV, viii, 2; VI, iv, 14–16.

37 “Easter Holidays,” line 25.

38 See Enneads, I, ii, 6; I, viii, i; III, vi, 6; IV, iii, 26–27; IV, iv, 5; IV, vii, 10; IV, viii, 1; V, i, 1, 3, 7; V, iii, 4; V, ix, 7.

39 “Quae Nocent Docent,” lines 7–12. “The cloisters' solitary gloom” refers only to the cloisters of Christ's Hospital. Coleridge had as little regard for the monastic life as did Plotinus.

40 See Enneads, I, i, 10; I, viii, 4, 9–10; II, iii, 8; III, vi, 5; V, iii, 7.

41 See Enneads, I, vi, 9; IV, iv, 25; V, iii, 8–9; V, v, 6–8; VI, vii, 35–36; VI, ix, 11.

42 See Enneads, II, i, 4–5; II, ii, 2; II, be, 8; III, iv, 6; IV, iii, 15, 17; IV, viii, 2; V, i, 2.

43 I am quoting from the early version of this poem, since the meaning of the lines is clearer than it is in the revised version.

44 See Enneads, I, viii, 4; IV, viii, 2; IV, ix, 2; V, ix, 1.

45 “Quae Nocent Docent,” lines 1–6, 13–18.

46 I am omitting mention of two poems which are commonly assigned to this period, “Anthem for the Children of Christ's Hospital” and “Destruction of the Bastile,” since, on the basis of content, it is unthinkable that either poem could have been written in 1789. I have shown elsewhere that the “Anthem” could not have been written prior to mid-1790 and that it was probably written in 1791. See “Coleridge's ‘Anthem’: Another Debt to Bowles,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology, LVIII (1959), 270–275. “Destruction of the Bastile” clearly belongs to the Hartleyan period. The social indignation expressed in this poem is irreconcilable with the whole Neoplatonic group. Plotinus himself steadily advised stoic resignation on the ground that the only real defense against human iniquity is virtue, the virtuous alone being unaffected by it (see Enneads, I, iv, 11; III, ii, 8–9; III, viii, 4), and Coleridge at this time certainly agreed with him. Moreover, the “Freedom” hailed in this poem is merely civil liberty; the only freedom which interested the Coleridge of 1789 was moral freedom.

47 See Enneads, I, viii, ii; III, ii, 4–5; IV, viii, 7.

48 Lines 56–57, 59–64.

49 For these essays, see Hanson, Lawrence, The Life of S. T. Coleridge (London, 1938), pp. 424–426Google Scholar.

50 See Enneads, II, iii, 8; IV, viii, 5; VI, viii, 1.

51 See Enneads, I, viii, 5; III, ii, 4–5; III, iii, 4; IV, iii, 16; IV, viii, 5–7; V, i, 1; V, be, 1.

52 See Enneads, III, ii, 4–5; IV, iii, 16, 24; IV, iv, 45.

53 “Honour,” lines 13–14.

54 Cato's Letters, III, 145.

55 This is evidently Plotinus's “tutelary spirit” (see Enneads, III, iv, 3–6; VI, vii, 25).

56 “Happiness,” lines 96–105.

57 For a consideration of the rôle played by these two men in the formulation of Coleridge's mature theology, see Werkmeister, , “Coleridge on Science, Philosophy, and Poetry: Their Relation to Religion,” Harvard Theological Review, LII (1959), 85–118CrossRefGoogle Scholar.