III. An Analytic Narrative of the Making of the Biographia
Literaria
The account of the Biographia's pre-composition,
supplied
in its essentials by Shawcross, was given its most elegant and
thought-provoking examination by George Whalley in 1953 and is
summarized most clearly by George Watson in the introduction to his
edition of the text (BL-Watson, pp. ix-xii).[5] The first piece of evidence is a
letter of
9 October 1800 to Humphry Davy (A) in which Coleridge says that he is
even more interested in writing "An Essay on the Elements of
Poetry" than in a long-contemplated work on Lessing. In 1802,
Coleridge wrote two letters (B and C) which contain, according to M. H.
Abrams, "the most revealing clues to Coleridge's standpoint and intention
in his debate with Wordsworth."[6]
Writing to Sotheby and Southey in July of 1802, Coleridge stresses in his
plans for a work "Concerning Poetry" the discovery of "a radical
difference" between himself and Wordsworth. This early plan, intended to
make clear Coleridge's growing discomfort with Wordsworth's Preface to
the 1800 edition of
Lyrical Ballads (an essay Coleridge calls
"half a child of my own Brain"), leads Watson to suggest that the
conception of the Preface in the Vale of Grasmere in 1800 is "the first
recorded moment in the life" of the
Biographia
(
BL-Watson, p. ix). In addition, Whalley cites a notebook
entry
of 1803 (D): "Seem to have made up my mind to write my metaphysical
works as
my life &
in my
life—intermixed with
all the other events or history of the mind & fortunes of S. T.
Coleridge."
[7] Thus, in the opening
years of the century, Coleridge possessed the main elements of the
Biographia, both in its intense concern with
speculation arising from his experience of Wordsworth and in its
autobiographical intention.
Yet between August of 1803 (the date of the notebook entry) and
March of 1815, when the story of the Biographia resumes,
there
is no evidence that Coleridge so much as contemplated a literary
autobiography.[8] These were the
poet's blackest years, blighted by opium addiction and its attendant woes:
financial insecurity, physical deterioration, the paralyzing torment of guilt
about his apparent self-destruction, and the erosion of his
personal relations. His friendship with Wordsworth was severely tried, and
their rupture of 1810 was still fresh in Coleridge's mind when he settled
with the family of John Morgan in early 1815. His desire to protect himself
from Wordsworth by self-distinction, by drawing a clear line between
himself and a man whom he considered the greater poet, must have been
sharpened by his reflections on
The Excursion, which had
been
out for just half a year. We should picture Coleridge as he has passed the
threshold of middle age, at the end of a decade in which he had consulted
no fewer than seven doctors in his struggle to understand and master opium
addiction, viewing the productivity of his old comrade against the backdrop
of his own inanition, and tormented not least of all because
The
Excursion had disappointed his high expectations. If we also
consider
Coleridge's extreme financial anxieties, on his family's as well as on his
own behalf, we will gain a further, important
insight into his probable state of mind in the early spring of 1815.
Suddenly, in March of 1815, three letters indicate that Coleridge has
determined to undertake a large project. A letter to Joseph Cottle early in
the month (F) is the first signal of the long, remarkable burst of production
comprising, among other works, the Biographia,
Sibylline
Leaves, the revised three-volume Friend, and
The
Statesman's Manual. The work in hand, which Coleridge offers
Cottle as security for an advance of funds, is a volume of "my scattered
& my Manuscript Poems." Certain of refusal, he informs Cottle three
days later (G) that he has asked Thomas Hood to solicit an advance from
a group of friends in Bristol, Mss Poems equal to one volume of 250 to 300
pages being sent to them immediately." Hood complied, and the labor
which would culminate in both Sibylline Leaves and the
Biographia began.[9]
Evidently Coleridge thought the volume of poems could be completed
rapidly. At the end of March,
he writes Lord Byron (H) and petitions for his good offices in finding a
publisher for the collection, now envisaged as two volumes.[10] "A general Preface," he tells
Byron, "will
be pre-fixed, on the Principles of philosophic and genial
criticism relatively to the Fine Arts in general; but especially to Poetry."
