Conference report

Coleridge’s Afterlives, 1834-1934, held at Clare College, Cambridge, 30 July 2004

 For further details of this conference see http://people.pwf.cam.ac.uk/jew36/Coleridge.html

 

James Vigus and Jane Wright

 

A doornail may be proverbially dead, but Thomas De Quincey was convinced that he had found something deader: James Gillman’s Life of Coleridge (1838), published four years after Coleridge’s death.  Yet despite this unpromising early memorial, Coleridge has lived on in multiple guises until the present day, in the fascination, research and sometimes revulsion of his readers.  Gillman was only the first of innumerable subsequent biographers; and Coleridge is unique among English Romantics in having continued to publish ‘new’ work continually for 170 years after his physical death.  Southey had written of the ailing Coleridge, with apparent good reason: ‘It vexes me and grieves me to my heart, that when he is gone, as go he will, nobody will believe what a mind goes with him––how infinitely and ten-thousand-fold the mind of his generation.’  But through successors’ work Coleridge’s paramount status has eventually been recognised, many years on.

 

Being peculiarly dependent on others in both his life and work, Coleridge has elicited so many constructions (and deconstructions) that it is impossible for us to read him unmediated by subsequent interpreters, whether editors, critics, biographers or allusive poets.  He has been modified by his own after-history. He is therefore a perfect subject for study in terms of Walter Benjamin’s concept of Nachgeschichte – after-history or afterlife.  While Coleridge has influenced the fields of poetry, literary criticism, philosophy, theology, social theory and others, these studies have influenced the Coleridge we read: the process is reciprocal.[1]  However, despite both a prolific contemporary Coleridge industry and ever-increasing interest in the phenomenon of influence, especially among students of Romanticism and Victorianism, no such study yet exists for Coleridge.  Amid the overwhelming diversity of Coleridge’s influences, Nicholas Roe’s collection Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Sciences of Life (Oxford, 2001) singles out one rich area for attention, but works on other Romantics such as Stephen Gill’s Wordsworth and the Victorians (Oxford, 1998), or Victorian Keats and Romantic Carlyle (ed. C. C. Barfoot, Amsterdam 1999) do not yet have a Coleridgean equivalent.

 

We are editing a collection of essays to fill this gap, based on the one-day conference we ran at Clare College, Cambridge this year.  Along with Roe’s collection, there is already excellent work on many areas of Coleridge’s influence, notably John Beer’s Romantic Consciousness: Blake to Mary Shelley (Basingstoke, 2003), Romantic Influences: contemporary, Victorian, modern (Basingstoke, 1993), and the brief but wide-ranging essay ‘Coleridge’s Afterlife’ (in the Cambridge Companion to Coleridge, ed. Lucy Newlyn, Cambridge, 2002); Seamus Perry’s edition of S.T. Coleridge: Interviews and Recollections (Basingstoke, 2000) and his essay ‘Coleridge the Talker’; and Stephen Prickett’s classic study of theological influence, Romanticism and Religion: The Tradition of Wordsworth and Coleridge in the Victorian Church (Cambridge, 1976).  Yet Coleridge’s afterlives are, we believe, definitely plural, reaching into so many areas of interest that a single writer cannot capture their breadth and variety.  Our volume will therefore bring together work by experts in different fields and periods to consider Coleridge in all aspects.  1934 is the nominal closing date of the study, as the centenary of Coleridge’s death and the year that saw the publication of I. A. Richards’ Coleridge on Imagination.  The powerful influence of the latter book on twentieth-century English studies, especially in Cambridge, has recently been underlined by the appearance of a new edition (ed. John Constable, London, 2001): Coleridge’s afterlives thus reach into the heart of modern literary theory.

 

