Coleridge and the Self-unravelling Clue

It is an open secret that for more than thirty-five years, in the intervals of other things, I have been collecting and editing the marginalia of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: that is, the manuscript notes he wrote in the margins, flyleaves, and other blank spaces of his and other people’s books.  In technical terms this has been a little like the work of Schleiermacher or Diels in assembling the materials for an edition of Heraclitus: the primary text (of unknown extent – a not-uncommon state of affairs for an editor) had to be identified and brought together, almost literally brought into existence, from scattered and arcane sources; and some way of presenting the material methodically and clearly had to be invented.  The primary text of Coleridge’s marginalia has turned out to be rather extensive: the edition will make five volumes of about 1100 pages each (not counting the comprehensive index) – say, with all the editorial up-propments, not far short of three million words.

This part of the Collective Coleridge edition was begun before the collective edition was actually launched, and has developed parallel to the edition of the Coleridge Notebooks, though beginning several years later.  I have therefore been able to profit continuously from Kathleen Coburn’s brilliantly conceived and finely executed edition of the Notebooks, having through her generosity had access to the Coleridge manuscripts and her work-in-progress as a guide to the way Coleridge’s writing might be understood and his manuscripts appropriately dealt with.  My work has also been helped and enriched, not only by consultative experts who try to make good my negligences and ignorances, but also by the work of my fellow-editors in the Collected Coleridge, both published and in preparation – contributions indispensable because of the scope and difficulty of my own particular enterprise, and because of the numerous widely scattered, and largely unedited and unpublished, Coleridge manuscripts and secondary materials that have to be taken into account in such an edition.  For Coleridge’s habit of mind is so commanding that every part seems to involve the whole; we are (it seems) in Plato’s country, conducted by Aristotle; if in this endeavour it were the mark of an editor’s triumph to conquer, to divide the country would not be a good way to go about it.

Elsewhere – at the 1971 Editorial Conference here in Toronto (the proceedings published as Editing Texts of the Romantic Period) and in the Introduction to Volume 1 of the Coleridge Marginalia (1980) – I have spoken a little about the nature and history of this project, and have tried to say what it involves, what relation it bears to the body of Coleridge’s writing and thought, and what it tells about his interior life; I have also considered some of the technical devices and critical procedures that I have found useful.  I need not go over all that again.  But having been invited to speak first at this Conference, and so to have the first opportunity to welcome my distinguished colleagues and to bring to a beginning the discussion of editing polymaths, I thought I might venture to speak generally about what editing Coleridge has made me aware of – apart from his portentous polymathia: about the relation between editor and author, about the extent to which in the course of study an author and his text transform the editor and shape his work; and how – at a time when there is much enthusiastic but uncritical talk about an “information revolution” and the machines that are bringing it about – those considerations affect our understanding of the nature of knowing itself.

Are knowledge and knowing distinguishable?  How accessible is the knowledge that we expect will be worth having?  How probable is it that, in order to receive the knowledge of high value that we most urgently seek – knowledge often so elusive that we can grasp it only for a moment before losing it again –, we shall have to qualify for that learning by refining and attuning our awareness, and by approaching warily, and often obliquely, through stages not otherwise open to us.  The editing of polymaths seems an ideal locus for such questions because of the brilliance of the authors we are dealing with, because of the inordinate demands the authors place upon us as editors and upon our processes of knowing, and because of the delicacy of judgment and tact required of each editor if he is successfully to impart to his reader whatever is needed to illuminate the primary text and to make it for the reader a hospitable country of the mind.

I have too little detailed acquaintance with the work of our other four polymaths to venture any generalisations about them.  Yet I have a hunch that each of them in his own way is so clearly a prototype of universal genius that the particularity of one of them – of Coleridge, the one I happen to know best – can disclose similarities and sympathetic resonances in the others, and throw light on the editorial responsibilities that individually we have ventured to assume.  For it seems to me that to edit well the work of genius is not only to celebrate the power and triumphs of human intelligence and sensibility, and to keep these alive as matters of delight and wonder in the civilised awareness that we foster and protect, but also to open afresh questions that are never superseded or finally answered, about the nature of knowing, judging, and perceiving.

