Coleridge, Schiller and Aesthetic Education

Coleridge, Schiller and Aesthetic Education Michael John Kooy

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Coleridge, Schiller and Aesthetic Education

10.1057/9780230596788 - Coleridge, Schiller and Aesthetic Education, Michael John Kooy

10.1057/9780230596788 - Coleridge, Schiller and Aesthetic Education, Michael John Kooy

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Michael John Kooy

10.1057/9780230596788 - Coleridge, Schiller and Aesthetic Education, Michael John Kooy

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Coleridge, Schiller and Aesthetic Education

© Michael John Kooy, 2002

No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2002 by PALGRAVE Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE is the new global academic imprint of St. Martin’s Press LLC Scholarly and Reference Division and Palgrave Publishers Ltd (formerly Macmillan Press Ltd). ISBN 0–333–74936–7 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kooy, Michael John, 1969– Coleridge, Schiller, and aesthetic education/Michael John Kooy. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–333–74936–7 1. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1772–1834—Knowledge—Literature. 2. Schiller, Friedrich, 1759–1805—Appreciation—England, 3. Criticism— Great Britain—History—19th century. 4. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1772–1834—Aesthetics. 5. Literature—History and criticism—Theory, etc. 6. Schiller, Friedrich, 1759–1805–Aesthetics. 7. Schiller, Friedrich, 1759–1805—Influence. 8. English poetry—German influences. 9. Aesthetics, Modern—19th century. 10. Aesthetics, Modern–18th century. I. Title. PR4487.L5 K66 2002 821′.7—dc21 2001036986 10 9 8 11 10 09

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for Katya

10.1057/9780230596788 - Coleridge, Schiller and Aesthetic Education, Michael John Kooy

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Acknowledgements

ix

List of Abbreviations

xi

Introduction: Reading Coleridge through Schiller A note on texts and translations

1

1 Schiller and the Young Coleridge Schiller in the 1790s: Jena and Weimar Coleridge’s reading of Schiller’s early plays Beddoes and the Horae

9

2 Coleridge and Weimar Classicism Coleridge in Göttingen The aesthetics of Wallenstein

33

3 British Germanophiles The German Museum Schiller and the British literary press Coleridge’s reading of Schiller’s prose

45

4 Schiller’s Poetry in Coleridge’s Notebooks Gedichte Part 1: dejection and theological speculation Gedichte Part 2: pantheism, metrics, the ‘beautiful soul’ Coleridge abroad, Schiller abroad The Muses’ Almanac and the new aesthetics Three translations

67

5 Semblance and Aesthetic Autonomy in Coleridge’s Criticism Coleridge and The Critique of Judgement Autonomy in the Aesthetic Letters ‘Semblance’ in Biographia Literaria 6 Aesthetic Education in Biographia Literaria, The Friend and the Lectures on Literature Aesthetic freedom / moral freedom vii

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115

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Contents

viii

Contents

7 Coleridge’s ‘Aesthetic State’ Bildung and politics ‘Cultivation’ and the state

141

8 The Clerisy and Aesthetic Education Cultivating the nation Women in the ‘Aesthetic State’ Imagined female figures

167

9 Epilogue: Bildung and History Schiller’s sublime history Coleridge, Bildung and providential history

193

Notes

207

Selected Bibliography

221

Index

231

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Biographia and beyond: Schelling or Schiller? Didacticism

This book began as a chapter in my doctoral thesis, which I wrote while at Keble College, Oxford, and it grew into its present shape while I held posts at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and the University of Warwick. During this time my work on the subject has been encouraged by many people; to three of them in particular I owe a large debt of gratitude: Roy Park, my thesis supervisor, for his indefatigable attention to detail; Elinor Shaffer, for encouraging me not to underestimate the strength of the Coleridge–Schiller relationship; and Michael Bell, whose chapter on Schiller in Sentimentalism, Ethics and the Culture of Feeling (2000) I read just as this book was going to press, for encouraging me to think about the broader issues in Schiller’s reception and, not least, for kindly agreeing to read and comment upon a draft of this book. Lesley Sharpe, Joyce Crick and Stephen Gill also read selections of the book and I am grateful to them for their careful and discriminating responses. I thank, too, a large number of people whose timely comments helped to shape this book, probably in ways unbeknownst to them: John Beer, Thomas McFarland, Heather Jackson, Peter Larkin, Anya Taylor, Raimonda Modiano, Nick Halmi, Graham Davidson, Douglas Hedley, Lucy Newlyn, Geoffrey Rowell, Val Cunningham, Christine Battersby, Andrew Benjamin, F. J. Lamport and Paul Hamilton. The book has also benefited from the intellectual exchange fostered by the postgraduate seminar at Oxford, ‘Romantic Realignments’, and in particular by two contemporaries of mine, both Coleridgeans: Tim Milnes and Seamus Perry. Much of the research for this book was carried out at the Taylor Institution Library, Oxford, and I am grateful to the librarians there, especially Giles Barber, Jill Hughes and David Thomas, for their expert advice and for helping to see me through one, rather lean, year. I also owe a debt of gratitude to a colleague at Warwick, Martin Warner, whose work on the relationship between philosophy and literature is a kind of education in its own right. ix

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Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements

Parts of this book were written while I held a doctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Canada, and later a postdoctoral fellowship from the British Academy; I am deeply grateful to both bodies for their support. A much earlier version of Chapter 6 and a part of Chapter 9 have appeared elsewhere in print: in The Wordsworth Circle, 26 (1995), 23–6 and Journal of the History of Ideas, 60 (1999), 717–34, respectively. I am grateful to the editors of these journals, Marilyn Gaull and Donald R. Kelley, for permission to include this material here. Writing this book would have been impossible without the support I received from Canada. I am grateful in particular to Douglas Loney and John Herbert, who helped direct my interest in poetics, and to John Rozema, Bernie and Tina Bax, Art and John De Groot and the board members of Vision ’74. And closer to home, Nadya Chobotova, and my parents Kees and Alice Kooy. Above all, I thank Katya Chobotova. In gratitude for her insight, unbending support, and much else besides, I dedicate this book to her.

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x

Aesthetic Judgement

Aesthetic Letters

AR

BL

Bowring

C&S

CL

CM

CN

Elias

Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911). Friedrich Schiller, Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, trans. L. A. Willoughby and Elizabeth M. Wilkinson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967). S. T. Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, ed. John Beer (London and Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994). S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and Walter Jackson Bate, 2 vols (London and Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983). The Poems of Schiller, trans. Edgar Alfred Bowring (London: John W. Parker & Son, 1851). S. T. Coleridge, On the Constitution of Church and State, ed. John Colmer (London and Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976). Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956–71). S. T. Coleridge, Marginalia, ed. George Whalley and H. J. Jackson, 6 vols (London and Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980–). The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn et al., 5 vols (New York: Princeton University Press and London: Routledge, 1957–). Naïve and Sentimental Poetry and On the Sublime, trans. Julius A. Elias (New York: Ungar, 1966). xi

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List of Abbreviations

List of Abbreviations

EOT

Essays

Friend

Lects 1795

Lects Lit

LS

NA

PW

SM

SW & F

TT

Essays on His Times, ed. David V. Erdman, 3 vols (London and Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978). Friedrich Schiller, Essays, Aesthetical and Philosophical, Bohn’s Library (London: G. Bell, 1884). S. T. Coleridge, The Friend, ed. Barbara E. Rooke, 2 vols (London and Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969). Lectures 1795: on Politics and Religion, ed. Lewis Patton and Peter Mann (London and Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971). S. T. Coleridge, Lectures 1808–1819 on Literature, ed. R. A. Foakes, 2 vols (London and Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987). S. T. Coleridge, A Lay Sermon, in Lay Sermons, ed. R. J. White (London and Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972). Friedrich Schillers Werke und Briefe (Nationalausgabe), ed. Julius Petersen et al. (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1943–). The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. H. Coleridge, 2 vols (Oxford, 1912). S. T. Coleridge, The Statesman’s Manual, in Lay Sermons, ed. R. J. White (London and Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972). S. T. Coleridge, Shorter Works and Fragments, ed. H. J. Jackson and J. R. de J. Jackson, 2 vols (London and Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995). S. T. Coleridge, Table Talk, ed. Carl Woodring, 2 vols (London and Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990).

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xii

The aim of this book is twofold. In the first instance, I seek to reconstruct in historical terms Coleridge’s relationship to his slightly older contemporary Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805). Then, on the basis of this relationship, I aim to offer an interpretation of Coleridge’s mature aesthetics in terms of Schiller’s notion of ‘aesthetic education’. The main argument of the book is that the claims Coleridge makes on behalf of the imagination imply an educative imperative best understood in terms of ‘cultivation’ or Bildung, according to which the experience of art as undetermined feeling indirectly results in real, though unspecified, moral and social benefits. In other words, in Biographia Literaria and elsewhere, Coleridge reworks Schiller’s thesis in the Aesthetic Letters. Part of my argument is that while conforming to the expectations of incipient bourgeois interests – and mostly male interests at that – the rationalist aesthetic programme as set out by Schiller and Coleridge nevertheless possesses a radical function in so far as it justifies a withdrawal from political and social action in the name of a more critical understanding of both the self and modernity. In setting out to compare Coleridge with Schiller, one is struck – and perhaps a little disconcerted, too – by the fact that there is so little scholarly precedent. After all, there are many obvious links between the two. Both wrote in a variety of genres – Gothic tales and poems, historical tragedies, supernatural ballads, lyric verse – in ways that challenged as much as strengthened received literary forms. As poets they similarly strove for an elevated diction that would appear natural. As critics they measured their own achievement and indeed 1

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Introduction: Reading Coleridge through Schiller

Coleridge, Schiller and Aesthetic Education

that of the age by the standard of great contemporaries who were also friends – Wordsworth and Goethe. As theorists they both thought in universal categories that they defended in terms of logical coherence and psychological truth. Finally, crucially, as joint heirs of Kant, both identified and then drew out the implicit argument of the third Critique, that non-cognitive experience, in particular aesthetic judgement, constituted a kind of freedom that could indirectly serve moral and social ends. There have, of course, been commentators on these and related issues. Some have adopted a comparative approach, like Rosemary Ashton, who in The German Idea compared Coleridge and Schiller’s response to Kant; Joyce Crick in her discerning analysis of his translation of Wallenstein; and Raimonda Modiano in her comparison of Schiller and Coleridge on the sublime. Driven by more overtly philosophical interests, Paul Hamilton has drawn on Schiller to illustrate the potential, and in his view largely suppressed, radicalism of Coleridge’s aesthetics. Others have sought to expose some of the ideological foundations of their work: Julie Carlson has identified the Burkean politics of Coleridge’s Wallenstein translation and Juliet Sychrava has claimed that both thinkers devalue the naïve in relation to the sentimental. Similarly suspicious, Linda M. Brooks has argued that as writers both Schiller and Coleridge experience the sublime in a way that precludes the transcendence of materiality. And Nancy Webb Kelly has maintained that in the interests of bourgeois professionalism Coleridge repressed the notion of ‘free play’ that he inherited from the aesthetics of the German Idealists. (My own reading of ‘aesthetic education’ will take issue with some of these strong ideological critiques.) But while criticism has on occasion seen reason to compare the two thinkers – and has in addition dealt exhaustively with the many other German Idealists Coleridge had read – there has never been a book-length study given over to his relationship with Schiller. A number of reasons for such critical caution spring to mind and these are best dealt with straightaway. One is that in spite of the many similarities an important religious difference divides the two. Coleridge’s thought is directly shaped by his Anglicanism and this is no more evidently so than in his definition of the imagination as imitative of divine creation; in his Christian apologetics; and in his advocacy of the national church as an agent of social and political stability. By contrast, Schiller is not only sceptical about the temporal power of the

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church but his aesthetic rationalism does not rest on theological foundations in the way Coleridge’s so obviously does. That said, Schiller often invokes motifs drawn from the Christian tradition and in so far as his ‘aesthetic education’ consists of a radical transformation of the self it can be seen to mirror the aspiration of many forms of religious practice. As for Coleridge, his speculative theology, and in particular his reflections on the Logos in history, shares with Schiller’s secular aesthetics the notion of progressive development over time. Nuances such as these open up dialogue between what appear to be fundamentally different systems of thought. Another reason for criticism’s wariness of linking Coleridge with Schiller is the fact that Coleridge’s aesthetics has largely been understood as answering epistemological and ontological questions rather than moral ones. Influential readings by I. A. Richards, René Wellek, G. N. G. Orsini and Thomas McFarland, for all their differences, stressed the idealizing tendency in Coleridge’s thought: art was a transmutation of material reality and the experience of art constituted implicit knowledge of the Absolute. In the face of such claims, questions of moral action appeared pedantic or narrowly political and naturally receded from view. They did not, though, entirely disappear and a number of critics writing on Coleridge’s aesthetics – John Beer, Elinor Shaffer, Laurence Lockridge, Anthony Harding, Anya Taylor – have continued to put forward the case for its moral and humanizing ambition. And as Seamus Perry has reminded us, even with regard to his own idealism Coleridge could be in two minds. Attending anew to Coleridge’s awareness of what is given in life, rather than what is negated, one sees the implicit morality of his aesthetics become, as it does with Schiller, explicit. But had Coleridge, after all, ever read Schiller’s aesthetic essays? Doubts about how much Coleridge knew of Schiller is a third reason – and by far the most obvious one – for why criticism has been reluctant to consider their relationship as significant. Throughout his work Coleridge astutely cites Kant, Schelling, the Schlegels, Solger, the Naturphilosophen, in fact nearly all the prominent German intellectuals of his generation, and thanks to scrupulous editorial work and his own marginalia we can often follow page by page his quarrels with each. But apart from a few echoes, Coleridge himself never refers to Schiller’s aesthetic essays explicitly in his published works and barely hints at them in his letters and table talk. There are

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Introduction: Reading Coleridge through Schiller 3

Coleridge, Schiller and Aesthetic Education

no extant marginalia. The absence of obvious markers has led to a critical consensus that Coleridge knew next to nothing about Schiller’s aesthetics, a mysterious and regrettable but somehow undeniable case of ships passing unnoticed in the night. Though it was not an isolated case: had not Coleridge similarly missed Hölderlin and dismissed Hegel? Since that consensus has not been examined for many years, and since it is something of a sticking point, it is worthwhile considering its origin. The last time Coleridge’s allusions to Schiller were examined at length was in 1922, by A. C. Dunstan, in a detailed and authoritative article published in Modern Language Review. His findings consisted of a few direct borrowings from (and also several veiled allusions to) the essays On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry (Über naïve und sentimentalische Dichtung) and On Grace and Dignity (Über Anmut und Würde) as well as various distant echoes of other shorter essays. His overall conclusion was that Coleridge knew just a little of Schiller’s work. Dunstan’s research was quoted at length in Frederic Ewen’s 1932 reception study, The Prestige of Schiller in England and again in H. M. Goodman’s 1957 doctoral thesis on Coleridge’s German learning. Judging from the evidence at hand, both again emphasized the limitations of Coleridge’s awareness of Schiller’s project, as did L. A. Willoughby and Elizabeth M. Wilkinson in the introduction to their magisterial bilingual edition of the Aesthetic Letters, though they did discuss a number of significant parallels. In their own work on the subject, Rosemary Ashton and Paul Hamilton have similarly maintained Dunstan’s cautious view that no more obviously historical connection could be proven. More recently, in an important and very useful survey called Schiller’s Aesthetic Essays: Two Centuries of Criticism, Lesley Sharpe has stated summarily that Coleridge ‘never alludes specifically to Schiller in his critical writings’. That long-standing critical consensus deserves now to be rethought, particularly in the light of new evidence about what Coleridge read, how he read and how he used ‘sources’. What I want to challenge is not so much the view that Coleridge rarely alludes to Schiller’s work – for that is, so to speak, true enough – but rather the unexamined presumption that Coleridge, because he rarely alludes to them, therefore had not read Schiller’s aesthetic essays, and therefore could not have been influenced by them. The reasons for challenging this presumption will be developed in greater detail in the first four chapters of this book but can be summarized briefly here. First, Coleridge had easy

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access to nearly the whole of Schiller’s corpus, much of it in his own library. A patient troll through the notebooks and letters reveals that he owned copies of Schiller’s Muses’ Almanac (Musenalmanach) for 1797 (which contained the famous distichs by Schiller and Goethe mocking contemporary taste and setting out their own aesthetic agenda), Schiller’s collected Poems (Gedichte) in two parts (1800, 1803), as well as two volumes of his collected philosophical and aesthetic essays, Shorter Works in Prose (Kleinere prosaische Schriften, 1792–1802). The first of these Coleridge had probably acquired while travelling and studying in Germany. In addition, by looking at the literary culture of the day it is possible to see that the whole range of Schiller’s work was available to Coleridge in England both before and after his trip in 1798–99, through periodicals like the Monthly Magazine and The German Museum as well as through the loose affiliation of English Germanophiles he kept in contact with. Many of these, like Thomas Beddoes and William Taylor of Norwich, had reviewed or translated Schiller; one, Henry Crabb Robinson, had met Schiller at Weimar in 1801 and they discussed, among other things, Coleridge’s translation of Wallenstein published the year before. For these reasons, and given Coleridge’s developing literary and philosophical interests at the time (contemporary theatre, translation, Kant) it is difficult to believe that he did not know of Goethe’s and Schiller’s ‘classical’ experiment at the Weimar Court Theatre or the theoretical essays which laid the groundwork for it. Secondly, the notion of ‘aesthetic education’ appears not only in the essays but in much else of Schiller’s work, as a leitmotif, and Coleridge, like any attentive reader, responded to this notion where he found it – in lyrical poems, ballads, tragedies. And Coleridge was a very attentive reader. His translation of Wallenstein captures both linguistically and thematically the dramatic tension of the original between the desire always to be free and the need to take decisive action (Schiller’s sceptical response, in dramatic terms, to Kant’s imperious practical reason). Coleridge was also a close reader of the poetry, analysing its metre for inclusion in his study of metrics or compiling selected distichs for their pithy insight into aesthetic principles. Several times he wrote translations, which are distinguished not so much by their fidelity to the originals as by their subtle variations on them and additions to them. In both Coleridge and Schiller, literary achievement could not be separated from philosophical interests.