Our conference opened with a session to introduce the topic.  Jane Wright noted that in his 1864 essay ‘Joubert; or a French Coleridge’, Matthew Arnold considered Joubert, in France more ‘possible’ than Coleridge was in England.  Consideration of Coleridge as a great thinker who was limited – be it by his geographical or historical location, or by drug addiction – could suggest its own critical and creative possibilities to later writers (perhaps including that Arnoldian criterion of the ‘possible’ itself).  A separation might be made between those who found Coleridge possible and those who found him impossible; albeit with allowance for those who changed their minds, itself an incorrigibly Coleridgean activity.  One obviously Coleridgean realm for the meeting and mingling of the possible and impossible is Imagination.  With only allusive acknowledgements of Coleridge’s presence, figures from Dr. Arnold to Dickens and Darwin were informed by especially Coleridgean possibilities for imagination in what seemed an increasingly mechanistic universe.  Divided views of Coleridge as a figure of both literary effort and moral indolence in turn prompted literary considerations of sympathy by writers such as Wilkie Collins and Henry James.  The capacity of Coleridge’s afterlives is vividly expressed in Henry James’ story The Coxon Fund, in which Coleridge is imagined as ‘a great suspended, swinging crystal, huge, lucid, lustrous, a block of light, flashing back every impression of light and every possibility of thought.’  James Vigus spoke about Coleridge’s philosophical and theological afterlives, especially in Cambridge.  Perhaps the strongest influence of Coleridge’s famous talk – snuffling ‘tawlk’, as Carlyle stigmatised it – was on the Cambridge-based group of writers who became members of the society of Apostles at Trinity College.  Tennyson was a member, and encountered Arthur Hallam’s boundless enthusiasm for Coleridge.  John Sterling, an incessant visitor to Coleridge at Highgate, and F.D. Maurice, who dedicated The Kingdom of Christ to Coleridge in 1846, were key figures.  Both were taught by J.C. Hare, lecturer in Classics at Trinity (1822-32), who himself imbibed ‘the life-giving words of the poet-philosopher’.  Immediately after Coleridge’s death Hare, at Sterling’s instigation, wrote to his friend William Whewell of Trinity to suggest that a Coleridge memorial prize be established at Cambridge, for essays ‘in the philosophy of Christianity’.  Whewell eventually put Hare’s proposal to the authorities, but it was rebuffed, and Whewell reported back: ‘With our governors, it seems, the vagaries of [Coleridge’s] earlier years are better known than the Christian philosophy, which he has impressed on so many in his riper years.’  Questions of personal morality made Coleridge ‘impossible’ for many.

 

The main part of the day consisted of five papers of twenty minutes each, followed by half an hour of discussion, invariably lively.  Fred Burwick began with a paper: ‘De Quincey on Coleridge’.  In Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821) De Quincey names Coleridge as foremost among those who might be ‘styled emphatically a subtle thinker’.  He credits Coleridge for an elucidation of the Italian artist Piranesi’s Carceri d'Invenzione so powerful that it was to haunt De Quincey’s opium-dreams without his ever having seen Piranesi’s work.[2]  However, the most revealing of De Quincey’s criticism of Coleridge appeared after the latter’s death: the ‘Recollections of Charles Lamb, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’ (Tait’s Magazine, 1834-5), the ‘Lake Reminiscences from 1807 to 1830’ (Tait’s Magazine, 1839), and ‘Coleridge and Opium-Eating’ (Blackwood’s Magazine, 1845).  These essays focus on Coleridge’s plagiarisms and addiction to opium, provoking responses from J.C. Hare, Ferrier, and Sara Coleridge.  However, there is more to De Quincey’s response to Coleridge than those controversial topics.  Fred mentioned that De Quincey frequently appropriated Coleridgean neoligisms: thus OED credits De Quincey as the first to use ‘subconscious’, but in fact the word first appears in a notebook entry by Coleridge of 1806 (CN II, 2915).  Fred focused on Coleridge’s presence in De Quincey’s dream-visions, beginning with the vertiginous plates of Piranesi. Walladmor (1825), De Quincey’s adaptation of a fake ‘translation’ by the German Willibald Alexis of a non-existent Walter Scott novel, contains a dream-sequence including quotations (from memory) of ‘Christabel’ and ‘The Pains of Sleep’.  Finally in Klosterheim De Quincey describes an ascent of the Brocken.  He had never climbed it – but Coleridge had.  In De Quincey’s resonant account, Coleridge’s experience is somehow more ‘real’ than his own ‘troubled remembrances.’  Fred’s paper prompted a conversation about De Quincey’s belligerence toward Coleridge as a figure who perpetually anticipated and usurped the younger opium-eater’s own experiences.  The speculation was made that De Quincey’s sense of entrapment in Piranesi’s nightmare architecture expressed his inability to escape Coleridgean precedents.  Constantly quoting Coleridge from memory, was De Quincey burdened by his inability to forget?

