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Romantic Pantheism and its philosophy - Coleridge on the Imagination -Keats on Beauty and Truth
In a general way all the great Romantics of Wordsworth's time are true to the "type of the wise" illustrated by him when he let his poem To a Skylark end as an answer in the negative to its owri opening question:
Ethereal minstrel! pilgrim of the sky,
Dost thou despise the earth where cares abound?
C. M. Bowra1 rightly remarks: "There are perhaps poets who live entirely in dreams and hardly notice the familiar scene. But the Romantics are not of their number... We cannot complain that by their devotion to the mysteries of life the Romantics failed to appreciate life itself. It is of course true that they do not belong to the company of the universal poets, like Homer and Shakespeare, in whom everything human touches some chord and passes into music. But they are closer to common life than Pope or Dryden, even than Milton or Spenser. It would be hard to think of another man who combined, as Blake did, an extraordinary power of vision with the tenderest compassion for the outcast and the oppressed, or who, like Shelley, used his Platonic musings to unfold an enormous scheme for the regeneration of the world. Even the staid Wordsworth found a new source of profound poetry in the humble creatures of fell and waterside, in leach-gatherers and old huntsmen, small girls and idiot boys. Even so devoted a lover of physical nature as Keats came to see that the poet must not detach himself from mankind, but live in compas-sionate understanding of it. And this understanding was in many ways new. It has a new tenderness which is far removed from the aristocratic dignity of the Augustans or the princely splendours of the Elizabethans. In their attempts to under-
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stand man in the depths of his being, the Romantics were moved by convictions which give a special humanity to their poetry."
This humanity we often forget under the keen glow of their sense of divinity. But the two are inseparable and complementary. Blake's most famous poem, containing the stanza -
Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire! -
ends with:
I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.
About Shelley who would seem to be a sheer "sun-treader" Sri Aurobindo2 has written: "If the idea of a being not of our soil fallen into the material life and still remembering his skies can be admitted as an actual fact of human birth, then Shelley was certainly a living example of one of these luminous spirits half obscured by earth; the very stumblings of his life came from the difficulty of such a nature moving in the alien terrestrial environment in which he is not at home nor capable of accepting its muddy vesture and iron chain, attempting impatiently to realise there the law of his own being in spite of the obstruction of the physical clay.... Light, Love, Liberty are the three godheads in whose presence his pure and radiant spirit lived; but a celestial light, a celestial love, a celestial liberty. To bring them down to earth without their losing their celestial lustre and hue is his passionate endeavour, but his wings constantly buoy him upward and cannot beat strongly in an earthlier atmosphere. The effort and the unconquered diffi-culty are the cause of the ethereality, the want of firm earthly
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reality that some complain of in his poetry. There is an air of luminous mist surrounding his intellectual presentation of his meaning which shows the truths he sees as things to which the mortal eye cannot easily pierce or the life and temperament of earth rise to realise and live; yet to bring about the union of the mortal and the immortal, the terrestrial and the celestial is always his passion."
Against a suggestion that Shelley's Skylark should be purged of the three or four stanzas where the "blithe spirit" which is the Skylark is likened to human and corporeal things, and that the poem should be "left winging between the rainbow and the lightnings and ignorant of anything less brilliant and unearthly", Sri Aurobindo3 contended in a letter: "Shelley was not only a poet of other worlds, of Epipsychidion and of The Witch of Atlas; he was passionately interested in bringing the light, beauty and truth of the ideal super-world from which he came into the earth life - he tried to find it there wherever he could, he tried to infuse it wherever he missed it. The mental, the vital, the physical cannot be left out of the whole he saw in order to yield place only to the ethereal and impalpable. As he heard the skylark and felt the subtle essence of light and beauty in its song, he felt too the call of the same essence of light and beauty elsewhere and it is the things behind which he felt it that he compares to the hymn of the skylark - the essence of ideal light and beauty behind things mental, the poet and his hymns, behind things vital, the soul of romantic love, behind things physical, the light of the glow-worm, the passionate intensity of the perfume of the rose. I cannot see an ordinary glow-worm in the lines of Shelley's stanza - it is a light from beyond finding expression in that glimmer and illumining the dell of dew and the secrecy of flowers and grass that is there. This illumination of the earthly . mind, vital, physical with his super-world light is a main part of Shelley; excise that and the whole of Shelley is no longer there, there is only the ineffectual angel beating his wings in the void; excise it from the Skylark and the true whole of the Skylark is no longer there."