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Introduction: Reading Coleridge through Schiller 5

Coleridge, Schiller and Aesthetic Education

Thirdly, the presumption that citation alone is an accurate measure of one writer’s interest in another is hardly valid in the case of a thinker as complicated and nervous as Coleridge. Given the continued association in the public mind of German thinkers with radical politics, Coleridge had plenty of reason not to mention his German sources – and Schiller, whose anti-establishment play The Robbers (Die Räuber) became a hit on the English stage in the 1790s, was long considered the most radical of the lot. Anxiety aside, Coleridge was in any case not primarily interested in advancing the reputations of German contemporaries abroad, but rather, as Rosemary Ashton has argued, in reconciling their ideas to an English temperament naturally sceptical of foreign influence and often hostile to idealist philosophy. Coleridge’s ability to develop an educative thesis in his own aesthetics attests not only to the strength of his similarities with Schiller but also to his success in making a German innovation seem philosophically native. The book proceeds more or less chronologically. In the first two chapters I survey Coleridge’s early reading of Schiller up to about 1800, a period which includes his first interest in drama and his first contact with the aesthetic essays as well as his travels in Germany and his translation of Wallenstein. I argue that during this time Coleridge not only read Schiller but also identified himself with him uncritically and, crucially, took a personal interest in Weimar classicism. Evaluating Coleridge’s response to Schiller depends in large measure upon a knowledge of Schiller’s own career, which is something of an unknown quantity outside German studies, so the first part of Chapter 1 is given over to a concise account of it and of Schiller’s main ideas. Here I rely on recent critical work on Schiller by a number of scholars – principally Norbert Oellers, Helmut Koopmann, Lesley Sharpe, F. J. Lamport and David Pugh – some of whom contest Schiller’s reputation for uncritical idealism and German nationalism in part by setting greater store by his intellectual achievement, both as it reflects certain Enlightenment values and as it questions them in the light of the Revolution crisis. Schiller’s social concern, in particular his reflections on what it is to be modern, are taken to be an integral, if problematic, part of his notion of ‘aesthetic education’ and this is the Schiller I try to bring into focus at the outset. The third chapter continues the account of Coleridge, relating it to Schiller’s British reception after 1800. Though the renewal of war after

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1803 closed off most of the continent to English travellers, and accordingly interrupted much intellectual traffic, yet discussion of Schiller’s work continued among Germanophiles in England and I argue that through this as well as through personal study Coleridge’s knowledge of Schiller in this period continued to grow. In particular, at a time when he first read Kant and found himself objecting to the formalism of both his moral philosophy and his aesthetics, Coleridge identified Schiller as one who shared his concerns. In the fourth chapter I trace some of these themes through a detailed analysis of Coleridge’s reading of Schiller’s poetry, drawing on his many notebook transcriptions and translations. Given that Schiller’s contributions to post-Kantian thought were in fact readily available to Coleridge, I go on to argue that they informed his own development of a notion of ‘aesthetic education’. With reference to Biographia Literaria, the lectures on literature and The Friend, I offer a reading of Coleridge through Schiller, focusing on their similar arguments for the autonomy of art, ‘semblance’ and the ‘play drive’ and against didacticism. I consider in some detail how both read Kant’s third Critique and also evaluate how Schiller’s response compares to that of Schelling, whose aesthetic absolutism Coleridge ultimately grew wary of. The programme of ‘aesthetic education’ has certain social implications, some by design and some not, and these are dealt with in the final two chapters. Here I position Coleridge’s notion of ‘cultivation’ and the ‘clerisy’, as set out in the Lay Sermons and On the Constitution of Church and State, in relation to Schiller’s argument for the ‘Aesthetic State’. I argue that several of the ambiguities of that argument – notably the role of the ‘educators’ and whether the ‘Aesthetic State’ is permanent or merely transitional – are resolved in Coleridge’s more programmatic strategy. In both cases, however, women are routinely accorded a lower status than men – though the notion of ‘aesthetic education’ is not, I argue, inherently sexist. I agree with Paul Hamilton that Coleridge fears the radical potential of the notion of Bildung, though I am not convinced that he suppresses it entirely. Instead ‘aesthetic education’ is drawn into the larger concerns of Coleridge’s mature vision, usually under the guise of new terms like ‘reflection’ and ‘cultivation’ or hidden in his critique of the ‘commercial spirit’. So far from announcing the death of art, the critique of contemporary civilization depends on a notion of self-transcendence derived from

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Introduction: Reading Coleridge through Schiller 7

Coleridge, Schiller and Aesthetic Education

‘aesthetic education’. Equipped with a knowledge of past achievement and a messianic sense of purpose – to construct a state in which the idea of humanity could be realized – Coleridge’s ‘clerisy’ has only one contrivance at hand: to preserve the condition of aesthetic freedom under which alone cultivation is possible. Finally, in an epilogue, I argue that both Coleridge and Schiller conceive of history as the progressive development of human potential, and thus analogous to the aesthetic project of Bildung, but a development which is, paradoxically, inscrutable. In relation to history, ‘aesthetic education’ thus appears sublime.

A note on texts and translations All references to Coleridge are taken from the standard editions of his work, with the exception of his poetry and the Wallenstein translation (both not yet published in the Bolligen edition at the time of going to press) for which I have continued to use the 1912 Oxford Complete Poetical Works, edited by E. H. Coleridge. References to Schiller’s work, including the letters, are taken from the Nationalausgabe, apart from the Aesthetic Letters, for which I have used the bilingual edition by L. A. Willoughby and Elizabeth M. Wilkinson. The matter of translations requires a further word of explanation. In all instances I have cited the German alongside the English translation except where, as in the case of the Aesthetic Letters, the German is readily available. Other translations I have used include Julius A. Elias’s On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry and On the Sublime (1966) and Essays, Aesthetical and Philosophical (Bohn’s Library, 1884). Translations of the poems are taken from Edgar Alfred Bowring’s Poems of Schiller Complete: Including all his Early Suppressed Pieces, 1851. Where the translation is not attributed to another, it is my own.

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When in 1794, fresh from reading a translation of Schiller’s first play, The Robbers (Die Räuber, 1782), Coleridge enthused to Southey, ‘My God! Southey! Who is this Schiller? This Convulser of the Heart?’ (CL, I, 122), he had no idea yet that this playwright was at that very moment publishing the series of letters for which as a theorist he would be most remembered, On the Aesthetic Education of Man. The ‘Convulser of the Heart’, an icon for the rebellious youth of 1790s England, had already moved on, lecturing on history at Jena, studying Kant, publishing essays on tragedy, literary history and aesthetics. In a few years he would move to Weimar in order to join Goethe in reinventing German theatre along newly conceived ‘classical’ lines. How Coleridge subsequently caught up with Schiller, both in the sense of growing more familiar with his plays, poems and essays, and in the sense of developing a similar morally and socially orientated aesthetic theory, is the subject of this book. These first two chapters concentrate on the former, that is, on the way in which Coleridge’s knowledge of Schiller took shape particularly in the years leading up to and during his trip to Germany. From an immediate enthusiasm for the early dramas, in which he saw reflected his own preoccupations with authority, guilt and the supernatural, Coleridge identified Schiller as a playwright who stood above his contemporaries and in some respects even rivalled Shakespeare. Soon after, he began to learn more about the main features of his mature thought and grew familiar with Weimar classicism more generally, and these interests soon led him to translate Schiller’s greatest historical tragedy, Wallenstein. 9

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Coleridge, Schiller and Aesthetic Education

Coleridge’s direct knowledge of Schiller at this early period of his career was mediated in three ways: by the translation and reception in Britain of Schiller’s early dramas; by the influence of Germanophiles, like Thomas Beddoes, who in the 1790s kept abreast of recent developments in German intellectual life; and by the books, journal articles and reports of Schiller that Coleridge himself picked up while travelling and studying in Germany in 1798–99. Before considering these in greater detail, though, it is necessary to call to mind the range of Schiller’s work and the development of his career, both of which have often been occluded in critical discussions of his ideas. One aspect in particular that I seek to stress is the continuity between his philosophical interests and his literary productions. An understanding of this historical Schiller will help later in situating Coleridge’s own engagement with his work.

Schiller in the 1790s: Jena and Weimar By the time Schiller accepted a chair in Philosophy at the University of Jena, in 1789, he had already established a considerable reputation as a playwright, poet and thinker. 1 His first play, The Robbers, staged in Mannheim amid great scandal in 1782, epitomized the volatile mix of sentimentalism and revolutionary politics so prevalent in the period just preceding the French Revolution. That was followed soon after by three quite different plays: Fiesco in 1783, a historical play set in sixteenth-century Genoa in which republican interests are pitted against hereditary virtues; the year after, Cabal and Love (Kabale und Liebe), a love story patterned after one of Lessing’s dramas; and Don Carlos, written with difficulty between 1782 and 1787, which tells the story of Carlos’s discomfited rebellion against his father, Philip II of Spain. During this period before Jena Schiller also wrote some lyric poetry – the ‘Laura’ poems, with their tender if sometimes intellectual descriptions of first love, date from this time – and published them in a volume he called Anthology for 1782 (Anthologie auf das Jahr 1782). He also wrote in prose. The first major pieces of writing were Philosophy of Physiology (Philosophie der Physiologie), in 1779, and a year later his final doctoral dissertation, Essay on the Connection between our Animal and Spiritual Nature (Versuch über den Zusammenhang der thierischen Natur des Menschen mit seiner geistigen), in which he sought to describe the interdependence

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of body and mind. In his Philosophical Letters (Philosophische Briefe, 1786), Schiller attempted to accommodate religious belief to Enlightenment rationality, by means of a lively dialogue between a man of faith and a man of doubt. In this same period he wrote a moving short story, recalling The Robbers, about a man driven by need to a life of crime, called The Criminal from Lost Honour (Der Verbrecher aus verlorener Ehre) and, in a distinctly Gothic vein, began work on a novel about superstition and gullibility, The Ghostseer (Der Geisterseher). These last two prose pieces, along with some of his own poetry, were published in the literary journal that he edited throughout the 1780s and early 1790s, called successively Rhenish Thalia, Thalia and New Thalia. For all their variety in terms of genre and form, Schiller’s early writings share a number of identifiable concerns that would continue to appear, if mutated, in the later aesthetics. One is liberal politics. Adapting the Enlightenment rationalism inherited from, among others, Lessing, Schiller expresses an optimistic belief in social improvement through the cultivation of feeling, sympathy for the outcast and the practice of toleration. Another is his Neoplatonic interest: Schiller evokes the correspondence between the physical and spiritual world, sometimes as an element in his own experience but more often as an ideal to be striven after. As in Plotinus, the subjective identification with something objective is the goal to be striven for – though Schiller’s more immediate source for this notion of harmony is Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury and, perhaps more fundamentally, the Protestant tradition of Swabian pietism in which he was raised. The third factor common to much of Schiller’s early work is an interest in the relation between art and action. This crops up interestingly in some of the dramas: in Fiesco, Act II, for example, the republican conspirators try to push their would-be leader into action by showing him a huge painting of the early Roman statesman, Appius Claudius Crassus. But Schiller treats the subject explicitly, too. In an essay published in the Rhenish Thalia (Rheinische Thalia) in 1784, ‘On the Effects of a Permanent Theatre’ (‘Was kann eine gute stehende Schaubühne eigentlich wirken?’), Schiller argues that the theatre might educate audiences by challenging our prejudices and by reconciling us to life’s misfortunes.2 And a few years later, reviewing a collection of poems by Gottfried August Bürger in the Jena Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, he

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Coleridge, Schiller and Aesthetic Education

identifies the condition by which art might have that ameliorating effect: through the poet’s estrangement from the material. Two of Schiller’s greatest poems of the 1780s similarly sketch out the socializing function of art. In ‘The Gods of Greece’ (‘Die Götter Griechenlandes’), first published in Wieland’s Teutscher Merkur in March 1788, Schiller for the first time describes in mythological terms the harmony of life in ancient Greece, as humans interact with nature and with the divine. The only way to relive that harmony today is in beauty. In the philosophical poem ‘The Artists’ (‘Die Künstler’), which first appeared with ‘The Gods of Greece’, Schiller makes an effort to eschew nostalgia in order to celebrate the immanent power of the artist to discern the unity of human experience and the natural world. The poem contains moreover one of Schiller’s most fulsome descriptions of art as a means of cultivating humanity.3 With their images of living gods and playful artists, both ‘The Gods of Greece’ and ‘The Artists’ anticipate the turn towards ‘aesthetic education’ in Schiller’s major essays and, later, the efforts of Weimar classicism to realize that programme. I will return to these poems at greater length when considering Coleridge’s knowledge of them. The move to the professorship at Jena in 1789 put a stop to Schiller’s literary career, at least for a time. The hiatus, though, was welcome: the long struggle with the Don Carlos material, which to his dismay would not conform to a unified structure, dealt a blow to his confidence as a playwright – Schiller defended the play against its detractors in his ‘Letters on Don Carlos’ (‘Briefe über Don Carlos’), first published in Wieland’s Teutscher Merkur – and in any case he was eager to pursue his growing interest in history and historiography. His first book in the subject, The History of the Revolt of the United Netherlands against the Spanish Government (Geschichte des Abfalls der Vereinigten Niederlande von der spanischen Regierung, 1788), of which only volume one appeared, was followed soon after by a new series on universal history of which he was general editor, General Collection of Historical Memoirs (Allgemeine Sammlung historischer Memoires), and a book called The History of the Thirty Years’ War (Geschichte des Dreißigjährigen Kriegs, 1790). In large part a study of the Bohemian general Albrecht von Wallenstein, who ended his days in rebellion against the Holy Roman Emperor, this work contains the idea for Schiller’s tragedy, Wallenstein: that the general did not fall because he rebelled, but rebelled because he was falling. Finally, Schiller’s

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inaugural lecture at Jena, ‘What is Universal History and Why do We Study It?’ (‘Was heißt und zu welchem Ende studiert man Universalgeschichte?’), echoes the progressivism in Kant’s own essay on the subject, ‘Idea for a Universal History’ (1788), but also anticipates certain aspects of Romantic historiography, particularly the creative encounter with the past and the hermeneutic method needed in interpreting raw historical data. Though Schiller’s historical work was soon overtaken by a new generation of scholars employing a more historicist methodology, in his lifetime it won for him a high reputation and some works, like the inaugural lecture and The History of the Thirty Years’ War, usefully shed light on his philosophy and poetic practice. Repeated bouts of illness in 1791–92 seriously interrupted Schiller’s university work and for many months he remained bedridden. The interruption gave him the time to study Kant and this spurred him on to further, independent work on aesthetics. Schiller worked through the Critique of Judgement (1790) and then read the earlier works, the Critique of Pure Reason (1781, 1787) and the Critique of Practical Reason (1788). His response was enthusiastic and from then on Schiller not only accepted the basic argument of the critical philosophy, that pure reason could not legitimately lay claim to knowledge of ideas, but he also began employing the new critical vocabulary in his own work. From the first, though, Schiller was critical of what he perceived to be the subjective ground of Kantian aesthetics. According to Kant, the world of sense and the world of intelligibility could not be bridged except in the mind of the subject, through the construction of an ‘as if’. While accepting the fundamental dualism, Schiller nevertheless sought to demonstrate how the gulf might be bridged objectively, that is, in a way that would have universal validity. The first attempt to articulate his views came in private letters to his friend, Christian Gottfried Körner, in which Schiller sketched out a transcendental deduction of the imagination to which he added, rather incongruously, empirical evidence drawn from art and nature. In the search for an objective ground for the aesthetic, and the tendency to draw in empirically based lessons from psychology, Schiller modified both the substance and the method of Kant. Their main innovation is to add an educative thesis to Kant’s notion of the aesthetic as the disinterested ‘play’ of the imagination, between reason

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Coleridge, Schiller and Aesthetic Education

and understanding. Precisely because art is autonomous, argued Schiller, it can have a positive effect on moral life. Schiller’s term for this kind of productive autonomy of the aesthetic is Gemütsfreiheit, or ‘freedom of the heart’. This innovative but often unjustified departure from Kantian orthodoxy, which is found in these letters to Körner, known as the Kallias Letters (Kalliasbriefe), runs through all Schiller’s major aesthetic essays. 4 Once back on his feet by late 1792, Schiller began writing again, this time producing not dramatic, poetic or historical work, but essays reflecting his new ideas about art. Taken together, Schiller’s essays are hardly systematic, but they do evince his interest in the personal and social effect of art, rather than in art as a mode of subjective expression. The most thoroughgoing defence of this theory comes in On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters (Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen, 1795), drawn from letters which Schiller wrote originally in the autumn of 1793 to the Danish prince F. C. von Augustenburg, as a way to acknowledge a gift of patronage. At the outset of the letters, Schiller diagnoses the problem of modernity as an excess of specialization, which results in the alienation of individuals both from themselves and from the culture in which they live. The solution to the problem comes not at the social level but the personal level, through the reintegration of the whole personality. This is only possible by way of the aesthetic, which Schiller defines through a transcendental deduction of beauty, introducing along the way the key concepts of the Formtrieb (the capacity for abstraction), Stofftrieb (the experience of the world in terms of sense perception) and Spieltrieb (the capacity for imaginative ‘play’). In the final letters Schiller rounds off his theory with a speculative look at how an aesthetically sophisticated culture might be brought about and what, ideally at least, it would look like. Here he introduces, almost in passing, the notion of Schein, or ‘semblance’, as the defining characteristic of aesthetic experience. Schiller’s theory of ‘aesthetic education’ is not confined to the 27 letters gathered under that name. The notion figures fundamentally in the essays ‘On the Grounds of Pleasure in Tragic Objects’ (‘Über den Grund des Vergnügens an tragischen Gegenständen’, 1792), ‘On Tragic Art’ (‘Über die tragische Kunst’, 1792), ‘On the Pathetic’ (‘Über das Pathetische’, 1793) and ‘On the Sublime’ (‘Über das Erhabene’, 1793–96). It is precisely through our pleasure in the representation of

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tragic action and in overdetermined scenes of violence and disorder that we are driven to acknowledge our freedom from material determination. All aesthetic experience, even of the most disturbing kind, Schiller argues, is potentially liberating in this way. Schiller’s goal of achieving psychic unity through aesthetic experience is expressed in two other, rather different essays, also written at this time: On Grace and Dignity (Über Anmut und Würde, 1793) and On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry (Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung, 1795–96). The first sets itself against the formalism of Kantian ethics, in particular the distrust of feeling, by elevating the role of inclination and habit in doing good (Schiller calls this ‘grace’) alongside the overcoming of sensuous desire (which he calls ‘dignity’). The essay on the ‘naïve’ and the ‘sentimental’, for its part, takes the conventional distinction between the ancients and the moderns (the first close to nature, the latter distanced from it) and treats the two not as historical facts but rather psychological phenomena, as attitudes or types of consciousness. In spite of notable counter-examples like Shakespeare and Goethe, modern art is dominated by the sentimental, that is, by the creation of aesthetic artefacts that self-consciously reenact the separation of consciousness from nature. Schiller diagnoses two options for sentimental poetry: to look back with regret at the loss of unity or to look forward to the future recovery of the ideal. It is unclear whether Schiller believes such recovery is really a possibility or simply a good idea, but clearly he prefers this to nostalgia. On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry turns out to be not just a vindication of the modern but also a programme for its future development. Even setting aside for the moment some of the contemporary critics of ‘aesthetic education’ – like some Marxists, who find it a poor solution to the problem of political alienation (Lukács), or poststructuralists, who regard with suspicion Schiller’s unreflecting affirmation of psychic wholeness (de Man) – the theory runs into trouble. One perennial problem is that in setting out the programme for ‘aesthetic education’ Schiller cannot decide whether he is offering a real solution that might actually be achieved in practice or instead an ideal solution that ought to be striven for but can never fully be realized. His idea of aesthetic culture seems sometimes to be constitutive of experience, sometimes merely regulative of it. The other main problem has to do with Schiller’s shifting attitude towards nature, that is, brute physical nature, and the determinism inherent in it.

