The Aristotle-Coleridge Axis

George Saintsbury wound up one of the final sections of his History of Literary Criticism (1917) with the sub-biblical declaration: ‘So then, there abide these three, Aristotle, Longinus, Coleridge.’  We are not concerned just now with all the figures in this arresting triad: the supposititious Longinus is printed in all the anthologies of literary-critical texts and has long received the subdued respect that we extend to documents of archaeological or genetic interest.  The other two figures have a more pervasive ambience – Aristotle often as a menacing undertone, Coleridge as a mercurial presence that with luck one might be able to ignore.  If we consider the succession of translations of Aristotle’s Poetics achieved in this century alone, the interminable discussions of the nature of tragedy in schools of English (and elsewhere), the post-war wave of neo-Aristotelianism at the University of Chicago, and the intrusion into critical terminology of a number of Aristotelian terms (often mispronounced, and not seldom introduced with less scrupulous regard for propriety than in search of an honorific effect), we could hardly say that Aristotle had not put in an impressive appearance in twentieth-century literary criticism.  Coleridge’s writing has attracted no such diligent attention: it is said that he wrote in English, and he is alleged to be ‘a romantic.’  It is true that four or five important studies of Coleridge’s criticism have been published in recent years, and that a few cautious suggestions have already been made en passant that there is some connection between Aristotle and Coleridge, but this has not (as far as I know) been pursued in circumstantial detail, partly perhaps because both are difficult to explicate, partly because Aristotle and Coleridge are commonly thought to represent opposite poles in criticism.  I am aware therefore that my title is mildly scandalous, and that it is all the more scandalous for the unrepentant use of the definite article – The Aristotle-Coleridge Axis.

To establish a clear identity of critical purpose between Aristotle and Coleridge would I think be possible, but this is not the time to attempt it; the question is in any case complicated by the fact that Coleridge considered that ‘There are but two possible philosophies – [two] possible seekings after wisdom’ – the Platonic and the Aristotelian, and he was sure that his own position was Platonic.  What I find interesting in the ‘axis’ is the possibility that there may be a way of coming at a critic’s or a philosopher’s way of thinking and working in much the same way we find out how a particular poem actually functions.  From that functioning we can discover and release the self-declarative drama of a poem – no matter what kind of poem it is, for I hold (with Croce and others) that Art is one, not many.  I should like to consider the critical thinking of Aristotle and of Coleridge in its dynamic mode, and the way language becomes a dramatic (rather than a merely semantic) representation of thinking; in short, to look for similarities between Aristotle and Coleridge – identity even – not on the grounds of some coincidence in the terms they use or the nature and weight of the conclusions they reach, but by their way of looking at things, the way of sustaining attention, the way of dealing with evidence and of using – and imparting – a guiding insight.

The test of a critic, in my view, is not that he says things that we can repeat with approval and that we can without uneasiness induce others to repeat, but that he uses and encourages us to use liberating and fertile ways of perceiving and thinking; that he purifies our perception and tones the muscles of our minds.  In our knowing and in our getting-to-know we navigate by recognitions, by (what Yeats calls) hound-voices, rather than by impregnable propositions or imperious gnomae.  To work out something for ourselves, by whatever means, because we must, and then to find it already noticed – and usually most trenchantly – by an Aristotle or a Coleridge is reassuring; such felonious anticipations are among the purest delights of the intellectual life.  There are some matters that can be set down for good and all, some that can be carried an irreversible step closer to finality.  But the haunting and inexhaustible questions about life and art can be answered only in fugitive glimpses which, no matter how triumphantly set down, have neither life nor meaning until we rediscover them as at once necessary and ineffable.  Eliot puts this well in East Coker – speaking of poetry, it is true, but it suits poetics just as well.

                                                And so each venture

            Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate

            With shabby equipment always deteriorating

            In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,

            Undisciplined squads of emotion.  And what there is to conquer

            By strength and submission, has already been discovered

            Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope

            To emulate – but there is no competition –

            There is only the fight to recover what has been lost

            And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions

            That seem unpropitious.  But perhaps neither gain nor loss.

            For us, there is only the trying.  The rest is not our business.

In my view Aristotle in the Poetics achieved an exceptional insight into the nature of poetry, a view so comprehensive and incisive, so spare, elusive, and paradoxical that it needs through submission to be discovered and rediscovered over and over again, being too radical and clear to be paraphrased or to be held long intact in the mind.  And Coleridge – surprisingly Aristotelian in his critical mentality and procedure, no matter how much he may drift Plato-wards in some of his early poems and in much of his later philosophy and theology – provides a complement to Aristotle through his immensely more sensitive and profound understanding of the poetic way of mind – an understanding based upon his exceptional gift of psychological observation and his power of introspection into his own experience in making poetry.  For Coleridge suffered a quality of poetic experience that no critic of comparable stature has ever enjoyed.  Add to this, in Coleridge, a mind capable of sustained heuristic inquiry that for its suppleness and acuity is difficult to dissociate from certain distinctive qualities of the Greek mind as we hear it embodied in the Greek language finely uttered.

