Coleridge and Vico

When Coleridge first opened the pages of Giambattista Vico’s Autobiography and the Scienza nuova on May 2, 1825, in his fifty-third year, his response was as quick, hospitable, and delicately incisive as one imagines it would have been twenty years earlier when he first discovered Giordano Bruno.  Coleridge’s habit in reading, as we know well from the copious and nervous notes that for more than thirty years he wrote in the margins of his books, was not that of a suspicious and tendentious scholar quibbling with the ipsissima verba of the text, nor was his motive that of the intellectual prospector panning or digging for pay dirt – though he knew well how to gut a book for his own purposes if he needed to.  Whatever book commanded his sustained attention became the focus for the full play of his mind: it might, and often did, provide a valuable personal relationship with an author long ago dead.  Least peremptory and judicious, he would seek to establish an inner dialogue with his author, respecting – and often revering – the intention of the original, his comprehensive and skillful attention tendriling outward like the alert awareness of a solitary but gregarious person in the presence of a fascinating and reticent stranger.

The impression given by much traditional comment on Coleridge – particularly as a philosopher – is that he was an eclectic who patched together other people’s leading thoughts into a plausible pattern of his own contriving.  Something more human, and more germane to Vico, was in fact the case.  “My memory, tenacious and systematizing” is a phrase he used in a letter to his brother in 1794, when he was twenty-four; such a mind led him along the hodos chameleontos.  What he read affectionately he digested and assimilated, and his intellectual color would be subtly modified or sharpened, as the diet of a transparent insect will declare itself to the observer; but what he took to himself seemed already to be his own.  His heuristic activity begins in recognition and ends in an enlarged self-knowledge.  He was fond of old books, not simply as living records of fine minds in action, but as evidence of the abiding principles of thought and feeling; his concern to restore neglected authors of stature to their rightful authority was an assault upon what was dangerous because novel, fashionable, or merely topical; he affiliated himself with what was radical and permanent wherever he could find it, in any period or culture accessible to him, in any of the languages he could use.  And when, pressing his own most original personal discoveries, he found that he had been feloniously anticipated by Plato, Bacon, Bruno, Spinoza, Kant, Schelling, he was encouraged rather than disappointed, finding assurance that the insistent pressure of his inquiry, in whatever field – and he inquired in many – would bring him again and again to recognize and discover to his satisfaction the continuity of “the shaping spirit,” the abiding patterns of human thought.  Perception, imagination, reason, he saw as activities implicating the whole person, and all the infinitely various products of our faculties were evidence to him of man’s integrative nature and a capacity for wholeness; for he conceived of the “faculties” as dynamic and concentric.  His sense of social responsibility was on the same pattern.  With a large generosity that matched the physical exuberance of his youth, he seems to have considered that no thought was his own until he had given it away.  The reception of his prose writings encouraged him little enough, for he writes ruefully in the Biographia Literaria, turning a favorite figure: “Prudence itself would command us to show ... a due interest and qualified anxiety for the offspring and representatives of our nobler being.  I know it, alas!  by woeful experience!  I have laid too many eggs in the hot sands of this wilderness, the world, with ostrich carelessness and ostrich oblivion.  The greater part indeed have been trod under foot, and are forgotten; but yet no small number have crept forth into life, some to furnish feathers for the caps of others, and still more to plume the shafts in the quivers of my enemies, of them that unprovoked have laid in wait against my soul.”[1]  But his was a germinal mind, and he was a teacher by instinct.  In the case of Vico, as with other writers and auditors before and after him, Coleridge’s admiration and his gift of faithful incisive comment were to be fertile, but the tradition does not clearly carry his name.

Always the poet, Coleridge returns again and again to the integrity of the word, to the fascinating self-containedness and self-shaping energy of words – a mystery that, as a writer of poetry, he was able at times to encompass with triumphant success and that, as psychologist and philosopher, he observed and interpreted with exceptional subtlety and rigor.  His definition of philosophy, for example, starts from the word itself, and the definition reveals the man: “The term philosophy defines itself as an affectionate seeking after the truth; but Truth is the correlative of Being.”[2]  He wrote this down in the Biographia literaria before September, 1815 (the book was not to be published until July, 1817).  But the habit of mind could be seen at an early date.  In the letter of March, 1794, to his brother, he had said: “I have little Faith, yet am wonderfully fond of speculating on mystical schemes – Wisdom may be gathered from the maddest flights of Imagination, as medicines were stumbled upon in the wild processes of Alchemy –.”[3]  This looks forward to his grouping of “Mystics” and “Revolutionary minds”; and, when we turn forward to the Biographia literaria again, we find the elements and axioms that were to vibrate sympathetically, at first touch, to Vico’s central and hard-won principles.  “Truth is the correlative of Being.  This ... is no way conceivable but by assuming as a postulate that both are ab initio identical and co-inherent; that intelligence and being are reciprocally each other’s substrate.”[4]  The early study, he says, of Plato and Plotinus, of Proclus and Bacon, of Boehme and Bruno, “has all contributed to prepare my mind for the reception and welcoming of the Cogito ergo sum, et sum quia cogito; a philosophy of seeming hardihood, but certainly the most ancient and therefore presumptively the most natural.”[5]  In his philosophical lectures of 1818-19 he was to treat the history of philosophy not as a chronological record of successive philosophical theories and conclusions but as a study of the development of the European mind as though it were one mind, in its growth, its digressions, its decline, its renaissance.  In a marginal note on Tetens’s Philosophische Versuche über die menschlichen Natur und ihre Entwicklung, perhaps as early as 1806, he asked: “What are my motives [of action] but my impelling thoughts – and what is a Thought but another word for ‘I thinking’?”[6]  In tracing Coleridge’s contact with Vico’s work there is an opportunity to trace something of the activity of a great intellect at play; and Coleridge, in advance of twentieth-century psychology, was aware of some of the serious implications of play.

