Abstract
Readers who are familiar with the nineteenth-century view of Coleridge as a man living in a cloud of metaphysical lore may be surprised to find that, as his notebooks convincingly show, he spent countless hours as ‘an Eye-servant of the Goddess Nature’ (CL; I, 658), taking painstaking notes on landscapes. Those looking for signs of Coleridge’s conversion to transcendentalist thought in the journals and letters written during his trip to Germany (1798–9) might be disappointed to discover that Coleridge seems to have been more impressed by the look of the German countryside than by the disputes of German philosophers, though, of course, he did not neglect the latter. The sheer bulk of Coleridge’s descriptive prose accumulated during the German tour and later travels in the Lake District, Scotland and Italy should by itself dispel the theory that external objects had little bearing on Coleridge’s mind and lend support to the view that nature for Coleridge had ‘her own proper interest’.1 Wherever he travelled, Coleridge was attentive to the most minute and rapidly changing phenomena in a landscape, patiently describing the diverse appearances of objects both far and near and nervously straining his eyes to encompass the perpetually varying activity of nature, ‘an ever industrious Penelope for ever unraveling what she had woven, for ever weaving what she had unraveled’.2
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes and References
Humphry House, Coleridge (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1953) p. 54. I am in complete agreement with House’s claim that by ‘minimizing the importance to Coleridge of the external world in which he lived, we run the risk of diverting attention from some of his most characteristic strengths as a writer — from his power of detailed poetic description of objects in nature; from his power of attuning moods of emotion to landscape and movements of weather; of using the shapes and shifts and colours of nature as symbols of emotional and mental states. Even his critical idealism, whether expressed in poems or in his more technical philosophy, is grounded in a minute analysis of the phenomena of sense’ (p. 14).
CN, ii, 2351. This note is an adaptation of the following passage from Herder’s Kailigone, a work which Coleridge was annotating at the time (see Part III, nn. 19–25): ‘sie [die Natur] schafft, indem sie zerstört, und zerstört indem sie schaffet, eine immer emsige Penelope, die ihren Schleier webt und trennt, trennt und webet’. (‘she [Nature] creates as she destroys, and destroys as she creates, an ever industrious Penelope who is weaving and unravelling, unravelling and weaving her veil’.) Herders Sàmmtliche Werke, ed. Bernard Suphan, 33 vols (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1877–1913) xxii (1880) 127. In an early fragment on nature (1783), Goethe expresses a similar perception of the continuous process of making and unmaking which goes on in the natural world: ‘Sie [die Natur] schafft ewig neue Gestallen; was da ist war noch nie, was war kommt nicht wieder — Alles ist neu und dock immer das Alte … Sie haut immer und zerstört immer und ihre Werkstätte ist unzugänglich.’ ( ‘She [Nature] creates for ever new forms; what is now was never before, what was before will never come again -Everything is new, and yet the old … She builds continually and demolishes continually and her workmanship remains inscrutable.’)
Goethes Werke, Hamburger Ausgabe, 14 vols (Hamburg: Christian Wegner Verlag, 1955) xiii, 45.
The locus classicus of Wordsworth’s indictment of the picturesque is Bk xii of The Prelude, ll. 109–39. Yet the roots of Wordsworth’s early interest in the picturesque had grown much deeper than the poet acknowledges in this passage. On this issue see J. R. Watson, Picturesque Landscape and English Romantic Poetry (London: Hutchinson Educational, 1970) particularly pp. 93–107, and
Russell Noyes, Wordsworth and the Art of Landscape (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968).
Coleridge was critical, however, of certain affectations caused by the picturesque, as exemplified by a group of ladies he once saw in the Lake District who were reading Gilpin ‘while passing by the very places instead of looking at the places’ (CN, i, 760). He also took issue with specific claims advanced by individual writers of the picturesque. See for instance his marginal comments to Richard Payne Knight’s An Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste published by Edna Aston Shearer in ‘Wordsworth and Coleridge Marginalia in a Copy of Richard Payne Knight’s Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 1 (1937) 63–99.
This review has been attributed to Coleridge by David Erdman. See ‘Immoral Acts of a Library Cormorant’, Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 63 (1959) 515–16.
Cf. The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Middle Years, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937) i, 2–3.
Price, An Essay on the Picturesque as Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful, 1st edn (London, 1794) p. 17: ‘It seems to me, that the neglect, which prevails in the works of modern improvers, of all that is picturesque, is owing to their exclusive attention to high polish and flowing lines, the charms of which they are so engaged in contemplating, as to make them overlook two of the most fruitful sources of human pleasure; the first, that great and universal source of pleasure, variety … ; the other intricacy, a quality which, though distinct from variety, is so connected and blended with it, that the one can hardly exist without the other.’
For Burke’s conception of the beautiful see A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (New York: Collier & Son, 1909) esp. Part iii. For a discussion of Burke’s theory of the sublime see Part iii, pp. 102–4.
On the importance of play in picturesque aesthetics see Martin Price, ‘The Picturesque Moment’, From Sensibility to Romanticism, ed. Frederick W. Hilles and Harold Bloom (Oxford University Press, 1965) pp. 270–5.
See e.g. CN, i, 1468 quoted on p. 14 above. Gilpin defined the picturesque as ‘that kind of beauty which would look well in a picture’. Observations on the Western Parts of England (London, 1798) p. 238. Uvedale Price contested Gilpin’s definition, arguing that it is imprecise and leads to the conclusion that all objects in art are picturesque, since ‘any object in painting will please, or else the painter wouldn’t have chosen it’. An Essay on the Picturesque, ch. iii. A brief history of the various meanings of the term ‘picturesque’ is traced by W. J. Hippie in The Beautiful, the Sublime, and the Picturesque in Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetic Theory (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1957) pp. 185–91. The entanglements between the terms ‘picturesque’ and ‘romantic’ in Germany, England and France are carefully studied by
Raymond Immerwahr in Romantisch. Genese und Tradition einer Denkform (Frankfurt: Athenaum, 1972) particularly chs i and ii. This study offers authoritative information concerning the influence of the English tradition of the picturesque on the German romantics.