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As with Wordsworth, so with Shelley, the hope of mingling the Here and the Yonder was intense and concrete through Pantheism. As with the older poet, so with the younger, there was no blindness to the insufficiency of life and of things as they commonly are: in fact, if they had been blind to it they would have lacked the passion of that hope; but equally would they have lacked this passion if they had not seen a glorious oneness of spiritual reality secretly present in the universe -heart of its heart, even stuff of its stuff - and often revealing itself to the poet's eye and holding the promise of a great transfiguration of man's existence. The vision of that glorious oneness is again and again the most natural to Shelley -"natural" in both the meanings of the term. Without even introducing explicit mysticism he can suggest an enchanting Apocalypse through a simple panorama:
And the blue noon is over us,
And the multitudinous
Billows murmur at our feet,
Where the earth and ocean meet,
And all things seem only one
In the universal sun.
More philosophically expressed, his mysticism centres in the Power
Which wields the world with never-wearied love,
Sustains it from beneath and kindles it above,
and in "the one Spirit's plastic stress" which "sweeps through the dull dense world", and in
That Light whose smile kindles the Universe,
That Beauty in which all things work and move,
That Benediction which the eclipsing Curse
Of birth can quench not, that sustaining Love
Which through the web of being blindly wove
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By man and beast and earth and air and sea
Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of
The fire for which all thirst...
About this Pantheism of Shelley's, which the Roman Catholic poet Francis Thompson who was deeply sympathetic to the Shelleyan imagination found yet extremely incongenial, no truer words have been written than by another Roman Catholic poet, Alfred Noyes. He reads in it no real conflict with essential Christianity where also God is spoken of as He "in whom we live and move and have our being". When Shelley sings of the young Keats,"Adonais", becoming by his death a portion of universal Loveliness, he does not mean a dissolution into material Nature as Thompson supposes: he means, says Noyes, an entry into a divine Spirit within Nature and to be part of it is not to be individually annulled, either. Here is neither the sleep of death in which our dissolved elements circulate in Nature's veins, as Thompson thought when con-sidering Shelley's Pantheism, nor a loss of individuality in some universal Being. It is, Noyes explains, "a perfected harmony, embracing, completing every individual note, and making it more, not less, itself". The sounds and odours and beams in the Garden of the Sensitive Plant about which Shelley has elsewhere sung "were not mingled and confused by their interpenetration. Their essential forms were not blurred. They became sharper and more definite in their communion. They moved 'like reeds in a single stream', in the consummate music of the One and the Many. It was not an extinction, much less a degradation of the individual, but an apotheosis. The being of Keats too is not conceived as merged and lost in the Universal Spirit:
The soul of Adonais, like a star,
Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are."
To be more precise and positive: the being of Keats is not only said by Shelley to suffer no self-loss in the Spirit that is
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universal - it is also seen shining in some dimension of reality high above, which is like a starry eternity and whose height is unmistakably hinted in the line just preceding the above quotation:
Whilst burning through the inmost veil of Heaven...
A transcendent dimension of ultimate truth and supreme life is visioned through Pantheos.