If we are to take a sufficiently comprehensive starting point for understanding how Coleridge used his books, how he welcomed new ideas, how he recognized what Vico called “a common mental language” in the strange and exotic, the crabbed and fantastic, the self-preoccupied and even the self-deceived, and found there evidence for a conceivably single shapely activity radical to the human nature and condition, it is well to note a passage from Kathleen Coburn’s introduction to Inquiring Spirit in which she discusses the psychological coherence that Coleridge could discern in details diverse, multitudinous, and even anomalous.

The strange and unfamiliar may have laws and significance if we but look.  Dreams are strange, if common, experience, but are they merely what they commonly appear to be?  Are they mere accidents?  Do they not indicate something illuminating about the content and the degrees of consciousness, and about the associative processes of the waking as well as the sleeping state?  And what of trances, oracles, mesmerism?  Need these, from Pythagoras to the contemporary animal magnetists, be put down to trick and imposture?  How does one mind work on another?  What do we know about the imagination?  In the tales of demonology and witchcraft, are there not many cases that suggest pathological states? … The more one reads Coleridge the more impressed one becomes with what can only be called a psychological approach to all human problems.  Whether it be punctuation, or political sovereignty, a criticism of Richard II, the position of the mediaeval Church, or the baby talk of children, the state of Ireland or the work of the alchemists, he sees it as a piece of human experience, understandable in relation to the whole human organism, individual or social, so far as that organism can be comprehended as a whole.  ... In personality, clearly or obscurely, everything is connected with everything else.  The necessity of seeing every problem in its relations and perspective, in a perspective increasingly multiple the more one knows, accounts for that sense of defeat by the complexity of his materials that sometimes paralysed him before he fairly set out.[7]

When Coleridge opened the first volume of Vico and started reading the Autobiography, he must at least have sympathized with him as a man – the neglect, the illness, the dependence and poverty.  In the Biographia literaria he had pointed to the fact that for the past two or three centuries there seemed to have existed “a sort of secret and tacit compact among the learned not to pass beyond a certain limit in speculative science,” and how “the few men of genius among the learned class” had had to overstep the boundary very circumspectly.  “Therefore [he continues] the true depth of science, and the penetration of the inmost centre, from which all the lines of knowledge diverge to their ever distant circumference, was abandoned to the illiterate and the simple, whom unstilled yearning and an original ebulliency of spirit had urged to the investigation of the indwelling and living ground of all things. … All without distinction were branded as fanatics and phantasts; not only those whose wild and exorbitant imaginations had actually engendered only extravagant and grotesque phantasms …; but the truly inspired likewise, the originals themselves!”[8]  And as he read on into the Scienza nuova he must have found himself on very familiar ground.

… we shall reduce these beginnings to scientific principles, by which the facts of certain history may be assigned their first origins, on which they rest and by which they are reconciled.

Uniform ideas originating among entire peoples unknown to each other must have a common ground of truth.

In the night of thick darkness which envelops the earliest antiquity, so remote from ourselves, there shines the eternal and never failing light of a truth beyond all question: that the world of human society has certainly been made by men, and its principles are therefore to be found within the modifications of our own human mind.

There must in the nature of human things be a mental language common to all nations, which uniformly grasps the substance of things feasible in human social life, and expresses it with as many diverse modifications as these same things may have diverse aspects. … This common mental language is proper to our Science. …[9]

Coleridge took the book, probed, tested, argued with it, in order to enlarge and confirm the foundations of Vico’s thought and with luck his own.

Even the circumstances of Coleridge’s first encounter with Vico’s “great Work” were unexpected but strangely apt.  The story has been told in detail by Max H. Fisch and will be well known to Vichian scholars; but it deserves to be retold, at least in summary, in order to trace Coleridge’s response to Vico.[10]  Gioacchino de’ Prati, born near Trent in 1790, came to England first in 1823 from Switzerland to take political asylum, accompanied by an unmarried female companion who went by the name of Giuseppe Maffei.  De’ Prati had been educated at Salzburg, Innsbruck, Vienna, Landshut, and Pavia; though he had had extensive training in medicine, he took a law degree at Pavia in 1810.  In England he was befriended by a group of literary men of liberal political sentiment, one of whom was Coleridge’s nephew Edward.  Edward Coleridge brought de’ Prati to Highgate to meet Coleridge in April, 1825.  Coleridge took to him immediately and offered to help him in any way he could.  As a tutor in German involved in small-scale educational enterprises and trying to establish himself as an occasional writer, de’ Prati did not prosper.  By 1829 he was in debtor’s prison; but being already “deeply engaged in physiological and medical studies” – Coleridge in his earliest reference to him gives him the title of “Doctor” – he used his time well, receiving instruction from Joseph Henry Green, Coleridge’s philosophical collaborator and later his literary executor.  When de’ Prati was released from prison he went to Brussels for a time; then, after a short stay in England, he left for France on revolutionary concerns of his own – for de’ Prati is described by the historian of the Italian irredentist revolution as “the most dangerous Irredentist of southern Tirol” and “one of the most dangerous innate revolutionists of the time.”[11]  He settled again in England in July, 1830, first as a lay preacher, then as a medical practitioner.  After repeated applications, he succeeded in getting himself repatriated to Austrian Italy in 1852 and died in Brescia in 1863.  Coleridge had died in July, 1834.

