A Library Cormorant

In one of his earliest passages of self-analysis, Coleridge said of himself: ‘I am, and ever have been, a great reader, and have read almost everything – a library cormorant.  I am deep in all out of the way books...’.  He was twenty-four at the time, and there is some pardonable exaggeration in what he wrote.  In any case, he went on reading for the rest of his life.  But it is the quality of Coleridge’s reading, rather than its scope or curiosity, that makes it worth study.  His guiding principle was: ‘Always to suppose myself ignorant of a writer’s understanding, until I understand his ignorance’.  His great gift was to be able to identify himself with an author, so that he could discern the writer’s intention, below the opaque surface of the words.  It did not seem to matter what kind of book it was.  A note written in December 1804, during the terrible months he spent in Malta, shows the finely adjusted, alert affinity he could establish with a book:

It is often said that books are companions.  They are so – dear, very dear companions!  But I often, when I read a book that delights me...feel a pang that the author is not present, that I cannot object to him this and that, express my sympathy and gratitude for this part and mention some facts that...overset a second, start a doubt about a third, or confirm and carry [forward] a fourth thought.  At times I become restless, for my nature is very social.

But the question arises: Is there anything important to be said about Coleridge’s reading since Lowes published The Road to Xanadu?  That book is a pioneer work of first importance.  But he says that it is ‘a study in the ways of the imagination’ rather than a study of Coleridge: and certain defects of emphasis occur which were inherent in Lowes’ purpose.  He over-emphasises the importance of books as sources of Coleridge’s poetic inspiration; he concentrates upon a limited period, and within that period only upon a limited range of Coleridge’s urgent preoccupations; he makes too much of the quantity and curiosity of Coleridge’s reading, and so fails to recognise the importance of compendious works, contemporary periodicals, and other current sources of information which were neither exotic nor recondite.  Coleridge himself said in March 1801:

I had read a multitude of out of the way books, Greek, Latin, and German [and some French]; and there are men who gain the reputation of a wide erudition by consuming that Time in reading Books obsolete and of no character, which other men employ in reading those which everybody reads – but I should be sorry to detect in myself this silly vanity.

He allowed that the magpie was a very clever bird; but it was a cormorant (in his own poem) that sat under the Tree of Knowledge.  And the cormorant is notable, not only for his omnivorous appetite, but also for his flawless digestion.  More remarkable than any alleged curiosity of reading (and some of that must be allowed) Coleridge’s flair was for singling out the minute germinal hint, whose virtue is ‘all in its needle-like quality, the power to penetrate as finely as possible’.

If much of the detail of Coleridge’s reading could be reconstructed, I thought, there would be ample evidence for the workings of that ‘capacious and systematising mind’.  In compiling an account of all his reading, I found that the marginalia were of unique importance in showing him in the ‘quotidian undress of his mind’.  It might be possible then to delineate not simply the poetic imagination but the imagination in its fullest sense – ‘that synthetic and magical power... [which] brings the whole soul of man into activity’.  For Coleridge was philosopher, psychologist, critic, theologian, political thinker, and amateur scientist, as well as poet.  Or rather (as I think) he was a poet in all those characters.

Shortly after his death there was published an impressive quantity of his marginalia.  But the early editors were afflicted with a pious desire to vindicate a man whose work they felt had been neglected, and they tended to print only those fragments of the master’s work that would support their claim to his greatness.  Furthermore, through editorial light-heartedness (we should now call it irresponsibility, but it was not that) they did not hesitate to smooth, correct, and delete – sometimes to the destruction of sense and often with a blurring of style.  To examine the books in which these marginalia were written was a surprising experience.  It was like moving into Coleridge’s presence, watching him at work when he was not aware that anybody was watching.  And it became clear that something essential to our understanding of Coleridge would emerge if all his books could be identified and examined: for only parts of the marginal notes have been published.

Reconstructing Coleridge’s Library

By using a little elementary detective work I found it possible to pick out the lines along which his books and his friends’ books had been dispersed, to reconstruct his library in part, to identify books individually, and to find where some of them were.  The term ‘annotated book’ I found too rigid; and the net was spread to find all the ‘marked books’ – that is, books that Coleridge had written anything in, and the books given to him with presentation inscriptions.  His poverty made his library small and rather arbitrary.  I doubt whether he ever owned much more than 1,500 titles; and these were never in one place at any one time.  There have now been identified some 800 of his marked books, and another 170 marked copies of his own works.  The whereabouts of about half of these are known.

