Scandals of the Romantic Poets

 

     This, like my piece on “The Hazardous Lives of the Sonneteers,” is meant to be more semi-journalistic and descriptive than scholarly.  This time, though, I did not suppress the endnotes.

 

      Artists today are often expected to be to some extent counter-cultural, displaying bohemian behavior and radical opinions, but this assumption is largely a recent one in the last two hundred years.  In Great Britain and in Europe, writers associated with the Romantic movement adopted a combative attitude toward their own societies, leading to the use of the term, originally military, avant-garde.  [1]  This general characterization of artists as rebels, often compounded of a mixture of reactionary philistine prejudice and accurate observation, though never encompassing all writers and painters, has been critical in the arts since. 

    In their own day the British Romantic poets were accused of every sort of immorality and, though it has no bearing on the evaluation of their writing, there was a good deal of substance to many of the charges against them. [2]  Many did seek to challenge the received ideas of their day, and these views, along with personal irregularities which may occur among all classes (but are perhaps more highlighted among artists) led to their condemnation by the guardians of propriety.  Drug abuse, irreligious views, and political radicalism, as well as lurid sexual irregularities were all alleged of the writers associated with Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley and Byron.  Without inquiry into why many of the principal poets of the day behaved, at least in youth, in ways that strayed so considerably from the norm, an assemblage of some of the data exploited by their critics looks hardly less sensational than stories from the National Enquirer. 

     In the Romantic era, the non-medical use of psychotropic drugs lacked a good deal of the cultural significance it has since acquired.  Opium and cannabis were not associated with artists; they were not even illegal and were soon to be ubiquitous in the formulation of panaceas.  Then as now, many addicts began with a doctor’s prescription.  Yet semi-recreational use existed as well.  Southey and Coleridge joined in “experiments” at the Pneumatic Institute inhaling nitrous oxide with such prominent scientists as Humphry Davy, Thomas Beddoes, and James Watt. [3]   

     With the conquest of India by Great Britain, opium became widely available and closely followed alcohol as the chief active ingredient of patent medicines.  Though consumed throughout English society, the medicinal preparation called laudanum was popular among the poets to such an extent that a number of books have focused on their use. [4]  Coleridge attributed “Kubla Khan” to an opium dream, and the poet’s lifelong use of the drug and his attempts to control, if not to cease, his consumption are documented in letters and memoirs.  Even more notorious was his friend, the essayist Thomas De Quincy, whose Confessions of an English Opium-Eater was a sensation in 1821.  Shelley took to carrying laudanum on his person to take against anxiety.  Crabbe, Jane Austen’s favorite poet and admired in his day by Byron and Scott, took opium for forty years.  Keats’ use of the drug is certain, but his degree of use is not. 

     Scholars continue to debate to what extent opium use influenced poetry.  Though opium’s effects are primarily soporific, many writers reported psychedelic effects on sensation and imagination, perhaps using the drug to justify flights of fancy and sublimity they would have experienced in any event.  Very like the drug users among the Beats, the Romantics drug use both to an expansion of vision and to a view of the artist as transgressive.  Whereas most earlier writers had striven either to cultivate connections with the power structure in the interests of patronage or, by the eighteenth century, to appeal to a bourgeois readership, this group considered themselves a counter-culture, and the subjective heavens and hells of opiate use doubtless intensified their belief in the primacy of the imagination. 

     Though opium consumption was no crime, admitting to unorthodox religious views not only attracted the strongest social opprobrium but was illegal as well. [5]  Shelley was expelled from Oxford for publishing The Necessity  of Atheism. [6]  He developed a sort of pantheism, claiming that “the universe is God” and arguing that Deism was reasonable and Christianity supported only by emotion.  He must “war against [the Christian god] for the sake of truth.” [7]  Wordsworth in his early work sounds very like a pantheist and Coleridge described him approvingly as “at least” “a semi-atheist,” [8] though both came to defend the Established Church later in life. 

     Coleridge himself had become a free-thinker upon reading Voltaire as a schoolboy, before slowly drifting back through Unitarianism to orthodoxy.   Often labeled an atheist, Byron throughout his life expressed an ambivalence about Christianity.  In his preface to his Vision of Judgement, an encomium praising George III, Southey (who had been in political and religious questions as radical as other Romantics) attacks the “Satanic school” of poets as “men of diseased hearts and depraved imaginations, who, forming a system of opinions to suit their own unhappy course of conduct, have rebelled against the holiest ordinances of human society, and hating that revealed religion which, with all their efforts and bravadoes, they are unable entirely to disbelieve.”  [9]  Conservative forces claimed that Byron’s clubfoot indicated his diabolism. [10]  In his youth Southey had been known as an atheist, though he was always willing to acknowledge “an intelligent first cause.” [11]  To the public the poets’ behavior considered along with such literary projections as Byron’s Manfred and Cain and Shelley’s Prometheus to leave little doubt that the whole group were rebels against heaven. 
     In politics virtually all the Romantics were originally supporters of the French Revolution, a view which made them radicals in their day.  Wordsworth made two trips to revolutionary France where he attended meetings of the Jacobin Club and the National Assembly and composed his “Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff” who had criticized the revolutionary regime.  He rapidly turned conservative in politics as well as religion, by 1818 advocating what he called a “softened feudalism” [12]

     Shelley, on the other hand, maintained a consistently revolutionary view.  His “Song to the Men of England” could hardly be plainer:

 

The seed ye sow, another reaps;

The wealth ye find, another keeps;

The robes ye weave, another wears;

The arms ye forge, another bears.

