Personality in Literature | Page 9

the inborn and
constitutive rules of the judgment and imagination, and it is always
intuitive." It is that which "calls on the soul" (+kalon+ quasi +kaloun+).

He conceives it to be the function of the human reason to discover the
unifying idea which underlies all the variety of nature; and thus it is
that when manifold objects of sense are reduced by the imagination to
order and unity the soul is satisfied, and its experience is an experience
of what is called the beautiful. It is with this discovering of order in the
seemingly chaotic, in other words the discovering of beauty, that the
creative artist is concerned. It is his business to inform matter with idea;
and matter symbolically used becomes the expression of the artist's
thought just as for the theologian the world of nature is an expression
of the thought of God. "To make the external internal, the internal
external, to make nature thought, and thought nature--this is the
mystery of genius in the Fine Arts." And he goes on significantly:
"Dare I add that the genius must act on the feeling, that body is but a
striving to become mind--that it is mind in its essence?" And in all the
Biographia Literaria there is perhaps no more striking suggestion than:
"Remark the seeming identity of body and mind in infants, and thence
the loveliness of the former."
It should be observed that Coleridge's philosophy presupposes "a bond
between nature in the higher sense and the soul of a man," presupposes,
that is, that the spirit of the artist "has the same ground with nature,"
whose unspoken language he must learn "in its main radicals." It is
only by reason of this bond that external nature, the manifestation of
Natura naturans, lends itself to the artist so that he too may manifest
himself. To attain this end the artist will imitate nature but not copy her.
("What idle rivalry!" he exclaims. Is not a copy of nature like a
wax-work figure, which shocks because it lacks "the motion and the
life which we expected?") The artist imitates what he perceives to be
essential in nature; he takes the images which life affords him and so
disposes of them as to bring to light the unities which the spirit loves; it
is he who brings order out of disorder, imposing upon matter a form
which the imagination has conceived.
For the purposes of the general critic of art, Coleridge has given us too
much and too little. He gives us too much: for the acceptance of his
theory in its completeness is only possible for those who can also
accept his metaphysic (his artist stands in a special relationship to that

Natura naturans which is a name for God). It is indeed clear to me that
no complete conception of the operations of art can be formed without
a complete metaphysical theory; but both are difficult to attain. Both
lead to speculation, controversy, and a thousand opportunities of error.
And any systematically complete theory of art, seeking as it must to
account for infinity, must, like all metaphysical systems, fall short of
the truth by precisely the difference between infinite thought and the
thought of one man--by the difference between the Universe and You
or Me. Those who are anxious to learn what can be learnt about the
creative process, and to explain it to themselves, not in terms of
abstract thought, but in terms of the humanly intelligible and
appreciable, may be satisfied with a lower degree of truth, with
something more certain though not fully explained. We may be content
if we can hit upon some least common denominator free from the
controversies of metaphysics.
If that is our object, Coleridge has given us too much. But he has also
given us too little. So generalised is his treatment that we are led to the
conclusion that his perfect artist (who cannot exist) ought to express
nothing less than the whole of himself in one single comprehensive
work of art, as the divine Creator is conceived to have produced one
harmonious expression of Himself in the Universe. What he does not
sufficiently discuss is the imperfect artist--the only artist that has yet
been given to the world. It is true the great genius in letters, or any
other kind of art, can never rest content until he has bodied forth in a
multitude of works all of that complex which is his conception of life.
But he works under the conditions of time and space. His conception of
life has been modified before he has had time to vanquish time. In
practice, at any given moment, he is at work upon a single aspect of life,
upon one part only of his general conception, so that the most