No descriptive account of de’ Prati survives.  The clear impression given by the records and by Coleridge’s response to him is that he was an intelligent, perceptive, and personable young man, well educated, widely read, and master of French and German, as well as of his native Italian.  His obscure autobiography, printed serially in the Penny Satirist between 1837 and 1840, shows that he came to write – one hopes as the eventual result of Coleridge’s coaching – a nervous, direct, and even felicitous English prose, without many foreign mannerisms.

An unpublished fragment of a letter from Coleridge to his son Derwent, postmarked April 15, 1825, gives the date of their first meeting: Edward Coleridge brought him with two other friends, and Coleridge refers to him as “a Dr Prati, a literary German.”[12]  They began to converse together in German – “Coleridge spoke this language,” de’ Prati tells us, “quite correctly, and with a soft Hanoverian accent” – and Coleridge was so taken with him that he invited him to walk with him in the garden the next morning.  Thereafter, de’ Prati says, he visited Coleridge at least once a week for two years.  No wonder: de’ Prati’s reading and literary enthusiasms were thoroughly Coleridgean – Boehme, Bruno, Spinoza, Schelling; he ascribed his intellectual awakening to Lessing’s Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts (On the Education of the Human Race) (and promptly borrowed some volumes of Coleridge’s set of Lessing); he had personal acquaintance with Jacobi, Schelling, Friedrich von Schlegel, Ritter, Oken – all men whose work Coleridge is known to have read and, all but Ritter’s, to have annotated; and, as an additional treat to cap so detailed a series of coincidences, de’ Prati had spent a few days in Mesmer’s house, had witnessed experiments in zoomagnetism, and had discussed with the Mesmer the medical implications of what they had observed.[13]  Vico must have been discussed in one of their earliest conversations.  In a letter of May 14, 1825, Coleridge acknowledges the receipt of books from de’ Prati, and continues in a postscript: “I am more and more delighted with G. B. Vico, and if I had (which thank God’s good grace I have not) the least drop of Author’s blood in my veins, I should twenty times successively in the perusal of the first volume (I have not yet begun the second) have proclaimed: ‘Pereant qui ante nos nostra dixere.’”[14]

The date of Coleridge’s first reading is recorded in one of his notebooks: “2 May, 1825.  Began to read Giambattista Vico’s Autobiography – born in Naples 1670. – The original Discoverer of the true Theory of the ‘Ομηροι vice, ‘Ομηρος, & of the character of the Ancient History of Rome –.  The Work in 3 vol. which D^r De Prati has lent me, contains only his Principi di Scienza Nuova D’intorno alla commune Natura Delle Nazioni.”[15]  The edition was correctly identified by Professor Fisch as the sixth edition (Milan, 1816); a further page reference in the Coleridge notebook confirms the identification.[16]  There is no way of saying what eventually became of the volumes.  In October, 1825, Coleridge told Gillman that he had left one volume behind in Highgate when he went to Ramsgate on holiday, and asked to have it sent to him.[17]  On October 29, 1833, he wrote to de’ Prati after an interval in their association, having read in “The Times of today” of his return to England: “I have (or rather, ought to have) two volumes of your’s – Vico’s Nuova Scienza but unfortunately I had yielded to the request of a friend and relation [Henry Nelson Coleridge], to lend them to him – and he is now in Devonshire and will not return till the end of November – but I should be most happy to order another Copy for you, if one can be found in London – or any other work, as a quid pro quo –.”[18]  Other instances are known of Coleridge’s keeping a borrowed book for rather a long time – Sotheby’s folio Petrarch, and a copy of Cocceius’s biblical commentary belonging to a clerical acquaintance – and of his apologizing for the delay and promising to return them.  On this occasion he was perhaps not informed by simple contrition: at the end of the letter he asked de’ Prati for “the volumes of Lessing’s Works which you once took home with you.”  De’ Prati returned the Lessing volumes: the set is intact in the British Museum.  There was no copy of Vico in the sale of the books J. H. Green received from Coleridge after his death; so presumably Coleridge played his part.