 

And there is perhaps no more bitter line of political poetry in English literature that the first of Shelley’s “England in 1819” which calls George III “An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying King,”  The poem concludes with a hopeful prospect of a glorious Phantom” which “may burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.”  Indeed Marx’s daughter was proud to claim him as a socialist.  [13] 

     Likewise supporters of France, Coleridge and Southey planned an egalitarian commune in America, to be governed by the principles of "pantisocracy," meaning rule by all and “aspheterism” or the collective ownership of all property.  Unsurprisingly, the project was never far advanced.   The two collaborated on The Fall of Robespierre commenting on the events in France.  In 1796 Coleridge published a short-lived newspaper The Watchman in Bristol which argued for the universal suffrage and the abolition of the slave trade.

     Leigh Hunt, though less read now than his friends Keats and Shelley, was a political influence on the Romantic circle.  In a series of journals beginning with The Examiner he published articles critical of the British government and, in particular, of the Prince Regent, later George IV.  Charles Lamb’s “The Triumph of the Whale” ridiculed the “Prince of Whale’s” corpulence and dissipation.  Hunt’s own piece “The Prince on St. Patrick’s Day” (with epigrams by Lamb) in which the prince is denounced as “a violator of his word, a libertine over head and ears in debt and disgrace, a despiser of domestic ties, the companion of gamblers and demireps, a man who had just closed half a century without one single claim on the gratitude of his country, or the respect of posterity." [14]  This language was sufficient to get Hunt and his brother (the printer) arrested for libel.  Though the Hunts had before been charged with libel, English juries had refused to convict them.  This time, however, the two were found guiltyand sentenced to two years in prison.  Something of a cause célèbre, Hunt took advantage of the corrupt practices of the day to make his accommodations in Surrey County Gaol a comfortable two-room private suite in the infirmary.  There he decorated his living space, concealing the bars behind Venetian blinds, papering the walls with floral prints, painting the ceiling with a cloudy sky, and importing flowers, books, and a piano, as well as comfortable couches.  According to Lamb, “there was no other such room, except in fairy tale.”  Attended by a servant, he there received a stream of visitors including Lamb, Byron and Thomas Moore. [15]  After he had served his term, when he went to Italy at Shelley’s invitation, the motive was in part to publish ta political paper not subject to British censorship. 

     It is a measure of the degree to which ideas of radical reform permeated the poetic scene of the day that even Keats, far less an activist partisan than others, left nevertheless no question of what side he was on in the contradiction between the wealthy and the working class.  His sonnet “Written On The Day That Mr. Leigh Hunt Left Prison” attracted an attack from Blackwood’s Magazine.  Perhaps the best statement of his political views is contained in a long letter from September 1819 in which he laments that the French Revolution stimulated a reaction which “spread a horrid superstition against all inovation and improvement – The present struggle in England of the people is to destroy this superstition. What has rous’d them to do it is their distresses – Perpaps on this account the pres’ent distresses of this nation are a fortunate thing – tho so horrid in the[i]r experience.”  To Keats “This is no contest beetween whig and tory – but between right and wrong.” [16]  The primary thrust of the aggressive ridicule of Keats in the conservative journals was his class origin.  The term “the Cockney school” [17] focused with unashamed class prejudice on the “plebian origins and education” of Keats and others.

     Byron defended the Luddites in the House of Lords where he had associated himself closely with radical reform.  For instance, in a stirring speech in 1812 he declared that Luddite demonstrators dismissed as a mob were in fact nothing but the country’s working people.

 

it is the mob that labour in your fields and in your houses – that man your navy and recruit your army – that have enabled you to defy all the world and can also defy you when neglect and calamity have driven them to despair. You may call the people a mob but not forget that a mob too often speaks the sentiments of the people.   [18]

 

 

Byron wrote for the radical British publication The Liberal and joined a secret society of Italian nationalists, and ultimately, of course, he died in service to what might be called an anti-colonial struggle. 

     While drug use and transgressive religious and political beliefs might offend many Britons, they surely took an even greater interest in the writers’ sexual lives.  Wordsworth had had a child with Annette Vallon in revolutionary France, and others of the Romantics had turbulent personal lives, but the real scandals concerned Shelley and Byron, who were accused of immorality based on behavior that, even today, would be condemned by most. [19] 

     Shelley had said of marriage in Queen Mab of marriage that "a system could not well have been devised more studiously hostile to human happiness.”  Still, he eloped and married Harriet Westbrook, daughter of the owner of a thriving coffee house and schoolmate of his younger sister, in 1811 just after her sixteenth and his nineteenth birthdays.  Though they had two children, they had all but separated by the summer of 1814, when he eloped once more with Mary Godwin, herself sixteen at the time.  Her illegitimate step-sister Claire Clairmont accompanied them to Europe and remained with the ménage becoming Byron’s lover and mother of his child Allegra. 