My own critical position rests upon a small number of premisses.  (a) The end of a critical act is not an overt evaluation of the work or an explanation of the work or a theory about the work; rather it is an extension of awareness shaped by the work under attention and – starting from the focus of that work – reverberating outward to engage other works and other ideas in a cognitive process.  (b) The end of a critical theory is to prepare and stimulate one’s capacities for acts of criticism, and if possible to provide the means of sustaining critical reflection upon works of literature.  (c) The end both of a critical theory and of the experience of satisfactory acts of criticism is to affect, enlarge, adjust, and extend our capacity to recognize each literary work simply for what it is; good critical theory is strictly speaking theoria – vision, a way of seeing.  (d) Critical theory must be sensitive enough to ensure that the work-to-be-known shapes and controls the cognitive process itself; otherwise the theory becomes a tautological imposition upon the work under inquiry.  All these taken together imply that successful critical activity depends upon the sensitive submissiveness of the critic, upon his deft use of his intellectual capacities in appropriately modifying his vision stage-by-stage; in short, that a critic should expect to be a self-effacing mediator rather than a perceptive authority.  (The claim that literary criticism should be or can be ‘scientific’ is either self-deception or an instrument of self-aggrandizement.)

The connection between these statements and my sense of the seminal grandeur of the Poetics may not be immediately obvious: Aristotle is not talking about criticism in the Poetics, and anyway the Poetics seems to cover much less than the whole field of poetry.  The Poetics, as we have it, devotes only a small amount of space to a general consideration of poetry, much of its space to a discussion of tragedy-making, a little to epic; there seems to have been a sizable section on comedy but we have no part of it.  No classical scholar has to be reminded that the Poetics is a fragmentary document, bristling with textual questions which have profound bearings not only upon the interpretation of single terms and passages but upon the nature, intention, and status of the whole document.  These very considerable difficulties can be reasonably resolved only by coming to terms resolutely with the Greek text.  We need also to ‘place’ the Poetics, warily and sensitively, in the context of Aristotle’s other writings; we need to place it also in the context of what is characteristic and peculiar in Aristotle’s way of seeing and knowing.  None of this can be done satisfactorily – that is, without grave hazard – either through a translation or through an exposition of Aristotle’s thought that does not see his mind as more daring and heuristic than the Middle Ages left it, or than the nineteenth century on the whole took it to be.

Admiration of the Poetics in this century has been blunted by two assumptions: that Aristotle’s view of poetry is severely limited by the fact that he said little about anything except tragedy; and that what he said about tragedy was confined to a set of deductions drawn from the narrow and special limits of Greek tragedy, the Greek mind, and Greek theatre (which Dryden seems to have said first, and it has stuck like a bur).  I am inclined to dismiss both these qualifying assumptions.  What Aristotle says about tragedy is not limited by the genre he seems to be discussing; it applies very well to any genre – which is precisely what is to be expected if in examining tragedy he was paying close attention to what he took to be the most highly developed kind of poetic art.  Again, because Aristotle consistently works, not by deduction and generalisation, but by inference – and clearly does so in the Poetics – the limits of inquiry, for such a mind and such a habit of thinking, are set not simply by the extent of material he examines (which in his case is usually encyclopaedic), but by his ability to reach inferences of broad and penetrating application.  Furthermore, in the Poetics Aristotle uses the paedagogic device of dramatic presentation: let us suppose (he seems to say) that you are capable of making tragedies, and I’ll tell you what things it is well to think about.  Instead or producing a prescriptive or regulative formula – the do-it-yourself tragedy-kit that Italian and French pedants seem always to have hoped the Poetics would turn out to be – the Poetics allows us to overhear Aristotle brooding over the nature of poetry as a highly developed and complex form and offers us a way of looking of poetry that is at once incisive, universal, and allusive.  Being allusive, what Aristotle says is patient of a number of different plausible, though partial, assumptions, interpretations, and conclusions.  The only way we can feel reasonably confident that we have grasped what Aristotle meant to say is by declining to regard ‘the words themselves’ as though they were written in an abstract notation that – like an inscription in an ill-known language – has to be deciphered word by word or else surrounded with an aura (or fog) of hypothetical readings and conjectural interpretations.  Given a reasonable text, language is somebody speaking intelligibly; it is dynamic, self-declarative in the way it goes, a meaningful gesture.  Through what is written it is surely possibly to enter imaginatively into Aristotle’s way of seeing, the dynamic of his mind, so that we find that the words he uttered fall as they do because they did not in fact go otherwise.