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Coleridge, Schiller and Aesthetic Education

This problem crops up most clearly in his incompatible descriptions of beauty, as the appreciation of the forms of nature and of art, and sublimity, as the overcoming of determinism in nature by a free act of will. To an extent Schiller’s broad aesthetic programme can accommodate the tragic and the sublime in so far as the acceptance of his or her circumstances constitutes the greatest moral achievement of the tragic character and wakens us to our own noble potential. But more often than not, both in theory (the essays) and in practice (the later dramas), the sublime moment results in a negation of nature rather than a harmonizing with it. Schiller himself and indeed his contemporaries recognized these difficulties and they will reappear later in Coleridge, though these problems did not seriously disrupt the argument for ‘aesthetic education’, nor did they undermine its influence. Schiller’s reflections on these matters were by no means private. In fact, through influential new friendships and through his own publishing endeavours, his thought played an important role in German literary thinking throughout the later 1790s, his aesthetic humanism setting the agenda of Weimar classicism at least until his death in 1805 while at the same time inspiring the more radical theories of the Jena Romantics, including those of the Schlegels, Novalis, Fichte and Schelling. Throughout the early 1790s Schiller had maintained close contact with Gottfried Körner, whose perspicacious remarks in correspondence helped focus his ideas. But in 1794 he made contact with Goethe, inviting him to contribute to a journal he was planning to launch, Horae (Die Horen). It was not the first time they met, but it was the first time they got on. Goethe, like Schiller, had already made a considerable literary career for himself, with Götz von Berlichingen (1773) and The Sorrows of Young Werther (Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, 1774) well behind him, as well as the trip to Italy (1786–88) that compelled him towards neoclassicism, evident in his Roman Elegies (Römische Elegien, 1788–90) and Torquato Tasso (1790). The two were by no means an obvious match: Schiller’s tendency to think in abstractions naturally ran counter to Goethe’s more empirically minded approach though each, as Schiller reasoned in his famous letter to Goethe of 23 August 1794, might well shed light on the other and the two reasonably agreed to meet halfway. Schiller’s articulation of the aesthetic project gave impetus to Goethe’s own less theorized intentions – he wrote Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Appren-

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ticeship (Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, 1795–96) soon after their meeting – while Goethe’s ‘genius’ offered Schiller convincing proof that his ambitions for art were not after all ill-founded. Schiller’s project was further encouraged around this time by the practically minded philologist and educationalist Wilhelm von Humboldt, with whom he struck up a friendship in 1796 and with whom he corresponded regularly, particularly between 1797 and 1799. In addition to offering welcome criticism of his essays and his poetry in this period, von Humboldt later became one of Schiller’s greatest promoters, notably integrating his notion of Bildung, the ‘cultivation’ of the whole personality in an atmosphere of freedom and responsibility, into the 1809 Prussian reforms of the higher education system.5 Later in life he prefaced an edition of their correspondence with a memoir, On Schiller and the Course of his Intellectual Development (Über Schiller und den Gang seiner Geistesentwicklung, 1830), which defended the coherence of his work as a philosophical and literary achievement. If Schiller’s project of aesthetic humanism would have any longterm effect on the moral health of the individual and the nation, it would have to begin by raising the general standard of taste. And that meant publishing his essays on the subject as well as new poetry which would, in theory, achieve a kind of ‘classical’ status among readers. To that end Schiller began republishing his essays in a collection called Shorter Works in Prose (Kleinere prosaische Schriften, four parts, 1792–1802) and relaunched his journal as New Thalia (Neue Thalia), where he published his essay On Grace and Dignity. With more of his own material to hand, and with Goethe’s enthusiastic support, he launched the journal Horae (1795–96). There he published not only most of the major aesthetic essays, including the Aesthetic Letters, but also Goethe’s Roman Elegies and work from J. G. Herder, F. H. Jacobi and others. With its wide range of contributors, its balance of poetry and prose and above all its unified focus on elevating taste, the Horae became the founding text of Weimar classicism. One of the unexpected inclusions in the Horae was a considerable amount of poetry written by Schiller himself. He had not written much since taking up the Jena professorship in 1789 and the appearance now of new poetry heralded a new burst of creative energy that continued for ten years. It was the result of having completed his contribution to aesthetics, the new and stimulating company of

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Coleridge, Schiller and Aesthetic Education

Goethe (whose power he could never match but could at least emulate), and the desire to articulate in a new medium, as well as experiment with practically, the aesthetic project he had been actively formulating. It is not surprising then that many of the poems written after the aesthetic essays echo, comment upon, extend and qualify Schiller’s philosophical commitments. This is true not only of the philosophical or reflective poems, but also of the ballads and many of the distichs, too. The poem called ‘The Ideal and Real Life’ (‘Das Ideal und das Leben’, 1795), first entitled ‘The Kingdom of Shades’ (‘Das Reich der Schatten’), for example, which was one of 24 that appeared in the Horae, eloquently contrasts the conflicting claims of the sensuous and intelligible worlds. Then, in a way analogous to the argument in the Aesthetic Letters, the poet suggests how the aesthetic contemplation of the ideal is just the thing to equip us for life in the real world. Another major poetic contribution to the Horae was a long lyrical piece praising the power of nature to heal and restore, ‘The Walk’ (‘Der Spaziergang’, 1795), first called ‘Elegy’ (‘Elegie’). The poem registers several of Schiller’s key philosophical concerns: the corruption of the ancien régime and the violence of revolution, the progress of civilization, the need for balancing the claims of reason and with those of sense, and the difficulty of maintaining a naïve relationship with nature. From the first Schiller sought to explore and extend his aesthetic project by means of the effective power of poetry. In the years that followed, these sorts of poetic reflections on philosophical problems became more common as Schiller’s poetic output rapidly increased. Newly confident of his powers and eager for an outlet for his own work and that of his friends, he began his own poetry annual that he called The Muses’ Almanac (Musenalmanach). The first volume, in 1796, opened with a rousing celebration of ‘The Power of Song’ (‘Die Macht des Gesanges’), which reworks the notion of the autonomy of art from the Aesthetic Letters: in momentarily freeing listeners from cares, songs distance them from the stern precepts of duty. That volume also included ‘The Ideals’ (‘Die Ideale’), Schiller’s most personal, indeed confessional, defence of the unrealistic dreams of youth as the only constant companion of the poet; and ‘The Dance’ (‘Der Tanz’), an evocation of the delicate balance required for harmony and grace. The following year, 1797, The Muses’ Almanac contained a well-liked though slightly

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atypical poem called ‘The Visit’ (‘Der Besuch’), later renamed ‘Dithyramb’ (‘Dithyrambe’), in which the poet is visited by the gods, notably Bacchus, and then taken up to be initiated into divine society. That year Schiller also included a large number of short poems and 55 distichs under the title ‘Votive Tablets’ (‘Votivtafeln’), many of which resonate with the terms of his moral philosophy, offering compact, discreet moments of insight. Thus, for example, ‘The Moral Power’ (‘Die moralische Kraft’): to strive for the beautiful even when you cannot feel it; ‘Each One’s Duty’ (‘Pflicht für jeden’): to seek the whole, not just the parts; and ‘The Single Ideal’ (‘Das eigne Ideal’): not just to know the divine but to feel it. Subsequent and related volumes included further poems that similarly stand in continuity with the aesthetic essays. ‘The Words of Belief’ (‘Die Worte des Glaubens’, 1797) implies a concept of moral freedom; ‘The Poetry of Life’ (‘Poesie des Lebens’, 1799) asserts the value of ideals; and the popular ballad ‘Song of the Bell’ (‘Das Lied von der Glocke’, 1800) metonymically stages the building of the ‘Aesthetic State’. Of course there is much more to Schiller’s poems than their thematic continuity with the aesthetic essays (while some, by contrast, seem too philosophical). Yet even at the level of form, where philosophical claims seem absent, Schiller’s best poetry looks to the notion of aesthetic autonomy that is central to his aesthetics. Schiller’s argument for the humanizing effect of art was not universally acclaimed. Public interest in Horae was sporadic at best and when it dropped off in 1797 Schiller was compelled to stop publication altogether. Disappointed to say the least, Schiller and Goethe gave in to their shared frustration and poured scorn on the literary world in a long series of distichs published under the subtitle Xenia (Xenien). The distichs expose to ridicule the poor taste of the public, the parochial interests of reviewers and the laziness of contemporary authors; their inclusion in the 1797 Muses’ Almanac made that volume particularly controversial and in turn exposed them to severe criticism. One of the results of that outburst was that Schiller came round to writing a series of ballads which, in a spirit of reconciliation, came close to meeting the public taste halfway. These, along with poems by Goethe, were published in the 1798 Muses’ Almanac. The ballad proved to be a very useful form for Schiller, for the demands of narrative, and to some extent of characterization and description as well, kept him from indulging in the more abstract

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Schiller and the Young Coleridge

Coleridge, Schiller and Aesthetic Education

reflections that crept into his reflective poetry. Here he could treat favourite subjects like the sublime power of nature in ‘The Diver’ (‘Der Taucher’), the pathetic in ‘The Knight of Toggenburg’ (‘Ritter Toggenburg’), the loyalty of true friendship in ‘The Hostage’ (‘Die Bürgschaft’), even the morality of the stage in ‘The Cranes of Ibycus’ (‘Die Kraniche des Ibykus’) in the liberating logic of poetry. It is clear that in these ballads, as in some of the lyric poetry of the same time (such as the remarkably compact poem, ‘The Unknown Maiden’, ‘Das Mädchen aus der Fremde’), Schiller exercised a certain freedom of thinking in images rather than in abstract terms and of experimenting in different metres and verse forms. It was not just the public that Schiller had trouble with. In a review the young Friedrich Schlegel panned Schiller’s journal Horae – too pompous, too idealistic and not nearly radical enough – as well as The Muses’ Almanac for 1796, in particular finding fault with the philosophical abstraction of Schiller’s poetic contributions. This provocative review caused great offence and from then on Schiller kept at a distance from the Schlegel brothers and the circle of young Romantics forming around them in Jena, which included their wives, Dorothea and Caroline, as well as Schleiermacher, Novalis and Schelling. Goethe, for his part, managed to stay friendly with both camps. Schiller’s work exerted an important influence on the Schlegels, in particular his notion of self-reflexivity as the fundamental condition of modernity, and yet the parting of ways here clearly marks the difference between the aesthetic humanism of Weimar classicism and the irony of the Jena Romantics. The psychic dissonance which for Schiller was an object of regret, to be overcome through aesthetic experience and eventually replaced by a sense of wholeness, was for Schlegel nothing less than aesthetic consciousness itself, escape from which was not only not possible but undesirable. Picking up where Horae left off, the Schlegels’ journal Atheneum focused on the process of creative invention rather than on the results of it, thus overturning the classical consensus. The creative critic, the self-conscious reader, the fragment – all those elements that Schiller had either taken for granted as part of the procedures of ‘aesthetic education’ or hoped to leave behind once it was under way – were celebrated themselves as modern achievements. Indeed, the very failure of achieving synthesis and the anxiety accompanying the sense of self-consciousness became sources of

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pleasure. Diversity was no longer a symptom of disease but a sign of vitality. That Schiller’s project could so readily be inverted in an ironic fashion was, and remains, one of its most interesting features, not least because such a move seems sanctioned by at least some passages in the aesthetic essays themselves. For Schiller, though, there was no question of going back to rework the theory in the light of recent criticism; his response came in the shape of brand new drama. The goal Schiller began to formulate with Goethe in the 1790s was nothing less than the establishment of a new German literature of a European standard and quality, based on indigenous but not parochial traditions. This new work would be as important to the feelings and aspirations of the populace as Greek and Latin literature had been to those of the ancients. Weimar classicism as it took shape in the late 1790s, through the efforts of Goethe, Schiller and Herder, was thus classical not in the sense of reproducing the styles and forms characteristic of the Greek stage (though of course both Schiller and Goethe had their neoclassical moments), but rather in the sense of recreating in modern Germany the civic spirit that had routinely accompanied the production and performance of classical literature and drama. That meant above all the creation of a new canon. From 1796 Schiller was engaged in writing a new historical tragedy based on the rebellion of the Bohemian general Wallenstein against the Holy Roman Emperor during the Thirty Years War. Though, as he admitted at the time, years spent theorizing about tragedy did not help him actually to write one, Schiller conceived and wrote the play as a model of the high drama of which he felt the German language was capable. It grew into a six-hour trilogy and was consequently performed in instalments between October 1798 and April 1799 in the court theatre at Weimar that Goethe had been managing since 1791. Schiller was by now a frequent visitor – he often attended rehearsals – and at the end of 1799 he moved permanently to Weimar to collaborate full-time with Goethe on their project. Once working in the theatre Schiller wrote much less poetry, though he did republish his work in two parts called simply Poems (Gedichte), in 1800 and 1803. The resounding success of Wallenstein and then the move to the Weimar theatre relaunched in a spectacular way Schiller’s career as a

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Schiller and the Young Coleridge

Coleridge, Schiller and Aesthetic Education

dramatist. The terms for his work had been set by himself in his essays of the early 1790s: now with Goethe he had the chance to see them fulfilled. The Weimar Court Theatre, like most in Germany at the time, kept itself afloat financially by a combination of royal patronage and productions of popular dramas by August von Kotzebue and A. W. Iffland. The idea was to introduce new works in between and so slowly and cautiously shift the popular taste away from naturalism and farce towards tragedy and history. To this project Schiller not only contributed adaptations of Goethe’s Iphigenia in Tauris and Lessing’s Nathan the Wise along with his own translations of Macbeth and Racine’s Phaedra, he also wrote a new play each year: Mary Stuart (Maria Stuart, 1800), a sympathetic portrayal of the victim of Elizabeth’s jealousy and cruel politics; The Maid of Orleans (Die Jungfrau von Orleans, 1801) an idealized account of Joan of Arc, who embodies uneasily the virtues of a Christian and the valour of a pagan; The Bride of Messina (Die Braut von Messina, 1803), a story of incest and fratricide told boldly in the form of a Greek tragedy, including a chorus; and William Tell (Wilhelm Tell, 1804), the story of the Swiss hero that doubles up as a parable about political emancipation. Though Mary Stuart is the most readily stageable of these later plays, and has always been popular, each is interesting for the different ways in which Schiller handles the tragic situation, as the title characters exhibit moral heroism in the face of their unhappy circumstances. More to the point, though, these dramas share a similar design upon the audience, for as Schiller explained in an introductory essay to The Bride of Messina (the last of his theoretic writings), it is through the aesthetic illusion of tragic action that we are drawn to recognize our own moral freedom. Long in poor health, he died in May 1805 at the age of 45, in the midst of writing his next play. This synopsis of Schiller’s work brings to the surface the intellectual and social context of his aesthetic thought. Two points in this regard bear restating. One is that the philosophical arguments that Schiller developed in a handful of aesthetic essays between 1792 and 1795 were not occasioned by a fleeting indulgence in ungrounded speculation, or even by the sudden, overpowering interest in Kantian metaphysics (as many early commentators, among them the influential Mme de Staël, supposed). They were on the contrary bound up with a lifelong preoccupation with relating aesthetic and moral concerns, expressed early in the ‘pre-critical’ essays and poems, in the

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ballads, distichs and lyrics of the 1790s and later in the tragedies and meditative verse. That is not to say of course that the poetry and dramas were simply deduced from the theory – Schiller himself admitted there was a gap between his theory and practice – but rather that they correspond to it in important and instructive ways. Readers of Schiller’s poetry and dramas, then, will quickly find themselves in contact with the main concerns of the essays. The second point concerning Schiller’s aesthetic project is that it had a public face: first in his own publications in journals like the Horae and collections like The Muses’ Almanac; then in collaboration with Goethe on the Weimar stage from 1798 onwards; and finally among vocal supporters like Wilhelm von Humboldt throughout the first decades of the nineteenth century. 6 Given the prominence of his work and reputation on the national stage, anyone in England interested in German intellectual life would soon know who Schiller was, and what he stood for.

Coleridge’s reading of Schiller’s early plays As scholarship on the subject has established, the first appearance of Schiller in England was his early work as a playwright.7 In the wake of the French Revolution, the translation of these early dramas into English during the 1790s gave them a whole new significance. The anti-authoritarian motifs originally understood by German audiences as the enthusiastic but admittedly idealistic hopes of political change became in England after 1789 an endorsement of a revolution already under way. The political topicality of these plays helped to sustain a flourishing, if short-lived, Schiller industry throughout the 1790s, with all four of the early plays as well as some prose works being published within a few years of each other and often in multiple translations. For all their topicality, though, they had to compete with the work of more popular and more prolific German contemporaries like Kotzebue and Iffland, whose frequent new plays could meet the demands of both the London stage and the growing number of provincial readers. To many, Schiller was just one of a whole range of new German writers finding their way to new English audiences. Coleridge, himself an avid reader of new plays, knew all four of Schiller’s in translation in the 1790s. 8 What is interesting about

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Schiller and the Young Coleridge

Coleridge, Schiller and Aesthetic Education

Coleridge’s reaction is that he not only responded to the political implications, he also began to discriminate between Schiller’s drama and that of his German contemporaries, and to identify with the author. The politics was easily discerned. Alexander Tytler’s 1792 translation of The Robbers, with its disturbing reversals of fortune as the father is unjustly imprisoned and the good-hearted Charles, victim of his brother’s scheming, takes up a life of crime (‘The world is then unhinged: – Outcasts are kings, and kings are outcasts!’ exclaims the horrified Amelia), ably conveys Schiller’s passionate attack upon conventional morality and his plea for understanding and forgiveness. Coleridge stayed up all night reading Schiller’s play in November 1794 and when he had finished, wrote to Southey, ‘Did he write his Tragedy amid the yelling of Fiends?’ (CL, I, 122). In 1794, while his pantisocratic plans were still alive, and his zeal for the French Revolution was still firm (in spite of the Terror and the recently declared war with England), Coleridge found in this ‘Convulser of the Heart’ a compatriot, a fellow malcontent who was shrewd enough to criticize the social order. More was to follow in the same vein, celebrating the virtue if not always the success, of rebellion: Cabal and Love, translated by Peter Columbine and J. J. C. Timaeus in 1795 (and Gothicized in a version by M. G. Lewis two years later), tells the story of star-crossed lovers driven to misunderstanding and eventually to death by the evil conniving of an ambitious and entirely unscrupulous courtier. Fiesco, Schiller’s first historical drama, translated in 1796 by John Stoddart and Georg Heinrich Noehden, has its title character challenging the status quo, but when his personal ambition gets the better of his republican sympathies he, like Julius Caesar, must pay with his life. Finally, Don Carlos, again translated by Stoddart and Noehden, in 1798, sees the son of the tyrant Philip II of Spain challenge his father’s oppressive control of the Netherlands. With the well-intentioned Marquis of Posa, Carlos plans an uprising, but a combination of untimely love, mutual suspicion and outright betrayal brings their plans to a disastrous conclusion. Coleridge, who read all these plays as they were published and discussed them with Southey, Wordsworth and Stoddart, among others, was struck by the unimpeachable moral and political ideals of the main characters and equally moved by the pathos of their failed rebellions and troubled affairs of the heart.

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But Coleridge was not just interested in Schiller as a political dramatist. From the time that The Robbers first appeared he singled out Schiller from the many German playwrights currently on offer and began to articulate what it was in his view that made his drama – indeed any drama – worthwhile, namely its sublime effect. That was the point he made in the closing sextet of his sonnet ‘To the Author of the “The Robbers”’, probably written in 1794: Ah! Bard tremendous in sublimity! Could I behold thee in thy loftier mood Wandering at eve with finely-frenzied eye Beneath some vast old tempest-swinging wood! Awhile with mute awe gazing I would brood: Then weep aloud in a wild ecstasy! (PW, I, 73) That sonnet was published two years later as one of 36 ‘Effusions’ in Poems on Various Subjects. It was also included as the last entry in his collection Sonnets by Various Authors, published the same year, and epitomizes, as David Fairer has shown, the way in which Coleridge sought to juxtapose his own voice with those of his ‘friends’ – William Lisle Bowles, Charlotte Smith and Schiller among them. 9 In the lines just quoted there is a revealing elegiac tone, as Coleridge longingly evokes a creative moment (the writing of The Robbers) in which he can participate vicariously. This move is familiar from its appearance at the conclusion of more famous poems, like ‘Kubla Khan’, ‘Dejection: An Ode’ and ‘To W. Wordsworth’. Schiller, like the figures of Kubla Khan, Sara or Wordsworth, provides the occasion for Coleridge’s own experience of deep feeling coupled with poetic expression. That is possible since all the figures in question possess qualities of ‘genius’: sympathy, originality, linguistic mastery, selfsufficiency. In the sonnet Coleridge identifies Schiller as a bard-seer, the poet of insight who not only describes the sublime (Coleridge instances the imprisoned father’s desperate call for help: ‘That fearful voice, a famish’d Father’s cry’), he embodies the sublime in his own actions: ‘Wandering at eve with finely-frenzied eye’. Schiller the playwright, in other words, participates in the sublime experiences that his play occasions for its audience (much later in life Coleridge identified this feature in Schiller as the ‘material sublime’, TT, I, 26).