Both volumes would "be ready for the press by the first week in
June."
[11]
The next two months, April and May, were spent in gathering
Coleridge's poems, editing them, and trying (unsuccessfully, despite his
attempts to talk a good game) to add new verse to the collection. He is thus
engaged when he writes to Lady Beaumont early in April (I), requesting
that she send him her manuscript copy of his poem "To William
Wordsworth." He explains that he is collecting poems to "be put to press
by the middle of June." In May, after receiving a copy of Wordsworth's
1815 edition of his poems, Coleridge had to deal with Wordsworth's written
request for an explanation of criticism of The Excursion
passed
on to him by Lady Beaumont from Coleridge's April letter to her (see
CL, IV, 570-571). On 30 May, when Coleridge replies to
Wordsworth (J), he is back on the schedule he had announced to Byron, for
he has, he tells Wordsworth, "only to finish a Preface which I shall have
done in two or at farthest three days." The poems, he must have thought
then, were
finally ready, and the "general Preface," which he had left till last, was
such that it would be short work indeed.
At this point we encounter the most tangled problem in the history of
the text. For all of June and July—the first two of the four critical
months in the composition of the Biographia—we have
but
one piece of evidence, Coleridge's letter of 29 July to R. H. Brabant (K).
To be sure, this letter contains the key to the major questions concerning
the birth of the Biographia. But it is a key which opens too
many doors, only one of which can be correct. The letter announces the
completion of a work which has fully occupied Coleridge for some time,
probably steadily throughout June and July. It is undoubtedly the work
which became the Biographia, for Coleridge calls it "an
Autobiographia literaria" and describes his having given "a full account .
. . of Wordsworth's Poems & Theory" and "a disquisition on the
powers
of association, with the History of the Opinions on this subject from
Aristotle to Hartley, and on the generic difference between the faculties of
Fancy and Imagination." So much is beyond dispute. What is in contention
is the evolution of the work as described in the first sentence of the
letter.
The letter to Brabant has been in the public domain since 1870, when
an inaccurate transcript of the manuscript was printed in the
Westminster Review. Because this was the only available text
of the letter until 1959, Shawcross in 1907 and Watson in 1956 arrived at
nearly identical conclusions about what it says. Shawcross with extreme
caution and Watson with the assurance that the evidence is "perfectly
explicit" surmise that Coleridge had by July of 1815 completed an
autobiography (BL-Watson, p. xiii). For, conjectures
Shawcross, "the original preface was either conceived as a literary
autobiography, or very soon took that form" (BL-Shawcross,
I, xc). By this account, Coleridge set out in July to write a preface to his
literary life. This got out of hand, for he found himself writing the long
critique of Wordsworth as well as at least part of the discussions of
association and of fancy and imagination. Since what Coleridge had planned
as a preface to "an Autobiographia literaria" had exceeded its limits, it "had
to be incorporated," as Shawcross puts it, "into the whole work"
(
BL-Shawcross, I, xc-xci). Shawcross believes that the work
sent to Gutch in 1815 did not include Chapter XXII, for he follows Dykes
Campbell's error in concluding that the Bristol printing ended with page
128, Volume II. Chapter XXII, says Shawcross, was not written until the
necessity of padding the
Biographia's second volume arose
in
1816. Watson holds that XXII was sent to Gutch in 1815. Since, however,
the Bristol printing stopped at the end of page 144 of Volume II, about
onethird of the way into Chapter XXII, and since printing
did not resume at page 145 until the spring of 1817, Watson suggests that
the final two-thirds of Chapter XXII may have been padded later (see
BL-Watson, pp. xvixvii).