Coleridge too at the peak of his poetic production lived in the same complexly pantheistic outlook and inlook. He even tried to make an argued philosophy of them. The thesis in it that concerns us may be briefly indicated. Considering the two states of form-consciousness in man - the state of sensation in which an external world is experienced and the state of imagi-nation in which forms like those of this world are combined and transfigured to make a world of our own - Coleridge looked upon the experience of external objects as a passive or at least automatic repetition in us of a constant creative act of ordered imagination by a universal Being and he looked upon our imaginative experience as the universal Being's creative faculty actively at work in the individual, co-existent with the individual's conscious will. The two experiences he named the Primary Imagination and the Secondary Imagination. In both, the individual partakes of the universal, though in different ways, and both are founded in a basic oneness of the universal and the individual and, in both, it is the spirit that is subject in one aspect, object in another: "The Intelligence tends to objecti-vise itself and... to know itself in the object." But if the individual is really to enter into the universal, instead of functioning in some sort of separation and alienation as he ordinarily does, he must take his experience of sensation not passively or automatically but with an activity of his consciously exercisable imaginative power. Objects received in mere sensation tend to be not only externally given but also dead and mechanical: when the imaginative power works upon them, "dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-
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create", they are received with a living sense in us of the original Creativity by which they are projected within the universal consciousness. As a result, they undergo two changes. In the first place, they become congenial to our mind and are felt as its own. In the second, while being enveloped by our mind, they get penetrated and read as symbols - symbols not merely standing for something behind them, for paradisal perfections, but also sharing in the Infinite Mind and them-selves suffused with Supernature. We then, says Coleridge, appreciate the position of the philosopher Malebranche, that we see all things in God. This actively imaginative sensing of what the active imagination of God has created is the source, whether recognised or not, of the highest poetry. In the highest poetry, according to Coleridge, the barrier between mind and matter, subject and object, seems miraculously broken down. He writes: "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. 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!" In its culminating intensity, the imaginative interpretation of things and our-selves within a commonalty of Infinite Mind passes into the mystical realisation that is pantheistic no less than alive to "unknown modes of being", the occult presences, and the transcendent glories of "God who is our home" and from whom the soul comes into terrestrial birth with what Plato calls "reminiscence".
The actively imaginative sensing, however, is not confined to the mystical apprehension or to the poetic vision. In fact it occurs every time Nature is enjoyed as beautiful or sublime, for, according to Coleridge, beauty and sublimity cannot be divorced from the spectator's awareness of significance in Nature. As Scott-James4 puts it: "That notion of significance could not be accounted for by any analysis of the separate sensations of which the vision appeared to be composed. Therefore, though it arose from the impression that is given, it could only be by some power in the soul that a character was
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discovered in it. [Coleridge] attributed it to a faculty of the soul, which gives what it receives, and receives what it gives -and this act, a volitional act, of bringing to nature something which it was capable of accepting, or of voluntarily accepting from nature that which the imaginative mind was so constituted as to receive, implied for Coleridge a 'common ground' between nature and the spirit, between the symbol and the mind which could recognise it or create it." In the poet's own words:
... we receive but what we give,
And in our life alone does nature live!
Ours is the wedding-garment, ours her shroud!
And would we aught behold of higher worth,
Than that inanimate cold world allow' d
To the poor, loveless, ever-anxious crowd:
Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth
A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud,
Enveloping the earth!
And from the soul itself must there be sent
A sweet and powerful voice, of its own birth,
Of all sweet sounds the life and element!
Further, the mind imaginative, the "shaping spirit of Imagination",
This beautiful and beauty-making Power,
as Coleridge calls it in the same poem, is not cloven apart from reason just as it is not cloven apart from feeling. It does not dispense with logic or with scientific observation, but it holds them subservient to itself instead of being dominated by them; or, rather, it assimilates them and is in its total aspect an intellectual as well as passionate maker of the beautiful from its own beauty. For, it answers in its own manner to the original divine Imagination which must also be a divine Reason creating a cosmos fraught with significance and system and
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charged with the goal of revealing in one way or another the workings of Supernature within the natural. It is a human glimpse of the supreme imaginative Creativity, so that, in Wordsworth's phrase, it
Is but another name for absolute power
And clearest insight, amplitude of mind,
And Reason in her most exalted mood.