On May 2, 1825, Coleridge set to work in his own way.  He seldom ignored the forepages of any book he handled; and the notes in this case begin with the Autobiography (pages iii-lxxiv).  Although Coleridge at their first meeting conversed with de’ Prati in German, and agreed in an early letter at least that each would employ “the most suitable vehicle for its [the heart’s] utterance, our mother tongue,” he had learned Italian when he was in the Mediterranean in 1804-6, part of the time in the post of secretary to the governor of Malta.  Since that time he had read extensively the major classics of Italian literature and much else, including a certain amount of curious, proscribed, and contemporary matter.[19]  When he took up Vico, he read the original with ease – an advantage that the earliest English translators and exponents of Vico seem not to have enjoyed.[20]  His first comment in Notebook 20 refers to page 54 of the Autobiography: “Plato, Tacitus, Bacon, and – Grotius ! li quattro Autori, che egli ammicava sopra tutt’ altri.”  Plato and Bacon were also very much Coleridge’s men; he had no special regard for Tacitus; but Grotius stood in Coleridge’s mind for a strain of dangerously infectious, because narrow, rationalism in the theology of his own time, and any position that could be seen as “Grotio-Paleyan” he treated with suspicion or scorn.  He next notes that Vico had made a commentary on part of Grotius’ De jure belli et pacis, quotes a sentence in Italian, and on Vico’s phrase “Opera di Autore Eretico” notes: “Striking instance of the Romish Superstition – even on the noblest Minds. –”  The next note is more interesting: a sentence in Latin referred to as “P. 60.  Vita di G. B. Vico” – “Omnis divinae atque humanae eruditionis elementa tria, Nosse, Velle, Posse: quorum principium Unum MENS; cujus Oculus Ratio, cui aeterni Veri lumen praebet Deus.”[21]  This sentence appears on the verso of the contents leaf of Aids to Reflection as the leading epigraph.  Aids to Reflection, a considerable series of aphorismic extracts mostly from the works of Archbishop Leighton, with Coleridge’s interpolated comments, had the following objects as announced in his preface: “I.  To direct the Reader’s attention to the value of the Science of Words, their use and abuse. … 2.  To establish the distinct characters of Prudence, Morality, and Religion. ... 3.  To substantiate and set forth at large the momentous distinction between REASON and Understanding. ... 4.  To exhibit a full and consistent Scheme of the Christian dispensation, and more largely of all the peculiar doctrines of the Christian Faith; …” Coleridge had always been a keen “mottophilist” and had a sharp eye for the sort of quotation that would focus the reader’s mind allusively upon his central intention.  He now takes up, as leading epigraph to a book long in preparation and completely printed in text, the thesis that Vico had proposed “at the solemn public opening of studies in 1719”: “All divine and human learning has three elements: knowledge, will and power, whose single principle is the mind, with reason for its eye, to which God brings the light of eternal truth.”  On May 19, 1825, Coleridge wrote: “My book [Aids to Reflection] will be out on Monday next, and Mr Hessey hopes that he shall be able to have a copy ready for me by to-morrow, so that I may present it to the Bishop of London.”[22]  Five days earlier the book had not yet “left the printer’s office in the shape of a volume.”  At most, eighteen days elapsed between his finding the Vichian thesis and the issuing of the completed copies of Aids to Reflection, where the thesis was printed on the verso of the contents leaf.  Coleridge might playfully have claimed to feel annoyance with those who had anticipated him, but he was more inclined to rejoice in them.

The notes then move to Book I, sections 53-54, of the Scienza nuova, and Zoroaster, beginning with a trenchant summary of Vico’s argument and overflowing into the comment: “O the notable Chain of such Dandelions as grow in the garden of Morpheus – the fallen-out teeth of the old Lion, Tempus edax!”; then come four lines of improvised and slightly indelicate verse, with more exuberant wordplay and the characteristic remark: “And these Chaldean Sages – what do we learn from the recorded FACTS of History, as opposed to the fancies, the putamenta, of Theorists – that they were Fortune-tellers, who practised divination by the trajectory of Shooting Stars, and after a time improved this trade into the noble Science of judicial Astrology! –”[23]  He makes a memorandum, to “Compare and collate the romantic tales and exaggerations imported into Europe by the Chinese Jesuits – & again magnified by the Solar Microscope of the Infidel Kalterfeltos of France, with the stories of the Greek Sophists & (not improbably) the Priests from their enmity to Philosophy, the true Religion of Greece, respecting Ægypt and Scythia –”  The next comment is less respectful: “Mem.  The Science of Comparative History – Comparative Anthropotomy.”  After some four pages of summary notes on the way human groups grow, he notes a resemblance between patricians and plebeians, on the one hand, and “the Planters and the Negros in our Colonies,” on the other – a thought that Henry Crabb Robinson’s diary shows Coleridge expounding in conversation on June 16, 1825.[24]  In these notes he has advanced at least to page 135 of Volume I – a reference given in the manuscript; but the book has been turned upside down and notes have been written from the back, so that there are notes on folios 39v-r referring (without citation) to Book I, sections 50-52.  At the end of these notes he sets down ten “Tests of Tradition,” all arriving at the same conclusion: “Ergo, the Hebrew Chronology is the more probable.”  Four of these tests are peculiarly Coleridgean, and all expand and support the argument in Vico’s section 54.

            3. That which best harmonizes with our own experience, ex. gr. of Americas, New Holland &c….

            7. That which is INDIVIDUALIZED and ordinary human….

            9. That which has fewest of the common to all other nations – … This argument fact has been hitherto historically interpreted instead of anthropologically & psychologically, as it should have been – & hence the arguments applied to the opposite conclusion. – …

            10. That which tho’ most unlike all the rest will yet, if admitted & layed down as the Ground, best explain all the others, when taken in conjunction with Anthropognosy & Psychology – …

I am not informed whether or not other notes and comments on the Scienza nuova are to be found in later notebooks.  There was no room for any more in Notebook 20 by the time he had reached the text of about Book I, section 91, and since that notebook seems to have been in use into September, 1825, it may include all that he had to write on Volume I – that is, on the Autobiography, the Idea of the Work and Explanation of the Chronological Table, and Book I, “The Establishment of Principle.”  But a few more direct traces of the reading can be recorded.

