University of Virginia Library

II

The evidence is unequivocal for concluding that these two leaves of Notebook 29 provide the continuation and completion of the incomplete text of the unrevised essay contained in the Duke manuscript. For example, the crucial sentence fragments (the one at the end of the Duke manuscript and the other at the beginning of the Berg) constitute a coherent sentence when joined together. Beyond this quite substantial evidence, there are the facts that Nature, the subject of the Berg pages, is clearly the subject of the final Duke pages and that the general theme of the essay is carried to its conclusion in the Berg pages. And conclusive evidence is found in the physical properties of the documents. Besides what one would normally expect — the facts that the documents match in their papers, in their formats, and in the general spacing of the inscriptions made by Green — one piece of physical evidence clearly indicates that the Duke pages formerly were bound in Notebook 29 just before folio 118. For between folios 119 and 118 a conspicuous separation in the binding of the book

occurs. From the fragments of paper clinging to the binding thread at this point, one plainly must conclude that leaves have been torn out of the book. These fragments belong to one and the same gathering of two leaves, and they adhere to the 119 side of the break. Naturally, one would look for the mates of these fragments in the initial leaves of the Duke manuscript. As previously noted, the initial Duke leaf is disjunct. Furthermore, it has been trimmed along its gutter edge in a straight line, and, as a result, it measures 7¾ inches from this inner edge to the outer edge. But all other leaves of both the Duke manuscript and the notebook measure 8 inches. Thus, the initial Duke leaf wants ¼ inch, and it is no accident, certainly, that ¼ inch is the exact width of the largest fragments adhering to the binding of Notebook 29.

It is safe, therefore, to assume that the Duke leaves were once bound in Notebook 29 between the folios now numbered 119 and 118, and that they were torn out and rebound after the entire essay had been copied into the notebook. For the word 'by' on the first page was covered when the leaves were rebound, and it is not at all likely that a certain number of leaves were first torn out, the essay subsequently copied onto them, and the copying continued on the succeeding leaves yet part of the book. We may conclude, then, that Green transcribed Coleridge's essay into Notebook 29 and that either he or Coleridge failed to extract folios 118 and 117 when tearing out the thirteen leaves. These leaves were thereupon bound as a unit. The continuation and completion of the text of these leaves is provided by the pages remaining in Notebook 29; the entire extant document of the essay in its early form — as conceived by Coleridge and transcribed by Green in 1821 — has now been recovered.

Unfortunately, it is not quite as apparent that this early form of the essay was composed in 1821 to aid Hartley in writing his poetic adaptation of Prometheus Bound, for we have no manifest proof that it was. Although second-person pronouns appear, Hartley is not addressed by name in the manuscript, and neither he, his father, nor anyone else whose mere word might have sufficed has identified this particular manuscript with the essay reportedly written for Hartley in or around May 1821. However, the evidence which does exist suggests strongly that this essay and our manuscript are identical.

We know, for instance, that the transcription of the essay must have been made between November 1817, when Coleridge met Green, and early 1825, when Green ceased acting as amanuensis for Coleridge.[6] It is not likely, therefore, that Green made the transcription for the 1825 lecture. Nor, to take another tack, is it likely that Coleridge composed the essay prior to 1819. Before this year there is no mention of a composition on Aeschylus' Prometheus, whereas Coleridge's 1818 letters abound with references

to the work on the two courses of lectures of 1818 and the revision of The Friend. This evidence, then, indicates that the essay in its earlier form was composed and transcribed sometime after 1818 but before early 1825.

Other evidence points more precisely to a probable date of composition and transcription. The letters of Hartley and of his father reveal that in early 1820 Hartley was contemplating a translation of Aeschylus in which the Prometheus, he wrote, would "serve as a sort of text, for some observations on the sacerdotal religion of Greece, and on the sources and spirit of mythology."[7] Hartley's project was to be entered in competition for the prize essay at Oriel. Greek drama was on Coleridge's mind also, and he mentioned specifically Hartley's and his own work on an essay dealing with the prosody of the Greek dramatists, though he seems to have supported the Prometheus project as well.[8]

These plans were upset, of course, by the dismissal of Hartley from Oriel in the spring of 1820, ostensibly on account of his unscholarly ways and his weakness for drink. By August 1820, his father had settled him with Basil Montagu in Bedford Square. There he was to continue his work on Greek drama. Though Coleridge continued for a while to concentrate on the essay on prosody,[9] Hartley's interests turned him in the direction of a poem based on Aeschylus' Prometheus, and on 19 February 1821 he wrote to his brother Derwent, "Prometheus prospers" (Letters of Hartley Coleridge, no. 18). Apparently it did indeed prosper, for according to Derwent the poetic fragment was a principal occupation during Hartley's stay in Bedford Square and had been completed virtually, though perhaps not in every detail, by May 1821, before Coleridge wrote his essay on the metaphysics of Aeschylus' tragedy.[10]

Derwent's testimony is confirmed by Coleridge's own remarks on the subject. He wrote to Derwent in a letter postmarked 16 May 1821:

Set beside this statement, the words of the manuscript immediately following the point where the revisions cease and where the lecture ends take on substantial significance. Clearly the essay in its early form was composed for someone close to Coleridge who was writing a poem the "subject" of which was Aeschylus' Prometheus;[12] clearly his father knew that Hartley was writing a poem on this subject at this time. Moreover, it is evident that the manuscript additionally fits the description that Coleridge gave of his essay: the accumulated materials amount to "a small volume almost" on the subject,

As a matter of fact, these accumulated materials seem to have crippled the wings of Hartley's Pegasus, as Coleridge himself intimates,[13] and indeed Derwent, who was kept informed throughout of the project and was at Highgate with Coleridge and Hartley in the summer of 1821, affirms that the views of the Prometheus expressed in Coleridge's lecture are identical with those which in May 1821 discouraged Hartley's poetic efforts.[14] Since, as will be indicated shortly, the manuscript contains the germ and much of the substance of the lecture, Derwent's affirmation is plainly tantamount to an identification of the essay of 1821 with that of the manuscript at Duke.

Whether or not the manuscript at Duke was the very one given to Hartley is another matter. The evidence is not conclusive but indicates that it was. Coleridge's principal aim was to present Hartley with the "small volume," and the manuscript appears to be just that. The first page, containing the words 'by the Author, S. T. Coleridge' but no text, gives the effect of a title page, and had the purpose of Green's transcription been to preserve a copy of the essay in the notebook for Coleridge's use, it is unlikely that the text would have been begun on the second page and that Green would have identified the author. The wrapper, which contains Coleridge's inscription of equations that later became part of the lecture

(Works, p. 347), had certainly been added to the manuscript by the time Coleridge revised it. Presumably Coleridge, accidentally overlooking the final two leaves of the essay, tore out the Duke leaves, had them bound, handed the manuscript to Hartley in 1821 during one of his visits to Highgate, and in late 1822 repossessed the manuscript before Hartley left London for a teaching position in the Lake Country. All that we know, then, points to the conclusion that the leaves at Duke and those at the Berg Collection constitute the "small volume" written for Hartley in 1821.