We are gathered to celebrate the enterprise of editing the works of five literary geniuses, each distinct in his kind, each of almost unimaginable productivity and scope of learning.  What do they have in common beyond their breadth of learning?  Among our five perhaps only one – Coleridge – is entitled to the primary name of “poet,” even though Diderot was a more than accomplished novelist and satirist, and Erasmus wrote with an abundant humour that is not easily excluded from the field of imagination.  We have in Erasmus a humanist of vast learning: editor of classical authors in Greek and Latin, and of many of the Fathers, editor of the Greek New Testament and translator of it into Latin, for several years a professional editor for an energetic publisher and one who knew what editing really was, yet could not refrain from writing much else, sometimes light-heartedly.  Diderot was encyclopaedist, critic, satirist, novelist, dramatist.  That leaves two philosophers, neither of whom falls comfortably within Coleridge’s definition of philosophy as “the affectionate pursuit of wisdom.”  Yet one term will, I think, cover them all and set them apart: the elusive term “genius.”  Not the sheer quantity of learning is it that sets genius apart, but the incandescence, the opulence, the extravagant gratuitousness, the rapidity of mind.  So it seems quite possible that one of these geniuses can in a real sense stand for “genius” altogether.

There is no way of accounting for the speed and penetration of understanding that genius commands; the all-embracing grasp of mind, the subtle and graceful flair in handling complexities; the impetuous and insolent facility with which the learning is disposed, correlated, commanded, combined, harmonised, and called to clarity as though at a lucky venture and without apparent effort.  We can only marvel, knowing that for them it was as a sailor might say “Money for old rope”; or as Lamb, when he sent Coleridge, apparently dying, five great folios of St. Thomas hoping that “A little school divinity ... [might] be healing,” assured James Gillman that these would be “nuts to our dear friend”; a work-a-day matter like a grand master playing several games of chess at once blindfold, or a wood engraver incising in boxwood the shape of a leaf or the fluent texture of a bird’s feather.  As for ourselves, humbled from the beginning by the preposterous disproportion of our resources to the enterprise, we find confidence – having to find confidence somewhere – in the likelihood that the shaping energy of our subject will impart the patience and discrimination – even the learning – that these polymaths demand for us.

A literary editor’s first responsibility, I take it, is to present a clear and accurate text in a form that the author might reasonably be supposed to expect would represent his considered wishes.  If the editor takes a step farther on behalf of author and reader, seeking (what Milton calls) “the plainness, and brightness” of his original, he may wish to provide some help in grasping the work as faithfully as possible as something that came into existence at the hands of a certain person in a certain place at a certain time, a living thing with a life of its own as well as a history.  To meet these ends much detailed matter of fact will have to be assembled and verified and deftly set down, especially if the author is distant in time and the current language has changed much since then.  The glossing, explaining, correcting, interpreting, however, will very soon begin to accumulate at a terrifying rate, and will (like stream-of-consciousness writing) stand in its own light by reason of its minuteness, its multiplicity, and its nagging and unshapely monotony, and so can quickly diverge from the main text and assume an existence of its own or impede the editor’s movement in the psychic surround of his subject.

The history of scholarship provides plenty of examples of inverted pyramids of pedantry ingeniously perpetrated by scholars who were nothing if not deeply learned.  Puzzle-solving has a sombre attraction for the busy mind, and many editions, classical and other, have been made in which the editor overshadows his author with a virtuoso exploitation of the obscurity, the physical defects, or the textual corruptions of an otherwise unimportant original.  (Is Housman’s famous edition of Manilius’s Astronomica such a feat?  Yet Manilius had received the minute and learned attention of both Scaliger and Bentley before Housman came to him.)  Then there are the efflorescent commentaries that vie for authority with the original – not least in biblical studies, as Milton, at the end of the first book in Of Reformation Touching Church Discipline, angrily observed.

He that cannot understand the sober, plain, and unaffected style of the Scriptures, will be ten times more puzzled with the knotty Africanisms, the pampered metaphors; the intricate, and involved sentences of the Fathers; besides the fantastic, and declamatory flashes; the cross-jingling periods which cannot but disturb, and come thwart a settled devotion worse than the din of bells, and rattles. ...

As long as an editor stays away from interpretation – which properly is not the end of his endeavour but only one of many resources at his disposal – the risk of radical damage by elaborate commentary may not be great if it runs in self-preoccupied parallel to the original text.  Such commentaries, in the early days of printing, provided the occasion for some ingenious and beautiful typographical designs that are still worth studying even though nobody has the money to commission anything like that any more.  Isaac Casaubon’s Persius (1647), a late and fine example of this kind, was an instance, Scaliger said, of the sauce being better than the meat.  Coleridge had a copy of it – it is now in the Victoria College library – in which he noted: “There are 616 pages in this volume, of which 22 are text, and 594 commentary and introductory matter.”  But then his note turns, not towards contempt, but into an expression of gratitude.