On May 23, 1825, Coleridge wrote to Hessey, the publisher of Aids to Reflection:

It is singular that on my return to Highgate much impressed with the Light, you had flashed upon my mind with regard to the cure of Stammering, one of the very first sentences I met with in Giambattista Vico was the following –

            “I mutoli mandan fuori i suoni informi cantando – e gli scilinguati par cantando

            spediscono la lingua a pronunziare!” –

i.e. Mutes or Dumb Persons send forth indistinct sounds in a sing-song: and Stammerers by chaunting gradually unloose and accustom or facilitate the tongue to pronounce freely.  A curious coincidence – I have myself repeatedly observed that children in being taught to read begin to stutter when you prevent them from singing their words.[25]

Here Coleridge finds a coincidence between one of Vico’s principles and his own absorbed observation of the behavior of children: here, he felt sure, if nowhere else – before the moment of evanishment, before the “shades of the prisonhouse” close upon the adult psyche – he might come upon some elemental clue to the continuously integrative workings of the human mind.  And did not Vico write: “every theory must start from the point where the matter of which it treats first began to take shape”?

In the very first notebook entry, even before the notes on the Autobiography begin, Coleridge characterized Vico as “The original Discoverer of the true Theory of the ‘Ομηροι vice, ‘Ομηρος, & of the character of the Ancient History of Rome.”  Is this what de’ Prati had told him to expect?  Coleridge was already versed in the details of the Homeric question, but his interest, unlike that of a textual critic, was primarily anthropological and psychological.  The way Coleridge’s mind in conversation flickered over a host of unexpected relations – if “flickered” is a possible word for so extended a process – is well illustrated in Henry Crabb Robinson’s account of a conversation during which de’ Prati was present and in the course of which Coleridge talked about Vico.  An informal account, and one that is less epigrammatic and condensed than most of the records taken by Henry Nelson Coleridge for the Table Talk, it is of further interest because Robinson was not always a sympathetic or patient auditor.  Robinson, Edward Irving (founder of the Catholic Apostolic Church and a spell-binding preacher), Irving’s brother-in-law Martin, and Basil Montague (an old disciple of Coleridge’s and, with Coleridge’s encouragement, editor of Bacon), placed themselves “in a chariot” on June 16, 1825, rode to Highgate, and took tea at the Gillmans.

I think I never heard Coleridge so very eloquent, and yet it was painful to find myself unable to recall anything of what had so delighted me, that is, anything that seemed worthy to be noted, so that I could not but suspect some illusion arising out of the impressive tone and the mystical language of the orator.  He talked on for several hours without intermission, his subject the ever recurring one, religion, but so blended with mythology, metaphysics and psychology that it required great attention to find really the religious element.  I observed that when Coleridge quoted Scripture or used well-known religious phrases Irving was constant in his exclamations of delight, but that he was silent at other times.  Dr. Prati came in, and Coleridge treated him with marked attention.  Indeed Prati talked better than I ever heard him.  One sentence (Coleridge having appealed to him) deserves repetition: “I think the Old Pantheism of Spinoza far better than modern Deism, which is but the hypocrisy of Materialism” – in which there is an actual sense and I believe truth.  Coleridge referred to an Italian Vico who is said to have anticipated Wolf’s theory concerning Homer (which Coleridge says was his at college.)  Vico wrote Sur une nouvelle science, viz.  Comparative History.  Goethe notices him in his Life as an original thinker and great man.  Vico wrote on the origin of Rome.  Coleridge drew a parallel between the West Indian planters and the negroes, the subjection between them, and the condition of the plebs of Rome towards the patricians; but when I inquired concerning the origin of the inequality Coleridge evaded giving me an answer.  Coleridge very eloquently expatiated on history and the influence of Christianity on society.  His doctrines assume an orthodox air, but to me they are unintelligible.[26]

Robinson’s mention of the talk that included “religion … blended with mythology, metaphysics and psychology” reminds us that on May 18, 1825, Coleridge, as a newly appointed associate, had delivered to the Royal Society of Literature his first and only annual paper, on the theme of the Prometheus of Aeschylus, in which he said: “I flatter myself I have thrown some light on the passages in Herodotus respecting the derivation of the Greek Mythology from Egypt….”[27]  Coleridge had not finished the paper by April 8, but he delivered the manuscript – possibly a draft – to the secretary of the Royal Society of Literature on April 26.[28]