     The complexities of life among these free-thinkers is suggested by the fact that some biographers think that, while socializing with Godwin’s family, Shelley had also been a lover of Fanny Imlay,  (daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and an American businessman) in 1814.  She committed suicide two years later as did Harriet Shelley, who was five months pregnant (there is debate about who the father may have been).  Meanwhile, Harriet’s sister Eliza had moved in with the couple and Shelley had conceived a passion (apparently unconsummated) for Elizabeth Hitchener, an unmarried schoolteacher, and suggested that she join the household, sharing all property. [20]  T. J. Hogg, the co-publisher with Shelley of The Necessity of Atheism, flirted with Harriet only -for Shelley to assure him he could not be jealous.  Later, he may well have encouraged Hogg and Mary to sleep together. [21]  During Shelley’s residence abroad, he fathered a child in Naples (falsely claiming when registering the birth that his wife was the mother).  He was involved as well in romantic attachments with Jane Williams, who lived with her lover in the same building as the Shelleys, as well as Sophia Stacey, who was staying at the same pension in Italy, and Teresa (Emilia) Viviani, teen-age daughter of the governor of Pisa and the muse of Epipsychidion.

     If providing even a brief summary of Shelley’s erotic involvements is difficult, to do the same for Lord Byron is impossible.  He was constantly pursuing both men and women.  His gay liaisons began the Trinity College choirboy John Edleston during his college days, and included his servant William Fletcher who attended Byron from 1804 until his death.  When he traveled to Greece, he felt much freer about homoerotic relationships and took numerous lovers including the fourteen-year-old Nicolas Giraud.  He indefatigably pursued his teenaged Greek page, Lukas Chalandritsanos, and, finding him uncooperative, managed to locate many who were more complaisant, reporting to his gay friends in England that he had managed over two hundred "pl and opt Cs,” a code for sexual indulgence derived from the phrase "coitum plenum et optabilem" in Petronius's Satyricon.

     He had as well an extraordinary number of heterosexual affairs, becoming perhaps the leading sex symbol of his time.  Most notoriously, he had an affair for years with his half-sister Augusta Leigh and very likely had a child with her.  In his “Epistle to Augusta” he imagines the joy of “a home with thee” and declares sentimentally, “The tie which bound the first endures the last!”

     In the interest of both cash and respectability he married Annabella Milbanke in 1815, but, following the birth of their daughter Ada the following December, she found his constant philandering (during this period he was linked to actress Charlotte Mardyn and Lady Caroline Lamb among many others) and she concluded that she could not live with him and sued for divorce. 

     The combination of his infamy and his debts caused him to go abroad in April 1816.  Though his reputation for sexual misdeeds was known to all, he was doubtless fleeing exposure for his gay lovers.   He was attacked in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in an article describing him as diabolical.  “It appears, in short, as if this miserable man, having exhausted every species of sensual gratification, -having drained the cup of sin even to its bitterest dregs, — were resolved to show us that he is no longer a human being even in his frailties, but a cool, unconcerned fiend, laughing with detestable glee over the whole of the better and worse elements of which human life is composed.”  As a result, Byron complains "I was advised not to go to the theatres, lest I should be hissed, nor to my duty in parliament, lest I should be insulted by the way; even on the day of my departure my most intimate friend told me afterwards that he was under apprehension of violence from the people who might be assembled at the door of the carriage." [22]  In Europe he cultivated an affair with a married woman Marianna Segati in whose house he was staying, then with another married woman, Margarita Cogni.  When he broke up with this last lover, she committed suicide.  He turned then to the Countess Teresa Guiccioli with whom he lived for several years.  At the time of his death he was lavishly patronizing a nine-year-old Turkish Muslim girl. 

     So the bill of particulars one wishing to condemn the Romantic poets might compile is varied, lengthy, and, in large part, well-substantiated.  Since then the actions of the poètes maudits, the Lost Generation, denizens of Greenwich Village, and the Beats have likewise been condemned.  Whatever the ethical lapses in the lives of the poets in any age, their behavior can have no relation to the evaluation of their work.  As much as the perceived contrast in beliefs and lifestyles between unconventional artists and those exemplifying the status quo may reveal about the social codes of their times and our own, such data have nothing to do with the reason we remember these men at all: their work.  In the evaluation of art terms such as immorality or blasphemy, sedition or dissipation can carry no weight.