Yet when I recollect, that I have the whole works of Cicero, of Livy, and Quintilian, with many others, the whole works of each in a single Volume ... & that they cost me in the proportion of a Shilling to a Guinea for the same quantity of worse matter in modern Books, or Editions, I a poor man whom [in Greek] “the terrible desire to possess books has afflicted since childhood” feel the liveliest Gratitude for the Age, which produced such Editions, and for the Education, which by enabling me to understand and taste the Greek and Latin Writers, has thus put it in my power to collect on my own Shelves for my actual use almost all the best Books in spite of my so small Income.

(Coleridge’s love of Greek gave special strength and precision to his writing and to the texture of his thinking.  It also, in his early manhood, probably saved his life.  When as an undergraduate of desperate fortune at Cambridge he joined the Dragoons and disappeared from his friends and relatives, he was noticed not so much for his happy inconsequence as a soldier as for his habit of writing Greek epigrams on the horse-stalls.  Once he had been identified as someone other than Silas Tomkyn Comberbache his family arranged for him to be discreetly withdrawn from the service on the grounds of insanity; so he escaped dying of yellow fever in the West Indies as a good many of his regiment did, and lived to write The Ancient Mariner and much else, and to die almost forty years later of something less infectious than yellow fever.)

A polymath is by definition a learned man, as its source in the Greek verb μανϴάνειν (manthanein) shows: he is not simply a person who knows a lot, but a person who has learned a lot.  (The quality of knowing may well be a direct function of the way a man learns.)  The Latin word doctus was for centuries used to refer to a learned man; in its positive form a term of respect, in its superlative doctissimus a mark of wonder and envy.  Latterly the word changed to doctor and lost force to such an extent that the Oxford English Dictionary simply notes: “doctor – an eminently learned man.  archaic.”  Nevertheless, the word “polymath” – a fancy word with no long history in English – stands firm on its Greek feet, pointing to something less factitious and futile than quizz-kiddery, marking a man as deeply read in various branches of study, as one who has assimilated much and who in doing so has forgotten much without ever quite losing it; for the hound-voice of an unforeseeable need can call forth something that has long ago retreated to some shadowy recess of memory, and the marshalling of these forgotten things is one of the great marvels of our study.  For the polymath, “experience” seems to mean little (unless it be “inner goings-on”) even though some polymaths – Erasmus, Goethe, Diderot – were men of the world and made a mark in public affairs.  (This is not true of scholars generally, however, and may well be rather the mark of the genius-polymath’s capacity for largeness of life.)  The mathy itself is indestructibly bookish, learned, a matter of language – so much so that it is interesting to consider what sorts of intelligent and well-informed persons we should not be able to call “learned.”  What is written down, what is taken up into the mind as written – this is the foot-thick reality of what was uttered; this is the substance that makes a man learned.  And between that and the mind that is to grasp it, and between that and the world, lie chasms not to be crossed other than by risky leaps, without rope or crampon – the sort of thing we do in dreams.

I have called our polymaths “geniuses” to distinguish them from mere scholars of redoubtable learning and talent.  Genius being unaccountable in its scope, force, elegance and rapidity, and obviously beyond the normal reach of mundane learning and imagination, the attempt to edit the work of a genius is an act of presumption or folly made possible only by some act of grace that supervenes upon the limitations of the inquirer to redeem the poverty of his resources.  Between the work-to-be-edited (on the one hand) and the editor (on the other) one expects that there will ideally be some reconciliatory justice at work, that the music will play upon the instrument, that a treaty of rightness will operate for the editor in the same way that the making of a poem is guided by the poet’s sense of rightness.  “Pedantry” is our name for the disturbance of that ideal relation whether between author and editor or between editor and reader; and “arrogance” is our name for the importunate or domineering management of an editor’s relation to this author.  But Casaubon’s Persius, falling short of arrogance and this side of blind pedantry, suggests another redeeming possibility: that the intent scholar will not only be seen as comic but will see himself as comic; that the grace may enter through his self-mockery, even if the mockery be deliberate.