Vico, then, cannot have influenced the Prometheus essay unless through de’ Prati’s conversations.  Indeed, nothing in the essay recalls Vico clearly, except perhaps a passage at the opening, where Coleridge writes: “… to a man of sound judgment and enlightened common sense – a man with whom the demonstrable laws of the human mind, and the rules generalised from the great mass of facts respecting human nature, weigh more than any two or three detached documents or narrations, of whatever authority the narrator may be, and however difficult it may be to bring positive proofs against the antiquity of the document….”[29]  Shortly afterward he claims that the Book of Genesis is “in perfect accordance with all analogous experience, with all the facts of history, and all that the principles of political economy would lead us to anticipate.”  These two passages have a Vichian color to them, but they are also typically Coleridgean.  Coleridge is arguing for the greater antiquity of the Hebrew culture and for the greater reliability of Hebrew chronology against the claims of contemporary French Egyptologists for the primacy of the Egyptians.  Vico at the very opening of the Scienza nuova argues also for the primacy of the Hebrews and in his chronological table dislodges the Egyptians from the first place, where John Marsham had placed them in his Canon, of 1672, to the fifth place below the Hebrews, Chaldeans, Scythians, and Phoenicians.  But this controversy had been going on one way and another for a century or so; Coleridge was already versed in some of the literature of the debate and followed with interest the reports of Napoleon’s Egyptologists, who, on fresh inscriptional evidence, sought to restore the claim for Egyptian antiquity.  Vico himself, at the beginning of his chronological section, makes it clear that in this issue he stands at the end of a process, not at the beginning.  Coleridge, though belatedly, had on March 16, 1824, proposed for the Royal Society of Literature “a series of Disquisitions” on the relations between philosophy, poetry, and religion in the gentile world, especially in early Greece.  The details of the proposal were altered a little before the Prometheus lecture was given, but there was no important change; for this was an area in which Coleridge was at home and where he had speculated independently – the essay even makes strong use of a substantial key passage from The Friend of 1809.

The parallel between the opening of the Prometheus essay and certain parts of the manuscript “Tests of Tradition” is striking, but it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the essay informed the “Tests,” rather than the reverse, and that the notebook entries – including the quizzical and facetious touches – show Coleridge testing another man’s theory by seeing what happens when he expands and develops it with his own store of knowledge and through his own sense of relations.  The Vichian turn of Coleridge’s mind, as shown in an essay written before he had read the Scienza nuova, perhaps accounts for the absence of a strong sense of fresh discovery.  De’ Prati may well have given Coleridge the gist of Vico’s theory in conversation; if he did, it seems to have encouraged rather than modified what Coleridge had been considering for some time.  Whatever Vico may have contributed indirectly, it was not lucidity or grace: the essay, even in a concentrated reading now, is a dense, and incomplete tortuous document.  Coleridge was aware of this too.  “Yesterday,” he told his nephew, “I had to inflict an hour and twenty-five minutes’ essay full of Greek and superannuated Metaphysics on the ears of the Royal Society of Literature, the subject being the Prometheus of Aeschylus deciphered in proof and as instance of the connection of the Greek Drama with the Mysteries.  ‘Douce take it’ ... if I did not feel remorseful pity for my audience all the time.  For, at the very best, it was a thing to be read, not to read.”[30]

A few more comments on Vico are preserved in Henry Nelson Coleridge’s collection of Coleridge’s Table Talk.  The earliest of these is almost five years after the first reading – May 12, 1830: “I have no doubt whatever that Homer is a mere concrete name for the rhapsodies of the ‘Iliad.’  Of course there was a Homer, and twenty besides….”  This is not a specific reference to Vico, but Henry Nelson Coleridge adds a note: “Mr. Coleridge was a decided Wolfian in the Homeric question; but he had never read a word of the famous Prolegomena, and knew nothing of Wolf’s reasoning but what I told him of it in conversation.  Mr. C. informed me, that he adopted the conclusion contained in the text [above], upon the first perusal of Vico’s ‘Scienza Nuova’; ‘not,’ he said, ‘that Vico has reasoned it out with such learning and accuracy as you report of Wolf, but Vico struck out all the leading hints, and I soon filled up the rest out of my own head.’”[31]  Henry Nelson Coleridge published in 1830 Introductions to the Study of the Greek Classic Poets, for which he had read Wolf’s Prolegomena in preparing the section on the origin of the Homeric poems.  The second edition, of 1834, only slightly revised from the first, contains his translation of Book III of the Scienza nuova – “Discovery of the True Homer.”  There is no reference to it in his introduction, and no prefatory comment to account for the abrupt interpolation of some forty pages of Vico in translation.[32]  But this was the first translation of Vico to appear in English; it was probably undertaken at Coleridge’s instigation, and it explains why de’ Prati’s volumes were in Devonshire in October and November, 1833.[33]

The Table Talk entry for July 9, 1832, is very similar to the earlier one, but it ends with several interesting observations: “The want of adverbs in the Iliad is very characteristic.  With more adverbs there would have been some subjectivity, or subjectivity would have made them.  The Greeks were then just on the verge of bursting forth of individuality.”  Two other entries are more circumstantial – one earlier, the other later.

23 April 1832.  To estimate a man like Vico, or any great man who has made discoveries and committed errors, you ought to say to yourself – “He did so and so in the year 1720, a Papist, at Naples.[34]  Now, what would he not have done if he had lived now, and could have availed himself of all our vast acquisitions in physical science?”

After the Scienza nuova read Spinoza, De monarchia ex rationis praescripto.  They differed – Vico in thinking that society tended to monarchy; Spinoza in thinking it tended to democracy.  Now, Spinoza’s ideal democracy was realised by a contemporary – not in a nation, for that is impossible, but in a sect – I mean by George Fox and his Quakers.

9 April 1833.  I have a deep, though paradoxical, conviction that most of the European nations are more or less on their way, unconsciously indeed, to pure monarchy; that is, to a government in which, under circumstances of complicated and subtle control, the reason of the people shall become efficient in the apparent will of the king.[35]  As it seems to me, the wise and good in every country will, in all likelihood, become every day more and more disgusted with the representative form of government, brutalised as it is, and will be, by the predominance of democracy in England, France, and Belgium.  The statesmen of antiquity, we know, doubted the possibility of effective and permanent combination of the three elementary forms of government; and, perhaps, they had more reason than we have been accustomed to think.