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Coleridge, Schiller and Aesthetic Education

What makes Schiller’s handling of the sublime so unique, in Coleridge’s view, is that it does not depend on extravagant figures drawn in from outside the action of the play, the ghosts, goblins and monsters that so many other dramatists dragged onto the stage for their shocking effects. ‘Schiller introduces no supernatural beings,’ Coleridge writes in a note accompanying his sonnet, ‘yet his human beings agitate and astonish more than all the goblin rout – even of Shakespeare.’ High praise indeed: sticking to real subjects, Schiller’s drama makes no concessions to the popular taste for extravagant representations of the supernatural. If his work evokes an enthusiastic response, in other words, it is not because of the material itself but because of the way he handles it. It is thanks to this internal economy – something Coleridge sought to achieve in his own work – that Schiller ranks with Shakespeare. Another reason behind Coleridge’s high praise for Schiller is the psychological accuracy he found in the plays, particularly the sympathetic portrayal of people struggling in desperately unhappy or unjust situations. This was a virtue of Wordsworth’s poetry, too. On one occasion Coleridge compared Wordsworth’s drama The Borderers to Schiller’s The Robbers, saying that in both he found ‘profound touches of the human heart’ (CL, I, 325), and later said it was because of this sympathy for his characters that he preferred Schiller to Goethe (TT, I, 342). He also drew lessons from Schiller to illustrate his views while lecturing in Bristol in 1795 (Lects 1795, 70–1, 296) and in the famously hostile review of M. G. Lewis’s The Monk (SW & F, I, 58). When Coleridge came to work his own first play, Osorio, written at Sheridan’s request in 1797, he again drew on the psychological depth of Schiller’s characters, as well as the more obvious aspects of plot and atmosphere. Set in Spain under the control of Philip II, Osorio charts the conflict of two brothers in love with the same woman, one embodying the noble ideals of political justice, the other guided only by self-interest. Like several of Schiller’s dramas, the play clearly valorizes a given moral and political worldview while at the same time deftly exploring the nature of evil and remorse. 10 The conflict between the brothers, Albert and Osorio, was based on an episode in Schiller’s unfinished novel of the supernatural, The Ghostseer, which had been translated in part by D. Boileau in 1795. The larger plot involves a mysterious wandering Armenian who wins the confidence of a prince by his apparent ability to work wonders at will; he then

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uses that trust to bring the prince to ruin. At one point the Armenian tells the story of two brothers, the younger of whom, Lorenzo, has his older brother murdered in order to steal both his betrothed and his inheritance. At the wedding, though, his evil plans are spoiled when the ghost of the dead brother appears before the assembled guests and exposes the crime. Is this divine justice, by which family wrongs are revenged, or simply an invention by the Armenian to mislead further his enraptured audience? Part of the interest of Schiller’s tale within a tale is that it raises the problem of belief in the supernatural: the narration of unusual events demands some credence from the readers, and yet the abandonment of our natural scepticism exposes us to the chicanery of charlatans and mountebanks. This staging of Enlightenment reason’s confrontation with the imperatives and contingencies of belief, mediated through strained fraternal relations, is in effect the theme of Coleridge’s Osorio, with its ghosts, magic and quarrelling brothers. 11 Coleridge uses Schiller’s work to help conceptualize his own. More obliquely, the problem of belief in The Ghostseer also looks forward to Coleridge’s own provocative use of the supernatural in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: like the duped prince’s search for explanation in Schiller’s novel, the desire for clarity on the part of the Wedding Guest, and indeed the reader, is thwarted by the inscrutability of the Mariner himself and the apparent immensity of his guilt. With so much on offer – masterful handling of the sublime, psychological insight, a nuanced understanding of the supernatural – all at a time when German plays were selling by the thousands, it is no wonder that Coleridge decided to translate all of Schiller. As he explained it to Thomas Poole in a letter of May 1796, the plan would include a visit to Schiller, then residing in Jena. ‘All the works,’ wrote Coleridge, thinking ahead, would make ‘a portly Quarto’ (CL, I, 209). Like many such plans, this one was postponed and then only partly realized. But it is a strong indication of the high regard in which Coleridge held Schiller, singled out from his generation. Here was an accomplished German contemporary, rivalling Shakespeare in the control he exercised over his material, who impressed Coleridge with his interest in liberal politics, the psychology of guilt, the claims of reason and of belief – all this even before Coleridge knew of Wallenstein, the aesthetic essays and the emerging discourse about ‘aesthetic education’.

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Coleridge, Schiller and Aesthetic Education

The translation into English of Schiller’s early dramas during the 1790s corresponded with the publication in Germany of Schiller’s aesthetic essays, notably in the New Thalia (1793) and Horae (1795– 96). It has long been thought that these went entirely unnoticed in England at the time, eclipsed to some extent by the relative popularity of the plays. But now it is clear that there was at least one notable exception, with a distinctly Coleridgean connection. 12 It is a favourable review of the Horae in Griffith’s Monthly Review written by the Bristol physician Thomas Beddoes and published in late 1796. Beddoes had led a diverse career. Having studied medicine in Edinburgh, he moved to Oxford but when it became clear that his sympathy with the French Revolution stood in the way of promotion he chose in 1792 to settle in Bristol, promoting new medical knowledge while opposing the growing anti-revolutionary backlash. When Coleridge moved to Bristol in 1795, he naturally fell in with Beddoes. They first met, it seems, at a political rally where both spoke against the ‘gagging acts’; soon after, Beddoes was encouraging Coleridge’s own lectures and also contributing material to the Watchman. Their shared interests consisted not only of politics, but also psychology, education (Beddoes had already published work in both areas) and medicine. When Beddoes finally launched his Pneumatic Institute in 1799, the young Humphry Davy set up experiments with the new nitrous oxide and Coleridge was among the first to submit himself to its effects. When Beddoes died in 1808, Coleridge wrote with striking depth of feeling: ‘Few Events have taken out so much Hope from my Life’ (CL, III, 160). A medic, philanthropist and entrepreneur, Beddoes was also a Germanophile whose enthusiasm for the literature and learning of that culture was matched by few of his contemporaries, perhaps only by William Taylor of Norwich. Though a materialist at heart and in any case hardly a metaphysician – his own books on education and psychology look to Joseph Priestley and David Hartley – he could appreciate the innovations brought out by the new learning in Germany and regarded with some sympathy Kant’s ‘Copernican revolution’ in the field of knowledge. In addition to translating scientific works, like C. W. Scheele’s Chemical Essays (1786), he reviewed new literature, including Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister and J. H. Voss’s Luisa,

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for Griffith’s Monthly Review and he helped to introduce Kant’s work to radical circles, offering a general discussion of the critical philosophy along with translated excerpts from the Critique of Pure Reason, the Critique of Judgement and the essay on Perpetual Peace.13 With his library packed with the latest from Germany’s leading thinkers, as Karl Weber and Werner Beyer pointed out, Beddoes was a pivotal figure in the reception of German ideas in England and for Coleridge a crucial link to Germany in the years before he knew the language. 14 Recently their connection has come more clearly into focus: Kathleen Coburn has signalled out Beddoes as the source for the choice of Göttingen (CN, I, 249n); Elinor Shaffer has shown how he early pointed Coleridge in the direction of the Higher Biblical Criticism, then flourishing under J. G. Eichhorn at Göttingen; Dorothy Stansfield has noted Coleridge’s reliance on Beddoes’s review of Kant’s essay on Perpetual Peace; and most recently, Neil Vickers has described how Beddoes’s knowledge of Brunonian medicine shaped Coleridge’s own understanding of the subject and prefigured his interest in Naturphilosophie.15 So what about Beddoes’s 1796 review of Schiller? The previous year Schiller’s literary monthly, the Horae, began publication by his new friend J. F. Cotta, in Tübingen. The thinking behind the journal was explicitly apolitical: in reaction to the now polarized debate in Germany concerning the French Revolution, the Horae aimed to exclude all political and religious subjects, which in any case divide rather than unite a population, and to promote instead the study and appreciation of beauty. But there was nevertheless a purpose to this distraction, as Schiller suggested in an introductory statement about the journal: ‘One dedicates oneself to Beauty for the sake of instruction and education’ (‘Man widmet sich der schönen Welt zum Unterricht und zur Bildung’, NA, XXII, 103). In line with this aim of self-improvement through aesthetic experience, Schiller published poetry and stories in addition to essays on art criticism, moral philosophy and history by, among others, Herder, Jacobi, Garve and Engel. To these he added his own poems, notably ‘The Ideal and Real Life’ and ‘The Walk’, as well as an essay on The Siege of Antwerp (Belagerung von Antwerpen), a historical study of a key moment in the Thirty Years War. Most important of all, though, were his own aesthetic essays: the Aesthetic Letters, ‘On the Necessary Limits of the Use of Beauty of Form’ (‘Über die nothwendigen Grenzen beim Gebrauch

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Coleridge, Schiller and Aesthetic Education

schöner Formen’), ‘On the Danger of Aesthetic Morals’ (‘Über die Gefahr ästhetischer Sitten’) and the first part of On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry in the volume for 1795; the second part of the latter essay, along with ‘On the Uses of Aesthetic Morals’ (Über den moralischen Nutzen ästhetischer Sitten’), in the volume for 1796. This is not quite a comprehensive list of all Schiller’s work on the subject – the essays ‘On the Tragic Art’, On Grace and Dignity and ‘On the Pathetic’ were published earlier in the New Thalia and the essay ‘On the Sublime’ appeared considerably later in the third part of Shorter Works in Prose – but it does represent more than adequately his work on aesthetics after Kant, and especially his prevailing concern to demonstrate how the ‘free play’ of the imaginative faculty should have real, though indirect, consequences in moral life. The first two volumes of Horae repeatedly set out Schiller’s case for the educative power of art in the modern age. Beddoes identified this argument and welcomed it. Writing in the Monthly Review he praised the Horae for not pandering to the current ‘gross and craving appetite of German readers’ and applauded Schiller’s repudiation of violence and political enthusiasm. He then introduced readers to the journal’s principal focus, quoting and translating from Schiller’s own prefatory essay: This current periodical is silent about politics, it ‘strives to please by something different from that by which everything pleases at this period. But the more the narrow interest of the moment strains, contracts, and subjugates, the minds of men, the more urgent it is to set them at liberty by an universal and more elevated interest in that which is purely human (rein menschlich) and far above all influence of the times; and to reunite the politically divided world under the banners of truth and beauty.’ 16 Beddoes goes on to list some of the contents of the journal. As for Schiller’s contributions, he expresses distrust owing to their Kantian bias, but recognizes Schiller’s power as a polemicist and critic: ‘[his] critical enquiries proceed on the system of Mr Kant; and though this circumstance does not recommend them to us, we failed not to recognize, in many of his remarks, refined taste, acuteness of discrimination, and comprehension of intellect’. Beddoes’s review is the first recognition in England of Schiller’s aesthetic essays and it is significant

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that his assessment is largely positive. Without mentioning the Letters by name, Beddoes detects and responds to the Horae’s key platform, ‘aesthetic education’. And he rightly recognizes Schiller as continuing Kant’s revolution in aesthetic judgement while offering fresh critical insight of his own. Given that Beddoes read both Kant and Schiller with considerable discernment and that he took seriously his self-appointed task of propagating German learning in radical circles, particularly among his young acquaintances; and given that Coleridge knew and admired Schiller’s literary work, even responding to it in his 1796 Poems and in Osorio, and that he was eager to keep up with the latest work coming out of Germany, it seems almost certain that Coleridge and Beddoes were talking about, perhaps even studying, Schiller’s aesthetics in Bristol as early as 1796. 17 Certainly it is hard not to see Beddoes behind Coleridge’s starting to study German that year as well as his proposal to visit Schiller in Jena and then translate ‘all the works’. In short, in the years leading up to the trip to Germany in 1798, Coleridge had not only read Schiller’s plays in translation, he also knew, through Beddoes, of Schiller’s employment in Jena and of the philosophical work undertaken there, had access, again through Beddoes, to a large and representative portion of his principal writings on aesthetics in the Horae, and finally was likely encouraged towards the subject by Beddoes’s own published commendation of Schiller.

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Once in Germany, Coleridge never got around to visiting Schiller in Jena. When he arrived in Hamburg with William and Dorothy Wordsworth in September 1798, he seriously considered setting off straight away for Weimar – where he knew he would find Wieland, Herder, Goethe and the visiting Schiller – but was put off by complaints from other English travellers about the high cost of getting there (CN, I, 340). In the end he settled on the town of Ratzeburg, where he spent about four months working on the language, and then moved on to the university town of Göttingen, where he remained until his departure in the summer of the following year. Schiller’s collaboration with Goethe and the Weimar Court Theatre, then about to begin its most productive stage, passed apparently unobserved. Coleridge, it seems, did not mind. A year after his return from Germany he wrote to Stuart: ‘To be known to Schiller was a thought, that passed across my brain & vanished’ (CL, I, 628; EOT, I, 227n). But that high-minded remark disguises continued interest in Schiller, for though Coleridge never actively sought his attention in Germany, he nevertheless kept up with his work and in early 1800, back in London, he was putting to use his command of the German language and the new aesthetics to translate into English Schiller’s newest and greatest historical drama, and a centrepiece of Weimar classicism, the Wallenstein trilogy.

Coleridge in Göttingen The Wallenstein project was a commission Coleridge picked up on his return to England and will be dealt with in the next section. While still 33

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Coleridge and Weimar Classicism

Coleridge, Schiller and Aesthetic Education

in Germany, though, what did Coleridge learn about Schiller? There is compelling circumstantial evidence that along with the other books he was buying at the time – by Kant, Jacobi, Bürger, Lessing and others – he acquired several volumes of Schiller. It is clear, too, that he was reading journals to which Schiller was contributing articles. The prominence of Schiller in the literary culture at the time, as well as the vibrant intellectual environment of Göttingen itself, would have made such encounters routine. Coleridge’s self-prescribed course of study at the university was linguistic and broadly theological: philology with C. G. Heyne; the Higher Biblical Criticism with Eichhorn; and natural history and anthropology with J. F. Blumenbach.1 Göttingen, though, boasted a lively literary culture beyond the lecture theatre. Germany was after all still highly decentralized, divided into many separate princedoms each with its own centre, and in the absence of a single major commercial and cultural centre like London or Paris, even modest provincial capitals and university towns attracted and supported locally based journals, publishers and booksellers, theatres and operas on a scale unheard of in Britain or France. 2 Göttingen, for its part, was home to several journals, among them the Göttingen Almanac of the Muses (Göttinger Musenalmanach), the Göttingen Historical Journal (Göttingisches Historisches Magazin) and the Göttingen Journal of Natural Science (Göttingisches Journal der Naturwissenschaften) – the latter of which Coleridge read for its description of the Brocken phenomena (CN, I, 430, 431, 439). Judging from references in later notebooks, it was in Göttingen, too, that Coleridge probably acquired Wieland’s Teutscher Merkur of 1788 containing Schiller’s poem ‘The Gods of Greece’, which he discussed with Wordsworth once back in England (CN, I, 494), as well as Schiller’s Muses’ Almanac of 1797, with its many distichs, some of which Coleridge later translated (CN, II, 3131). In Göttingen, too, Coleridge could have picked up a copy of the first part of Schiller’s Shorter Works in Prose (CL, III, 387), which had been published in 1792 and contained, among other items, the Philosophical Letters, the ‘Letters on Don Carlos’ and the inaugural address on ‘Universal History’. The Schiller on offer in 1798 and 1799 was no longer the hotblooded iconoclast, author of thrillingly radical dramas like The Robbers, but a political moderate, and Coleridge noticed. Recalling de Barruel’s recent accusation of the German illuminati as revolutionary conspirators, Coleridge delighted in writing to Poole not long after

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he arrived in Germany: ‘It is absolutely false that the literary Men are Democrats in Germany – Many were; but like me, have published Abjurations of the French – among which number are Klopstock, Goethe, Wieland, Schiller & Kotzebu’ (CL, I, 435). What was Coleridge referring to? One of Schiller’s most public pronouncements had appeared in his poem ‘The Walk’, published in the Horae in September 1795, in which he likened the forces of revolution to the rage and misery of a tigress that had broken free from its cage (‘Einer Tigerinn gleich, die das eiserne Gitter durchbrochen’, NA, IIi, 313, l. 167). But his more nuanced consideration of revolutionary ideology came in the Aesthetic Letters (could this be the ‘Abjuration’ Coleridge was referring to?). The problem was, Schiller argued, that the people were not ready for the political freedom which they clamoured for: The fabric of the natural State is tottering, its rotting foundations giving way, and there seems to be a physical possibility of setting law upon the throne, of honouring man at last as an end in himself, and making true freedom the basis of political associations. Vain hope! The moral possibility is lacking, and a moment so prodigal of opportunity finds a generation unprepared to receive it. . . . Among the lower and more numerous classes we are confronted with crude, lawless instincts, unleashed with the loosening of the bonds of civil order. . . . The cultivated classes, on the other hand, offer the even more repugnant spectacle of lethargy, and of a deprivation of character. . . . (Aesthetic Letters, V.2–5, 25–7) The subsequent argument is that the social progress envisaged by radical politics cannot be realized by the enforcement of abstract ideals, but rather requires the education across all classes of a new sensibility. Coleridge’s opinion that Schiller had grown sceptical about revolutionary politics was not only accurate, but proved to be the starting point for his project of ‘aesthetic education’. Apart from hints such as these, the clearest textual evidence for Coleridge’s reading of Schiller at this time comes from a notebook entry of August or September 1800. As L. A. Willoughby, Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and later Kathleen Coburn have argued, the entry refers to an article by Schiller in the Jena Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, a journal that Coleridge was reading while in Göttingen (Aesthetic

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Coleridge and Weimar Classicism 35

Coleridge, Schiller and Aesthetic Education

Letters, clxvii–clxix). The article is Schiller’s well-known 1791 review of Bürger’s Poems (2nd edn, 1789), an influential collection of ballads. Coleridge and Wordsworth both knew of Bürger before going to Germany, through William Taylor’s translation of Lenore, and some of their own efforts in the Lyrical Ballads drew on the ballad form that Bürger himself had helped to popularize. Both bought copies of Bürger’s works soon after they arrived in Hamburg and discussed his poetry with F. G. Klopstock, who praised it above Schiller’s (BL, II, 202). Once separated – Coleridge in Ratzeburg, Wordsworth and Dorothy in Goslar – the two poets corresponded about Bürger and apparently Wordsworth thought less of the work, particularly Lenore (CL, I, 566). Given the interest in Bürger, it is highly plausible that Coleridge stumbled on, or even sought out, Schiller’s review in a back copy of the journal when in February 1799 he was consulting the current issue for other matters (CN, I, 388–9). Of Bürger Schiller writes with some disparagement, then suggests his own view of the creative process: ein Dichter nehme sich ja in Acht, mitten im Schmerz den Schmerz zu besingen. So, wie der Dichter selbst bloß leidender Teil ist, muß seine Empfindung unausbleiblich von ihrer idealischen Allgemeinheit zu einer unvollkommenen Individualität herabsinken. Aus der sanftern und fernenden Erinnerung mag er dichten, und dann desto besser für ihn, je mehr er an sich erfahren hat, was er besingt; aber ja niemals unter der gegenwärtigen Herrschaft des Affects, den er uns schön versinnlichen soll. (NA, XXII, 256) A poet takes care not to celebrate suffering in verse while still in the midst of it himself. So long as the poet simply partakes of suffering, his feeling inevitably descends from ideal universality into imperfect individuality. From tranquil and distanced recollection is poetry made, and so much the better when the poet has himself experienced what he celebrates in his verse; but never while under the influence of present emotions, which he should rather convey through representation. All of this is relevant to the Lyrical Ballads, but in particular the rather familiar phrase: ‘Aus der sanftern und fernenden Erinnerung

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mag er dichten’ (‘From tranquil and distanced recollection is poetry made’). The phrase appeared thus in Coleridge’s notebook: ‘so poetry . . . recalling of passion in tranquillity’ (CN, I, 787). As Wilkinson and Willoughby argued, Coleridge might well have passed on this phrase to Wordsworth in his letters the previous year from Göttingen to Goslar (the letters do not survive) but in any case when it appeared here in his own notebooks, around August 1800, it was certainly in time for the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, written by Wordsworth between 13 and 30 September. Schiller’s phrase might well have influenced Wordsworth’s famous definition of poetry as ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’. That connection must remain a matter of conjecture. In any case, Coleridge’s echo of Schiller’s Bürger review in this notebook entry is real enough. Years later, in fact, Coleridge referred to it once more. Recalling Schiller’s demand that poets distance themselves from their subject (‘sich selbst fremd zu werden’), Coleridge in Biographia Literaria paid tribute to Shakespeare for ‘the utter aloofness of the poet’s own feelings, from those of which he is at once the painter and the analyst’ (BL, II, 22). The disinterested attitude of the poet with regard to his or her subject later became a key element in both Schiller’s and Coleridge’s conception of aesthetic experience. By the time he returned to England, then, in September 1799, Coleridge’s knowledge of Schiller had broadened far beyond his work as a playwright. The early dramas like The Robbers and the novel The Ghostseer, to which he had responded with such enthusiasm in his own work and even, as I have suggested, in which he found the image of his own ambition as a writer of ‘genius’, now appeared alongside newer, more reflective work in prose. Coleridge now knew Schiller as the principal author of the Horae, introduced to him by Beddoes, with its impressive argument for the civilizing function of art and its distinctive foundation in Kantian aesthetics, and, through reports in Germany, as the close friend of Goethe beginning to collaborate on projects for the court theatre at Weimar. He had also seen many of Schiller’s most recent poems in The Muses’ Almanac of 1797 as well as reviews and essays in the first part of Shorter Works in Prose and the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung. Along with his mastery of the language and growing familiarity with Kant, Coleridge’s understanding of Schiller as a critic and theorist, as well as poet and dramatist, grew, and with it a deeper sense of their mutual interests.