[12] Otherwise, both Shawcross and
Watson
posit that the critique of Wordsworth, constituting Volume II of the
Biographia (excepting only the interpolated matter of 1817
and
the Conclusion) and a small portion of Volume I ("some part at least" of
the philosophical material, says Shawcross) were the additions of
midsummer 1815 to an already complete work comprising the greater part
of Volume I. Basically they would have it that the book was built from
bottom to top, Volume I preceding Volume II in composition.
Yet there are strong grounds for believing the opposite to have been
the case. Here is the first sentence of the letter to Brabant as read by
Shawcross and by Watson when he wrote his preface in 1956: "The
necessity of extending what I first intended as a preface to an
Autobiographia Literaria, or Sketches of my literary life and opinions, as
far as poetry and poetical
criticism are concerned, has confined me to my study from eleven to four
and from six to ten, since I last left you."
[13] Here is the same sentence, printed
in
accurate transcript for the first time by Griggs in 1959: "The necessity of
extending, what I first intended as a preface, to an Autobiographia literaria,
or Sketches of my literary Life & opinions, as far as poetry and
poetical Criticism is [are] concerned, has confined me to my
Study from 11 to 4, and from 6 to 10, since I last left you"
(
CL, IV, 578). All of the differences from the earlier printed
text of the letter are important, but the most telling difference is the
insertion of commas setting off the words "what I first intended as a
preface." Where Shawcross and Watson had read a compound noun, seeing
Coleridge as having enlarged a prefaceto-an-Autobiographia, Griggs's text
suggests, as he says, that "at no time did Coleridge propose a preface to his
autobiography. In his
letter of 29 July he refers to a preface to his poems" (
CL, IV,
578n.). For the comma severing "preface" from what Griggs reads as the
indirect object of "extending" (so that he understands Coleridge to have
extended the preface to the poems
into "an Autobiographia
literaria") makes the preface-to-an-Autobiographia reading less appealing.
One notes too that Griggs's transcript offers nothing with any typographical
resemblance to a book title. Coleridge's capitalization is old-fashioned (e.g.
"Criticism" and "Study" in the first sentence of the letter to Brabant) and
he does not always italicize the titles of books, yet it is rare to find titles in
which he has both omitted italics and left the initial letters of key words in
lower case. "Autobiographia literaria" is probably not a title to the work but
merely a description of its nature: it is probably, though extended, a preface
to the poems and not what Coleridge later called "a Work per se," which
would have merited,
if not italics, at least a capital "L" in "literaria." One might note that even
before the Griggs transcription appeared, George Whalley took issue with
Watson. Professor Whalley had always read the disputed sentence just as
Griggs reads it.
[14] Yet, in justice to
Watson's reconstruction, it must be admitted that the letter by itself cannot
"be interpreted with certainty" (
BL-Watson, p. xxi). That is,
Watson may still be right.
[15] But
tracking the story of the
Biographia one step further, we find
evidence which swings the balance of probability to Griggs's view.
Throughout August, Coleridge worked strenuously. He had two
projects on his hands, the final preparation of material for Sibylline
Leaves and of that for its extended preface, "an Autobiographia
literaria." He was sufficiently preoccupied to leave all of his
correspondence to John Morgan. Three letters of August, 1815, from
Morgan to Thomas Hood provide evidence for reconstruction of the events
of this period.[16] The most important
of the three, dated 10 August 1815 (L), accompanied the first dispatch of
material to the printer in Bristol, John Gutch. The work at issue is clearly
intended for Sibylline Leaves, for Morgan explains that the
delay in sending the remainder of the manuscript has been caused by an
allegedly minor difficulty in the "prefacing work," an essay already of such
length as to astonish Morgan ("you will see how rediculous it
wod be
to call it preface"). We may surmise that the "57 sides" sent to Bristol by
Morgan
in early August included some poems and, as Coleridge's letter to Gutch of
17 September indicates (Q), the first three chapters of the
Biographia. "The rest," wrote Morgan, "(full 100 sides) is
finished, and not finished— . . . there is a metaphysical part of about
5
or 6 sheets which must be revised or rather re-written." By "5 or 6 sheets"
Morgan might have meant ten or twelve sides of manuscript or "5 or 6
sheets" of octavo forms, comprising eighty or ninety-six pages. The first
alternative seems the more probable, first because Morgan, a layman, is
unlikely to have used "sheets" in its technical printer's sense, second
because Morgan, by his own account "no dreamer" ("my
facts
are not ideas you know"), is unlikely to have trusted the
unpredictable Coleridge to rewrite close to a hundred printed pages in only
"a few days."[17] The notes in this
letter and also in that of 14 August (M) about duplicating the design of
Wordsworth's
latest Preface are a further indication that Coleridge still intended his
"Autobiographia literaria" as a "prefacing work" to Sibylline
Leaves in the style of the famous Preface to which he saw himself
as
responding. Here, as throughout our story, we find reaction to Wordsworth
a major shaping force on the Biographia. On 17 August, the
date of the third August letter (N), Morgan still expects to post the
remaining material for Sibylline Leaves in short order.