Without venturing on a detail excursus of the Poetics, and as preliminary to what I want to say about Coleridge, let me suggest what seems to me peculiar to Aristotle’s vision of poetry in his discussion of tragedy.  He sees the making of poetic constructs as a necessary human activity which engages its own peculiar pleasure both for maker and for witness.  He recognizes that a poem is complex but unified, that the whole is logically prior to the parts, and that each part bears intimations of the whole; a poem is not something put together out of components, but a whole which – both in the making and in the remaking – can be regarded from various angles of vision.  That poems are made of words he has no doubt, but he notices that the life of poetry is ‘action’ – drama – and he is the first person to use the term drama in this pure-plain-emphatic way to point simply to action, movement, life – that is, self-declarative action.  The principal thing he has to say about tragedy is that tragedy is a special action with profound human and moral implications, disclosing matters radical to our human nature and to our situation in the moral universe.  If he had emphatically drawn a distinction between the word drama (action, simply) and the word praxis (action of a certain quality done by a person of a certain quality) it would be clearer to us that he is saying: if a tragic poet is to trace out the drama peculiar to tragedy – that is the action that will disclose to us what it alone can disclose – the action needs to be specified and shaped with fine precision within very strict limits.  Unlike hortatory, philosophical, and moralistic procedures, tragedy does not trace out an action that begins with an assumed ‘moral’ or hypothetical proposition, nor does it end in a conclusive statement.  What it has to disclose can only be disclosed obliquely, opened to our fascinated – even horrified – gaze; we have to be able to see from the trajectory of the action itself what is to be known about (say) human destiny or human dignity; it is given to us dramatically, in the form of action, because there is no way adequately either of discovering or disclosing it by means more prosaic or descriptive.

If drama is conceived of as an action traced out in psychic space, it ceases to be an action if it is not a whole, unified action – as single as a trajectory, a gesture, a dance.  And if it is to be apprehended as a single action or gesture, it needs to imply its own initiative, direction, amplitude.  But since what is tracing the action is a man conscious and purposeful and not an inert projectile passively acted upon, the ‘flight’ once started must be capable of being modified; yet the modifications must be consistent with the origin, impulse, direction, and final fulfilment of the action.  The six merē (aspects) of tragedy-making that Aristotle sets forth are in one sense the limiting factors that make the tracing of a tragic action possible, the factors that are needed to secure the required degree of precision and depth of implication.  Starting at the outboard end of the list there are physical considerations, the stage being in any case a stylized representation of the possibility of free and self-initiating action within limited compass: the physical senses – the eye and ear – must be engaged by ‘visuals’ and music at least, since physical engagement is at the roots of any imaginative activity whether of making or remaking.  More internal and specifically human is the aspect of ‘wording’ (lexis), the physical stuff the action will be made in (for the tragic frisson can be achieved by reading as well as by witnessing); and more internal yet, the ‘thought’ (dianoia), the choices that aim and redirect the flight.  The list ends with the two crucial terms, plot and character, more intimately related than any other pair of merē.  All these ‘aspects’ are in indissoluble dynamic relation with each other in order to define, to delimit in the trading-out of it, a particular moral trajectory, an action that is specifically tragic.  If those are the limiting and shaping factors, the forces are intrinsic and powerful: law as multiplanal limit and goal, knowing and not-knowing as intuitive, freedom and mechanism, choice and destiny as ineluctable tensions.

As everybody knows, Aristotle gives much more space to ‘plot’ than to ‘character.’  It is usually assumed that he neglected ‘character,’ either because he was blind to the richness of individual character or because he and his contemporaries were ‘not interested in character in the way we are.’  There is, however, another more positive explanation.  If indeed he is concerned primarily with a self-declarative moral trajectory of universal rather than general import, his desire for universality would focus his attention upon the particularity of his central character in such a way as to disclose the prototypal situation of man rather than the typical situation of a man; the definition of his required particularity is more austere than the sense of the individual ‘character’ that haunted the Renaissance mind.  If the mind is to be tempted into an abstract recognition of an action that is abstract though directly and physically disclosed, it had better not be much distracted by the obvious and easy luxury of ‘interesting’ character.  But that consideration is probably minor.  The astonishingly original aspect of Aristotle’s view of poetry – and it may well be unique – is his ability to see a poetic work simply as action, the mathematical expression of internal functions, a space though complex linear configuration which implies, and even explicates, all the forces that are in play within it; yet the action bodied and coloured by being human.  Instead of the figures symbolizing the action, the action symbolizes the fate of the figures.  Since there is no sign of anybody before Aristotle being capable of looking at poetry steadily in this way, it would not be surprising if he placed great emphasis upon ‘plot’.  Perhaps he does not ‘do justice’ to character as in our tender regard for individuality we might wish; perhaps he is allowing some idiosyncratic concern to draw him away from giving ‘equal time’ to each of the two top ‘merē.’  What we are given, however, is a very strong emphasis on plot; are in developing his view of plot and the way it needs to be put together in order to get the tragic trajectory, he insists that it be dynamic, shapely, and single – dynamically simply in its directness and unity, yet radically complex.