Max H. Fisch, in his and Thomas G. Bergin’s edition of The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico, has traced out the lines of the transmission of Coleridge’s interest in Vico to his young Broad-Church admirers – Thomas Arnold, Julius Hare, Thirlwall, F. D. Maurice; how Henry Hart Milman’s review of Henry Nelson Coleridge’s Introduction in the 1831 Quarterly Review clarified the Homeric question and gave Vichian direction to further discussion; how John Kenrick, encouraged by Hare and Thirlwall, prepared for the Philological Museum in 1833 an able exposition of Vico’s doctrine which was to be the most reliable English source for almost fifty years.[36]  Some of the influence is clear, but in this case, as with others, it is very difficult to trace Coleridge’s influence with any precision.  There can be no doubt that, in Vico’s case, he fulfilled his persistent desire to make current and vital the work of neglected genius.  It is tantalizing to wonder whether James Joyce might somehow have discovered the Vico who was to be important in Ulysses through Coleridge, in whose poem he found the recurrent phrase “He listened and looked sideways up.”

It is not, however, correct, I think, to see an almost exclusively Vichian strain in the theological inheritance the young Broad Churchmen received from Coleridge.  Coleridge’s scrupulous and detailed study of the Bible goes much farther back than 1825, nourished by a study of the Fathers, certain Caroline Divines, and the leading commentators of the Reformation, particularly Luther.  After his life became regular and quiet in Highgate – after about 1819 when the rifacciamento of The Friend and the philosophical lectures were finished – the notebooks and marginalia show an insistent, almost daily, study of the Bible, book by book, in the light of his own sense of history, his prolonged reflection upon psychological phenomena, and his reflections upon the materials that were beginning to provide a focus for the emergent disciples of anthropology, comparative literature, and the higher criticism.  The commentaries and analyses of Eichhorn and Cocceius, and later of Schleiermacher, were at his elbow as he sought to dispel the superstition and the panic-stricken irrationality of blind enthusiasm that he saw around him.  He insisted upon reading the Bible as a human and historical document.  His prime resolve was to drive the resources of intelligence and knowledge to the limit and, by so doing, to reinforce the reality of religious experience.  He could foresee clearly the rationalistic assault that would be made upon the Bible, upon religion, upon the Church; he could even see what strategy would be used and tried to teach his young admirers how to meet that assault.  To renounce any human resource was to capitulate.  All the strength of ingenious and disciplined inquiry must be brought to bear to secure man’s great birthright – the wholeness of imagination and that larger completeness of the individual which Coleridge called reason.  In an early notebook, he had written down a question from Plato in Greek, and then had translated it: “Do you suppose the nature of the soul can be sufficiently understood without the knowledge of the whole of nature?”[37]  He might well have added, even before reading Vico: “Do you suppose that the whole of nature can be sufficiently understood without the knowledge of the nature of the soul?”

Coleridge for years had been swimming against the dominant current of his times and had suffered for his temerity.  In his letter of May, 1825, offering to help de’ Prati as best he could, he admitted that although he had “some influence ... a growing influence,” it was “disproportionate to what it ought to be” – “at which you will not wonder when you know that during five and twenty, I might say thirty years, I have been resolutely opposing the whole system of modern illumination, in all its forms of Jacobinism, and Legitimatism, Epicurean (and in our country Pelagian) Christianity, Pelagian morals, Pelagian politics….”  In saying this, he was declaring himself as being of the party of Plato, Bacon, Boehme, Bruno: men whose work and spirit had encouraged and sustained him in his isolation.  For in the postscript he suggests to de’ Prati a project which he himself had had in mind since – at the latest – January, 1810.  “By the bye, when I see you on Thursday I will mention a set of articles, on which I myself for a long time had set my thoughts, a critical and biographical account of the great revolutionists in the intellectual world, philosophical and religious.  I am pretty certain that I could dispose of them, so as to make it worth your while….”  On May 8, 1826, he mentions this proposal again.  De’ Prati had sent for his comment an essay on Schiller, and Coleridge was troubled because Thomas Carlyle had recently published an impressive essay on Schiller in the London Magazine which rendered de’ Prati’s essay unsalable.  Probably the writing was not very accomplished: Coleridge offers to help revise his work if he will send “Half a dozen pages fresh from your hand (if you did feel yourself equal or disposed to a biography of Bruno: yet a spirited Sketch of Vico’s Life and great Work, your copy of which I have, would be more attractive to the Learned Public, and easier and readier to yourself) – …”[38]  “Great revolutionists”; now two are named – Bruno and Vico – and the circle closes.

On January 21, 1810, Coleridge wrote Lady Beaumont a long letter about his periodical The Friend, which had started in June, 1809, and was to continue until March, 1810.  He goes on to speak about Jacob Boehme and to discuss what he was elsewhere to call “Vindiciae Heterodoxae” as part of a comprehensive philosophical work.