But mid-September would pass before the work was complete. On 17
September (Q), Coleridge announces to Gutch a radical change in the plan
he had more or less held to since March. He freely admits that the August
promises of additional material for the press were a consequence of his
self-delusion "with the belief, that I should have finished & be
able to write myself [i.e., rather than Morgan in his stead] in the course of
a few days." Presumably the work which remained to be done on August
10, the revision of "5 or 6 sheets," had led to a further, demanding
expansion of the preface to the poems, so much so that it is now, in
mid-September, "not a Preface, nor any thing in the Nature of a Preface,
but a Work per se: I would fain have it printed in chapters." It has become,
moreover, "the
main work," for Coleridge has resolved not
to
print "Poems
and a Preface" but instead to issue
"Biographical
Sketches of my LITER-ARY LIFE, Principles and Opinions, chiefly on the
subjects of Poetry and Philosophy, and the Differences at present prevailing
concerning them both: by S. T. Coleridge. To which are
added,
Sibylline Leaves, or a Collection of Poems, by the same
Author."
[18] The new stress on
philosophy suggests that it was the enlargement of the "metaphysical part"
of the
Sibylline Leaves preface in August and the first half of
September of 1815 which changed the piece into "a Work per se." And
Coleridge's retraction of the August requests to emulate the design of
Wordsworth's Preface encourages the conclusion that his notion of the
"Autobiographia literaria" as an analogue to his friend's work had also
changed in the intervening weeks.
[19]
Probably on 19 September, the entire manuscript was sent to Bristol. In
letters of 29 September and 7 October (R and S) Coleridge says the work
has passed wholly out of his hands and into the printer's. "I have delivered
compleat to my printer . . . the Mss of two Volumes octavo," he tells John
May. And on 15 October (T), he informs Byron that the two volumes "are
now entire in the printer's possession." Although he was not yet done with
the project conceived in March of 1815, he thought that he was. Only an
unfortunate miscalculation extended his labor beyond the reading of the
proofsheets, which began to come to him in October. Printing of the
Biographia began in October, 1815, that of
Sibylline
Leaves a month later (
CL, IV, xlix).
Before pursuing the narration, I should like to set down what seems
to me, on the basis of the evidence underlying the foregoing account, the
most probable reconstruction of the evolution of the
Biographia
in 1815. In March, Coleridge made a plan to issue his poems in two
volumes, with a preface. But the preface, which at the end of May still
promised to be
a short essay, confined him to his study throughout June and July, when he
probably wrote the critique of Wordsworth (Chapters XIV-XXI and
certainly the first thirteen pages of Chapter XXII) and at least the first three
chapters of Volume I.