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Coleridge, Schiller and Aesthetic Education

The staging of Schiller’s Wallenstein at the Weimar Court Theatre between October 1798 and April 1799, widely reported on in the literary press, occurred during the course of Coleridge and Wordsworth’s stay in Germany. But while Coleridge no doubt heard about the production while in Göttingen, it was not until he was back in England that the offer of translating it came forward. Schiller translations had been big business in the 1790s and the idea was to sell this new work, fresh from the poet’s pen, to the same audience. But this, unlike any of the previous translations, would be in verse. It might even be staged. Coleridge leapt at the offer and threw himself into the task. As the work had not yet been published in Germany, Coleridge worked from a MS copy of the play from the first Weimar production. Schiller had himself had the MS sent to England in 1799, eager to see a translation, but the London publisher Bell, who had originally purchased the copyright, had second thoughts about the project and eventually sold the copyright to Longman (Schiller had still not been paid). Coleridge’s name crops up in Schiller’s letters in this period (NA, XXX, 193), but the two never corresponded themselves. And though Schiller later praised the translation, his own revised German edition, published after the English edition, remained free of its influence. Coleridge worked hard, translating the second and third parts of the trilogy, The Piccolomini (Die Piccolomini) and Wallenstein’s Death (Wallensteins Tod), in a matter of months, complaining all the while about the great effort of composing and the pressure of the publisher’s deadline. He was driven to some extent by the threat of a rival translation being published before his own (this did in fact appear though not until 18053). Equally unforeseen, though at a much higher cost, was the growing anti-German backlash. Published at its height in mid-1800, Coleridge’s work bore the brunt of its fury. After several mostly negative reviews, it disappeared from public view for more than 20 years.4 The translation is lively and perceptive and does ample justice to Schiller’s original; it remained the standard English text well into this century, both for readers and actors. 5 The place of Wallenstein in Coleridge’s career, though, and its relationship to his other work and to the period more generally, is still understudied. Joyce Crick, who has edited the work for the Princeton edition of Coleridge’s Poetical

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The aesthetics of Wallenstein

Works, has shown how in translating Coleridge employed a variety of literary styles familiar to him – the language of Shakespeare, the diction common in Gothic drama and also the familiar style of the Lyrical Ballads – which accounts to some extent for both the unevenness and accomplishment of the finished text. 6 William Crisman has argued that Coleridge later drew on his own experience of translation in writing the ‘Dejection’ ode.7 And Julie A. Carlson has argued that in translating Wallenstein Coleridge aimed, as did Schiller himself, to rectify along nationalist lines the social upheaval caused by the French Revolution.8 Such work goes some way in accounting for Coleridge’s interest in the project and the long-term success he achieved, in spite of an unexpectedly hostile contemporary audience. What was it, though, that attracted Coleridge in the first place? Two things about Wallenstein stand out. For one, it was a work by a playwright whom Coleridge already knew and admired far above any of his contemporaries – and yet a work that seemed unlike anything that had preceded it. Surpassing the enthusiastic productions of the Sturm und Drang period as well as the melodramas of the contemporary London stage, this new drama conveyed the rare depth of feeling known only in the greatest playwrights of the past. In his 1800 preface to the translation Coleridge boldly suggested that Schiller, at least as a historical dramatist, might rank with Shakespeare (PW, II, 724–5) – an opinion he had already voiced in 1796 (PW, I, 73) and would reiterate years later (TT, I, 340–1). If Coleridge responded to Wallenstein it is because he recognized in it a new and exciting theatrical tradition, one that achieved its effects not by way of affectation and sentiment but through the pathos of a tragedy played out in history. It might translate to the English stage and even reform it. What also set Wallenstein apart was that it was accompanied by a sophisticated theory about its own production and intended effects. While the idea for a play about the rebellious general originated in Schiller’s earlier work as a historian of the Thirty Years War, the play itself was written during and just after the period of the major aesthetic essays, including the Aesthetic Letters, and accordingly resonates with Schiller’s preoccupation with the moral and social benefits of ‘play’, as well as his engagement with tragedy and the Kantian sublime. By 1800, it stood as the foundation stone for Weimar classicism. Translating Wallenstein, then, brought Coleridge face to face with Schiller’s project of social harmony through aesthetic emancipation. In the short

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Coleridge, Schiller and Aesthetic Education

term it confirmed and strengthened what he had learned of Schiller through Beddoes and picked up during his own trip to Germany; in the long term it helped him articulate the necessarily indirect relationship between aesthetic experience and moral action. The relationship between Wallenstein and the Aesthetic Letters is not simplistically mimetic: Schiller’s play, after all, ends in defeat while the Letters exhibit a cautious optimism about the establishment of the ‘Aesthetic State’. Instead the literary work enacts the options for moral action that are opened up by the philosophical work. In the case of the latter, Schiller argues that the disparity between human aspiration on the one hand (we aim to be entirely free) and human capacity on the other (we are bound by the limits imposed by nature) cannot be overcome simply by conceptual forms of experience. In place of science, Schiller suggests that we might be reconciled to our limitations (those imposed by nature) and yet not lose sight of our ideals (our ambition to be free) by the experience of art. Art deals in actual things, things we can know and feel, and yet handles them in a way that disregards their reality in the world of everyday experience. The experience of freedom afforded by art recalls to us our freedom as moral agents and we return to the everyday world with a disposition ready to face challenges and a mind emboldened to make certain moral choices. Only through aesthetic experience are we truly human. One of the ways Schiller saw of bringing this about was in tragedy, the presentation of a character caught in a moral dilemma of his own making and driven to immense suffering. It is not so much the pity that Schiller valued, though, as the feeling of pleasure that accompanies it. As much as it is drawn into the tragic situation, the audience is drawn out, too, through pleasure, to reflect upon its own aloofness from the action, its own distance from the constraints under which the hero labours, and ultimately to reflect upon its own freedom from sensuous limitation. Like the Kantian sublime on which it is modelled, Schiller’s tragedy is a liberating experience. It is not difficult to see how Schiller might bring this about dramatically. There would be a toning down of the directly moral aspects of the drama: the bombast, anger and highly charged sentiment of The Robbers and Cabal and Love would have to go; so, too, the liberal ideology so blatantly embodied in such characters as Posa, in Don Carlos. Instead, the drama would be more interested in the tragic action itself, regardless of political affiliation. In fact, better yet, the

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politics might be of another age altogether and so distract less from the arousal of pity. This shift in emphasis from the programmatic (leading directly to action) to feeling (leading instead to a sense of freedom) is signalled at the outset of Wallenstein. The ‘Prologue’, spoken at the first performance of Wallenstein’s Camp in October 1798 and published the same month in the Allgemeine-Zeitung, announces that the poet will leave well-trodden paths, And carry you beyond the confines of Domestic life, on to a wider stage, That will not be unworthy of the high Momentous times in which we live and strive. Only an object of sublimity Can stir the deepest depths within man’s soul; In narrow confines men grow narrow too, But greater when their goals are higher set. And as our century so gravely ends, When truth, it seems, would take the shape of art, When we behold a struggle of great natures For a momentous goal before our eyes, And for those objects men hold most sublime They fight, for power and for liberty – So art upon its shadow-stage as well May strive for higher flights, indeed it must, Or yield in shame before the stage of life.9 This is more than just an apology for introducing an old historical subject onto the Weimar stage; it is a manifesto of Schiller’s expectations of his art. For modernity, in the wake of the revolutionary crisis, there is a radical cure, the ‘shadow-stage’ of art which alone will recall to humanity the freedom it aspires to. In stating explicitly that ambition, Schiller’s ‘Prologue’ alerts his audience to the preoccupations of the tragedy to follow: the grandeur of its subject, the artificiality of stage life, the potential and not just the actual in each character, the ambition of art to outperform life itself. Above all, Schiller offers in this historical tragedy an experience of the sublime that is as liberating as, if not more than, the fight ‘for power and for liberty’. And all because, as Schiller put it famously in the concluding line, ‘Ernst

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Coleridge, Schiller and Aesthetic Education

ist das Leben, heiter ist die Kunst’ (‘Life is in earnest, art serene and free’). Wallenstein enacts that ambitious philosophical project, but not in a dogmatic way. After all, at the level of dramatic action the play tells the story of a spectacular failure: Wallenstein’s untimely rebellion. At first, loved by the soldiers and confident in his command of thousands, he bides his time, resisting the demands of the Emperor to fight the invading Swedes, which he deems unnecessary, while simultaneously ignoring the calls of the Count and Countess Tersky to rebel at once while the chances of success are high, which he deems treasonous. This aesthetic contemplation of his own situation proves fatal. Events unfold of their own accord and Wallenstein, driven on by astrology, ambition, his impatient generals and the willing Swedes, finally takes charge of the military rebellion at a point when he no longer commands the loyalty of all his troops. He loses the fight. In the context of Romantic period politics, the inevitable defeat of the rebels and the death of Wallenstein himself reflect a deep scepticism about the possibility of orchestrated political change.10 At the level of audience perception, though, the play opens up a range of possibilities that are not bound ideologically. Here the indirect link to the Aesthetic Letters becomes apparent. For the very failure of Wallenstein’s course of action invites the audience to consider its own relationship to the drama not in terms of content, that is, in judging whether Wallenstein’s actions are morally justifiable, but rather in terms of form, through recognizing that Wallenstein’s actions are shaped by a determinism from which the audience itself is free. Distanced from their immediate interests, the play solicits the audience to regard not actuality but potentiality, not what is but what might be, not the dictates of practical reason but the call of the imagination. The result is the consciousness of aesthetic freedom, the necessary antecedent to moral action in the real world, and in this sense at least the audience is set to become the real hero of the drama. Even in enacting the failure of change, then, the play enables a productive rather than simply reactive relationship to the contingencies of everyday life. Another way putting this is to say that this dynamic effect of the play at the level of form – that is, as a play – persists in spite of the more obvious, and in some sense contradictory, thematic concern with the failure of revolution. This is vital to an understanding of how Coleridge made use of the play. For him it was at one level a

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parable about the failure of Romantic politics after the French Revolution. As Julie A. Carlson has demonstrated, translating the play in 1800 helped Coleridge put aside his early radicalism and validated his own increasingly Burkean politics. As a play, though, enabling at the level of form the same aesthetic freedom and moral self-determination Schiller had prized in the essays, Wallenstein functioned not simply as a political allegory for the age but also, contradictorily, as a resource for conceptualizing resistance to prescriptive politics. Coleridge after Wallenstein remained committed to aesthetics in terms of an Idealist philosophy of mind, sharing with Schiller a view of the meta-political function of art as individual self-knowledge. In fact, one of the most innovative of Coleridge’s contributions is that while preaching Burke in the post-Napoleonic period, with appeals to the past and to respect for institutions, he continued to maintain the need for individual ‘cultivation’ through art as the foundation on which social and political institutions alone can reliably be based. As a translator, drawn into the tragedy where the revolutionary model is seen to fail and from which ultimately the audience is driven to recognize its own freedom, Coleridge dealt at first hand with this new aesthetic. Wallenstein not only exemplified the power of the new German drama at the centre of Weimar classicism, but it also gave to Coleridge a clue to the power of drama altogether, in its function not as a programme for political action, but as a preparation for it, as conveying not actuality but, far more importantly, potentiality. While implicit throughout the play, that view is at one point given voice explicitly: in Thekla’s reflections upon her lover Max’s ethics of the heart as he chooses between obedience to his father Octavio or loyalty to his friend Wallenstein: Is it possible, that that can be the right, The which thy tender heart did not at first Detect and seize with instant impulse? Go, Fulfil thy duty! I should ever love thee. Whate’er thou had’st chosen, thou would’st still have acted Nobly and worthy of thee – (The Death of Wallenstein, II, ix, 74–8, in PW, II, 761) Thekla is confident that in any deliberation about specific action Max can trust his heart to make the right choice because it is already

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Coleridge, Schiller and Aesthetic Education

pure, disinterested. Furthermore, he cannot go wrong because in the right ‘cultivation’ of the heart, antecedent to action, he has already reconciled the normally competing demands of duty on the one hand and desire on the other. Schiller invites us, then, to admire Max not because of the choice he makes or the specific action he takes but rather because of the potential he embodies. Coleridge reacted positively to this element in the play. Commenting in the margin of a copy he gave to his brother-in-law, Thomas Hutchinson, sometime around 1807, he wrote: The great main moral of this Play is the Danger of dallying with evil Thoughts under the influence of superstition, as did Wallenstein; and the grandeur of perfect Sincerity in Max Piccolomini, and the unhappy effects of Insincerity, tho’ for the best purposes, in his Father Octavio.11 Each model of action mentioned here is problematic. Wallenstein confuses art with life by treating in earnest instead of aesthetically the various portents offered in the night sky. Octavio’s loyalty to the establishment, including his Burkean respect for national traditions, fails for not encompassing in it the personal demands of long-established friendship. As for Max’s ‘perfect Sincerity’, it drives him on to a suicide attack on Wallenstein’s Swedish allies. But in spite of this injustice, Coleridge’s admiration for Max’s self-consistent sincerity is unreserved. It hinges, in the spirit of Schiller’s Aesthetic Letters, on the distinction between ‘play’ and real life: for while in the tragedy Max’s sincerity eventually leads to an undeserved death, in the minds of the audience it leads to the consciousness of their own freedom.

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3

Coleridge’s discovery of Schiller’s drama in the 1790s culminated in the translation of Wallenstein, but his exploration of his work as a poet and thinker was just beginning. The following decade brought him in contact with nearly the entire corpus of Schiller’s published writing. The reason for this interest lay in the recognition of Schiller’s unique contribution to post-Kantian aesthetics: the extension of Idealism’s formalist preoccupations into the world of action by way of a new anthropology: that man is only fully human when he is ‘at play’. To understand how Coleridge made sense of Schiller’s work during this period, it is necessary to look closely at how, in a quite literal sense, he read it. I want to track down the texts Coleridge owned or had access to, either in his own library or in the libraries of friends, and the ones that he came in contact with in the literary press. I begin with the latter, for a close look at the press in the period reveals a continued interest in Schiller in at least some quarters and certainly among the sorts of intellectuals Coleridge was in regular contact with. The greatest evidence of Coleridge’s reading comes from the notebooks themselves. These suggest a sustained and creative encounter with Schiller’s work, particularly his poetry and the ways in which it re-enacts some of the principal concerns of the aesthetic essays. I will return to the poetry in the next chapter. Ultimately, as I hope to show, it is as much how Coleridge read as what he read that compels us to take seriously his relationship to Schiller. If Coleridge had any hopes of easily exploiting his new discoveries in Wallenstein they were soon dashed: cool reviews in several journals, symptomatic of the literary establishment’s increasing weariness of 45

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British Germanophiles

Coleridge, Schiller and Aesthetic Education

the German stage, put Coleridge immediately on the defensive.1 He tried to vindicate himself in a letter to the editor of the Monthly Review (CL, I, 648) and as late as 1816 he was still busily distancing himself from contemporary German theatre (BL, II, 210–12). But with Wordsworth, Walter Scott, Henry Crabb Robinson and later Hazlitt, Ludwig Tieck and A. W. von Schlegel all paying tribute to his translation, it was not long before he expressed a higher opinion of it himself: indeed, he once wrote, the ‘parts most admired were substitutions of my own, on a principle of Compensation’ (CL, III, 524).2 Public recognition finally came in 1823 when Blackwood’s published a long, laudatory synopsis of the piece by Scott’s nephew, John Gibson Lockhart. 3 Coleridge later attributed the initial neglect to the prejudiced ‘state of public Taste’ (CL, III, 524) and as Julie Carlson has shown he was perfectly right to do so.4 The year 1800 saw a sudden decline of interest in German writers, victims of the Anti-Jacobin Review’s successful campaign against the new German learning that had begun in earnest the previous year. The same vituperative spirit that in ‘The New Morality’ print of 1798 had accused Coleridge of abandoning family responsibilities in order to study ‘at a German university’ also, in due course, put an end to Schiller’s career in England and for similar reasons: guilt by association. In subsequent years there seemed little immediate chance of recovery. The recommencement of hostilities after the failed Peace of Amiens in 1803 hardened English nationalism and severely restricted communication with the continent: Schiller’s reception in England was suddenly and nearly insuperably interrupted. Coleridge’s knowledge of Schiller during the war years, while clearly exceeding that of the literary public, has often appeared limited, apparently circumscribed by the same parochial and increasingly nationalistic interests that dominated public life. Considerable evidence, though, points in the opposite direction. Throughout this period Coleridge managed to keep up with Schiller, translating poems in his notebooks, commenting on the new dramas like Mary Stuart, The Maid of Orleans, The Bride of Messina, William Tell, and citing some of the essays, including On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry and On Grace and Dignity. Furthermore, it is now clear that Coleridge’s reading of Schiller was by no means an isolated endeavour in early nineteenth-century Britain. In some quarters, particularly among dauntless Germanophiles like Henry Crabb Robinson and in literary

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journals with a European bias, like The Universal Magazine and The Monthly Review, Schiller’s status as a prolific playwright and philosopher was widely recognized in spite of misinformation and official disapproval. Before examining more closely the specific references to Schiller in Coleridge’s notebooks and letters, I want to look at the contemporary record of Schiller in England – not the dominant public opinion that was largely ignorant of or hostile to Schiller but rather the attitude of an often obscure minority quite in his favour.5

The German Museum One early and important journal that did more than any other to bring Schiller to an English audience – and that since has been almost entirely lost from view – was The German Museum.6 Edited by Peter Will, the German-born pastor of the Reformed congregation in Savoy, and by Anton Willich, Edinburgh-trained Kantian and author of Elements of the Critical Philosophy (1798), the journal was published monthly in London by the German bookseller Constantin Geisweiler. With his wife, Maria, who had already translated two of Kotzebue’s plays the year before, Geisweiler set himself up as London’s Kotzebue expert at the time of his greatest popularity, while also offering brand new imported German books as well as dictionaries and grammars. With The German Museum he sought to extend and consolidate his control over the commercial side of this interest. The aim of the journal was to bring the latest in German literature and learning to England, to compare the literary cultures of the two countries, and to counter the prejudice, spread by the Abbé Barruel’s alarmist allegations about the German illuminati, that the new Idealist philosophy was a Jacobin conspiracy. It contained vast amounts of German material new to England: essays on literary and political culture, translations of poetry and prose, reviews of new medical, philosophical and historical works in German, transactions of learned societies in Scandinavia, Russia and France and finally, at the end of each month’s edition, a running list of all the books on sale at the annual Leipzig book fair, the premier gathering of German language booksellers. Though not comprehensive, the coverage in the journal was substantial. During the short 18 months of its run, from January 1800 to June 1801, The German Museum published named review articles and reports on works by most of the major contributors to

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Coleridge, Schiller and Aesthetic Education

contemporary German-speaking culture: Goethe, Kant, Herder, Fichte, the Schlegels, Blumenbach, Eichhorn, Lavater, Garve, Alexander von Humboldt, Wieland, Klopstock, Voss, Jean Paul, August Lafontaine, Anton Wall and Georg Lichtenberg. It also published original English translations of Kant (‘Idea of a Universal History, With a Cosmopolitan View’) and Herder (an extract from his Letters on the Progress of Humanity) as well as poetry and prose by J. J. Engel, Salomon Gessner, G. A. Bürger and Wieland. Correspondents, which included Klopstock as well as English expatriates living abroad, sent in regular reports of the latest literary news from centres like Weimar and Göttingen. But by far the one name that dominated the journal, in terms of review articles, notices and translations, was that of Schiller. With their ear to the ground, the editors of The German Museum easily picked up that the greatest literary event of the moment was Schiller’s new historical tragedy, Wallenstein – staged in Weimar the previous year to great acclaim and not yet published in German. In their opening two numbers, for January and February 1800, they devoted considerable attention to it, beginning with ‘An Account of Wallenstein’s Life’ by Peter Will drawn largely from Schiller’s own History of the Thirty Years War. Thereafter followed a lengthy summary of the action of the second and third parts of the trilogy, The Piccolomini and Wallenstein’s Death, generously interspersed with translated passages and commentary. The January issue also included the announcement that one Joseph Mellish, an Englishman residing in Germany, was currently working on a translation of Wallenstein’s Death and that the whole of the German version would be published in May. Clearly Coleridge was not the only one in England enthusiastic about Wallenstein. Like Coleridge’s own translation, the synopsis and passages translated by Will in The German Museum seem to follow the stage version of the play (markedly different from the amended version Schiller published later that year), and this has led one of Schiller’s editors, Lieselotte Blumenthal, to suggest that both Coleridge and Will must have been working from the same manuscript. 7 This tempting thesis has the Wallenstein manuscript changing hands rather often in England: from Bell (who received it from Germany in November 1799) to Will (who kept it until February 1800) to Longman (who bought it from Bell that month) and finally to Coleridge (who worked with it until April). The timing is right, but as Joyce Crick has shown, a close