When he could not possess books, he borrowed them – from libraries when they were at hand, and always from friends.  His library borrowings increase our knowledge of his reading by about 100 titles – but that is a separate inquiry.  His friends were usually generous and long-suffering.  Occasionally, there was an outcry.  Coleridge would then ‘eat atoning mutton’ with Charles Lamb, or write a letter of outraged innocence to John Murray, or (if pressed) admit that he had once been guilty of keeping Sotheby’s folio Petrarch for about thirteen years – but that was through a lapse of memory and the obtuseness of his womenfolk.  It was difficult to deny a man whose need was so urgent and guileless.  Sometimes he would repay his debt by annotating the book at the owner’s request.  But sometimes he wrote notes in borrowed books, and the owner was not pleased.  If possible, all these books should be recovered, even the ones that bear only his signature or initials.

Coleridge’s practice of annotating books started late in 1802, though a few marked books and sets of proofs are of earlier date than that.  The earlier marginalia are usually terse and exclamatory.  The 1802 notes in Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici, later given to Sara Hutchinson, have a deep personal undertone characteristic of many of the earliest marked books.  And many of the earliest notes refer more directly to his intimate concerns than to the text of the books they are written in.  We can see him, for example, trying to communicate to Sara Hutchinson his own discriminating enjoyment; and his annotated copy of Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica flowers, at the moment of presentation, into a long letter, partly personal, partly critical, addressed to her.  Some of the most important books used at an early date were not annotated at all, but bear only his initials or name – seldom with a date of acquisition.  Sometimes the absence of annotation is eloquent.  A few books contain poems and two books have drafts of his own epitaph written in them.  Many of his books have notes almost of essay length written on the fly-leaves and end-papers, or running through page after page of the text written in the head and foot margins.  He might jot down on the end-paper of a book a list of items to be taken to Ramsgate on holiday, or a note to a friend in the middle of conversation asking to be left alone with his other two guests.  But although marked books have been found to represent almost every year from 1802 onwards, sustained annotation is unusual before 1807; and the most profuse running commentaries belong to the Highgate years – 1816 onwards.

From the earlier to the later years, his interests may change and his style changes; but the motive does not alter.  For the marginalia were self-communings – ‘not criticisms nor decisions, but a history of my impressions, and, for the great part, of my first impressions’.  Some of his books he read and annotated repeatedly – Shakespeare, Milton, Kant, Boehme, Jeremy Taylor, Fuller, Baxter, Schelling, Tennemann – with notes on notes, corrections on earlier readings, confirmations of first guesses.  ‘P.S.’, he wrote in Tennemann’s History of Philosophy:

I found on turning the leaf, that I have wronged Tennemann from not reading thro’ the remainder of the paragraph before I answered it...But the comment has its own value; and as Tennemann brought it upon himself by the crassness of all his preceding Glosses, I am not sorry that I have written it.

Or in Schubert’s Naturwissenschaft:

Second Postscriptum, 4 August 1818.  I am glad, I have reperused this work.  For tho’ I have not found one reason to annul any of my former particular objections, yet I find more merit to counterbalance them than from the glaringness of the Faults I had been able to see and appreciate in the first perusal.

Occasionally he addressed a possible reader with a warning to read certain notes first – ‘lest perchance I should lead him into errors from which I have [now] extricated myself’.  He could make generous allowances, even when enraged; but outbursts of disgust – sometimes jocular, sometimes bitter – are not unusual.  ‘I cut open this book October 1, 1803’, he wrote in Paullinus’ disquisition upon the worminess of death, ‘the leaves having remained uncut an exact century, 8 years of the time in my possession.  It is verily and indeed a Book of Maggots’.  ‘What vile trash’, he writes in one of Herder’s books; ‘O blasphemy!...this semi-demi-quavering Book’.  And in Jung’s book on ghosts:

It is perhaps necessary, that the same total quantity of Folly should exist in all ages; but differently distributed.  If so, I should fairly infer, that all the Hum-drummery of all the old Grannams of the preceding Century had been condensed into this credulous cock-sure Dotard of a Ghost-monger.

The earliest known marginal note on Kant – on the Grundlegung – written only about two years after what seems to have been his first attentive reading, shows how he could disagree without ever losing his profound admiration for Kant’s mind:

But Kant, and all his School, are miserable Reasoners, in Psychology, and particular morals – and analysis of aught but Notions, equally clumsy in the illustration and application of their Principles – so much indeed as often to shake my Faith in their general System.

Characteristic in a different way is this note in Schelling’s von den göttlichen Dingen of 1812; for it shows him making a direct moral judgement of a thinker with whose work he had shown sympathy in the Biographia.