     Yet the partial displacement of the arts from the central power structures of society has made a difference in both themes and styles.  It may be that a lineage of creative types stretching back to archaic semi-psychotic shamans, through wandering Old English scops like Widsith, gypsy goliards, minstrels and showpeople has long tended to act and think in somewhat more independent fashion than the local masters who, for all their wealth, were obliged to accept the assumptions of their time.  The bourgeois may have envied as well as condemned the free-thinker and free-liver, but it was not until the time of the Romantics that it came to be expected that artists often live by different rules than others. 

.

 

 

1.  The term was first used to describe art by was first used in the cultural sphere in 1825 by the Saint Simonian mathematician Olinde Rodrigues in his essay, “L’artiste, le savant et l’industriel.”

2.  Similar claims have been made concerning virtually every avant-garde movement since, often, as in the originating example, with some reason.  The attacks on Keats and Hunt focused more on their supposed “plebeian origin and education” to quote the letter from Z. (John Gibson Lockhart) in Blackwood’s for May 1818 now so8und thoroughly out of date.

3.  Laughing gas remained a subject of interest.  In the late nineteenth century William James and his associates used it in an attempt to experience mystical states.  See lectures XVI and XVIOI of Varieties of Religious Experience (1901).  James had earlier written an anonymous article on “The Anaesthetic Revelation and the Gist of Philosophy” in The Atlantic Monthly as well as an 1898 piece in the Psychological Review on “Consciousness Under Nitrous Oxide.”

4. The classic study is still M. H. Abrams The Milk of Paradise (1971), but see also the earlier Opium and the Romantic Imagination by Alethea Hayter (1968) and Elizabeth Schneider’s Coleridge, Opium, and Kubla Khan (1983).  Nicholas Roe claims in his John Keats: A New Life (2012) that Keats, too, was a regular user. 

5.  Britain’s blasphemy laws were not abolished until 2008 in England and Wales and 2021 in Scotland.  A similar law remains in effect in Northern Ireland.  The last conviction in England in 1977 involved a gay publication so doubtless homophobia played a role in that case.

6.  In  1834 a proposal to allow attendance by Dissenters was defeated in Parliament.  Until 1854 in order to matriculate at Oxford a student needed to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles of Anglican faith.  In Cambridge the requirement lasted two years further and only in 1871 were non-Anglicans allowed to teach in those institutions. 

7.  Letter to Elizabeth Hitchener, June 20, 1822.

8.  Letter from Coleridge to John Thelwall May 13, 1796.

9.  Byron was then inspired to write his own Vision of Judgment in response and in his own preface he aggressively denounces Southey for rushing in “where he had no business” and accusing him of being a traitor to the progressive views he had once held. 

10.  One example is The Dorchester Guide; or, a house that Jack Built (1819), a satirical pamphlet of 1819.  The anonymous publication warns that “the mind is corrupted” by Byron’s “sweet and harmonious” poetry and says his real identity is revealed to those who “look at his feet,” a reference to his club-foot, for proof of his association with the devil.

11.  Letter of Robert Southey to John Prior Estlin, 9 April 1797.

12.  See his “Two Addresses to the Freeholders of Westmoreland.”  He had accepted the patronage of Lord Lonsdale since 1813.

13.  Edward and Eleanor Marx-Aveling, “Shelley and Socialism,” To-Day, April 1888.

14.  The Examiner, 22 March 1812.

15.  See Leigh Hunt, Autobiography.

16.  To George & Georgiana Keats, September 17, 18, 20, 21, 24, 25, 27, 1819.

17.  The term, referring primarily to Keats, Hunt, and Hazlitt, originated in a series of eight hostile reviews in Blackwood's Magazine in 1817 and 1818.

18.  George Gordon Byron, The Works of Lord Byron including the suppressed poems complete in one volume (Paris, A. and W. Galignani, 1828), p. 555.

19.  While far greater latitude in lifestyle had been accepted through the twentieth century, the last few decades have seen a renewed wave of condemnation of certain artists and politicians on the basis of what is deemed by their critics unacceptable sexual behavior.

20.  Bieri, James (2008). Percy Bysshe Shelley: a biography. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. 170, 193–5

21.  Richard Holmes, Shelley, the Pursuit (London:1974), pp. 391, 594, 678.

22.  “Some Observations upon an Article in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine,”  Blackwood’s, August 1819.  The response was unpublished until John Murray’s 1833 edition of The Works of Lord Byron.

 

Coleridge’s Dialectic of Art

Unattributed quotations are from Coleridge’s essay “On Poesy or Art.”