[20] To the
production of June and July we can probably add Chapter IV—which
in
addition to being a natural antecedent to Chapter XIV introduces the
Fancy-Imagination distinction— and Chapter V. It is likely that
Chapter
V, headed "On the law of association—Its history traced from
Aristotle
to Hartley," was behind Coleridge's description to Brabant of the
philosophical portion of his extension of the preface, "just finished" on 29
July. He must have realized, though, that Chapter V barely scratched the
surface of his philosophical concerns, yet for a curiously long time he
misled himself as well as Morgan in the belief that the "metaphysical part
of 5 and 6 sheets" (probably not much more than the present Chapter
V) could be revised in a few days. Accordingly, when Morgan urged him
to give the printer manuscript from which he could begin setting type,
Coleridge allowed only what became Chapters I-III out of his hands. That
he would have held onto Chapter IV in contemplating expansion of Chapter
V is understandable, since he did not yet see the "Autobiographia" as "a
Work per se" and had therefore failed to divide it into chapters. He would
have wanted to keep with him the material immediately preceding what
became Chapter V in his anxiety not to send to press manuscript which
might require important revision. As it turned out, rewriting the
"metaphysical part" entailed so great an enlargement of the intended preface
that Coleridge's conception of the work had changed irrevocably by 17
September. He must have written his opening comment about the
"miscellaneous reflections" of the
Biographia, therefore,
before
10 August. But the more pointed "immethodical miscellany" remark occurs
at
the end of Chapter X and must have been written after Coleridge had
transformed the scope of his text. What would have been first drafted in
August and September, then, were Chapters VI through XIII, part of
Chapter V certainly, and part of Chapter IV in all probability.
[21] As we have seen, Coleridge was
under
fierce pressure from Gutch
and Morgan to send the
Biographia to press. Surely it was
this
pressure, as he sped to complete Chapters XII and XIII—the last of
the
Biographia he produced in 1815—that forced Coleridge
to
plunder Schelling's
Abhandlungen as he did in Chapter XII.
The
anxiety about having fallen so far behind his deadline may also account, in
part at least, for the odd, evasive letter to "C." in Chapter XIII. Since
Chapter XII refers to the date "this morning (16 September 1815)" and
since Coleridge sent the
Biographia manuscript "compleat,"
as
he then thought, "to my printer" on 19 September, we can be sure that
Chapters XII and XIII were turned out at white heat. Gutch also must have
thought the work complete, for, in a letter of December, 1816 (Z), he
threatened to issue the book himself as it had first been sent to him.
Printing of the Biographia went on from the fall of
1815
through the early spring of 1816, when it was discovered that the two
volumes (the Biographia and Sibylline Leaves)
would be of unequal length. Coleridge later blamed Gutch for "the blunder"
of deciding to issue the work in three volumes of equal size (Z). But
Morgan's letter of 6 May 1816 indicates that the decision to divide the
Biographia into two volumes was collective; Coleridge, who
had
accurately computed the length of both the poems and the
Biographia (in G and U), was no less to blame than Gutch for
not realizing that the Biographia manuscript of 1815 would
fall
considerably short of two volumes of 300 pages each (see also letters X and
Y). Coleridge's disgust was extreme. He so exacerbated relations with
Gutch that the printing in Bristol came to a halt in the fall of 1816, at the
end of page 144 of Volume II. The manuscript, along with the sheets
already printed, would
have to be sent to Coleridge's London publisher, Gale & Fenner, with
whom he had contracted in the summer of 1816 (W). Gale & Fenner
could then see the book through to completion. But Gutch refused to send
the materials he held until financial accounts were settled. This held up the
entire project until the spring of 1817, when Gutch at last surrendered the
manuscript and printed sheets. In September of 1816, Coleridge wrote of
starting on the extra material needed to fill out Volume II of the
Biographia (Z), but he did not complete this task until the
spring of 1817 (II, MM).[22] At one
point he apparently considered filling out the Biographia with
Zapolya, but a prior commitment of the play to
John Murray forced him to use "Satyrane's Letters" and the critique of
Bertram instead (EE, HH). He would then have had to revise at least the
last page of Chapter XXII. Watson's speculation that he padded throughout
the latter portion of XXII is at least possible on the basis of what we now
know, as is his supposition about the Conclusion, which he says was made
up in 1817 of parts of the old ending of Chapter XXII and of new material
in response to attacks on Coleridge in the autumn 1816 numbers of the
Edinburgh Review (
BL-Watson, pp. xvii-xviii).