The word he uses for what the single complex plot discloses – or allows to be disclosed – is praxis.  As we know from many other passages in Aristotle, praxis (unlike the word drama) is not a neutral or abstract term; it means an action or specific quality, the action of a spoudaios man, of a man-of-(moral)-action-in-action.  (I note in passing the desirable concentration of action in the word protagonist; the late Italian importation of the word hero too easily deflects attention from the actor’s action to the quality of the actor.  It would be worth knowing whether in the lost section on comedy he allowed himself to use the word praxis for the action of the comic protagonist; properly he should not have done so if he were to use this term consistently, but would need to revert to the more general and neutral word drama – which is not even specifically human – or find a corresponding word for the quality of action of a comic figure.)  The ‘plot’ (muthos) is the sequence of events that allows the actor to trace out his praxis, the extended moral action that both makes and declares his ‘character.’  But the ‘character’ also shapes the praxis; the acts and decisions must be those that would be presented to him and would be taken up for purposeful action by that person-being-what-he-is.  Aristotle gives major emphasis to plot because his preoccupation is with drama as the singular and premonitory trace of what is in fact done – decisions and all.  It may well be that if he had not had as dull an ear for poetry as he seems to have had he could never have seen tragedy in this bizarre and penetrating way.  At very least he knew that without plot there would be no disclosure of action, that a ‘character’ though interesting or even fascinating could be inert, incapable of initiating action.  Aristotle, assuming as he does that ‘character’ initiates action and is shaped by it, would see plot and ‘character’ as two aspects of the prime delineation of tragic drama (action); neither plot nor character could be primary in an ideal scheme, though the two may be separated conceptually and in imperfect practice; for they are inseparably linked by likelihood and necessity.  The more strongly the two are linked the more Aristotelian the view of tragedy; the more weakly they are linked, the more plays called ‘tragedies’ move towards disunity in (for example) the Renaissance preoccupation with the centrality of ‘character.’

In recent years Aristotle’s Poetics has been treated in some circles with condescension on the grounds that the criticism is ‘formal’ or that it is ‘moral.’  Both observations are in their way correct enough; yet if by ‘formal’ is meant ‘formalistic,’ and if by ‘moral’ is meant ‘moralistic’ or ‘moralizing’ both are certainly wrong-headed.  Aristotle is a moral critic inasmuch as his praxis is nothing if not morally determined and his values emphatically man-centered (man being neither a plaything of the gods nor the sort of victim who, in the modern psychopathic way, can get off the hook by arguing that what he did was no crime because he was just made that way); and the fulcrum of the action is knowing and not-knowing, the issues man-centred in the tension between inventiveness and mechanism of action when man is considered as radically free.  Again, he is a ‘formal’ critic, not in the sense that he prescribes what form, structure, mould, generic framework, a work should have, but in the sense that his way of looking at anything – man, creature, poem – inevitably presents it as becoming or having become what its internal necessity demanded of it.  Aristotle’s intentness of regard is extremely rare, and his way of looking avoids the abstractive inertia of dividing up process into matter and form, form and content, cause and effect.  This is not usually taken into account at all, on the unexamined assumption that we all see in much the same way and that we are all equally good at looking at things.  What Aristotle has done in the Poetics is to specify the forces that induce form, that induce life.  He has not described or specified the static structure that a tragedy will (or must) assume, not even the dynamic structure; the form is indefinable until the thing has grown into existence.  From the way he handles his various instances of tragedy, and makes his comparisons with Homer, it is clear that his sense of form allows for wide variety, that he conceives of each tragedy having a unique form even though the forms will fall into a family because of some similarity in the forces that induce them.  The form is simply what the thing becomes and is; what is disclosed is a revelation, the abyss opening; what is ‘seen’ is definable except in direct experience of the action as drama.