Of Jacob Behmen I have myself been a commentator, from Plato, Plotinus, Proclus, & some Catholic Writers of the Vie Interieure. – But for myself I must confess, I never brought away from his Works any thing I did not bring to them – It is a maxim with me, always to suppose myself ignorant of a Writer’s Understanding, until I understand his Ignorance.  This I have not yet decyphered to myself in the Teutonic Theosopher [Boehme]: yet I conjecture that being ignorant of Logic & not versed in the Laws of the Imagination, he rendered many Intuitions in his own mind, perhaps of very profound Truths, and, as it were, translated them into such Images and bodily feelings as by accident were co-present with his Intuitions…. Yet Jacob Behmen was an extraordinary man…. If it please God, I shall shortly publish, as a Supplement to the first Volume of the Friend, a work of considerable size & very great Labor – the toil of many years – entitled, The Mysteries of Religion grounded in or relative to the Mysteries of Human Nature: or the foundations of morality laid in the primary Faculties of Man…. Either in this or in some after Number of the Friend I shall give the character of Jacob Behmen & compare him with George Fox – and both with Giordano Bruno. – The most beautiful and orderly development of this philosophy, which endeavors to explain all things by an analysis of Consciousness, and builds up a world in the mind out of materials furnished by the mind itself, is to be found in the Platonic Theology of Proclus….[39]

In September, 1814, the proposal has changed somewhat: it is to be “a large volume on the LOGOS, or the communicative intelligence in nature and in man, together with, and as preliminary to, a Commentary on the Gospel of St. John; and in this work I have labored to give real and adequate definitions of all the component faculties of our moral and intellectual being, exhibiting constructively the origin, development, and destined functions of each.”[40]  In the Biographia literaria (written in 1815) he says that the work is in progress, refers to it as Logosophia, promises an announcement of it “at the end of this volume” (but did not carry it out), and implies that it will consist of at least five treatises, in the fifth of which there will be a discussion of Spinozism.[41]  The design is refined further on September 27, 1815: “LOGOSOPHIA: or on the LOGOS, divine and human, in six Treatises.”  Here, for the first time, the context into which Coleridge was to place Vico appears clearly: “The vth. [Treatise] (Λόγος Ἀγωνιστής) on the Pantheists and Mystics; with the Lives and Systems of Giordano Bruno, Jacob Behmen, George Fox, and Benedict Spinoza. –”[42]  The Logosophia was not so easy to finish as the confident letters of 1815 suggested it might be; and the “Vindiciae Heterodoxae” ran into difficulties at once – the Bruno essay never got started, because copies of Bruno were, and are, extremely rare, and Coleridge was refused the loan of the only complete collection he knew of.[43]  Another revised form of the work appears in September, 1816: there is to be a large new poem at the beginning and at the end; and the Λόγος Ἀγωνιστής persists as “Biography and Critique on the Systems of Giordano Bruno, Behmen, and Spinoza.”[44]  Thereafter, except for the proposal that de’ Prati should write something of the sort, there is no further mention of the “Lives” except in a wistful marginal note, perhaps written in 1830 or even later, in The Works of the Late Reverend Mr. Samuel Johnson, sometime Chaplain to the Right Honourable William, Lord Russell (London 1710): “Among my countless intentional Works, one was – Biographical Memorials of Revolutionary Minds, in Philosophy, Religion, and Politics.  Mr. Sam Johnson was to have been one.  I meant to have begun with Wickcliff, and to have confined myself to Natives of Great Britain – but with one or two supplementary Volumes, for the Heroes of Germany (Luther and his Company) and of Italy (Vico).”[45]

When Coleridge first met Charles Augustus Tulk, the exponent of yet another heterodox genius, Emanuel Swedenborg,[46] he told him: “If I had met a friend & a Brother in the Desart of Arabia, I could scarcely have been more delighted than I was in finding a fellow-laborer and in the only Country in which a man dare exercise his reason without being thought to have lost his Wits, & be out of his Senses”; and added – “My main Object is to demonstrate that while my Opponents (I speak not of my Libellers; but of the warm Adherents of the Tabula rasa and Nil nisi ab extra Scheme) call out for Facts, Facts, Facts – all the Facts of Experience are on my side.”[47]  It is a pity that the “Lives” were never written.  It is a pity that Coleridge never made the projected translation of Bacon’s Organum with parallels from Vico: it might have been a powerfully influential book.  It is disappointing that in the end there is no direct celebration of the imaginative sweep of Vico’s thought, or any forecast of the effect that it would eventually have upon the development of historical imagination and the concept of historical science and the basis for a scientific history.

As early as 1804 Coleridge had set down his view of the timelessness and privileged vitality of “true genius”: “a Shakespere, a Milton, a Bruno, exist in the mind as pure Action, defecated of all that is material & passive.  And the great moments, that formed them – it is hard and an impiety against a Voice within us, not to regard [them] as predestined, & therefore things of Now & For Ever and which were Always”[48]  That Coleridge should instantly have included Vico in the company of his chosen mystics and neglected geniuses is the tribute of powerful and penetrating intelligence; the recognition of a fellow spirit across the gulf of time, a most hospitable greeting in that country where all things are one through the dynamic integrity of the human mind.  Some words Vico had written about the Scienza nuova must have struck Coleridge’s ear almost like a reverberation of Giordano Bruno’s voice: “The composition of this work, if I am not deceived, has filled me with an heroic spirit, which places me above the fear of death and the calumny of my rivals.  I feel myself on a rock of adamant, when I think on the judgment of God, who does justice to genius by the esteem of the wise.”