By
22 July 1817 (KK),
Sibylline Leaves and the
Biographia
Literaria had been published.
[23]
Coleridge's composition of most of the Biographia in
three and a half months in 1815 was an astounding feat of concentration and
energy. Doubtless John Morgan, who took dictation from Coleridge, was
indispensable to the effort. "Possibly," Kathleen Coburn observes, "the
albatross fell off into the sea when John Morgan, acting as amanuensis,
extracted the Biographia from Coleridge, almost by force, in
1815."[24] But the extraordinary effort
of will and intellect was Coleridge's. It is time that we bury for good the
account of the Biographia's composition as "a story of
ludicrous
dilatoriness."[25] And such recent
statements as M. G. Cooke's that Coleridge "balked" at the end of Chapter
XIII, "accidentally turning to Wordsworth and opinions on poetry" and
away "from his proper subject of the nature and function of the
imagination"[26] ought now, at best,
to be taken
figuratively; after all, it appears most likely that Coleridge turned from
Wordsworth and opinions on poetry to the "subject of the nature and
function of the imagination." As George Whalley suggested twenty years
ago, the more one reads the Biographia, the more one sees
the
intimate relation of the "metaphysical part" to the practical criticism of
Wordsworth. That Coleridge spent two months adding the metaphysical part
to a work which he could have passed off as finished demonstrates that
from his standpoint the philosophy of Volume I of the
Biographia was an essential foundation for the assessment of
Wordsworth's poems, theory, and poetry in Volume II.
In dealing with the story of the Biographia, we are
forced
to go beyond the ambiguities of the evidence into the realm of conjecture.
Working with possibilities and probabilities, we cannot claim certainty for
our conclusions, and so the role of the textual historian is reduced (or
perhaps raised) to advocacy of supposition and conjecture. The future
insertion of a single
new fact into the array of evidence may alter the matter only slightly or else
may force us wholly to revise our estimates of the probabilities and give us
new insight into the compositional history of the
Biographia.
The reconstruction offered here confirms Griggs in his reading of the letter
to Dr. Brabant and in his dating of the composition of the greater portion
of Volume I after that of Volume II but is considerably more explicit in
identifying the particular chapters of the
Biographia
assignable
to each stage of the development of the text. Coleridge's letter of 17
September in particular reinforces my sense of the sequence: it could only
have been shortly before writing to Gutch on that date—and not, as
Griggs suggests, "not long after writing to Wordsworth" in May
(
CL, III, xlvii)—that Coleridge grasped the nature of
the
changes his work had undergone from preface, to prefacing
"Autobiographia literaria," to the
Biographia Literaria, a
separate title in its own right. It would be illuminating to know the fate of
the proofsheets of the
Biographia, particularly if, like the
proofsheets of
Sibylline Leaves, they contain "numerous
revisions and corrections" by Coleridge (
CL, IV, 618). We
shall be able to distinguish the passages that were dictated to John Morgan
from those penned by Coleridge only if someone turns up the missing
manuscript of the
Biographia. But unless and until new
information does turn up, the foregoing reconstruction of the birth of the
Biographia would seem the most probable and detailed
possible.
Coleridge's great critical work emerged from a thicket of tangled designs
and intentions. Reviewing the evidence about the making of the text, one
recalls William Hazlitt's report that Coleridge liked "to compose in walking
over uneven ground, or breaking through the straggling branches of a
copsewood."
[27] The present account
of the
composition of the
Biographia, based on all the facts now
known to me, not only illuminates major problems raised by the text but
also constitutes a chapter in the astonishing story of Coleridge's
breakthrough into the productive period of his middle years.