We may even say that by its very essence the Imagination cannot but be such a fused agency. For, in Coleridge's view, it is an agency whose master job is to fuse diverse elements, it is "esemplastic", as he dubbed it in a curious Greek coinage intended to connote "into-one-moulding".* Even in its pri-mary function which is automatic and seems passive, there is a secret associative action gathering together the sensations of colours, sounds, odours into "wholes", into objects of per-ception: a form or mould is brought to the data of sense, concentrating and synthesising them. In its secondary function, especially as a poetic or artistic power, the Imagination is more refinedly, more deeply esemplastic and differs from Fancy in precisely that Fancy constructs only patchworks from memory and combines things without real synthesis, "plays with fixities and definites", while Imagination, as we have already noted, "dissolves, diffuses, dissipates in order to re-create". Not that Imagination annuls anything in the fusion: the elements remain individual but lose their exclusiveness. Imagination is the shaper of beauty and, to Coleridge, the Beautiful "is that in which the many, still seen as many, become one." On the other hand, Fancy brings together dissimilar objects by some superficial resemblance through which is suggested no depth of significance making the dissimilars interpenetrate and strike on a common essence: it is a practitioner of ingenuity and not of insight as is Imagination.
* Lucas (op. cit., p. 164, fn. 1) remarks that the word would really mean "into-in-moulding" and that elsewhere Coleridge makes the necessary correction to "es-eno-plastic". It is the incorrect form, however, that has passed into currency.
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But, if Imagination were itself exclusive instead of being an integrated manifold, a unity-in-multiplicity, it could hardly be "esemplastic", hardly exercise the function "by which one image or feeling is made to modify many others, and by a sort. of fusion to force many into one". The harmony it effects must answer to a nature of harmony within itself: that is why Coleridge hails it not only as "beauty-making" but also as itself "beautiful".
Coleridge could not but think of Imagination as what Wordsworth terms it in those three lines, for actually he came to his theory of it as distinct from Fancy by the unforgettable experience of finding it so in Wordsworth's own poetry. He has recorded this experience in a passage which is itself memor-able: "While memory lasts, I shall hardly forget the sudden effect produced on my mind, by his recitation of a manuscript poem... there was here no mark of strained thought, or forced diction, no crowd or turbulence of imagery... It was not however the freedom from false taste... which made so unusual an impression on my feelings immediately, and subsequently on my judgment. It was the union of deep feeling with profound thought; the fine balance of truth in observing, with the imaginative faculty in modifying the objects observed; and above all the original gift of spreading the tone, the atmosphere,and with it the depth and height of the ideal world around forms, incidents, and situations, of which for the common view, custom had bedimmed all the lustre, had dried up the sparkle and the dewdrops... This excellence, which in all Mr. Wordsworth's writings is more or less predominant, and which constitutes the character of his mind, I no sooner felt, than I sought to understand. Repeated meditations led me first to suspect... that fancy and imagination were two distinct and widely different faculties, instead of being, according to the general belief, either two names with one meaning, or, at furthest, the lower and higher degree of one and the same power."
It is clear that in implying Wordsworth's poetry to be imaginative and not fanciful he pointed by the term "ima-
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gination" to some faculty of the soul by which, while the objects observed were being modified, there was no mere "arbitrary bringing together of things that lie remote", no aggregating and ingenious presenting of impressions drawn from memory, but the creating of an indissoluble oneness in which the imaginative beauty could be both felt and under-stood. Not only did the heart warm to it: the understanding also went out to embrace it. The unique quality of this result by a "beautiful and beauty-making Power" was that at the same time it awoke emotion and satisfied the reason. For here was a faculty of insight that rendered beauty a thrill of some inner truth of the universe - a faculty whose ultimate flowering is a complex pantheistic mysticism.
Towards this flowering all the five great Romantics had a nisus. Even Keats who is on the whole more aesthetic than mystic has wonderful moments of that nisus and his aesthe-ticism is never without a tinge of it, however subdued. In his Ode to a Nightingale, he recognises the bird's song to be revelatory of a timeless order of things through a phenomenon of Nature repeating as a single ravishment within diverse forms across the march of the ages:
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same voice that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien com;
The same that oft-times hath
Charm'd magic casements opening on the foam
Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn.