     Art has been variously conceived as entirely self-justifying, as a tool for the cultivation of a more refined sensibility, as a source of specific truths leading to greater insight or ethical standards, and as pure pleasure, either through the contemplation of aesthetic forms or through the experience of emotion. Coleridge in his essay “On Poesy or Art” proposes several of these possibilities, but then proceeds to outline a dialectic view of art’s potential that goes beyond art for art’s sake, delight, and instruction, which aims in fact at nothing less than enlightenment. [1] His theory, while striking, is muddled, in particular by the intrusion of religious doctrines suggested not by his topic but by the norms of his day.
     Coleridge uses the term “poesy” to refer to all the arts, not just verse or literature. Without considering the complicating cases of music or the abstract elements of plastic art, he accepts, though only as a starting point, the traditional definition of art as imitation. For him no simple imitation, regardless of how perfect it might be, could suffice for art. In fact he concludes that the failures of imitation are in a sense more significant than its successes.
     A pure mimesis in Coleridge’s terminology, adapted most directly from Spinoza, [2] would be natura naturata, “nature natured,” the creation considered as a passive finished product. He contrasts this inferior product to true art, natura naturans, “nature naturing.” This expression well summarizes Coleridge’s view of the role of art, but his usage allows no simple paraphrase.
     Art for him “is the mediatress between, and reconciler of nature and man” since it “humanizes” nature “infusing the thoughts and passions of man into everything.” “It avails itself of the forms of nature to recall, to express, and to modify the thoughts and feelings of the mind.” What is added, then, to nature itself is the maker’s affect and inferences so that the art object registers not the external in itself, but always refracted through the consciousness of the poet or painter. As “Frost at Midnight” makes clear, nature is for Coleridge altogether passive in this communion with the individual. [3]
     Yet the artist does not merely represent the data of the world as lived experience, inspirited by human desire and intuition. The chaos of sense data is ordered to be beautiful and, as the cosmos becomes more patterned, significant, and intelligible, beauty, value, truth, and meaning arise. “While it recalls the sights and sounds that had accompanied the occasions of the original passions, poetry impregnates them with an interest not their own by means of the passions, and yet tempers the passion by the calming power which all distinct images exert on the human soul.”
     The relation was sufficiently distinctive for Coleridge to generate the neologism eisemplasy (or esemplasy) and to revive the rare coadunation. [4] Throughout the essay the point is repeated in various forms. Art “is the mediatress between, and reconciler of nature and man.” “In every work of art there is a reconcilement of the external with the internal.” “This unity in multeity I have elsewhere stated as the principle of beauty.” “The mystery of genius in the fine arts” is “to make the external internal, the internal external, to make nature thought, and thought nature.”
     Since the two individuals, the creator and the consumer of art actively seek to make sense of the phenomenological world, while they employ images recorded by their perception, which provide the raw material and the occasion for their, still their conclusions are their own. Preferring a divine origin for his impressions, Wordsworth had maintained in “Intimations of Immortality” following older Platonic and neo-Platonic writers, that one’s highest wisdom, one’s connection to the cosmos, is originally inborn. Coleridge maintains the same access to a prenatal Truth for his own insights. “I seem rather to be seeking, as it were, asking, a symbolical language for something within me, that already and forever exists, than observing anything new.” [5] The use of the word “asking” reveals the author’s awareness that this inborn wisdom of surpassing importance is based on his desire rather than any evidence.
     That “something within” is neither more nor less than the mystical correspondence, amounting almost to identity, between inner and outer, idem et alter, psyche and world, mortal and divine. Pursuit of that goal requires that the passions, rather than being suppressed, be cultivated. Only through the individual consciousness can the greater be accessed. Rather than striving to reproduce a second-rate reality (as Plato had it) the artist in fact delineates the gap or difference between what one might very nearly call the atman and the Atman. Paradoxically, according to Coleridge’s schema, it is by spotlighting the very limitations of humanity’s perceptive organs and the insufficiency of the mind as it tries to grasp the nut of reality that the individual may solve the dilemma of dualities and mend the divided consciousness.
     The element of order may be clear in the aesthetic object, while the events of everyday life may seem to proceed chaotically or randomly. Art makes the order of the cosmos perceptible. “Hence nature itself would give us the impression of a work of art, if we could see the thought which is present at once in the whole and in every part; and a work of art will be just in proportion as it adequately conveys the thought, and rich in proportion to the variety of parts which it holds in unity.” [6]
     Art operates, then, through difference and dialectic, playing what is seen without against what is felt within. “Philosophically we understand that in all imitation two elements must coexist, and not only coexist, but must be perceived as coexisting. These two constituent elements are likeness and unlikeness, or sameness and difference, and in all genuine creations of art there must be a union of these disparates.” This relation is inevitable since, when Coleridge says, “the primary art is writing,” he does not mean to privilege verbal art over others. What he means by “writing” is sign-making. Coleridge recognizes the gap between signifier and signified that is present in all representations of reality, though it is obvious in the difference between inked words on a paper page representing certain sounds and the objects to which these symbols correspond.