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look at the text tells a different story. The basis for Will’s Wallenstein in The German Museum was a lengthy review of the first Weimar production published in a German periodical – close, but not quite identical to the manuscript Schiller had had sent to England.8 Coleridge and his publisher Longman, though, could hardly have known that and when they read The German Museum, with its independent extensive coverage of Wallenstein and its notice about a new translation by Mellish, they clearly saw competition on the horizon. The pressure was on and Coleridge simply had to finish quickly. And when he did, the people at The German Museum took notice. Peter Will, the editor, later grumbled that Coleridge’s translation ‘marred the beauties of the original’. 9 The German Museum’s coverage of Wallenstein helped precipitate Coleridge’s own translation, but what does the journal tell about the rest of Schiller’s work, and what was the impact on Coleridge? In the 18 months of publication, the journal mentioned Schiller repeatedly, offering through reports, reviews and translations a fairly clear picture of the range of his activities. The Wallenstein material was followed six months later by accurate reports that Schiller was working on a translation of Macbeth and on a new historical tragedy, Mary Stuart. Again in advance of its publication in Germany, Geisweiler published a synopsis and translations by Mellish of selected passages (Museum, II, 368–9, 531–6); one year later Mellish’s full version of the play was published in London by Schiller’s own publisher, Cotta.10 Schiller’s own translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, Book 2, which he had included in Thalia in 1792, was reprinted next to Dryden’s translation of the same in an exercise comparing English and German renderings of classical texts (Museum, I, 15–25, 88–95). Keen to promote the new historical studies in Germany (H. E. G. Paulus, F. J. Majer, J. D. Michaelis and Eichhorn are all mentioned), the journal highlighted Schiller’s historical work, reviewing his Allgemeine Sammlung historischer Memoires, vols 8–15 (1794–98) and noticing the new English translation by W. Blaquière of his Thirty Years War (Museum, I, 67–8). The journal also ran a full translation of The Criminal from Lost Honour, Schiller’s early prose tale of how an otherwise unremarkable man is driven by need into a life of crime. Schiller’s own preface, published with the tale first in the Thalia in 1786 and again in the first part of his Shorter Works in Prose in 1792, contains one of the clearest early defences of his narrative art: to describe not only events, but the motivations and

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feelings of those who shape them (Museum, II, 344–9, 439–43, 529–33). Politically, too, Schiller’s contribution was felt. Peter Will translated at considerable length the first half of Schiller’s essay ‘The Legislation of Lycurgas and Solon’ (‘Die Gesetzgeburg des Lykurgus und Solon’), originally Jena lectures that were published in the Thalia in 1790. Having surveyed Lycurgas’s comprehensive system of laws regulating all aspects of Spartan life, and having shown how they served to build a unified state, Schiller then attacks the subordination of all life to a single political end. In contrast to the ‘civism’ of Sparta, and by implication that of Jacobin France, Schiller vigorously argues that the state ought not exist for its own sake but rather only as condition necessary for humanity to improve itself (Museum, III, 283–7, 347–55) – an idea that Schiller would reiterate in his essay ‘On the Sublime’ (‘Über das Erhabene’) years later and that would become foundational in Wilhelm von Humboldt’s 1792 essay, ‘The Limits of State Action’ (‘Ideen zu einem Versuch, die Gränzen der Wirksamkeit des Staats zu bestimmen’). Geisweiler’s Schiller comes either from correspondents in contemporary Weimar or from the pages of the Thalia, published some ten years earlier; it is clear he does not have a copy of Horae (1795–96) and accordingly does not mention the principal aesthetic essays written during the 1790s like On Grace and Dignity, On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry, and the Aesthetic Letters. That is not surprising, really, given the Horae’s relatively short life as a journal. The essays mentioned did not finally get widely read until Schiller included them in the second and third parts of his Shorter Works in Prose, which only then were being published in Leipzig, in 1800 and 1801 respectively. Nevertheless, Geisweiler and the Museum editors did convey some of the main preoccupations of Schiller’s aesthetics. In May 1800 they opened the current issue with a full translation of Schiller’s essay ‘On the Effects of a Permanent Theatre’ (first published in the Rhenish Thalia in 1784 and later, revised and with a different title, in the fourth part of Shorter Works in Prose, 1802). The essay, which had already appeared once in English in The Monthly Mirror only six months earlier, links Schiller’s status as a playwright with his preoccupations as a theorist.11 Written before he had read Kant, the essay rests upon an uncritical understanding of the stage as embodying the moral law: just as we need religion to make us take moral life seriously, so we need drama to enact the precepts of the law which otherwise would appear cold and

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unappealing. Crucially, though, Schiller begins and ends his essay on quite another note. He argues that humanity, satiated by sensuality on the one hand and exhausted by mental exertion on the other, needs diversion from both. Thanks to its indeterminacy, art occasions that kind of productive diversion. Anticipating the definition of the Spieltrieb in the Aesthetic Letters, which is distanced alike from the demands of sense and those of reason, Schiller describes the stage as an unreal world that regenerates us because it taxes neither mind nor body: the artificial world, into which we are transported, makes us forget the real world with all its cares and burthens; we are regenerated, as it were; our feelings are roused; salutary passions shake our dormant spirits, and give quicker circulation to the stagnating blood. (Museum, I, 390) This thinking, which subsequently informed the later aesthetic essays, eventually found expression in Schiller’s collaboration with Goethe at the Weimar Court Theatre. The German Museum picked up on this collaboration, publishing in July 1800 and in February 1801 two lengthy reports from Weimar by an English visitor (probably Joseph Mellish, then living in the city and translating Maria Stuart with Schiller’s cooperation). The first, ‘An Account of Weimar’, charts the historical and cultural features of the city, including the parks, castle, opera and theatre, and describes in detail the first performance of Wallenstein’s Camp in October 1798, noting particularly the public’s preparation, anticipation and approbation (Museum, II, 24–9, 136–41, 234–9). The second article, ‘On the Theatrical Company at Weimar’ is more specific. Ascribing the current low taste in drama to the fact that most theatres are run simply for profit, the author suggests a more noble purpose: a theatre . . . ought to be conducted by men, who being themselves actors, consider the perfection of the art as an end, not as a means; who will therefore adhere to its true principles. The theatre should be formed for the public, not according to their whims and caprices. With just such principles it appears the court theatre of Weimar is conducted by Göthe and Schiller, men whom their countrymen regard as the first of poets and writers. (Museum, III, 112)

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The perfection of art ‘as an end, not as a means’, either to gratifying barbarous taste or to fulfilling certain moral expectations, is a neat summary of the ethos Schiller and Goethe sought to achieve at the Weimar theatre. Its evocation here, on the pages of The German Museum, suggests that some at least in England were fully alive to the distinctive features of Weimar classicism. Readers were encouraged, too, to find out more. Geisweiler published the catalogue of the Leipzig book fair with the offer to obtain any book required within weeks. Among Schiller’s works on offer were: Poems, part 1 (1800), Shorter Works in Prose, part 2 (1800), as well as the Wallenstein trilogy (1800).

Schiller and the British literary press In July 1801 The German Museum ceased publication owing to its dwindling number of subscribers. It was a sign of the times – and another victory for the Anti-Jacobin Review – as the English reading public turned away from German letters altogether, weary of its sublime effects and suspicious of its alleged radical politics. Interest in Schiller, too, dropped off: the later dramas, The Maid of Orleans, The Bride of Messina and William Tell, would not be translated until after the rediscovery of German by Carlyle and others in the mid 1820s. Nevertheless, even during this period of reaction, Schiller’s few but devoted English readers continued to offer occasional new translations of his poetry and prose and to champion his work in review articles. Benjamin Beresford, sometime contributor to the Museum, had his translations of selected poems by Schiller and Goethe published in 1801, in Berlin. 12 Henry Crabb Robinson, still studying in Germany, sent back a translation of Schiller’s poem ‘The Genius’ which appeared in The Monthly Register and Encyclopedian Magazine in 1802. And three years later an anonymous contributor to the Annual Review called for ‘the whole of Schiller’s works, and the whole of Goethe’s . . . to be translated; but let not the translators of Nathan [William Taylor of Norwich] and of Wallenstein [Coleridge] thus employ themselves again; they have higher calls.’13 Among some readers at least, the value of Schiller and the efforts of Coleridge had not been forgotten. In 1805 there appeared, unexpectedly, an anonymous new translation of parts one and two of the Wallenstein trilogy, called The Piccolomini’s, A drama in five acts. It was published in octavo in London

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by J. Cundee and sold under the imprint ‘Albion Press’. There are so few copies of this work that apart from its mention in some bibliographies earlier in the twentieth century criticism has entirely lost sight of it. The work is remarkable for a number of reasons. One is that it includes the first part of the trilogy, Wallenstein’s Camp (which Coleridge had not translated), rendered in rhyming couplets in imitation of Schiller’s. That is a first in English, antedating by many years James Churchill’s translation of the piece, published in Fraser’s Magazine in 1846 (Churchill’s joined Coleridge’s to form the standard translation of the whole play throughout the nineteenth century). Secondly, the work was apparently based on the same manuscript that Coleridge had used. This is evident from the fact that, in addition to many verbal similarities, The Piccolomini’s of 1805 includes the first two acts of Wallenstein’s Death and ends at the point where Piccolomini and his son Max part ways: in other extant manuscripts and in all published versions of the play in German the division between the two parts is placed considerably earlier. Indications are that this was at long last the translation that Peter Will had announced in The German Museum back in 1800, the promise of which had at that time driven Coleridge into such a concentrated effort of his own. Finally, regardless of any direct Coleridge connection, the work represents continued serious interest in Schiller. With its lively rendering of Wallenstein’s Camp and confident versification of Piccolomini (the only attempt yet, apart from Coleridge’s, to render Schiller’s drama into verse), and also with the promise of the last part, Wallenstein’s Death, still to come, the work clearly aimed at being the new definitive translation of the drama, supplanting Coleridge’s incomplete and presumably unavailable effort of five years previous. That ambition was not fulfilled: the promised third part never appeared, its author or perhaps its publisher likely put off by a scornful anonymous review in The British Critic.14 Obviously Wallenstein’s day had not yet come, but Schiller’s supporters had not yet given up. Schiller died on 9 May 1805 and The Gentlemen’s Magazine, reflecting current opinion, barely noticed.15 Considerably more alive to European developments, The Monthly Magazine published a ‘Biographical Sketch’ the following January – the first in English. It is a well-informed and highly sympathetic portrait that considers all aspects of Schiller’s career. The anonymous contributor draws on Schiller’s own published comments on his plays, notably an article on The Robbers in the

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Coleridge, Schiller and Aesthetic Education

Rhenish Thalia, in which Schiller excused the enthusiasm of that piece on the grounds that he had not yet then studied ‘the human heart’, and the ‘Letters on Don Carlos’ (first published in the Teutscher Merkur), in which he described the competing intentions during the composition of that piece. The contributor goes on to praise his historical writing (‘he united German industry with the elegance of the ancients’) and to note the shift in his interests while at Jena in the early 1790s: ‘he likewise held lectures on aesthetics . . . [and] instigated by Reinhold, he indefatigably studied the Criticism of Kant’. Interrupting the survey, the author at this point slips in a translation of one of Schiller’s essays in which he developed the notion of ‘genius’, consequent upon his study of Kant: The childlike character (says he) which genius stamps upon all its works, it likewise manifests in private life, and in its manners. It is modest, because Nature is always so; but it is not decorous, because decorum only attends corruption; it is rational, for Nature can never be the contrary; but it is not crafty, for craft belongs only to art. It is true to its character and its propensities, not so much from principle, for Nature, not withstanding all digressions, invariably returns to the same spot, and always brings back the former necessities; it is unassuming, nay even timid, because genius ever remains a secret to itself, but it is not anxious, because it is unacquainted with the dangers of the way it is pursuing. We know little of the private life of the great geniuses, but the little that has been preserved confirms this observation.16 This is an accurate translation of a key passage in Schiller’s 1795 essay On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry. There Schiller characterizes ‘genius’ as a stranger to its own methods and achievements: instead of studying nature, bearing witness to it, such a ‘genius’ lives nature in unreflecting proximity, exhibiting it. Hence the claim that the intellectual and aesthetic character of ‘genius’ will naturally be in accord with the moral (‘was es im Intellektuellen und Ästhetischen ist, kann es im Moralischen nicht verläugnen’, NA, XX, 424). Schiller goes on, in the passage translated here, to particularize that claim by an appeal to experience, evoking by analogy the actions of (apparently Rousseauesque) children and the private lives of named ‘geniuses’. Coleridge would do much the same thing in the second chapter of Biographia

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Literaria, where he seeks to disprove the ‘supposed irritability of men of genius’ by positing a link between aesthetic value and moral character (see also CN, I, 1057). This ‘Biographical Sketch’ is important for another reason, too. It was the first in the British press to include a detailed account of the ill health Schiller suffered from during much of his life and which eventually led to his death at 45 years of age, still at the height of his powers. The untimeliness of his death naturally attracted interest, but commentators went further, linking the disease and early death directly to Schiller’s unusual study habits – notably his tendency to rise late in the day and then study far into the night and early morning – and to the subject of his study: Kantian philosophy. His body, in other words, was seen to bear the cost of his philosophical investigations. After 1805 the figure of Schiller became in Britain a warning for the man of letters to cultivate moderation in his study habits. This was apparently Wordsworth’s meaning when in 1812, thinking of Coleridge, he said of Schiller ‘that when he was opened [upon death] his entrails were, as it were, eaten up, while his brain was sound’.17 It was a comparison Coleridge naturally resented and the effect was to deepen the rift between the two men. The Monthly Magazine’s article suggests that the range of Schiller available in Britain in 1806 was wider than previously supposed. At the very least the contributor must have had a copy to hand of On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry (in either Schiller’s 1795 journal, Horae, or the second volume of his Shorter Works in Prose, 1800) and access to recent periodicals in German. Furthermore, though in fewer numbers than in the 1790s, new assessments of Schiller’s work continued to appear throughout this period in other journals. In 1807 The Universal Magazine ran two articles on ‘the genius of Schiller’, one praising The Robbers for its masterful portrayal of character (which rivalled the efforts of Shakespeare) and the other dismissing Don Carlos for its over-determined philosophical content (which, the contributor suggested, was derived from Herder’s Philosophy of History).18 The latter article called forth a lively rebuttal from an anonymous Schiller supporter, calling himself ‘Philo-Teuton’, published in the next number of the journal as ‘Vindication of Schiller and German Literature’. Defending Schiller from moralists like Hannah More, the anonymous contributor insisted that Schiller’s dramatic and philosophical interests did not clash: ‘poetry never appears to me with greater lustre, than

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when she speaks the language of Philosophy. This it is that gives the superiority to the English and German poetry over that of every other nation, ancient or modern.’ 19 This, though, was just the beginning. In the following year, 1809, The Universal Magazine published a full translation of Schiller’s ‘Ode to Joy’ (‘An die Freude’), taken from his Poems, Part 2 (1803) and signed ‘Philo Germanicus’, and a new translation of Schiller’s tale The Criminal from Lost Honour, originally published in the Thalia in 1786.20 Most important of all, it published the first full-length English translation of Schiller’s post-Kantian aesthetics: his essay ‘On the Tragic Art’. 21 The essay, which had been published originally in his journal New Thalia (1792) and then again in the fourth volume of the Shorter Works in Prose (1802), set out the characteristically moral – though not moralistic – turn in his thinking on art. Before turning to a formalist account of tragedy, as a genre, Schiller describes the nature of aesthetic pleasure: it depends not upon the satisfaction of sensuous instinct but rather on the suspension of moral judgement. This activity, particularly the feelings of pleasure aroused in the presentation of tragic action, is nothing less than the workings of reason: and in proportion as the free efficiency of it, as an absolute self agent, deserves in preference the appellation of action, in proportion as the mind feels itself perfectly independent and free in its moral actions; so is certainly the satisfied impulse of action the origin of the pleasure arising from mournful emotions. But also it is not the number, nor the vivacity of the ideas, nor in general the efficiency of the power of desire; but it is a determined species of the first, and a determined efficiency of the latter, produced by reason, on which that pleasure is founded. 22 The notion of tragedy as indirectly ennobling, preparing the audience for its own acts of heroism, would become central to Schiller’s argument for ‘aesthetic education’. The depth of feeling aroused by the semblance of reality teaches not the content of the moral law but the possibility of wanting and respecting it. In Britain during the first decade of the century, Schiller continued to surface in literary and philosophical discourse. In, for example, William Mudford’s Nubilia in Search of a Husband (1809) – a novel of social satire, set against Hannah More’s didactic novel Coelebs in Search

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of a Wife (1809) – the protagonist praises his work at great length, placing him ‘unconditionally, at the head of German literature’. 23 And in 1810 The Scots Magazine and Edinburgh Literary Miscellany ran a nearly complete translation of Schiller’s inaugural address at Jena in 1789, ‘On the Advantages to be Derived from the Study of Universal History’, and referred in the headnote to ‘the elegance of the stile, and the fame of the author’.24 Such allusions and accounts, though well informed, did little to alter the prevailing ignorance and parochialism of the time with regard to German literature and learning. Nonetheless, they do suggest that prior to the revival in Schiller’s fortunes, first with Mme de Staël’s De l’Allemagne (1810, translated 1813) and then with articles by De Quincey, William Taylor, Carlyle and Lockhart in the 1820s – when Schiller’s ‘aesthetic education’ gets mentioned by name for the first time – a portion at least of the literary public knew and read across the whole range of Schiller’s work. 25 Through The German Museum, The Monthly Magazine and The Universal Magazine Schiller’s dramas and prose works, including some of the aesthetic essays, continued to reach an English reading audience. These reviews and translations point to a loose network of Germanists interested in Schiller’s work as a dramatist, poet and philosopher: people like Peter Will, Anton Willich, Constantin Geisweiler, Henry Crabb Robinson, Walter Scott, Thomas Beddoes, John Stoddart, Thomas Holcroft, William Southeby, G. H. Noehden, William Taylor of Norwich, and William Mudford, as well as many anonymous contributors to periodicals like The Universal Magazine’s ‘Philo Germanicus’. Resisting the dominant trend to dismiss German learning, their work bears witness to an informed discourse about Schiller that carried on in Britain throughout the war years. Of these figures, one in particular stands out, for he had met Schiller in person: Henry Crabb Robinson. In November of 1801, while a student at Jena, Crabb Robinson made an excursion to the nearby town of Weimar and paid visits in turn to its most eminent inhabitants: Wieland, Goethe, Herder and Schiller. When he mentioned Coleridge’s Wallenstein translation, Schiller reportedly acknowledged that the translator was ‘a Man of Talents’ but that, as he understood, he had made ‘ridiculous blunders from his ignorance of the language’. 26 Writing to his brother back in England, Crabb Robinson praised Schiller’s latest work, The Maid of Orleans, then playing in the Weimar Court Theatre, and paid tribute to the way he and Goethe

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managed the theatre, not as a source of profit but as a means of directing ‘the common interest’: ‘Without any view to profit, their Arrangements are the result of a pure genuine love of the Art’. Philosophical interests were equally evident. Schiller, Crabb Robinson wrote, is eminent as a philosopher & metaphysician – his Poems are highly metaphysical & contain some of the profoundest Ideas I ever met with – He has written long didactic Odes or lyrical didactic poems in which we know not what most to admire the splendour of the poetry or the depth of the Reasoning. Crabb Robinson continued to make visits to Weimar both for the theatre and for the conversation of the eminent inhabitants and visitors, including Mme de Staël and Benjamin Constant. By the time he returned to England in 1805, not long after Schiller’s death, he had acquired a vast collection of books and many stories to tell. Among Coleridge’s circle of friends, he is a direct link to Schiller and Weimar aesthetic humanism.