As Patricia Ball notes, Coleridge ‘is never reluctant to treat a picture as a point of departure for a verbal impression in which he can evoke and stress the animation of nature, only present in the picture by implication … He extols the painter’s method simply because it meets his own evaluation of the importance of visual experience, epitomizing the immediacy of an encounter with the world outside the self.’ The Science of Aspects: The Changing Role of Fact in the Work of Coleridge, Ruskin and Hopkins (London: Athlone Press, 1971) pp. 19–21.
Looking at Coleridge’s transcription of a waterfall from one of Beaumont’s pictures, Patricia Ball remarks that ‘Coleridge responds to it in a way almost indistinguishable from a personal encounter with a cataract’ (The Science of Aspects, p. 19). In a letter to Beaumont, Coleridge himself talks about his identical response to a landscape drawing and an actual scene in nature: ‘Of the poems on your Sketches, dear Sir George! I hope thus much / that they will give evidence that the Drawings acted upon my mind as Nature does, in it’s [sic] after workings — they have mingled with my Thoughts, & furnished Forms to my Feelings’ (CL, ii, 1004). The similarity between Coleridge’s descriptions of paintings and of natural objects could mean equally that he gave priority to art over nature or to nature over art. The aesthetics of the picturesque itself, despite the emphasis it placed on the study of the arts, encouraged a flexible transaction between art and nature and, as Karl Kroeber points out, brought about a ‘disposition to conceive of both the natural and the artificial less as absolutes than as terms of an interactive relation’. Romantic Landscape Vision: Constable and Wordsworth (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975) p. 5.
George Whalley, ‘Coleridge’s Poetic Sensibility’, in Coleridge’s Variety: Bicentenary Studies, ed. John Beer (London: Macmillan, 1974) pp. 8–9.
Coleridge was keenly interested in the subject of space and time and frequently tried to define these concepts and their relationship to each other. From Kant’s Inaugural Dissertation De Mundi sensibilis atque intelligibilis forma et principiis (1770) and the Transcendental Dialectic of the first Critique he adopted the view that space and time were universal forms of sensible intuition. Cf. CN, i, 887, CN, iii, 3973 and nn., CL, iv, 851–2, P Lect, pp. 389–90, L & L, p. 121, and Coleridge’s marginalia to Thomas Taylor’s Proclus in CN, i, Appendix B, pp. 456–7. In later works influenced by the German Naturphilosophen Coleridge developed a theory of polar interaction and interdependence of space and time. Space is generally classified as the force of infinite repulsion or diffusion and time as the counterforce of attraction. Time, Coleridge argued, cannot be conceived without space and vice versa. By itself time remains a ‘spaceless point’ and represents the ‘power of unity and active negation, i.e. retraction, determination, and limit, ab intra’. On the other hand, space without time becomes a force of ‘infinite repulsion, uncounteracted and alone’ which ‘is tantamount to infinite, dimensionless diffusion, and this again to infinite weakness’ (TL, p. 582). For similar views on the interaction of space and time see The Friend, i, 117 and n. 1, and Coleridge’s letter to C. A. Tulk of September 1817, CL, iv, 770–5. Coleridge was also interested in mental experiences of space and time, and he recorded a curious phenomenon of metamorphosis of time into space during states of sleep, disease or opium-induced hallucinations. Cf. CL, ii, 478 and CN, i, 1823. For a discussion of Coleridge’s poetic representation of space see Michael G. Cooke, ‘The Manipulation of Space in Coleridge’s Poetry’, New Perspectives in Coleridge and Wordsworth: Selected Papers from the English Institute, ed. Geoffrey H. Hartman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972) pp. 165–94.
Lessing, Laocoon, trans. Ellen Frothingham (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1890) p. 106.
This is an edited version of an earlier note written in November 1799. Cf. CN, i, 582. For an analysis of this entry see John Beer, Coleridge’s Poetic Intelligence (London: Macmillan, 1977) p. 230. On Coleridge’s frequent use of the image of starlings see George Whalley, ‘Coleridge’s Poetic Sensibility’, pp. 10–11.
Irving Massey, The Uncreating Word: Romanticism and the Object (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970) p. 54.
Gilpin, Observations of Cumberland and Westmoreland, i, xxii, Quoted by John R. Nabholtz, ‘Dorothy Wordsworth and the Picturesque’, Studies in Romanticism, 3 (1964) 128.
The tensions caused by pantheism in Coleridge’s early poetry have been analysed by Albert Gerard in English Romantic Poetry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968) ch. 3. On Coleridge’s lifelong struggle with pantheism see McFarland’s authoritative study, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition.
For his observation that dreams were caused by states of the body Coleridge may have been indebted to the theories formulated by Hobbes, Hartley and Erasmus Darwin. See David S. Miall, ‘The Meaning of Dreams: Coleridge’s Ambivalence’, Studies in Romanticism, 21 (1982) 57–71.
See Knight’s note to the second edition of his poem Landscape printed in Price, A Dialogue on the Distinct Characters of the Picturesque and the Beautiful, in Answer to the Objections of Mr. Knight (London, 1801) pp. 89–90.
Copyright information
© 1985 Raimonda Modiano
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Modiano, R. (1985). Coleridge and the Picturesque. In: Coleridge and the Concept of Nature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-07135-7_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-07135-7_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-07137-1
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-07135-7
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)