      The novelty of Coleridge’s rhetoric lies in his insistence on denying strict mimesis. “Art would or should be the abridgment of nature. Now the fullness of nature is without character, as water is purest when without taste, smell, or color; but this is the highest, the apex only—it is not the whole. The object of art is to give the whole ad hominem; hence each step of nature hath its ideal, and hence the possibility of a climax up to the perfect form of a harmonized chaos.” For him the highest revelation would be clear as water or air, empty as a void. By including human desire one muddies but thereby enriches the water, churning up ideas images, attitudes, fears, and hopes that would resolve into nothingness from the eternal viewpoint.
     Coleridge belies the pellucid nature of Reality which he correctly notes must lack all attributes through his prejudice in favor of a moral order. Art he claims not only resolves the multifarious elements of the observed world into a single coherent system, it also “stamps them into unity in the mould of a moral idea.” The skeptic might wonder from whence arose this morality, but for Coleridge “the fundamental principle of all this is undoubtedly the horror of falsehood and the love of truth inherent in the human breast.” For him the contemplation of beauty involves the processing of “images, totalized and fitted to the limits of the human mind, [so] as to elicit from, and to superinduce upon, the forms themselves the moral reflections to which they approximate.”
     The idea that the moral sense is entangled with the idea of beauty is, like Coleridge’s Christianity as a whole, a matter of faith. (Within the churches, this is, of course an orthodox position.) For him, “to the idea of life victory or strife is necessary; as virtue consists not simply in the absence of vices, but in the overcoming of them. So it is in beauty.” The moral element is not, however, in reality essential to every case of the dialectic of art. Just as life is struggle, drama requires conflict, and we become ourselves through work and struggle, learning through suffering, art, too is generated in conflict but morality may or may not play a role.
     At times Coleridge defines the tension required for art in a formal, structural way that seems quite independent of ethics. “The sight of what is subordinated and conquered heightens the strength and the pleasure; and this should be exhibited by the artist either inclusively in his figure, or else out of it, and beside it to act by way of supplement and contrast.”
     Apart from the miraculous appearance of morality in the soul and the art, Coleridge’s theory is limited by its reductiveness. There may be countless ways for the work to imply the sort of denial of duality that for Coleridge constitutes a window into profundity, but the result is always much the same. While this may be quite true, it views all great art as essentially similar and all themes as one. Particularities of form or image may play a role in this omnipresent idea, but their specific implications are lost in taking the grandest view, which, though it may not be wrong, necessarily ignores all the others.
     Coleridge was motivated by his sense of mortality, poignantly suggested by the dramatically eloquent closing passage on the unavoidable physical decline of the individual. “And with a view to this, remark the seeming identity of body and mind in infants, and thence the loveliness of the former; the commencing separation in boyhood, and the struggle of equilibrium in youth: thence onward the body is first simply indifferent; then demanding the translucency of the mind not to be worse than indifferent; and finally all that presents the body as body becoming almost of an excremental nature.“ The use of the word “excremental,” when speaking of the flesh, sounds almost monk-like.
     He devised an escape route from this inevitable decay of the flesh in the pursuit of beauty. The faith that art can vault the spirit into the empyrean provided an alternative to nihilism that bolstered Coleridge’s troubled Christianity. Yet he sought to root this doctrine in Plato rather than Christ. “The life which is in us is in them likewise; and that to know is to resemble, when we speak of objects out of ourselves, even as within ourselves to learn is, according to Plato, only to recollect.”
     A personal god is necessary if one is to see intelligence and intentionality in nature as he did. Man’s creativity and god’s are much the same for him. “The wisdom in nature is distinguished from that in man by the co-instantaneity of the plan and the execution.” God is equally required for his belief in some sort of inborn conscience. Though he roamed about the heights of German philosophy and flirted with atheism before conducting an affair with Unitarianism, he settled down with a sort of liberal Anglicanism. He often preferred to sound Platonic as in this passage. “What is beauty? It is, in the abstract, the unity of the manifold, the coalescence of the diverse; in the concrete, it is the union of the shapely (formosum) with the vital.” Never quite comfortable with conventional religion, yet unable to do without it, Christianity often appears as here as an implicit subtext.
     Coleridge’s essay claims that the knowledge one gains from art is not dependent on the specific data used in a picture or poem, or even in the new perspective that understanding another’s vision can bring. For him the principal value of the beautiful is that it can resolve contradictions and thus bring a person to enlightenment through realizing the identity of inward and outward, divine and human. He means something very close to the Vedantic “Tat tvam asi” though the concept exists in a number of traditions. This is the bold portion of his thesis. These provocative speculations on art’s power to effect a dramatic alteration of consciousness are weakened by his wish to cling to an anthropomorphic deity who like an artist designed the universe and instilled in humanity a conscience. Through his own polemics with himself, through the contradictions he felt in his own life and thought, through mental wandering, he proposed an aesthetic that can enrich our own semi-blinded blundering in the direction of what seems to be truth.