Coleridge’s reading of Schiller’s prose It is against this background that we should understand Coleridge’s references to Schiller in his own notebooks and letters at this time: not as unique intimations of a distant body of work, difficult to acquire and only half-understood, but rather as pointers to and reminders of a readily available discourse relevant to his own immediate interests. The journals and books I have mentioned were not necessarily sources for Coleridge’s knowledge of Schiller, for after all he had his own, more direct ways of obtaining German material and commentary – through friends and acquaintances like De Quincey, Crabb Robinson, William Sotheby and John Stoddart, as well as the London bookseller Thomas Boosey, who supplied many of Coleridge’s German books. Rather, they provide the context for this aspect of Coleridge’s studies, suggesting that the reading of Schiller at this time, at least by anyone interested in Kant and already committed to a rationalist aesthetic, would be informed by an awareness of Schiller’s contribution to Idealism, notably its concentration on the moral and social effects of art by way of a new anthropology. On at least four occasions Coleridge referred to Schiller’s aesthetic essays explicitly, in 1803,

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1807, 1812 and finally in 1819, and I want to look at each of these in turn. Around the time Coleridge first began copying Schiller’s poetry into his notebooks (1801–4), he jotted down a reminder to himself to look up a passage in On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry. What prompted this was his study in early December 1803 of Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, 1785). Coleridge was deeply impressed by its defence of virtue, not happiness, as the goal of life and its definition of virtue as consisting of the good will or obedience to duty. But while emphasizing the conscience Kant’s account sets little store by feeling, sympathy and instinct, which he deemed more likely to mislead than properly direct the will. Here Coleridge paused for thought: ‘Remember T. Wedgwood, as we were sitting together in the Coach /& forever are loving to look at Children / Vide Schiller’ (CN, I, 1705). The reference here is to the opening remarks of Schiller’s essay – in particular the phrase: ‘that we, in certain moments, are moved by such emotion while in the company of children’ (‘daß wir in gewissen Augenblicken mit so viel Rührung bey Kindern verweilen’, NA, XX, 416). The broader context is the essay’s distinction between two modes of being, the ‘naïve’, characterized by the unmediated perception of truth and goodness, and the ‘sentimental’, characterized by an awareness of the distance between aspiration and reality. Children figure prominently in Schiller’s analysis, by way of illustration: in their innocence they represent neither helplessness nor a lack of intelligence but rather a superior force of intuited goodness, for ‘a heart full of innocence and truth, is the source of that which out of its inner greatness scorns the aid of art’ (Elias, 88; ‘ein Herz voll Unschuld und Wahrheit, die Quelle davon sey, welches die Hülfe der Kunst aus innrer Größe verschmähte’, NA, XX, 417). Like the forms of nature, children offer to mature consciousness a reflection of its own earlier self, as yet uncorrupted by experience. We see in them pure determinability (Bestimmbarkeit), whereas in ourselves we see only the already determined (Bestimmung). Earlier Schiller had employed that distinction as a way of describing ‘aesthetic education’: in art we are brought into contact with pure determinability, with what might be, which in turn draws us towards recognizing our own freedom to act in the moral sphere (Aesthetic Letters, XX, 3–4). In ‘looking at children’ a similar reaction takes place: while intellectually we

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cannot help but dismiss their naivety as ill-informed, morally we are driven to respect it as the artless approximation of an ideal we too are striving to achieve. In short, in the context of studying Kant’s characteristically rigorous ethics, Coleridge invokes as a countermeasure Schiller’s essay, in particular its apology for the simplicity of feeling and intuition of goodness exemplified in children. Such intuitionism was also the subject of Schiller’s earlier essay, On Grace and Dignity, and several years later Coleridge made explicit reference to it. While reading Schiller’s journal The Muses’ Almanac for 1797 in September 1807, and copying distichs in German into his notebook, Coleridge recorded one, from among the Xenia, in his own English translation. It stands out as the only translation in the notebook entry, and in it Coleridge departs from Schiller’s original. Here is Schiller: Griechheit was war sie? Verstand und Maaß und Klarheit! drum dächt’ ich, Etwas Geduld noch ihr Herrn, eh ihr von Griechheit uns sprecht. (NA, I, 348)27 Here is Coleridge’s version: Plain Sense, Measure, Clearness, Dignity, Grace over all, these made the genius of Greece. (CN, II, 3131 [9]) Coleridge captures Schiller’s praise of Greek moderation, but in place of the unfavourable comparison of it to the loquacity of his contemporaries (‘Etwas Geduld noch ihr Herrn’) he adds to the list of Greece’s virtues ‘Dignity’ and ‘Grace’. The appearance here of these two terms suggests not only that Coleridge knew Schiller’s essay by 1807, but also that he could link it creatively, and justifiably, with Schiller’s reverential classicism. The essay’s argument, moreover, resonates throughout Coleridge’s notebook reflections on moral philosophy in this period. On Grace and Dignity challenged Kant’s dualism between the rational and sensuous and his stoicism in denying the moral relevance of one’s inclination. In the face of Kant’s insistence that only the rational will could be considered moral, Schiller argued that disposition, too, played its part in our doing good. Such a moral

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disposition was to be achieved in two ways: on the one hand in the liberation of natural voluntary movements (‘grace’) and on the other in the control and development of involuntary movements (‘dignity’). (In the second edition of his Religion Within the Bounds of Reason Alone Kant acknowledged the force of Schiller’s critique.) Coleridge, too, was critical of Kant’s stoicism and like Schiller thought of morality as the expression of one’s whole being rather than as a series of isolated actions more or less rationally determined. At a time when he felt more acutely than ever his own inability ‘to do my Duty for the Duty’s Sake’ (CL, III, 307), he looked with Schiller to feeling, purified of the dross of possessive desire, as a motivational force (CN, II, 2210; Friend, I, 35) and praised with him the moral value of impulsive actions, those ‘primary & therefore unbewusst, & ineffable Acts’, of which love is the greatest (CN, III, 3562).28 As in On Grace and Dignity, Coleridge’s notes around this time repeatedly value habituation over deliberation. Even later in life he continued to think of moral action as the expression of ‘goodhearted Impulses’, resulting from a ‘kindly & cheerful mood, and the play of minute Sympathies continuous in their discontinuity like the Sand-thread of the Hourglass, and from their minuteness and transiency not calculated to stiffen or inflate the individual’ (CN, IV, 5115). It is a characteristically Coleridgean description of Schiller’s schöne Seele. By 1807, then, Coleridge had read at least two of Schiller’s major aesthetic essays. But in which edition? On Grace and Dignity had originally been published in Schiller’s journal New Thalia in 1793 and On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry in the Horae in 1795–96, and there is no surviving evidence that Coleridge owned either. Both essays, though, were later republished in the second part (1800) of Schiller’s Shorter Works in Prose and this along with an additional volume – both of which are now lost – were in Coleridge’s library. We know this because in April 1812, while living in London with the Morgans and preparing for the forthcoming set of lectures on drama (and not yet reconciled to Wordsworth), Coleridge wrote to his wife at Keswick with a specific request for books: ‘If with [Wilhelm Heinse’s Ardinghello] the two volumes of Schiller’s prosaische Schriften were sent off immediately, it would be of serious benefit in my Lectures’ (CL, III, 387). The books must have been at Grasmere and the request forwarded there, for Dorothy Wordsworth at Dove Cottage reported in a letter of early May to William and Mary, then newly arrived in

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London, that she had sent off the volumes immediately.29 Coleridge presumably received them in time for the next series of lectures, which began in the middle of that month. Coleridge’s reference to Schiller here leaves unanswered two important questions: which ‘two volumes’ did he own, and when did he acquire them? The work in question, Shorter Works in Prose, was published in Leipzig in four parts over ten years, in 1792, 1800, 1801 and 1802, and included all Schiller’s major aesthetic essays as well as book reviews and essays on historical subjects. The four parts were often bound in two volumes, and if such was the case here Coleridge must have had all of Schiller’s works to hand, including the Aesthetic Letters. If, on the other hand, the parts had been individually bound into four separate volumes, it is not immediately clear which two were the ones in Coleridge’s possession. One of them must have been the second part, published in 1800, for it contained On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry and On Grace and Dignity, the essays Coleridge specifically referred to in 1803 and 1807. It also contained the shorter essay, ‘On the Necessary Limits of the Uses of Beauty’ (‘Über die nothwendigen Grenzen beim Gebrauch schöner Formen’). But which was then the other volume? Either part 1, published in 1792 and containing ‘pre-critical’ works such as the tale The Criminal from Lost Honour and the essay on universal history – and would Coleridge have requested this in the run up to his lectures on drama? – or, which seems more likely, part 3, published in 1801, which contained the Aesthetic Letters as well as two essays on related subjects, ‘On the Sublime’ and ‘On the Pathetic’. (It is also possible, though less likely, that the second volume referred to was part 4, published in 1802 containing the essays on tragedy and the Bürger and Matthison reviews.) As for when Coleridge acquired the volumes, one must assume it was soon after they were published (and so after Coleridge’s return from Germany) and in any case before his first reference to the second part, in December 1803 (CN, I, 1705). Until the volumes are traced or further evidence is found, it will be impossible to be certain about how much of the Shorter Works in Prose Coleridge owned. At the very least, though, it is certain that Coleridge’s knowledge of Schiller’s aesthetic essays extended beyond the two he specifically referred to and it is very possible that it included the text for which Schiller was already becoming known, the Aesthetic Letters.

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Coleridge’s request for his Schiller at this time, April 1812, is interesting for another reason, relating to his use of source material when giving lectures. The previous December, in the middle of the ninth of his lectures on Shakespeare and Milton, Coleridge had been handed a copy of A. W. Schlegel’s 1809 Vienna lectures on more or less the same subject, On Dramatic Art and Literature (Über dramatische Kunst und Literatur). The effect was felt immediately. Coleridge recognized that Schlegel was developing a defence of Shakespeare’s ‘genius’ on the same sort of lines as his own and began using the material in his own lectures. The trouble was that for all their relevance Schlegel’s ideas plainly were not entirely original. There is a good example of this in that ninth lecture. Coleridge drew the distinction between Greek drama as akin to statuary (highly dignified, few characters, a high measure of abstraction) and Shakespearean drama as akin to painting (an immense number and variety of characters, less abstraction). As successive editors have pointed out, Coleridge here is relying on Schlegel’s twelfth lecture on Shakespeare (Lects Lit, I, 348–9). But Schlegel in turn is relying on Schiller’s assertion in On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry, published nearly 15 years earlier, that the power of the ancients consists in ‘the art of finitude’ while that of the moderns consists in ‘the art of the infinite’ (Elias, 114) (‘Jener . . . ist mächtig durch die Kunst der Begrenzung; dieser ist es durch die Kunst des Unendlichen’, NA, XX, 440). To anyone already familiar with the essay, like Coleridge, the connection would have been obvious, but in December 1811 it was the expanded Schlegel version, not the Schiller original, that was to hand and anyway there was no time to worry about sources at this stage, with an audience waiting. Coleridge continued to use Schlegel off and on throughout the remaining eight lectures. But after that series finished in January 1812 and once he had settled on plans for another, on drama, Coleridge naturally took the opportunity to send for the Schiller essays: sensing no doubt his overdependence on Schlegel, which he had only just been introduced to, his aim was to refresh his mind about Schiller, to check Schlegel’s sources and to judge how either or both might feed into his forthcoming lecture series. That led to some tangible, if relatively minor results. On at least one subsequent occasion, in October 1813, Coleridge pointedly used Schiller’s term ‘statuesque’ in preference to Schlegel’s ‘plastic’ when describing the state of ancient Greek drama in contrast to the modern

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drama (Lects Lit, I, 517). This episode suggests that while Coleridge was borrowing from Schlegel, he nevertheless recognized Schiller’s aesthetic essays as the source. Indeed, it was because Coleridge had been familiar with Schiller’s work in the first place that he could so effortlessly incorporate Schlegel’s development of it into his lectures. Finally, on a fourth occasion Coleridge explicitly referred to Schiller’s aesthetic essays. In notes for the fifth lecture of the 1819 series on Shakespeare, he characterized the ‘sentimental’ poet as one whose ‘general reflections on any Act or Image [are] more fore-grounded than the act itself’ (Lects Lit, II, 399). Then to illustrate the point he contrasted Homer with Ariosto: ‘The change of arms between Diomed & the Trojan Prince in Homer with the two Knights, Saracen and Christian, in Ariosto.’ Coleridge’s illustration comes straight from On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry, where Schiller points out how differently the ‘naïve’ Homer and the ‘sentimental’ Ariosto treat the similar subject of sworn enemies making peace in the midst of battle (NA, XX, 433–5; Elias, 108–9). In the Iliad, Diomed learns on the battlefield that his enemy Glaucus is in fact an old family friend and he accordingly puts down his lance and as a token of friendship exchanges armour with him; Homer does not bat an eye. But in Orlando Furioso, when the rivals Ferragus and Rialdo join forces to seek the fugitive Angelica, Ariosto himself expresses astonishment and admiration at their moral heroism. What is interesting about Schiller’s appearance here in Coleridge’s lecture is not the unacknowledged borrowing itself but the way Coleridge employs it in his own argument about literary history. Schiller’s distinction between the ‘naïve’ and ‘sentimental’ was a typology of two kinds of consciousnesses, based largely on psychology and linked in variable ways to the historical record. Coleridge, though, chooses to treat them as historical categories in their own right. Here, as throughout many of the lectures on literature, Coleridge is interested not just in defining art from first principles but in constructing a history of literary form and achievement. In specific, he wants to show how historical Christianity stood at the turning point between ancient and modern and how the shift in consciousness it inaugurated shaped and determined literary forms. In Coleridge’s telling, then, Schiller’s distinction between ‘naïve’ and ‘sentimental’, the ancient and the modern, is seen to be mediated by the advent of Christianity. This episode in the 1819 Shakespeare lectures is a good

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illustration of how Coleridge would sometimes use Schiller not as a source to steal from – more relevant material was to hand in A. W. Schlegel’s On Dramatic Art and Literature and Friedrich Schlegel’s History of Ancient and New Literature (Lects Lit, I, lix; CN, III, 4384n) – but rather as an inspiration for his own thinking.

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Schiller’s Poetry in Coleridge’s Notebooks

In the years after Wallenstein Coleridge continued to explore Schiller’s work, not only the aesthetic essays but also the poetry, which he began transcribing, summarizing and translating. This was a sporadic but persistent topic of study and altogether there are more references to Schiller’s poems than to those of any other German poet, including Goethe, Klopstock and Lessing. Coleridge studied Schiller’s poetry during at least three distinct periods, notably between 1801 and 1803, when he was at Greta Hall, Keswick, and then again around 1807, when he was in London. He also referred to Schiller on several occasions while in Malta, most likely from memory. This was work he carried on in the notebooks, but some at least of his translations and adaptations he later published, usually (though not always) acknowledging the source. Most of the poetry came from Schiller’s Poems, Part 1, published in Leipzig in 1800, which for the first time brought together many of the poems written after the aesthetic essays that had appeared earlier in journals like the Horae and The Muses’ Almanac. From the way he quoted and translated, it is clear that Coleridge also acquired during this time the second part of Schiller’s Poems, published in 1803, as well as The Muses’ Almanac of 1797, which contained the whole run of the infamous, anonymous distichs by Schiller and Goethe. With these works to hand, Coleridge possessed the whole range of Schiller’s considerable poetic output. Two things emerge from the way Coleridge treated Schiller’s poems. One is the sense of common ground between the two poets – not in terms of a single aesthetic project, as had been the case with 67

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Wallenstein, for there is simply not enough material to support such a claim, but rather in terms of identification and appropriation on Coleridge’s part. Unlike his treatment of other poets of comparable stature, like Wordsworth or Goethe, which ranged from admiration to censure, Coleridge’s handling of Schiller is distinguished by its uncritical spirit. Even among other German poets Coleridge copied from for the sake of his metrical studies, like his contemporaries J. H. Voss, F. L. Stolberg, and the eighteenth-century poet F. von Hagedorn, Schiller stands out as an object not of criticism but of emulation, even self-identification. As in the previous decade Schiller’s dramas figured as starting points for Coleridge’s own efforts, in the early 1800s Coleridge found in Schiller’s poetry many of the same qualities that he was striving to achieve in his own verse: the depiction of purely imaginary scenes where the supernatural becomes real; the balancing of moralism and lyricism in his ballads; the confident rendering of a philosophical idea in the language and metre of poetry; and the capturing of a single poignant sentiment in only a few words, as in a distich or aphorism. And as the confidence in his own voice waned, Coleridge continued to find expression in Schiller’s. The second feature is the way Coleridge responded to the aesthetics implicit in Schiller’s poetry. For, as mentioned in the first chapter, the poems display the whole range of Schiller’s abilities and preoccupations: not only his technical mastery with regard to lyrical and ballad forms and his interest in presenting character and dramatic situations, but also his philosophical concerns. From the power of aesthetic representation to awaken the conscience, hinted at in the ballad ‘The Cranes of Ibycus’ (‘Die Kraniche des Ibykus’, 1798), to the disparaging allusions to contemporary sentimental dramatists like Iffland and Kotzebue in ‘The Ghost of Shakespeare’ (‘Shakespears Schatten’, 1797), Schiller’s poems abound in thematic references to material covered in his own aesthetic essays. This is especially evident in the longer, meditative verse. In ‘The Walk’ (‘Der Spaziergang’, 1795), for example, Schiller contrasts a ‘naïve’, pre-industrial view of nature as a static system of values, to the ‘sentimental’, modern view of nature, according to which it responds dynamically to ever-changing demands. Equally, Schiller’s poems seek to dramatize at the formal level notions that the essays deal with in logical and abstract terms. In ‘The Dance’ (‘Der Tanz’, 1796) not only the dancers, following the prescribed steps, but also the elegaic couplets themselves, with their

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strict syllabic demands, enact the tension between external law and internal freedom, the very tension that Schiller said demanded reconciliation in moral life. And in ‘The Ideal and Real Life’ (‘Das Ideal und das Leben’, 1795) a similar dialectic is at work, in alternating verses, enacting the passage from the perils of sensuous nature to the serenity of the intelligible world via the liberating energy of imagination. Linking the poems in this way to Schiller’s broader concerns is not, though, to collapse them into a philosophical programme that had already been articulated more clearly in prose. Not only were the majority of these poems written after the aesthetic essays, and so bear the trace of continued reflection on the issues involved, but they speak in their own voice, as poems and not as essays, as a kind of writing in which formal and linguistic elements determine as much as convey the ideational content. Schiller was often nervous about this relationship, fearful that his poetry might, in spite of all efforts to the contrary, address mere reason. He once advised von Humboldt not to think at all while reading his poetry – though that is perhaps asking too much. The point is that Schiller’s poetry, while irreducible to his aesthetic idealism, cannot be read apart from it. And Coleridge, who had the whole of it before him at a time when he was rethinking his own views of poetry and poetics in the light of his study of Kant, responded to the whole range of its implications.

Gedichte Part 1, dejection and theological speculation The first time Coleridge referred to Schiller’s poetry was in December 1801, when he copied into his notebook four distichs, in German. These he selected from among 55 distichs, first published in The Muses’ Almanac for 1797 along with contributions by Goethe, and then more recently in the first part of the collected Poems in 1800. Textual evidence in the first distich copied makes it clear that Coleridge’s source is the latter. The distichs, which do not all occur consecutively in the original, were chosen for the related, and to Coleridge particularly relevant, theme of intimacy as it is threatened by the contingencies of expression. They appear undifferentiated in the notebooks thus: Hast du etwas, so theile mir’s mit und ich Zahle was recht ist; Bist du etwas, o dann tauschen die Seelen wir aus.