If we are to make a direct comparison between Coleridge and Aristotle it had better be in the matter of tragedy, disregarding for the moment the possibility that Aristotle’s scheme of tragedy may in fact be a scheme for poetry altogether.  What Coleridge has to say about tragedy (in the fragmentary records that have survived) is mostly about Shakespeare, very little about Greek tragedy; and conflicting things are said about Coleridge’s Shakespearean criticism.  On the one hand: ‘It is Coleridge above all others who is the interpreter of Shakespeare, the inspired critic who revealed for the first time the immense range of Shakespeare’s genius, and pointed out the innumerable and previously undiscovered approaches to an appreciation of it’; and T. S. Eliot has said that ‘It is impossible to understand Shakespeare criticism to this day, without a familiar acquaintance with Coleridge’s lectures and notes.’  On the other hand, it has been said again and again that Coleridge does an injustice to Shakespeare by concentrating on character to the neglect of everything else and in defiance of Aristotle’s dictum that plot is the life of tragedy.  And we are familiar with another often-repeated proposition that Shakespeare’s plays lie completely outside the scope of Aristotle’s analysis, and that therefore we must accept the fact of an extra- or ultra-Aristotelian kind of drama; such a proposal is not infrequently ascribed to Coleridge but I am not aware of any documentary evidence, actual or inferred, to support such a claim.

Coleridge developed many lines of intellectual activity, being poet, philosopher, psychologist, theologian, journalist, theorist of education, of science, and of political institutions.  He was not a don and was never professionally engaged in any of these spheres; nor was he a ‘professional critic’ in our sense of the term or in the way his younger contemporary William Hazlitt was.  He was a thoroughly trained classical scholar, outstanding in his generation at Christ’s Hospital, and as an undergraduate at Jesus College, Cambridge, until his personal affairs fell into disorder.  He brought to his engagement in most of the dominant intellectual concerns of his time a fluency in Latin, a love of Greek, and a mastery of Italian and German that nourished his pervasive sense of the continuity of thought.  His notebooks and marginalia show that as a reader he had a remarkable flair for identifying himself with the writer behind the writing, so that certain writers that to others seemed strange and unorthodox fell comfortably (for him) within recognizable traditions of human thought.  The sense of language which not only made him a poet of the first order also made him an observant and original philosopher of language, fascinated by the shades and resources of language and scrupulously alert to the ways language stimulates, shapes, and nourishes both thinking and awareness.  His sense of language was heightened and refined by his excitement at the supple clarity of the Greek language.  His own practice in verse – at its best scrupulous and painstaking, and always referred to an exceptionally fine ear – was deeply informed by his careful study of Greek prosody, particularly in Pindar and the tragedies.  But beyond that I doubt whether he could have carried forward his thinking as he did in the fields of psychology, perception, and imagination without the use of a number of carefully clarified Greek terms and an awareness of Greek syntactical functions that scarcely existed in English at the end of the eighteenth century.  A fertile coiner of words – many of which have quietly entered our day-to-day use – he also made discoveries about the nature and functions of language that remained to be rediscovered with (on the whole) less clarity in this century; but this aspect of Coleridge’s work has so far received little detailed exposition.  He was not, of course, a classical scholar to rank with Bentley or Porson; but he was accurately learned and deeply read in five languages, and there were few books of substance that did not arouse him to the full exploratory vigour of a powerful and courageous mind and a fertile imagination.

Coleridge’s critical effort falls into two blocks or streams.  The earliest in conception, but not in print, was several series of lectures on Shakespeare and other writers (both dramatic and non-dramatic) delivered between 1808 and 1819.  After his death these were patched together from lecture notes, marginalia, and miscellaneous manuscripts, fattened out with a few shorthand transcripts and some reports from newspapers, diaries, and reminiscences, and published in Literary Remains, 1836.  They were reissued separately in 2 volumes in 1843 by his daughter Sara as Notes and Lectures on Shakespeare and Other Dramatists.  This scrappy unassuming little book, first put together with great difficulty from perplexing fragments and steadily reprinted ever since, has had a momentous effect upon the progress of Shakespeare criticism in England.  The most recent editor of that material – T. M. Raysor – opens his introduction by declaring that ‘In the history of English criticism there is not work which surpasses in interest Coleridge’s lectures upon Shakespeare’ – perhaps a little exaggerated, but not far wide of the mark.  The other book, Biographia Literaria, written in 1815 after some ten years’ gestation and published in 1817, contains his nearest approach to a coherent theory of poetics; it contains some general reflections that had been worked out in the Shakespeare lectures, but the book, arising from his reflection upon the peculiarities of Wordsworth’s poetry and poetic genius, analyzes and celebrates Wordsworth’s poetry in what is still one of the most eloquent and penetrating critiques of a major poet by a contemporary critic.  The Biographia has suffered much neglect.  Until the last ten or fifteen years it has had only a scattered and intermittent effect on general critical thinking.  The Biographia has been paid lip-service as the seed of modern critical theory and practice; the Shakespeare lectures seem to have been praised less for what they say than for their anticipation of later critical developments (which Coleridge had in fact initiated).  I find the deepest interest of both to be in the clear evidence they give of the Aristotelian quality of Coleridge’s critical perception.