Similarly in the Ode on a Grecian Urn he took not beautiful sound but beautiful form, a visible silence, as a glimpse-giver of the timeless, the divine inner verity of things:
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O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,' - that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
As a comment by Keats himself on the mystical meaning of these two most famous poetic passages from his work, espe-cially of the second, there could not be anything more succinctly apt than the following from a letter of his to Benjamin Bailey: "I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of Imagination - What the Imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth - whether it existed before or not - for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love; they are all, in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty... The Imagination may be compared to Adam's dream - he awoke and found it truth."
"Adam's dream" is, of course, a reference to Milton's story in Paradise Lost of how when Eve was created Adam saw Eve's existence in a dream and this existence continued, as it were, from dream into reality, as if the dream were itself creative of what was true, what really existed. To Keats, the Imagination, creator of Beauty, reveals something which, whether already seen as real or not, is still an undeniable reality, an actual existence, a truth inhering in our world though not always perceived by the gross sense. This truth is a dream-perception, a discovery made by an inwardly creative faculty which in the act of creating or dreaming the beautiful awakes to and lays bare a world within our world just as real as the objects we usually honour with that name. And this dream-creation of the true is also in a further sense like Adam's dream. Eve who continued into reality from that dream was a creation by the
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Divine Power: Adam's dream partook, as it were, in that creation and was a translation into human terms of an activity which was divine. Similarly, Keats's "truth of the Imagination" is ultimately a human reflex of what a Divine Power, some Eternity which teases us out of thought, has visioned into existence through shape and sound and colour of the natural universe.
Perhaps a hint of Keats's fundamental mood in speaking of "the truth of the Imagination" may be read in the phrase he has coupled with this expression - "the holiness of the Heart's affections". "Holiness": there we have a religious approach, a spiritual attitude - the intuition of the Divine in the Heart's finest movements. And these movements are intimately re-lated by Keats to those of the Imagination, for, "they are all, in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty", Beauty which the Imagination seizes in things. The epithet "essential" too is a hint of the revelation both the Heart and the Imagination effect: it points us to a divine depth of reality, the Platonic world of essences that are the eternal truths of the objects we here experience, the Platonic domain where exists behind the Nightingale whose voice was heard on Hampstead Heath the essentiality to which Keats could say:
We may pause a moment to consider how "all our Pas-sions", and not only "Love", create "essential Beauty" when they are raised to the sublime pitch. Evidently, "Love" is conceived as having the Beautiful for its raison d'etre, a passion fired by a creative vision of some lovely perfection inherent in the beloved. Similarly, all other desires springing from the genuine emotional being, the heart, if kindled to their intensest . and immensest, are idealists, lovers of something supreme, visionaries and revealers of an ideal form in the object desired, conducers to what Keats in another letter terms "fellowship with essence" - "essence" here under the aspect of Beauty. Thus "all our Passions" are a species of imaginative energy -
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and, conversely, the Imagination that seizes the Beautiful is a species of passionate energy. Does not Keats himself, in a communication to George and Georgiana Keats, write: "the yearning passion I have for the beautiful"?
All in all, Keats's pursuit of the "beautiful and beauty-making Power" which Coleridge talked of was a creative idealistic process which - in Wordsworth's language - came always to add to the experience of day-to-day life and nature
the gleam,
The light that never was on sea or land,
The consecration and the poet's dream.
The passage, therefore, from the letter to Bailey is not only a succinctly apt comment on the stanzas we have quoted from Keats's two greatest Odes. It is also eminently in tune with the core of the new Romanticism, the animating philosophy and religion of that movement, as figured by Blake, Wordsworth and Shelley no less than by Coleridge with whom they held views more or less in common about the Imagination.
References
1.C. M. Bowra, op. cit., pp. 13,285.
2.The Future Poetry, pp. 125,128.
3.Ibid., pp. 528-29.
4.The Making of Literature (Martin Secker & Warbung Ltd., London, 1946), p.220.
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