Here we come upon the traditional figure of the scholar as a figure of fun, so bedecked with amiable vanity that not even malice can penetrate the disguise of his defensive garment: the obsessed man redeemed from madness only by his blind devotion to an impossible or fruitless task to the neglect of the world and all its glories and riches; a man not of this time at all but of long ago: fur-tippetted against the damp of the library and the foggy weather; baggy-eyed from anxiety and asquint with the candle-light reflected from vellum; and see how the great thoughts slip in and out of the forecourt of his mind with the same demure self-possession that his cat enjoys as she goes, according to fancy, in and out of her own cat-door.  Nobody could be so preoccupied, so serious, so delighted with little things in the guise of big things, nobody so short-tempered, so explosive in contempt for error, so unforgiving of those who unwittingly shatter his calm sensibilities by clumsiness or ignorance or inaccuracy – a false value, a mispronunciation, a hybrid coinage – for he is excruciatingly aware (as all philologists are) how most changes in language are (in that fine phrase of Fowler’s that Gowers has unhappily expunged) “perhaps due to ignorance rather than choice.”^[1]  (Did Aristotle, coming from the islands, afflict the fine Athenian ear?  or was his idiom taken for honest eccentricity, in the way that Coleridge’s incorruptible Devon speech seems to have aroused no distaste in his cultured contemporaries?)

Nobody could be farther withdrawn from the world than this imagined scholar.  Yet short of being an imaginative author, in his own right how could he be closer to the heart of the matter?  who more jealous a guardian of the eternal verities?  who more minutely engaged in that greatest miracle of our human make-up, “the beautiful machine of language”?  And his task, not easy either to see or to define, is a most delicate one.  He must find the clue that leads to the heart of the labyrinth, “the labyrinth of another’s being” in Yeats’s phrase, and pass the thread to us, his readers, with a hint of the right touch and tension for handling it, so that, coming to the gorgeous chambers of the labyrinth one by one and passing through them in turn, we come to the beginning (not the end) of our quest.

My experience in editing has been limited.  I have never tried to edit any author except Coleridge; and trying to turn Aristotle’s Poetics – the smallest of his surviving writings and textually the most defective – into an English version that would feel like the Greek original, even though it involves some knotty textual questions, hardly counts as editing; and anyway it isn’t finished yet.  But, as Coleridge often recalled the phrase from Giordano Bruno’s Ode, the Marginalia have proved to be “enough and more than enough.”  How the work has fared I am not the one to say.  One thing I know is that it has called up all the resources I could muster from a literary, classical, theological, and musical training, from the ragbag detritus of ill-assorted enthusiasms, and from some knock-about experience of what is commonly called “the real world.”  I also know that, as time has passed and the primary text has grown and the footnotes have retreated from their earlier large flamboyance, I have been chastened to learn how to move with an appearance of ease in confined space (as Coleridge learned how to move with ease in the cramped spaces accidentally offered by the margins and blank spaces in books), and know that the appearance of ease has been won by gaining sea-room wherever possible at the cost of much that I enjoyed finding out, and wrote up with pleasure, and then had to put aside with keen regret.  This question of space must have caused me some deep-seated anxiety.  In a dream years ago when my eldest daughter aged three crept into bed with me I said: “Move over, Tink, or there won’t be room for the footnotes.”  (In another dream I was filling out an elaborate death certificate and came at the end to this cadenza-footnote in civil-service prose: “Applicants are to state whether there is a requirement for a stake to be driven through the heart”; but that may not have been a purely editorial dream.)  Perhaps another chance will turn up to use those cherished notes whose faces I turned away from the light.  At times I feel like the Kaffir patriarch who prayed every night that there would be another nigger rising so that he could use the old gun again.