We know that Coleridge owned at least one collective edition of Aristotle and that he used it regularly for his work in logic, psychology, and the theory of knowledge.  He was not a man to be pulled by the nose by his neoclassical predecessors in England or France any more than he could accept on trust Dr. Samuel Johnson’s critical pronunciamenti and ‘coarse brutalities of wit’: and we do not find him saying, with Wordsworth’s luxurious innocence, ‘Aristotle, I have been told, has said, that Poetry is the most philosophic of all writing.’  Yet Coleridge seldom refers directly to the Poetics except, in passing, to take a sly nip at those who treat Aristotle as ‘the infallible dictator.’  I presume that the Poetics from familiarity had dropped far below the threshold of conscious recognition; whatever is Aristotelean in Coleridge’s poetics is not consciously derived.  Coleridge’s starting-point and preoccupation in any case is ‘facts of mind,’ ‘ways of mind,’ ‘inner goings-on.’  As a critic (he said) he ‘laboured at a solid foundation on which permanently to ground my opinions in the component faculties of the human mind itself and their comparative dignity and importance.’  He knew – and said he had been taught at school – that poetry has ‘a logic of its own as severe as that of science; and more difficult, because more subtle, more complex, and dependent on more and more fugitive causes.’  He was consequently alert to the peculiar quality of Aristotle’s way of thinking and outlines it brilliantly in the fifth of his Philosophical Lectures (1818-19).  He notices Aristotle’s immense and untiring knowledge; he notices how ‘the dialectic habits and the inductive logic to which during twenty years he had been familiarized in the Platonic school, and which had prepared in a mind so capacious and so predisposed, the spirit, first of observation, secondly of discrimination, and thirdly of abstraction and generalization.’  (Coleridge describes his own mind and memory as ‘capacious and systematizing’).  He notices how Aristotle, ‘grateful for the number of facts, conceptions, possibilities, which Plato’s ever-flowing invention presented,’ yet ‘like an original genius, still bringing them within his own plan of interpretation, brought them into his own construction.’  He noticed also Aristotle’s capacity to encompass a complex view with the clarity and precision of a geometrical figure.

Himself a poet, with his greatest poems behind him, Coleridge knew perfectly well that nobody can write a good play or poem by rule – not even by Aristotelian rule – though it is difficult to guess by what aids, fetishes, and haruspications any individual poet will get his work done.

It was Lessing who first proved to all thinking men, even to Shakespeare’s own countrymen, the true nature of his apparent irregularities.  These, he demonstrated, were deviations only from the Accidents of the Greek Tragedy; and from such accidents as hung a heavy weight on the wings of the Greek poets, and narrowed their flight within the limits of what we may call the Heroic Opera.  He proved that in all essentials of art, no less than in the truth of nature, the plays of Shakespeare were incomparably more coincident with the principles of Aristotle, than the productions of Corneille and Racine, notwithstanding the boasted regularity of the latter.  Under these convictions were Lessing’s own dramatic works composed.  Their deficiency is in depth and imagination; their excellence is in the construction of the plot; the good sense of the sentiments; the sobriety of the morals; and the high polish of the diction and dialogue.

His central assertion about Shakespeare follows much of the same line, but is drawn from different premisses: that Shakespeare was pre-eminently a poet, as evidenced by his non-dramatic writing; that the ‘shaping spirit of imagination’ exhibited in the poems can be expected also to be seen in the plays; and that Shakespeare is a man of firm artistic judgment, not an automatic writer who gets things right by lucky accident.  He wished to prove that

... Shakespeare appears, from his poems alone, apart from his great works, to have possessed all the conditions of a true poet, and by this proof to do away, as far as may [be] in my power, the popular notion that he was a great dramatist by a sort of instinct, immortal in his own despite, and sinking below men of second or third-rate character when he attempted aught beside the drama – even as bees construct their cells and manufacture their honey to admirable perfection, but would in vain attempt to build a nest.  Now this mode of reconciling a compelled sense of inferiority with a feeling of pride, began in a few pedants, who having read that Sophocles was the great model of tragedy, and Aristotle the infallible dictator, and finding that the Lear, Hamlet, Othello, and the rest, were neither in imitation of Sophocles, nor in obedience to Aristotle – and not having (with one or two exceptions) the courage to affirm that the delight which their country received from generation to generation, in defiance of the alterations of circumstances and habits, was wholly groundless – it was a happy medium and refuge, to talk of Shakespeare as a sort of beautiful lusus naturae, a beautiful monster – wild, indeed, without taste or judgement, but like the inspired idiots so much venerated in the East, uttering, amid the strangest follies, the sublimest truths.