 

The second speaker was Stephen Prickett, with the title ‘Romantic Fragments and Victorian Pluralisms: From Lyrical Ballads to Guesses at Truth’.  Stephen suggested that although Wordsworth and Coleridge subsequently asserted the unitary nature of the Lyrical Ballads – Coleridge’s account of ‘imagination’ is that it reconciles opposite or discordant qualities; Wordsworth emphasised that all of us have ‘one human heart’ – we should look to the advertisement of 1798 for the original nature of the project.  There, a key word is ‘experiment’.  The Lyrical Ballads are experimental and fragmentary not through the poets’ youthful lack of confidence, but because they respond to a new awareness of pluralism in society.  John Keble called Wordsworth the poet of the poor, which may be true; yet the really original social commentary in Lyrical Ballads is embodied in the diverse viewpoints of the narrators and subjects – a mad mother, a sea-captain, an Indian woman and more.  Such awareness of the fragmentation of experience challenges the eighteenth-century orthodoxy of ‘uniformitarianism’, the idea that we can rely on an essentially common basis of humanity.  Pluralism was a challenge with which J.C. Hare too was to struggle in his fragmentary work (with Augustus Hare) Guesses at Truth – as the diffident title hints.  The Hare brothers compared themselves to the Schlegel brothers in Germany: they may be said to have anglicised the Schlegelian fragment.  Guesses was first published in 1827; like Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection, whose aphoristic structure it resembles, it was to be hugely influential on an influential minority, running to expanded second and third editions (1838 and 1871).  Hare’s diverse meditations on literature, philosophy and society reflect a gradual recognition of living in the world’s first fundamentally pluralistic society.  The notion of organic form, of the unity of art, is an ideal throughout Guesses, but in the special sense that the artist is a representative consciousness of his time.  Shakespeare writes differently from Goethe, but had Shakespeare lived in 1800, he would have written differently again.  Genius is not isolated, for Hare, but rather a social power; organic art is not equivalent to completion – as, we might now add, the Lyrical Ballads show.

 

In a paper entitled ‘In the possession of Mr Cottle’ Lynda Pratt then spoke on two of the most controversial mid-nineteenth century accounts of Coleridge’s life: Joseph Cottle’s Early Recollections (1837) and its successor Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey (1847).  Cottle of Bristol was Coleridge’s early and long-suffering publisher, and a poet who regularly went to Coleridge for advice.  He was a key figure during much of Coleridge’s life.  During his opium-crisis of 1814 it was Cottle and Josiah Wade, another old friend from Bristol, to whom the desperate Coleridge turned.  In a lecture in 1838 Montgomery proclaimed: ‘so long as Bristol shall have cause to be proud of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey, let not Bristol be ashamed of Joseph Cottle.’  Yet as Lynda pointed out, most biographers have been ashamed of Cottle’s reminiscences, regarding them as a necessary evil to be quarried for whatever facts Cottle has not distorted out of all recognition.  Admittedly Cottle’s pious, self-justifying tone is often unattractive: he insists that exposure of Coleridge’s weaknesses accords with Coleridge’s own wish that his unfortunate example might serve as a warning to others.  However, the tangled literary politics informing the production of the two works are fascinating.  Coleridge entirely neglects to mention Cottle and plays down his Bristolian roots in Biographia Literaria.  Cottle, deeply disappointed, sets out to reclaim the poet both for himself and his home city.  Cottle secured the collaboration of Robert Southey to his project: the two had earlier corresponded confidentially regarding Coleridge’s drug-problems, and now Cottle was able to exploit the old fissures between Southey and Coleridge.  Lynda showed how Cottle often altered his material to suit his own ends.  In publishing the letter of Coleridge in which he criticises Southey for writing ‘too much at his ease’, for instance, Cottle substitutes for the name of Southey the general ‘some Poets’.  Cottle’s mixture of casuistry and genuine insight not only sheds light on Coleridge’s past behaviour but also had a considerable effect on Coleridge’s later reputation.

 

Next, Douglas Hedley took us forward into the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with his paper ‘Imagination from Coleridge to Collingwood’.  The Collingwood in question is R. G. Collingwood (1889-1943), a prolific though now somewhat neglected writer whose works include Ruskin’s Philosophy (1922) and The Historical Imagination (1935).  However Douglas began by speaking about R. G.’s father, W. G. Collingwood, since he worked as Ruskin’s secretary – and Ruskin is known to have derived ideas on aesthetics from Coleridge.  Collingwood pére states that Ruskin was ‘following Coleridge’ in asserting beauty to be a real independent quality.  So Ruskin’s aesthetics, for instance his notion of the symbol, being indebted to Coleridge’s writing on the imagination, may provide a historical link between Coleridge and R. G. Collingwood.  The younger Collingwood in fact criticises Coleridge as a rigid, abstract Kantian, contrasting him with the fluid, organic, historicist Hegelianism of Ruskin.  Yet Collingwood also discusses imagination extensively, and Douglas explored the residual Coleridgean element to be found in his work.  Not only do Collingwood’s essays on prayer show theological affinities with Coleridge, but also both writers invoke Platonic eros in their aesthetics, Collingwood seeing art as a kind of primordial drive; both address the combined conscious and unconscious elements of the artist’s mind, indicating that genius operates as unconscious activity; both link art to prophecy via the medium of the symbol, seeing poetry, philosophy and religion as united endeavours.  The Christian Platonic doctrine of the symbol, Douglas explained, is based on the notion of the divine as at once immanent and transcendent: the symbol is in Coleridge’s term ‘translucent’ to the divine reality beyond, and consubstantial with it.  In this way it seeks a via media between (Aristotelian) doctrines of God as absolutely transcendent, and (Stoic) pantheism for which the divine is entirely immanent.  Discussion after the paper focused on the reasons for this tradition having subsided: given the rich vein of both tradition and speculation in Collingwood, why were his ideas not substantially taken up in the later twentieth century?