A child-prodigy and precocious youth, Coleridge by the time of the annus mirabilis was already “myriad-minded” (the monkish word that he chose to characterise Shakespeare) and had to a great extent taken upon himself the shape of his mature accomplishment – as Kathleen Coburn has described him: “Author of The Ancient Mariner and other unforgettable poems, great literary critic, psychologist, philosopher, theologian, lecturer, journalist, constructive critic of church and state” – to which add that he was a scientist of acute powers of observation and of a philosophic impulse no longer fashionable in the field of science.  A man who deplored his neglect of mathematics as much as he regretted his lack of training in music and painting, he was master of Greek, Latin, German and Italian, and above all English; he knew French (and read it when he could overcome his distaste for all things French), and could manage Spanish and Portuguese with a dictionary crutch; in the later years he renewed and extended his Christ’s Hospital training in Hebrew with the help of his friend Hyman Hurwitz, the first Professor of Hebrew in London University.  In the annus mirabilis he had said

I am, & ever have been, a great reader - & have read almost every thing – a library-cormorant – I am deep in all out of the way books, whether of the monkish times, or of   the puritanical aera ... I seldom read except to amuse myself - & I am almost always reading. –

If by twenty-five he had “read almost every thing,” he went on – at a rate often of eight hours a day – to read just about everything else.  I do not wish to argue that he was the learnedest clerk of all; for even he could not match the sheer quantity of learning and writing of an Aristotle, an Augustine, a Leonardo, a Luther, a Milton.  He knew far fewer languages than his youngest son Derwent was to master, fewer perhaps even than Robert Southey or than the nephew Herbert who was to be one of the founders of the Oxford English Dictionary.  Nevertheless, I place him firmly where neither his son Derwent nor his brother-in-law Southey belongs, in that noble company of minds that as editors we are drawn to honour and to explicate.

Paradoxically for a polymath, though probably not for a poet, Coleridge’s learning gives the impression not so much of manifoldness as of unity.  It is as though in the habitual activity of his mind and memory he embodied his own definition of poetry as “unity in multëity” – that is (to rephrase with clumsy polysyllabism), unity intersecting with multifarious particularity.  His memory, he said when not much more than a child, was “tenacious & systematizing.”  A mark of the power of his unifying tendency, his need to see everything as related to everything else without any loss of the definition of particulars, appears when you try to index his work: it is virtually impossible to index in the usual way under general categories of subject, theme, or content; but the individuality and integrity of single words and distinct phrases give precise access to crucial and memorable passages; given an index that consists largely of a concordance of words, the “Ferrets and Mouse-hunts” are greatly simplified.

Again, his attitude towards his own learning was unpossessive and functional; learning was for use, not adornment; it was to provide the springs of intellectual action.  He was always delighted to find some of his own most original discoveries anticipated by earlier writers, and searched diligently through the work of eccentric and neglected writers being certain that truth was one and abiding, and that it could show up very clearly, though sometimes “fantastically crowned with flowers,” in some very odd places.  He was entirely innocent of Newton’s agonising suspicion that other people wanted to rob him of all his original ideas: Coleridge wanted to give his away – and wrote in a notebook:

Why do you make a book?  Because my Hands can extend but a few score Inches from my Body; because my poverty keeps those Hands empty when my Heart aches to empty them; because my Life is short, & [because of] my Infirmities; & because a Book, if it extends but to one Edition, will probably benefit three or four on whom I could not otherwise have acted; & should it live & deserve to live, will make ample Compensation for all the afore-stated Infirmities.

He asked “What is a thought but I-thinking?”  What he took up into his mind became active from within.  His word “intellecturition” (like its sister-term “percepturition”) conveys his feeling that the intellect is impelled by desire or longing to realise itself, to make itself real, to bring itself to birth.

Knowledge became for him intelligence in the form of cognitive action; and even though the power to act too often slipped through his own grasp, action was in his view the distinctive ground and signature of human integrity, the sovereign ensign of the shaping initiative that distinguishes human beings from psychic mechanisms.  And for all his curious and multiform learning – as much unlike the cluttered stage-setting of Aubrey’s Brief Lives as may be –, we find the universe of his knowledge a “mindscape” under a wide sky; like Hopkins’s “inscape” it is dynamic and (in Coleridge’s phrase) “counterfeits infinity.”  The problem Coleridge presents us with is not how to duplicate his knowledge, but rather how to enter the universe of his mind and find out how to be at ease there.  Beyond that, we need as editors to find a way of opening – or at least of not allowing to remain closed – a way into that universe so that the reader can go there and be taken for a native of the country, and (like the moon and stars in the gloss to The Ancient Mariner) “enter unannounced, as lords that are certainly expected and yet there is a silent joy at their arrival.”

I shall not afflict you with a “paroxysm of citations” to endorse these suggestions.  But I should like to read a couple of passages that show Coleridge reflecting upon the quality of knowing, upon the way we get to know and learn, how our ability to learn is affected by the intentional disposition of our minds.  First a notebook entry of February-May 1807, which is also echoed in a marginal note of similar date on Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations.