Here I must refrain from detailed exposition of Coleridge’s position and will notice a few salient points.

(a) ‘The spirit of poetry, like all other living powers, must of necessity circumscribe itself by rules, were it only to unite power with beauty.  It must embody in order to reveal itself; but a living body is of necessity an organized one; and what is organization but the connection of parts in and for a whole, so that each part is at once end and means?  This is no discovery of criticism; – it is a necessity of the human mind; ...’

(b) Coleridge objects to the sense of ‘form’ that ‘confounds mechanical regularity with organic form.  The form is mechanic, when on any given material we impress a pre-determined form, not necessarily arising out of the properties of the material; – as when to a mass of wet clay we give whatever shape we wish it to retain when hardened.  The organic form, on the other hand, is innate; it shapes, as it develops, itself from within, and the fulness of its development is one and the same with the perfection of its outward form.  Such as the life is, such is the form.’

(c) He insists upon the impersonality of Shakespeare’s art, and upon the absence of self-expression in great poetry.  He insists also upon the importance of distancing poetry from actual experience, as Wordsworth does; and his own finest poetry is characterized by the complex interaction of several modes of distancing.

(d) Coleridge’s sustained critique of Wordsworth’s poetry in the twenty-second chapter of Biographia Literaria – a masterly example of the way critical observation can be dramatically presented in order to achieve a single apprehension of complex evidence – shows that Coleridge’s critical way of mind in the presence of a poem is indeed thoroughly Aristotelian in the sense that he is seized and fascinated by what is before him, by the fact that it is, that it is what it is and not otherwise, and that the nature of the thing is disclosed by intensifying passive attention.  This way of looking, radical to Aristotle, is radical to Coleridge as reader and critic.  It happens to be thrown into sharp relief in the critique of Wordsworth because it is the same sense in Wordsworth which, when directed towards both objects in the natural world and states of mind within himself, provides the mysterious substance of his major poetry; only when we can see Wordsworth’s major poems as dramatic tracings of the movement of his mind in psychic space do we begin to understand why Coleridge saw Wordsworth as a poet of stature comparable to Milton.  This is the more remarkable when we consider the great difference between the poetic intelligence and sensibility of Wordsworth and Coleridge.  When Coleridge writes his critique of Wordsworth he is not writing a critique of his own poetry or a disclosure of his own way of working.  Indeed both The Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan are right outside the compass of Wordsworth’s relentless exploration of his own mind.  Wordsworth is a naturalist of certain activities of the mind; Coleridge finds in his own poetry a symbolic embodiment of the life of the mind.

(e) Like Aristotle, Coleridge thinks of poetry as making; he uses the word ‘creative’ very seldom and then in a way that bespeaks a fastidious theological sensibility.

(f) Coleridge himself is haunted in his own life by the ambivalence of action and by the enormous hazard that is involved if initiative is found only in the deliberate will.

(g) Coleridge’s theory of imagination is a dynamic view, involving a complete break both with the faculty-psychology and with the causal-mechanistic descriptions of his day.  Imagination is a state of the person – a state in which the whole soul of man is brought into activity with the correct relation of all its functions.  Though imagination needs to be highly specialized to produce poetry, imagination is the birthright of all of us.  It is rooted in sensory experience, and draws the feeling-tone of perceptual experience into every kind of mental activity.  With the possible exception of A. N. Whitehead, Coleridge is the only man who has produced a theory of poetic imagination that springs in a single arc from the physique of perceptual experience to the engagement of critical and reflective intelligence and the controlled construction of works of art.  What he calls the ‘primary imagination’ is simply sense perception; and his theory of perception anticipates the gestalt theory of this century: perceiving is intrinsically meaningful.  The part played by association he observed, studied, and recorded with a delicacy and acuteness that is still unsurpassed.  Unlike Aristotle he noticed that the visual sense is dominantly abstractive, and warned against the ‘despotism of the eye’; the sense of hearing he considered paramount in poetry, and the sense of touch he regarded as the first and radical of the senses, observing how in the synaesthetic activity of imagination words, sounds, colours, and even abstractions can become tactile.  If Coleridge had been able to establish – as he himself knew well – the inseparable presence of feeling in perceptual and cognitive activity, the study of aesthetics might long ago have lived up to its name by dealing with perception and ‘feeling’ rather than indulging fruitless inquiries into an abstraction called ‘Beauty.’  He recognized the extreme vulnerability of the poetic process, and how – although it is sustained by volition – it is easily subverted and coarsened by wilful intention; yet for him there was no place in poetry for luck or accident, though much for the grace of transfiguration.  In his passion for desynonymizing words he drew distinctions between imagination and fancy, idea and law, copy and imitation: these show how readily in his mind mimesis stood for a relation between the work of art and whatever stands over against it in reality – a relation every time unique and never in general to be specified, predicted, or predicated.  His theory of symbolism finds that the only way to avoid inert generalization is to concentrate upon sharply perceived particulars and so to evoke the universal; he finds metaphor to be the fundamental principle of dynamic relation in poetic and symbolic contexts, and asserted that a poetic symbol ‘partakes of the reality which it renders unintelligible’ – a special instance of mimesis.

