BOOKS
The Coleridge Graffiti
By KARL MILLER AL notebooks are hard to read. Coleridge's, at times, are gruelling.* The abrupt transi- tions are all right : 'The quick raw flesh that burneth in the wound—Mr. Belsher, the bottom of High Street.' We don't really need to be told that this is the poetry of the Apocrypha and the address of a radical bookseller. The very per- sonal entries don't give much trouble either— when, for example, as a domestic safeguard, a reference to laudanum is transliterated into Greek. But not even a whole companion volume of careful scholarly annotation can cope with so intense and volatile a mind, which jotted down Perceptions for his own convenience rather than ours and jumbled them up with laundry lists, recipes, dark theory and oracular quotation.
There is a certain unity, however, in these Coleridge graffiti, this wide variety of private Chalkings on the wall of his cell. The first volume, Which covers the crucial years of his life, the Years of the poetry and the collaboration with Wordsworth, does not tell us a great deal about his genius, but it does tell us something about What is left when the genius is taken out, the socket, as it were, of his experience. For one thing there is far more evidence of the famous failures of nerve, of his allergies and addictions, than there is of his actual achievements. And out of this unity comes a rather poignant atmosphere, in which the snow gathers on Skiddaw, he worries about his marriage, sets out on his walking tours and wakes screaming from his bad dreams. The notebooks don't make his life seem any the less sad and disorderly, though I should add that those scholars who are for ever rehabilitating the great figures of the past, maintaining them in the neces- sary state of perfection, have now decided he was very neat and gay.
Professor Coburn is the champion of the hitherto unpublished parts of Coleridge and her complete edition, which will probably run to five volumes, will no doubt be a landmark in the specialist study of his work. Many readers may feel, though, that material which is a century overdue is unlikely to revolutionise our concep- tion of the author. And if they brave the in- cidental discomfort of the notes they will find that they were right. Proust's Jean Santeuil is another case in which the delay is virtually a comment on the novel itself.
The Romantic audience loved to feel cheated of the books their author might have written, untimely death being the most popular hazard. Coleridge's temperament produced the equal *THE NOTEBOOKS OF S. T. COLERIDGE: VOLUME 1, 1794-1804, TEXT AND NOTES. Edited by Kathleen Coburn. (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 75s.) hazard of an untimely life. And ever since he died, Romantic readers have seemed half inclined to hope that they could make up for it by recon- structing the great book he failed to write out of the heap of unpublished jottings which he left behind. The notebooks, however, will never be more than the outskirts of his achievement.
Although he was responsible for many very valuable explorations in various intellectual fields, he was above all an imaginative artist. And this is one thing which the notebooks do reveal about his work. They show an inexhaustible sen- sitivity. They show him moving with the same familiarity among a great range of sensations and ideas and making a poet's connections be- tween them. From the beginning to the end of his writing life all his different activities depend in one way or another on a permanent creative in- tention. His criticism could only have come from his own poetic practice, and when he uses the lan- guage of abstract thought he often does so for reasons which are largely creative. This means that there is an important continuity in his work and that there is no grand succession of phases and categories. He did not cross over entirely into didacticism and settle down into a kind of pro- fessorship in Highgate.
In some writers their poetry and their theory seem to make up a single unit. This is true of Coleridge as it is true of Blake and Keats. When he loses touch with his artistic experience, his writing frequently becomes very wordy and evasive. There are plenty of these unconscion- able entries in the present volume. In spite of his success in certain general discussions and in spite of his influence as a middleman to the German philosophers, he had an overwhelmingly literary mind. By 1804 he was unable to write poems any more, but his abilities remained in kind what they had always been. The very letter to Godwin in which he talks about the end of his poetry is charged with poetic feeling. And the critical analysis of other poets years afterwards owes everything to his old creative gift.
One of the most decisive entries in the note- books takes up his complaint that the meta- physicians of his day did not 'go into their own nature' when criticising a philosophical system. Coleridge thought that systems should be under- stood, whatever their starlding in logic, as com- plex human appeals. Let them be read, for that matter, as poetry.
All this explains why the most memorable entries usually contain a poet's interests. Take this extraordinary passage : When in a state of pleasurable & balmy Quietness I. feel my Cheek and Temple on the nicely made up Pillow in Cmlibe Toro meo, the fire-gleam on my dear Books, that fill up one whole side from ceiling to floor of my Tall Study—& winds, perhaps are driving the rain, or whistling in frost, at my blessed Window, whence I see Borrodale, the Lake, Newlands. . . . 0 then what visions have I had, what dreams—the Bark, the Sea, all the shapes & sounds & adventures made up of the Stuff of Sleep & Dreams, & yet my Reason at the Rudder /0 what visions, mastoi as if my Cheek and Temple were lying on me gale o' mast on—Seele meines Lebcns!—& I sink down the waters, thro' Seas and Seas.. .
He is carried into a movement of luxuriant with- drawal from the world, buoyed up by his love for Sarah Hutchinson, which merges into a sense of motherly protection. The style is wildly allu- sive and some of the references are tied together by these far-fetched puns. Night and sleep have released in him a prose full of modern artifice which suggests a modern curiosity about uncon- scious sources of feeling. This is a humble example of the way his mind often worked. And in passages like this ideas are often thrown up in imaginative form which others could take away and state in different terms.
The notebooks give other hints of the high order of versatility and invention in Coleridge. He laid his eggs in the sand, he says, `with ostrich carelessness,' and some hatched out to feather other people's caps. There are several entries which touch on the importance of the unconscious areas of the mind as they make them- selves felt, not only in these states of near-sleep, but in forms of poetic beauty and philosophical conviction. There are 'advanced' insights into the interplay between tradition and individuality in good writers. And, as a matter of detail, he knew from his illnesses that skin conditions were 'the terra incognita of medicine.'
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