In all processes of the Understanding the shortest way will be discovered the last, and this perhaps while it constitutes the great advantage of having a Teacher to put us on the shortest road at the first, yet sometimes occasions a difficulty in the comprehension – / in as much as the longest way is more near to the existing state of the mind, nearer to what, if left to myself on starting the thought, I should have thought next.  – The shortest way gives me the knowledge best; the longest way makes me more knowing.

Again, in August 1820 he is writing to his eldest son Hartley, giving him advice on how to study, how to think heuristically.

We proceed – / at a tortoise or pedicular Crawl ... there is no other way of attaining a clear and productive Insight ... all impatience is an infallible Sympton that the Inquirer is not seeking the Truth for Truth’s sake, but only a truth or something that may pass for such, in order to some alien End. ... There is no way of arriving at any sciential End but     by finding it at every step.  The End is in the Means: or the adequacy of each Mean is already its end.  Southey once said to me: You are nosing every nettle along the Hedge, while the Greyhound (meaning himself, I presume) wants only to get sight of the Hare, & FLASH! – strait as a line! – he has it in his mouth! – Even so, I replied, might a Cannibal say to an Anatomist, whom he had watched dissecting a body.  But the fact is – I do not    care twopence for the Hare; but I value most highly the excellencies of scent, patience, discrimination, free Activity; and find a Hare in every Nettle, I make myself acquainted  with.  I follow the Chamois-Hunters, and seem to set out with the same Object.  But I am no Hunter of that Chamois Goat; but avail myself of the Chace in order to a nobler purpose – that of making a road across the Mountains, of which Common Sense may hereafter pass backward and forward, without desperate Leaps or Balloons that soar indeed but do not improve the chance of getting onward.–

In the “Essays on the Principles of Method” – very Baconian and quintessentially Coleridgean –, first written as an introduction to the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana and later, after being published in garbled form, placed in purified and expanded form in a position of honour near the end of the three-volume Friend of 1818; Coleridge gave much thought to the education of the mind: the need for order, patience, the suspension of deliberate will, and how in the growth and development of a line of thinking towards clarity there is need, as in the mental development of children, for “a period in which the method of nature is working for them; a period of aimless activity and unregulated accumulation, during which it is enough if we can preserve them in health and out of harm’s way.”  For with him it is a first principle of education that “all true and living knowledge proceeds from within ... it may be trained, supported, fed, excited, but can never be infused or impressed.”  Here it is that we come on the phrase that I chose for my title: “the self-unravelling clue.”  When he uses that phrase to explain the word “Method” we recognise again Coleridge as the Pointer, the undirected Chamois-Hunter, and we see Method as his special heuristic way of getting any particular thing done, of (in Bacon’s phrase) “hunting by scent,” not forcing the issue by predetermined formula.  The issue, and the specification of it, arises from our need to find

some ground common to the world and to man, [w]herein to find the one principle of permanence and identity ... to which the soul may cling amid the fleeting surge-like objects of the senses. ...

In order therefore to the recognition of himself in nature man must first learn to comprehend nature in himself, and its laws in the ground of his own existence.  Then only can he reduce Phaenomena to Principles – then only will he have achieved the METHOD, the self-unravelling clue, which alone can securely guide him to the conquest of the former [i.e. phaenomena] – when he has discovered in the basis of their union the necessity of their differences; in the principle of their continuance the solution of their changes.

It would seem then that for Coleridge inquiry in the finest sense is not the analytic or logical solution of questions, but the discovery of a line of approach or an arc of action that will disclose those questions which, by seeking to be answered, generate in the inquirer a self-realising and self-finding activity.  In editing, much can be done, and has to be done, by annotating details – dates, references, sources, real persons and incidents, historical and mythological identities, lexical meanings of unusual or new words, historical changes in the meanings of common words.  This is the least that an editor can do, and – whether or not he does it con amore – he must do it accurately, for it is irritating not to know what a crossjack yard is (or how to pronounce it), or (with Coleridge in a ship at sea) not to know what futtock shrouds are, or why “knots an hour” is a solecism, or to be unaware that “protagonist” divides at prot- and not at pro-, or that the first element in John Donne’s title Biathanatos is not to do with “life” but with “violence.”  But even this has to be done civilly and deftly, falling back if need be upon that gracious Pepysian formula “As Your Lordships are doubtless aware,” which is still in Naval correspondence the conventional way of correcting one’s superiors without giving punishable offence.  For what editor, no matter how solicitous of the temper of his reader, can say what the unknown reader knows or wants to know?