Out of the many matters that crowd forward for attention one more must be considered; this goes back to the beginning and the question of Coleridge’s alleged inordinate concentration upon ‘character’ in his dramatic criticism.  Long before Coleridge attempted any formal Shakespearean criticism his inquiry into the psychic sources of action had been profound and sensitive; if there is any one single concern that colours and guides his thinking in all its varied ranges it is his conviction that the nature of the mind shapes our knowing and that the nature of the individual psyche affects every shade of individual action and experience.  When he came to reflect sustainedly upon Shakespeare’s writing he recognized at once a man who had a profound understanding of the ways of the human spirit.  His sense of wonder at Shakespeare’s intricate disclosures of human character reinforced his own central concern, and as he studied the work of the greatest poet England has ever seen he was strengthened in his belief that he could indeed lay ‘a solid foundation’ for critical judgment in his understanding of ‘the component faculties of the human mind itself.’  It was perhaps inevitable then that his main critical reflection would come to rest upon Shakespeare and Wordsworth.  Since his own psychological preoccupation – dealing in matters rather more subtle and powerful than ‘motives’ – came into focus with Shakespeare’s fascination with the ‘dark adyta’ of ‘character,’ it allowed him to explore areas of human initiative, sources of human action, that Aristotle may never have recognized or been able to recognize.  What this conjunction does in Coleridge is not (so to speak) to snatch the primacy of ‘plot’ out of Aristotle’s hands and reassign it to ‘character’; it is rather to complement and reinforce Aristotle’s position.  For Aristotle had seen that tragedy is action of a certain kind and figure; it is induced through a person (‘character’) acting out a certain configuration of events (‘plot’).  As long as the action is significant human action, plot can no more be separated from character than initiative can be separated from the tissue of knowing and not-knowing.  What Coleridge has done is greatly to enrich the possibilities of tragic action by allowing for a greater intricacy of initiative, thereby allowing for a finer, more exquisite definition of moral trajectory; he has done nothing to detract from the integrity of the drama, the self-defining of the action as tragic.  Although Coleridge could not accept the proposition that Shakespeare was a lusus naturae, he did not argue that Shakespeare’s tragedies were perfect instances of the tragic mode.  Did he perhaps glimpse, through the unevennesses and imperfections of Shakespeare’s actual achievement, the possibility of a greatly enriched tragedy in the Aristotelian mode?  He was quite incapable of writing such a tragedy himself, but he was quite capable – renewing as he did in himself the Aristotelian mode of perception – of foreseeing such a possibility, of seeing it even as sooner or later inevitable.

If indeed Coleridge is in these matters harmonious with Aristotle, as I think he is, he provides an unexpected extension of Aristotle’s unaccountably just and penetrating insight into the nature of poetry.  Imagination, which Aristotle had scarcely considered except as our ability to present to the mind ‘pictures’ of things not physically present, assumed in Coleridge’s mind a role that Aristotle would probably have approved – as the supreme realizing function, a dynamic state of wholeness accessible to all men, and overflowing into things-made so that they may have a life of their own, not being the image of the person who made them.  In his reading of Shakespeare, Coleridge saw how Aristotle’s scheme of tragedy could be extended and enriched, not defied, by concentrating on character.  His understanding of the pure drama of language allows Aristotle’s view of tragedy to be extended without violence into areas (lyrical, for example) which were closed to Aristotle.  Coleridge’s exceptional experience of making poetry gave him an understanding of the symbolism of words and the functions of metaphor that can easily be found in Greek poetry though not in Aristotle’s Poetics or Rhetoric, it also allowed him to give an account of perception and of association which supports Aristotle’s more intuitive account and allows us to extricate it in considerable detail.  The heart and substance of Coleridge’s poetic theory and practice is strongly Aristotelian – even though he himself may have thought otherwise.  Over a long period of time Aristotle’s Poetics has been ‘lost and found and lost again and again’; so, in a much shorter span of time, has Coleridge’s.  This may be a propitious time faithfully to discover each of them singly and to find both of them together.