 

The final paper was given by Seamus Perry, on ‘T. S. Eliot’s Coleridge’.  Eliot saw someone ‘rather…of my own type’ in Coleridge, as he said in 1955 – though he often disliked what he saw.  His Harvard lectures, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, ended remarkably with ‘the sad ghost of Coleridge’ beckoning from the shadows.  In an essay on ‘Andrew Marvell’ he said of ‘the images in the Coy Mistress’ that they ‘are not only witty, but satisfy the elucidation of Imagination given by Coleridge’.  Seamus saw a pattern of identification and resistance in Eliot’s response to Coleridge, but also a subtle internalisation of some of the movements of Coleridge’s verse in Eliot’s own.  ‘Kubla Khan’ has been called (by Rosemary Ashton) the first non-discursive poem in English that is not a lyric, in that it omits connectives between stanzas: after ‘A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!’ comes ‘A damsel with a dulcimer’, with only white space between the two.  Seamus drew a fascinating parallel with some of Eliot’s extraordinarily experimental omissions of transitions in The Waste Land.  The ghost of Coleridge also seems to linger in Eliot’s famous critical assertions of the imaginative reconciliatory work of ‘a poet’s mind … constantly amalgamating disparate experience … always forming new wholes’. The element of impersonality in this power of imagination for Coleridge and Eliot provided another link.  Seamus further showed how Eliot’s responses to Coleridge were often far more subtle than the sometimes literal-minded interpretations of the contemporary scholars I. A. Richards and John Livingstone Lowes.

 

This was a diverse set of papers, but not lacking unity in its diversity.  Running throughout the talks and discussions for instance was an interest in Coleridge’s afterlives in the literal sense of posthumous biographical accounts.  For it seems implicit in most of the discussions of Coleridge in this period – and often in our own day – that his literary and philosophical achievement cannot be considered apart from the troublesome question of his personal morality.  This is a message of Henry James’ story The Coxon Fund, inspired by James Dykes Campbell’s 1893 life of Coleridge. Matthew Arnold, while praising Coleridge’s ‘effort’, qualified his praise with intriguing parentheses: ‘not a moral effort (for he had no morals)’, while Leslie Stephen asked whether a man is to be forgiven for having deserted his family because he has written The Ancient Mariner.  T. S. Eliot’s observation on Coleridge that to be a ruined man can sometimes be a vocation, captures the fascination of the paradoxical co-existence of genius with weakness: it is in this light (though not only in this light) that the responses of De Quincey, Cottle, and Eliot may be seen.  A related general point to emerge from these papers is that the responses to Coleridge that have been most vital in shaping his afterlives have nearly always been uncomfortable ones.  Both De Quincey and Eliot recognised themselves in Coleridge, and the recognition was a self-rebuke; Collingwood wrote unfavourably of Coleridge, but absorbed him nevertheless.

 

We were extremely fortunate to hear five papers which were not only each thoroughly researched and stimulating, but also complemented each other so well: this was Coleridgean ‘talk’ at its best.  The projected volume on Coleridge’s Afterlives will contain essays by the speakers just mentioned, with further provisional titles including: ‘The “Platonico-Wordsworthian-Coleridgean-anti-Utilitarians”’; ‘Coleridge and Nineteenth-century Masculinities’; ‘Ralph Waldo Emerson and Coleridge’s American Legacy’; ‘”The Mariner hath his will”: narrative power after Coleridge’; ‘The Sin in Sincerity: a critical tradition from Coleridge to Wilde’; ‘Coleridge, Evolutionary Theory and Proto-Evolutionary Theory’; ‘“The consummate symbol”: Coleridge’s future for philosophy’; ‘German studies after Coleridge’.  Coleridge’s many afterlives seem to confirm Goethe’s maxim that the one proof of genius is posthumous productivity.