1. The influence of German philosophy on these thoughts has been, it seems, more studied than the thoughts themselves. My intention here is to consider only Coleridge’s assertions, ignoring sources and influences, though Schelling’s lectures on The Philosophy of Art before and certain recent strains of postmodernism after are clearly related.

2. The expression was originally used by the medieval Scholastics. For Spinoza nature is substantially equivalent to god (Deus sive Natura). See Ethic, Proposition 29, scholium to Part I.

3. Even in the first published text, Coleridge calls the idea that nature is actively “giving” its sympathy to the individual an “idle thought.” In his later revision he is more insistent yet that “the idling Spirit” seeking “an echo or a mirror” of itself is making “a toy of Thought.”

4. The first was his own coining, the second, though rare, is recorded by the OED since 1558. Esemplasy was a translation of Schelling’s own neologism “Ineinsbildung.”

5. Notebooks ii.2546

6. This quantitative stress at the end, which makes the artist sound like a juggler trying to keep a large number of objects in the air at once, is misplaced.

“Monk” Lewis, Mr. Coleridge, and Popular Taste

     Matthew Lewis’ The Monk has been popular since its publication over two hundred years ago. A contemporary American may recognize the pleasure it yields as a “good read” and its secure place in the “Gothic novel” chapter of literary histories while feeling that the very qualities that make it enduringly popular bar it from what critics may regard as the more sublime higher reaches of Parnassus. Coleridge’s early review of the book [1] defines its strengths and weaknesses with considerable insight but his analysis is marred by his expressed distaste for the norms of popular art. Coleridge looks with condescension on characteristics that belong to popular art, failing to understand that reaffirming people’s received ideas is as great a part of literature as challenging them, and that the “cheap thrills” of the book are appropriate to its genre.
     Coleridge’s essay does open with a consideration of the book’s widespread appeal, noting that “the horrible and the preternatural have usually seized on the popular taste, at the rise and decline of literature. Most powerful stimulants, they can never be required except by the torpor of an unawakened, or the languor of an exhausted, appetite. The same phaenomenon, therefore, which we hail as a favourable omen in the belles lettres of Germany, impresses a degree of gloom in the compositions of our countrymen.” One wonders whether this unabashed nationalism and condescension toward literary popularity can be unrelated to envy of the younger author’s higher sales.
     After all, in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth had explained his own role in his collaboration with Coleridge as the description of “incidents and situations from common life,” though he sought “to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect.” In a clear division of labor, while his colleague sought to heighten the everyday, Coleridge took the opposite role of rendering believable “persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic.” [2] Coleridge’s own use of the fantastic, the miraculous, the sensational and the exotic, not to mention his enthusiasm for German literature might have made Coleridge a likely natural advocate for Lewis, yet his review of The Monk is decidedly ambivalent, and Coleridge strays toward hostility on the very point at which his ideas are least supportable. [3]
     He suggests (with a rhetorical shudder of horror) that Lewis shows signs of being less than an orthodox Christian, based primarily on the novel’s passing ironic comments about the Bible’s tales of immorality. Coleridge is greatly concerned about this though, for some reason, he provides a reference to what strikes him as the dirtiest passage in scripture (Ezekiel XXIII). Probably the one line in the review that has attracted the greatest amount of attention is his claim that “the Monk is a romance, which if a parent saw in the hands of a son or daughter, he might reasonably turn pale.” Coleridge doubtless had in mind not only the waggish comments on sexual themes in the Bible but also certain seduction scenes in the novel itself. Yet Monk’s jest about the Bible was flippant if daring and the author had, after all, consistently catered to British religious opinion in depicting Catholicism as superstitious and corrupt and foreign lands as realms of injustice and tyranny.
     In the first place, Coleridge is of course out of step with contemporary standards which would find neither the religious opinions nor the erotic scenes (more often implied than enacted) objectionable. Further, many readers would consider Coleridge himself far from averse to the use of an appeal to the sensational. The more significant problem with this stricture, however, is that it belies the popular character of Lewis work, and the book was immensely popular. It went through edition after edition, both authorized and pirated, and inspired stage and film adaptations as well as an opera. Almost apologetically, Coleridge says that he has only come to write about the book because of “the unusual success which it has experienced.”
     The reading audience, predominantly bourgeois and largely female, may have indeed been intrigued by the claims of Coleridge and the book’s other opponents. Lewis’ biographer drily notes that, the public had heard that The Monk was “horrible, blasphemous, and lewd, and they rushed to put their morality to the test.” [4] Indeed, criticism so abashed the author that he apologized to his family and his readers and expurgated later editions in a response to the opprobrium.
     While high art often interrogates and challenges received ideas, popular literature typically reinforces them. To be truly popular a work may flirt with transgression in a titillating manner, but it must ultimately strengthen rather than overturn the reader’s preconceptions. While it is true that the redoubtable Marquis de Sade (whose Justine may have influenced Lewis and who may have been influenced in turn) [5] wanted to think Lewis’ book “revolutionary,” but in fact the author’s subsequent disavowal of such an aim was no more than candid.