In addition to the harsh quarrelsome and vindictive Spirit that displays itself [here]...there is a Jesuitical dishonesty in various parts that makes me dread almost to think of Schelling.  I remember no man of anything like his Genius and Intellectual Vigor so serpentine and unamiable.

            As the years advanced, Coleridge’s need for intellectual intercourse and sympathy deepened, but was persistently unsatisfied.  The marginalia became so much an extension of himself – personal, written for no eye but his own – that the dividing line between the marked books and the Notebooks is often an arbitrary one; at times he moves back and forth from one to the other without noticeable change of style or intention.  An interleaved volume or a special notebook for intentional ‘Marginalia’ inhibited his spontaneous impulse, and he left them almost untouched.  But the cramped margins and empty spaces of a book acted as a stimulus and guide to his thought.  And he wrote there, as he did in the Notebooks, ‘far more unconscious that I am writing, than in most earnest modes of talk [I am conscious of talking]’.  Intimate, self-revealing, reflective, critical, appraising, exploratory, playful, contemptuous – the notes flowed year after year from his pen.

Personal Notes

Some moving personal notes are preserved.  A ‘map of the road to Paradise drawn in Purgatory on the Confines of Hell by S. T. C. – July 30, 1819’ is written in Barry Cornwall’s Poems.  In one of Fichte’s books there is a draft poem and a note on love and time:

the two loves hung over each other

as fearfully, as lovingly,

as the half-open’d and yet opening leaves

of the Moss-Rose –

Stole over her heart

Soft as the pearly fleeces of the Neon

over the Islets of blue sky in Autumn.

Intensity and extensity [are] combinable by blessed Spirits – Hence it is, that Lovers in their finite state, incapable of fathoming the intensity of their feelings, help the thought out by extension...and thus they think the passion as wide in time as it is deep in essence – Hence (they say) Thine for ever!

There are curiosities, too.  He rejects scornfully Nehemiah Grew’s suggestion that the moon may be inhabited: ‘Must all possible Planets be lousy?  None exempt from the Morbus pedicularis of our verminous man-becrawled Earth?’  In Eichhorn’s Commentary on the Apocalypse he reflects – not for the first time – upon the poor quality of paper in his German books:

I have had, for years, the first volume, among my odd books and should have so filled the Margins before this time, that it would have been fairly worth the 101 blood-drops wrung from the pinched Hippocratic Nose of my Poverty (10s. 6d.) to any Friend of mine of an Apocalyptic Turn – but the villainous paper, the spongy Goodwin Sands, that would suck in the gallon of ink-wit, baffled every attempt tho’ you may still see sundry black wrecks hulking shapeless in the margins.

There is another note on Eichhorn that may have a moral for our own times:

The shallow Morality of Paley, Garve, Faber, and others, which Kant crushed with elephantine feet, and the constitutional lack of all religious sensibility, fitted Eichhorn admirably for the Scavenger Office of removing Rubbish, but – in short, Scavengers are not Architects!

And it is agreeable to know that he had met a naval officer (he gives the name) who saw a sea-monster so big that the ship took ten-and-a-half minutes to sail past it at six knots.

And there are passages of unintentional self-revelation, too.  In John Park’s Conservative Reform he wrote:

We are all, the best of us, imperfect mortals, more or less laden with sins, and sin-begotten infirmities.  If we deemed no one worthy the name and duties of a Friend, but one who in no part of his conduct and character gave grounds for regret or blame, Friendship could have no existence on earth...

And in Schlegel’s Gedichte:

God prevents us from having any vivid pre-experience of the consequences of our actions, in order to preserve us, in some measure, [as] free-agents – Else, if the Youth could have given to him not merely the knowledge...but the feelings accompanying the actual experience, of Unchastity, Intemperance, etc., and above all the almost fiendish Tyranny of an evil habit; it would be so impossible for him to err, as to render his life not that for which he was manifestly intended...a Life of Probation.

In 1820 Coleridge said of his writing that

The main portion of my harvest [including the marginalia] is still on the ground, ripe indeed, and only waiting, few for the sickle, but a large part only for sheaving, and carting, and housing.

He was to live and write for more than twelve years longer; but he never brought in that harvest – all the sustained reflection, the self-revelations, the elaborate foolery, the sensitive, searching criticism, the petulance and prejudice, the sorrowful notes of despair, the unfulfilled plans that every writer has, the delight of coming upon some neglected fellow-spirit who has been dead three centuries perhaps; the pedantic hesitations and quibbles and speculations that were pressing towards a synthesis he never in the end achieved.  All this needs to be at least housed, and probably sheaved as well, if we are ever to understand the inquiring, myriad-minded, suffering person that Coleridge was.