If you ask a learned person how he knew some arcane detail – the name of the second highest mountain in Wales, say – he will probably give a circular reply, “It’s the sort of thing one knows.”  The instinct for fertile knowledge belongs to the jackdaw rather than to the deliberate researcher; the person who goes in search of what he thinks he knows he needs too often comes home with trophies from the fishmonger; often the best hunter in the thickets and pools of imagination is the person who absent-mindedly picks up things he likes the look of without having any idea how he might use them or for what.  At least the history of the genesis of The Ancient Mariner as given by John Livingston Lowes confirms this remarkable dreamwork, and Coleridge’s notebooks and marginalia confirm it at almost every turn of the page.  This indeed is an aspect of the self-unravelling clue; for it is also a vivid image of the baffling enclosedness of cause as defined by its effect, of fate as the activity of the law of the moral world and of our nature generated by ourselves from within yet nonetheless acting upon us from without, of necessity ( ἀνάγκη, anangke) as not the intrusion from without of an alien will or a blind mechanism, but simply the way things work out being what they are, and the way the laws of our nature and of our inner and private world are in turn defining forms of necessity.

I should like to have said something about Coleridge’s sources and how he uses them, and particularly about the transforming catalysis that makes almost everything he takes up into his mind distinctively and identifiably his own without renouncing or dishonouring its source; and from that I should have liked to infer a theory of literary influence on an analogy other than the commonplace of orchard robbery.  I should also have liked to speak in some detail about Coleridge’s use of language, his hundreds of new words, and his use of old words in new senses; some new words jocular, some uncouth, many elegant and memorable, and some so useful that they have slipped into everyday use without our being aware of their origin.  His word-making serves most spectacularly his need for finer and finer distinctions, for more exact “desynonymization,” his name for the fastidious process of disentangling confused or carelessly alternating terms by which he hoped, not simply to purify the language, but also to discover hitherto unrecognised entities, and what grounds for significant discrimination are veiled or undermined – as is often deliberately done in sophistical argument – by the impersonation of terms.

Coleridge made new words and used old ones in new senses for many purposes.  In crucial passages of discourse he regularly succeeded in releasing from within a self-declarative principle at once semantic and functional.  I have mentioned the desiderative word “intellecturition.”  Let me offer one other word that Coleridge put to special use: a Greek word that arises from his attempt to understand and render into words the creation of the world and the way all things come into being – the same inquiry that informs the note on Jakob Böhme’s Aurora part of which (if you can make it out) was reproduced in the poster announcing our conference.  The Greek word is τò ἄπειρον (tō apeiron), the exact verbal equivalent to the Latin infinitum and the English “infinite” – α-πειρον/in-finitum – meaning “without limit, without boundary,” perhaps even in Blake’s phrase ‘without bounding line”; but the Greek word, unlike the Latin, has a definite article to turn the neuter adjective into a noun.  In Coleridge’s use of τò ἄπειρον in other closely related annotations in this copy of Böhme the sense of the Greek word points in one direction, and the Latin word in the other.  The Latin word, and with it the English “infinite,” has by now assumed exclusively the mentally centrifugal implication of something so vast or distant that its outer limits (fines) cannot be determined, whereas τò ἄπειρον – in a sense that Coleridge seems to think of as Heraclitan as well as Platonic (though it was more probably Anaximander’s usage to begin with) – means any “thing,” no matter how small, that has no defining outline or envelope.  This second sense is centripetal, implicitly the inverse image of the first.  It stands for “the coagulation of Chaos,” representing matter in the process of creation on a sub-microscopic scale rather than as being of a cosmic largeness.  In Coleridge’s imagining, Chaos is not confusion, any more than it is in “The Representation of Chaos” in Haydn’s Creation.  “The whole Universe” – quoting from the note on Aurora (Coleridge Marginalia 1:562) – “must be represented as a single transparent Drop – a divine Chaos, not as the confused Commixture of all Distincts, but as the identity of them all”; and τò ἄπειρον is potential matter at the instant of realising itself, of making the astonishing transition from nothing to something; although it was some real and imaginable sense primordially some-thing, it is in this instant conceived as passing from formless potential into shapely and actual particularity.  So we return again to “unity in multëity.”