     Perhaps the most intensely erotic image in the entire book is the “daemon” conjured by Matilda: “It was a Youth seemingly scarce eighteen, the perfection of whose form and face was unrivalled. He was perfectly naked: A bright Star sparkled upon his forehead . . .” [6] Yet in spite of this clearly homoerotic image in a book full of cross-dressing and androgyny, the issue of homosexuality in lived experience never arises. This pattern is paradigmatic for The Monk as a whole. A sexy youth is a moment’s marvel. A joke about religion is only a joke. In the end, once the reader has relished scenes of women subjected to ravishment and naked appetite, the vicious suffer for their sins, Ambrosio most dramatically.
     The reader thinks about Lewis’ attitude in parliament and in private business toward slavery. While claiming an enlightened “modern” attitude and opposing slavery at home, the inheritor of sizable Indies plantations wished to maintain ownership of his own slaves. In the end, though more liberal than some, he took his position with the ruling class.
     Carnival thrill houses and horror films likewise must provide carefully regulated safe fear for people’s amusement in precisely the same way that sentimental stories like “tear-jerker” movies evoke strong but shallow levels of emotion. Lewis’ extravagant evocation of the supernatural as spectacle has a different character sixty years after the statute against witchcraft was repealed, when most educated people no longer believed in ghosts or sorcerers or raising the devil. Lewis may achieve Guignol-style shocks (such as Agnes holding the body of her baby), but he never rises to the true tragedy of Marlowe’s Faustus. Ambrosio, in contrast, can excite only curiosity and perhaps, from the soft-hearted, pity. He is a singularly weak diabolist, constantly wavering and acting more out of impulse than decided will.
     Ambrosio’s character strikes Coleridge as deeply implausible, and here he has a point. He finds the transition from a “man who had been described as possessing much general humanity, a keen and vigorous understanding, with habits of the most exalted piety” into “an uglier fiend than the gloomy imagination of Dante would have ventured to picture” altogether incredible. To Coleridge the monk’s character lacked a sufficient “semblance of truth . . . to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith.” [7] It is surely a fact that Ambrosio is a two-dimensional slave to the narrative, though this is generally the case in popular genres (and in folk stories where character depth is nonexistent).
     The enjoyment of naughty stories that conclude with the most conventional of morals extends from the account of hot times in Sodom in the medieval Pearl-poet’s Clannesse through Moll Flanders and Reefer Madness. Coleridge faults this technique, claiming that Lewis has gone too far. “The sufferings which he describes are so frightful and intolerable, that we break with abruptness from the delusion, and indignantly suspect the man of a species of brutality, who could find a pleasure in wantonly imagining them.” Such righteous indignation only flare the higher if the indignant reader is aware of his own participation in sado-masochistic pleasure.
     Coleridge says that in a book like The Monk “the order of nature may be changed wherever the author's purposes demand it . . . For the same reasons a romance is incapable of exemplifying a moral truth.” He might more generally have said that a romanced cannot support a theme implying something about lived experience, as it need not coincide even with a single person’s impression of reality. With the inclusion of supernatural cause and effect, “all events are levelled into one common mass, and become almost equally probable, where the order of nature may be changed wherever the author's purposes demand it.” This allows a certain irresponsibility for which the compensating value must be neither more nor less that its “having given pleasure during its perusal,” what moderns might call a beach or an airplane book. With the same envious condescension a professor might use in ridiculing Stephen King, he comments on the cheapness of the Gothic: “the public will learn . . . with how little expense of thought or imagination this species of composition is manufactured.” “Figures that shock the imagination, and narratives that mangle the feelings, rarely discover genius, and always betray a low and vulgar taste.
     Vulgar it may be in the literal sense, but, as Seldes said, outstanding popular art is far preferable to mediocre high art. Though Coleridge conceded that Lewis displayed “an imagination rich, powerful, and fervid,”(and that last adjective suggests pathological excess), he failed to understand the role of popular literature. People have always demanded such work, filled with sensation as contemporary popular movies are filled with cars crashing through windows and glimpses of naked breasts. Such pandering does indeed correspond to themes that reinforce rather than challenge the reader’s ideas, but this, too, is an important role of art. Popular art like Lewis’ The Monk transmit culture no less than oral folk-tales in preliterate societies. Though powerful art always contains ambivalences, mysteries, and contradictions, such cues suggesting a critical attitude toward what “all the world” thinks have only recently come to the fore in the narratives people have always invented to occupy their leisure. The Monk is indeed unrealistic and sensational; these are appropriate generic characteristics. It titillates readers into thinking it transgressive while in fact reinforcing their pre-existing opinions.



1. Coleridge, review of Matthew G. Lewis, The Monk, The Critical Review, Feb. 1797, pp.. 194-200. Oddly Coleridge in this review refers to the main character as Antonio, not Ambrosio. Subsequent references to this same review will not be separately noted.

2. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, Ch. XIV.

3. There is little doubt that Wordsworth would have shared Coleridge’s opinion of The Monk. In the Preface to Lyrical Ballads he frames his project in direct opposition to what he considers the coarsening of taste which he attributes to urbanization and which has resulted in a “degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation.” He would surely have considered Monk one of those writers have supplied the public’s desire through the “application of gross and violent stimulants.”

4. Peck, Louis (1961). A Life of Matthew G. Lewis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 28.

5. Horner, Avril. European Gothic: A Spirited Exchange 1760-1960. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 39 ff.

6. Chapter 7.

7. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, Ch. XIV.