The Greek word τò ἄπειρον does not always or even necessarily mean exactly what I have explained, either in the pre-Socratics or even in Coleridge; but that meaning very clearly lies hidden within the word, and Coleridge – catching a glimpse of that striking possibility, and finding that it exactly and tantalizingly fitted his purpose – held the word for a time to that exceptional meaning, not by assigning a private or arbitrary meaning to it, nor even by overtly defining it to show what he meant, but by holding it to its radical meaning and allowing it to define itself in its context.  This would scarcely have been possible with the word “infinite” except through very elaborate preparation and specification – if then; but to a reader sensitive to the radical meaning of the elements of the word in Greek the word written in Greek does not mean (in our now-usual sense) “infinite” and therefore can function as Coleridge wished and as he had seen it meaning – or thought he had – in Anaximander, or Heraclitus, or Plato.

By turning back to the vocabulary of the pre-Socratic philosophers (whose writings were only just beginning to be carefully assembled in his own day) Coleridge had by a feat of sympathetic imagination reimaged on a minute scale the creation of the world as they had imagined it, and thereby calls back to us “the coagulation of Chaos” – if at sight of the Greek characters we pick up the precise intonation of that single diamond-sharp talismanic word shaped to that singular meaning in the context provided by his own peculiar verbal sensibility.  It is as though τò ἄπειρον, the unrealised, the undifferentiated, had desired to be brought into existence and in doing so had disclosed the first principle of self-realisation through self-definition.^[2]  It was Coleridge’s way to notice that “nature” – natura – is a future participle, meaning “things about to come to birth.”

But those are the sort of things that need a little sea-room and are not easy to catch in a footnote.

As though the range of knowledge that we need if we are to come to terms with a polymath were not charge enough upon an editor, each of us will probably also be haunted by the fact that everything he touches – if he is sure he need touch it and would not do better to leave it alone and keep silence – will affect the imaginatively invented mindscape of his original.  The most serious effect is the unavoidable dislocation of emphasis that occurs whenever we draw attention to what was only in the back of the author’s mind, or try to explain things that the author never needed an explanation for, or raise questions about the sources and origins of things that – by whatever means we cannot say – came into his mind.  When Coleridge was young he was thought by some to be “clever ... and extremely vain of it.”  Perhaps as a boy he was aware of his own brilliance and – as he himself admitted – sometimes showed off a little; but he soon lost that tendency in a much more endearing, more generous, habit.  At once lonely and gregarious, he seems usually to have assumed, as a gesture of hospitality, that the person he was speaking to naturally knew what he knew and shared the same mental universe.  But nobody can penetrate or reproduce the axiomatic climate of any person’s mind or memory – the way everything falls into place and belongs simply because it is there and somehow it all fits together without effort or strain.  We could agree that by intuition some sympathetic sharing is possible.  I wonder whether it comes about through that quality of genius that we have kept returning to – the generosity and largeness, the ample grace, out of which genius makes an unself-conscious gesture of hospitable invitation to us as though to equals.

In The Lyttleton Hart-Davis Letters, Rupert Hart-Davis has said that “Good editing, like good printing, should be so suited to its subject as to be taken for granted.”  Perhaps much of the dignity and satisfaction of our work is in its self-effacingness.  I hope that if I speak for myself I shall also speak for all the distinguished and learned editors who have met here to tell us about their work and to be honoured for it.

We begin in wonder and respect, and are all the time sustained by a sense of delight, at the quality of the original we are working on, at the intricacy of our craft, and at the small day-to-day satisfactions that are hardly communicable to the reader unless somehow in the physical texture of the way we handle our materials.  In the end, even though the editor may justly have raised a monumental structure worthy of admiration in its own right, we hope for a luminous anonymity that pays tribute to genius, to the copious powers and compass of the human mind, the grace of imagination, the fertility of intelligence.  And out of our visits to the “dark adyta,” and our elaborations and explications, and after all the hazardous trials of tact, there – with a little bit of luck – will stand the object of our inquiry – forthright, actually present in his own person, speaking in his own voice, in his “plainness, and brightness.”  For the self-unravelling clue leads to the beginning.  What we seek is not the explanation of the great learning, but the clear and fashioned embodiment of it in the writing itself: himself wearing his learning lightly; the author, the original.