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Coleridge, Schiller and Aesthetic Education

An die Muse – Was ich ohne dich wäre, ich weiss es nicht aber Mir grauet, Seh ich was ohne dich Hundert & Tausende sind. Warum kann der Lebendige Geist dem Geist nicht erscheinen? SPRICHT die Seele, so spricht ach! schon die SEELE nicht mehr. Lass die Sprache dir seyn, was der Körper den Lebenden Er nur Ist! der die Wesen trennt und der die Wesen vereint. (CN, I, 1063)1 Hast thou anything? Share it with me and I will pay thee the worth of it. Art thou anything? O then let us exchange souls. To the Muse / What I should be without thee I know not – but I shudder When I see what hundreds and thousands are without thee. Why can living spirit not commune directly with spirit? Once the soul speaks, then alas! its speech is no longer the speech of the soul. Let language be to thee what the body is to the living. It alone Severs being from being and unites beings together. 2 Coleridge’s selection of distichs forms a neat little poem of its own, with a clear, personal resonance. Beginning with images of the intimacy enjoyed by lovers – including an invitation ‘To the Muse’ (‘An die Muse’), namely Sara Hutchinson, to ‘exchange souls’ (‘tauschen die Seelen wir aus’) – the poet suddenly withdraws, plunged into doubt about maintaining such intimacy given the divisive nature of language. For language divides subjectivity both from itself – ‘its speech is no longer the speech of the soul’ (‘so spricht ach! schon die SEELE nicht mehr’) – and from others, severing ‘beings’ even as it unites them (‘der die Wesen trennt und der die Wesen vereint’). The pessimism of these two lines is echoed in a bleak and prophetic notebook entry made by Coleridge only days later, referring again to Sara Hutchinson: ‘virtuous & tender & brotherly friendship with an amiable woman – the obstacles – the jealousies – the impossibility of it’ (CN, I, 1065). In thus dramatizing the impossibility of the present, this little poem also looks beyond the biographical context and towards

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the larger poetic achievement that would grow out of it. Next to these lines in the notebooks there is a brief sketch of a plan ‘To write a series of Love Poems – truly Sapphic, save that they shall have a large Interfusion of moral Sentiments & calm Imagery on Love in all the moods of the mind’ (CN, I, 1064). The hope of mutual exchange and, equally, the pathos of separation that are touchingly evoked in these eight lines from Schiller would in four months’ time become the twin themes of ‘Dejection: An Ode’. The presence of Schiller in Coleridge’s dejection is matched by his appearance in Coleridge’s theological speculations. At a time when he was mulling over the transcendence of God, again in December 1801, he came upon these lines from Schiller, which he copied into his notebook: Und ein Gott ist, ein heiliger Wille lebt, Wie auch der menschliche wanke, Hoch uber der Zeit und dem Raume webt Lebendig der höchste Gedanke; Und ob alles in ewigem Wechsel kreist, Es beharret im Wechsel ein ruhiger Geist. (CN, I, 1074) And a God is, a holy Will lives However the human will may waver. High above time and space there moves, Ever active, the highest thought. And though everything revolves in eternal change, There persists in the change a still, unchanging Mind. This is the fourth of five stanzas that make up the poem ‘The Words of Belief’ (‘Die Worte des Glaubens’), published in The Muses’ Almanac of 1798 and then in Poems, Part 1 (1800), which again is Coleridge’s source here. This is the closest Schiller comes to speaking his own credo. In oblique reference to Kant’s ‘God, freedom and the immortality of the soul’, Schiller describes three ‘words of belief’ which give value to human life: ‘Humanity is created free’ (‘Der Mensch ist frei geschaffen’); ‘Virtue is not meaningless’ (‘Und die Tugend, sie ist kein leerer Schall); and ‘There is a God’ (‘Und ein Gott ist’). That penultimate verse was significant for Coleridge for at least two,

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Coleridge, Schiller and Aesthetic Education

possibly three, reasons. Its evocation of the unmoving and unmovable ‘holy Will’ seemed to answer to Coleridge’s attempt at the time to define God in terms of being rather than action, by what he is rather than what he does: ‘Even the Creation of the Universe disturbs my Idea of the Almighty’s greatness’, he wrote in a notebook around this time (CN, I, 1072). Secondly, though not one of his best poems, Schiller’s ‘Words of Belief’ is still successful, managing to make abstract assertions like ‘And a God is, a holy Will lives’ (‘Und ein Gott ist, ein heiliger Wille lebt’) function as poetry as well as a truth claim in accordance with the Kantian frame. Coleridge committed the lines to memory and quoted them again several years later (CN, II, 2431). Finally, it is worth pointing out that ‘Words of Belief’ has a companion piece, published two years later, ‘The Words of Error’ (‘Die Worte des Wahns’, 1800). Coleridge did not refer to the poem but he would have read it in his copy of Schiller’s Poems, Part 1 (1800) and would perhaps have been wryly amused by the three delusions there described: to assume that the right and the good will triumph in this life; that fortune will find its way to the deserving; and that truth can be easily discerned. This pessimism is reversed in the closing couplet, which in Neoplatonic language enjoins the ‘soul’ to seek truth and beauty within itself: ‘It is not outside that the gate is to be found / It is within you, you bring it forth eternally’ (‘Es ist nicht draußen, da sucht es der Thor, / Es ist in dir, du bringst es ewig hervor’) – lines reminiscent of Coleridge’s similar injunction in the third stanza of ‘Dejection: An Ode’: ‘I may not hope from outward forms to win / The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.’ A few months later, in February or March 1802, Coleridge again picked up his copy of Schiller’s Poems, Part 1, and began translating. He drafted a faithful, though condensed, translation of Schiller’s three-stanza poem, ‘Sayings of Confucius’ (‘Spruch des Confucius’), concluding with these words of advice: ‘Wouldst be happy, take the Delayer for thy Counsellor, / Do not choose the Flyer for thy Friend, / Nor the ever-remainer for thy enemy’ (CN, I, 1127; see also 1138). He then quoted in German the ten lines that comprise the first stanza of ‘Dithyramb’ (‘Dithyrambe’), a poem celebrating in Bacchanalian images the poet’s powers (CN, I, 1128). In the same note he quoted the fourth stanza from one of Schiller’s finest lyrics, ‘The Unknown Maiden’ (‘Das Mädchen aus der Fremde’); judging from several irregularities in the transcription, the lines from the latter must have

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been quoted from memory. Coleridge then began work on ‘The Bards of Ages Past’ (‘Die Sänger der Vorwelt’), a poem commemorating the power of the ‘living word’ – once sung by bards and now all but lost – to mediate between the divine and the human. Coleridge’s phrase ‘the Hearer’s Feelings kindled at the Song, the Singer nourished the sacred flame’ is a reasonably close rendering of Schiller’s ‘An der Glut des Gesangs entflammten des Hörers Gefühle, / An des Hörers Gefühl nährte der Sänger die Glut’ (CN, I, 1129; NA, IIi, 298). There are also brief references at this time to Schiller’s medieval ballad ‘The Glove’ (‘Der Handschuh’), in which a lady, unjustly suspicious of her lover, demands that he retrieve her glove from the den of wild animals; he does, but is so offended he returns only to slap her across the face with it; and to ‘The Sharing of the Earth’ (‘Die Theilung der Erde’), a poem describing how the poet, having missed out on his share of earth’s treasures, is by way of compensation given free membership of heaven by Jove himself (CN, I, 1130, 1139). Most of these notes are false starts at translations, though given their number and variety, they do attest to the attention with which Coleridge read Schiller and the range of his interest in his poems. One of the six poems Coleridge worked on at this time, ‘Dithyramb’, he would later return to, writing a complete, free translation of it for publication in Sibylline Leaves (1817).

Gedichte Part 2: pantheism, metrics, the ‘beautiful soul’ Not long after it was published in Leipzig in 1803, Coleridge acquired the second part of Schiller’s collected Poems. This contained a large number of ‘pre-critical’ poems like the ‘Ode to Joy’ (‘An die Freude’, 1786), ‘The Renowned Woman’ (‘Die berühmte Frau’, 1789), the ‘Laura’ poems (1782) and ‘The Artists’ (‘Die Künstler’, 1789). This last, a paean to the power of art to free humanity from the ‘chains’ (‘Sklavenbanden’) of sense and so usher in an age of virtue, anticipates the argument of the Aesthetic Letters and at nearly 500 lines it dominated the volume. Schiller also included more recent poems, among them ‘The Four Ages’ (‘Die vier Weltalter’, 1803), which describes the role of the poet in giving shape to the shapeless and celebrates the continuity of beauty over time, from the ‘golden age’ to the present day.

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The volume also included, at the demand of its many admirers, the original and more obviously pantheistic version of ‘The Gods of Greece’ (‘Die Götter Griechenlandes’, 1788).3 This 25-verse poem celebrates the immanence of deities during the classical age, where every locale was presided over by some spirit, and mourns their passing at the advent of Christianity, which replaced them with a single and remote God. ‘When the gods were more human, /the humans were more godlike’ (‘Da die Götter menschlicher noch waren, /waren Menschen göttlicher’, NA, I, 195). Coleridge referred to this poem in a notebook entry of 1799 (CN, I, 494) and in October 1803, while going through that same notebook again – and perhaps prompted by the recent republication of the original version – he gave it further thought. Recalling the events of 1799, he wrote: At Croft we discussed the question of Polytheism & Monotheism, of Tombs by the Roadside & Tombs in Church yards. – Though[t] of translating Schiller’s Götter des Griechenlandes – & of writing an Antiphony to it. – Better write both myself in the manner & metre of Penseroso & Allegro. (CN, I, 1588) Coleridge never wrote such a translation, or for that matter the twin poems on polytheism (‘Tombs by the Roadside’) and monotheism (‘Tombs in Church yards’), though in a sense of course his whole life’s work was just that, a ‘Penseroso’ and ‘Allegro’ on the vexed theme of God’s relationship to the world. What is interesting about the reference to Schiller is the way Coleridge incorporated the uncritical polytheism of that poem into a larger project of his own. So far from banishing it as pagan humanism – as some of Schiller’s first readers had, scandalized by its impiety – Coleridge read it as an echo of his own concerns. On another occasion probably around the same time, Coleridge again turned to Schiller’s poems, this time in relation to his ongoing study of metrics. He quoted, among other poems by Schiller, Voss, Hagedorn, Stolberg and several Italian poets, ten lines from the fourth stanza of Schiller’s early lyric poem, ‘Laura at the Piano’ (‘Laura am Klavier’, 1782), without adding any comment or markings (CN, I, 2224 f 79). The citing of this poem, first published in Schiller’s Anthologie auf das Jahr 1782 and then not again until Poems, Part 2 (1803), provides the first clear evidence that Coleridge had recently

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acquired a copy of the latter. Kathleen Coburn, editor of the notebooks, dated this whole entry October 1804, the period of Coleridge’s first trip to Sicily, principally on the grounds that this German material occurs in close proximity to the notes on Italian metrics, which are plainly from the Malta period. She admitted, though, that the dates could not be fixed with certainty, given the occasional use of Notebook 22 over several years (CN, I, xliii–xlv; II, 2224n, 2363n); both Ernst Hartley Coleridge before her and Donald Sultana since have argued for a date of around 1800 or 1801. E. H. Coleridge’s evidence is not apparent (PW, II, 1014n) but Sultana points out that Schiller’s Poems did not accompany Coleridge to the Mediterranean and would have been very hard to find in the places he visited.4 It seems that though in Malta Coleridge continued to pursue his German studies – he asked Southey to send his German notebooks to him – the notes on German metrics likely predate Malta, probably coinciding with Coleridge’s occasional reading of Schiller between December 1801 and October 1803. Apart from the ‘Laura’ poem, Coleridge quoted in succession three other works by Schiller – these taken from Poems, Part 1 – paying special attention to the variety of metres employed (CN, II, 2224 f12–13). First was the ballad, ‘The Hostage’ (‘Die Bürgschaft’, 1799), which describes a touching scene of faith in friendship, as a man puts himself forward as a hostage so that his friend, an accused assassin, can pay a short visit to his home. Coleridge copied out the fifth stanza and scanned each line, concluding that it was ‘an admirable metre’. He then turned to ‘The Ideals’ (‘Die Ideale’, 1796) – an apologia for maintaining youthful ideals even when they do not find fulfilment – and quoted in German the fourth of the 11 stanzas. That stanza describes the poet’s memory of his happy youth, spent in proximity to the natural world and concludes, ‘Es fühlte selbst das Seelenlose / Von meines Lebens Wiederhall’ (NA, IIi, 368), which Coleridge rendered thus, ‘the echo of my own Life – in inanimate Nature’. Finally, ‘The Victory Feast’ (‘Das Eleusische Fest’, 1799), a poem of more than 200 lines describing the Greeks’ bittersweet victory song after the fall of Troy. Coleridge quoted and scanned the first stanza. Coleridge had long had an interest in metrics. In Germany in 1798–99 he made notes on classical, English and German prosody (CN, I, 373) and in Malta five years later he began collecting and analysing the work of Italian poets, notably Pietro Metastasio, Giovanni Battista

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Coleridge, Schiller and Aesthetic Education

Strozzi il Veccio and Giambattista Marino. The interest was driven to some extent by his desire to complete his own metrical experiment, ‘Christabel’, and to correct Wordsworth’s dismissive attitude to prosody in the preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1800). Above all, though, he was driven by the ambition to write an essay on the subject, one that would challenge the contemporary neglect of metre and its corollary, the fascination with ‘new and striking Images, incidents that interest the Affections or excite the curiosity of the reader’ (CN, II, 2599). As Edoardo Zuccato has argued, these reflections on metre, and in particular the work on the Italian poets, proved fundamental to the theory of poetry later expounded in Chapter 16 of Biographia Literaria.5 Schiller’s role in this project is not difficult to discern: in 1803–4 his poems, along with those of several other German poets, provided examples of the sort of sophisticated, self-conscious metrical control that Coleridge was beginning to promote in English poetry. In Schiller’s lyrical and balladic pieces, as in the various poems by Voss, Hagedorn and Stolberg which were also quoted, Coleridge found exemplary metrical sophistication that married sound to sense without sacrificing the strength of either. He did not, in the end, quote any of these German examples in Biographia – perhaps because in the mid1810s German poetry was still deeply unfashionable, while his Italian poets provided a fresh, and politically neutral, illustration of his point. Nevertheless, his citing of Schiller in the notebooks at this time is conspicuous. For one, it implicates Schiller in Coleridge’s rethinking about poetry in the wake of the Lyrical Ballads. Not only as a playwright rivalling Shakespeare, but as a practising poet writing exemplary verses, Schiller served as a model for Coleridge’s own theorizing. Secondly, Coleridge’s citing of Schiller here demonstrates his continued and wide-ranging interest in his work as a whole. In reading across the whole range of Schiller’s poetry for the sake of his planned essay on prosody, Coleridge found again and again the key ideas of Schiller’s aesthetic rationalism, rehearsed in phrases, images and poetic form. One of the best instance of this occurs in a notebook entry quoting Schiller’s poem, ‘The Dance’ (‘Der Tanz’, 1796), from Poems, Part 1 (CN, II, 2363). Kathleen Coburn tentatively dated this entry December 1804, though for reasons already given I think this belongs, like the notes on metrics, to the time just before Malta, 1803–4. The poem opens with a party of dancers gracefully following the prescribed steps, described in lines which Coleridge began to paraphrase: the dancers

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are tossed as if ‘upon the waves of the Melody’ (‘auf des Takts melodischer Woge’). Then one of the several pairs of dancers steps out of line and for a moment it seems that the whole dance will be thrown into chaos. But no, they reappear a moment later, newly confident of their way. They freely move in space, apparently following their own heart, while at the same time obeying the unwritten rules of the game. Order is again suddenly, mysteriously restored. Coleridge copied out the 14 lines describing this scene, including the question, ‘Jeder ein Herrscher, frei, nur dem eigenen Herzen gehorchet, / Und im eilenden Lauf findet die einzige Bahn?’ (‘How is it that each is his own master, free to obey the dictates of his heart, / But as he pursues his swift course, yet finds the sole path he must take?’). Schiller’s poem continues: Willst du es wissen? Es ist des Wohllauts mächtige Gottheit, Die zum geselligen Tanz ordnet den tobenden Sprung, Die, der Nemesis gleich, an des Rhythmus goldenem Zügel Lenkt die brausende Lust und die verwilderte zähmt; Und dir rauschen umsonst die Harmonieen des Weltalls, Dich ergreift nicht der Strom dieses erhabnen Gesangs, Nicht der begeisternde Takt, den alle Wesen dir schlagen, Nicht der wirbelnde Tanz, der durch den ewigen Raum Leuchtende Sonnen schwingt in kühn gewundenen Bahnen? Das du im Spiele doch ehrst, fliehst du im Handeln, das Maaß. (NA, IIi, 299) Wouldst thou know how it is? ’Tis Harmony’s powerful godhead, Changing the boisterous leap into the sociable dance, That, like Nemesis, links to the golden bridle of rhythm Every violent lust, taming each thing that was wild. Is’t then in vain that the universe breathes its harmonious numbers? Does not the music divine bear thee away in its stream? Feelest thou not the inspiriting time that all creatures are beating? Not the swift-whirling dance that through the wide realms of space Brandishes glittering suns, in paths intertwining with boldness? Honouring Measure in sport, thou dost avoid it in the deed. (Bowring, 249) Coleridge did not copy these lines but he did offer a clipped summary: How is the dance possible? ‘It is harmony. Will you admire it in

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dance – & not in the Universe.’ Coleridge hardly needed anyone to tell him that the end of poetry was harmony, but Schiller’s conceit here was nevertheless attractive and memorable. It neatly captured the view of art Coleridge had begun to develop in the letters to Sotheby of 1802 as the reconciliation of opposites, of disorder and method, freedom and necessity and, in moral terms, self-government and external law. Schiller’s poem spells out the implications of that view of art. It is, for one, emblematic of the unreflective moral action or ‘grace’ (Anmut) that characterizes the ‘beautiful soul’ (schöne Seele); but it is also emblematic of the deep structure of the universe, a divinely ordered harmony in spite of its chaotic appearance. Coleridge later recalled the poem while in Malta, referring in his notebook to Schiller’s image of the dance as patterned chaos, in which all the elements ‘not merely conform to, but of, and in, & forming, the delicious harmony’ (CN, II, 2395).

Coleridge abroad, Schiller abroad Throughout this period, 1801–4, Coleridge had been transcribing or translating Schiller with his copy of the Poems, Parts I and II, before him. While he was travelling in the Mediterranean, though, between 1804 and 1806, the pattern was different. Without the Poems to hand – he did not take the volumes with him and there is no evidence he acquired them while abroad – Coleridge began quoting Schiller from memory. Once, in December 1804, Coleridge recalled Schiller’s poem, ‘The Sharing of the Earth’ (‘Die Theilung der Erde’), first published in Horae and then again in Poems, Part 1. Zeus divides the world among its inhabitants but misses out the poet and, with no material blessings left to bestow, offers instead free membership of heaven: ‘Should you wish to live with me in my heaven, /Whenever you come, it shall be open to you’ (‘Willst du in meinem Himmel mit mir leben / So oft du kommst, er soll dir offen seyn!’, NA, IIi, 407). Coleridge’s brief, laconic rendering of Zeus’s words runs thus: ‘cut your throat & come to me’ (CN, II, 2365). A few months earlier, in October 1804, while climbing Mount Etna in Sicily, Coleridge returned to ‘The Gods of Greece’ (earlier referred to in CN, I, 494, 1588). He was walking past a series of sepulchres on either side of the road and noticed that local women were spreading out clothes to dry upon them. Coleridge was struck by their calm proximity

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to death, particularly as it contrasted with ‘the impurity of touching the Dead among the ancients’ (CN, II, 2202). He then jotted down this cryptic remark: ‘Pro & Con between them & tis in this respect / Schiller’s Gotter.’ The contrast between the ancient world, with its many local gods, hallowed places and judicious respect for the dead, and the modern Christian world, with its discomforting emphasis on sin, is the theme of Schiller’s poem – and there is no doubt that while evoking both, Schiller means to eulogize only the former. Referring sympathetically to the classical personification of death as a young boy bearing a torch, for example, Schiller writes: ‘Damals trat kein gräßliches Gerippe / vor das Bett des Sterbenden. Ein Kuß / nahm das lezte Leben von der Lippe, / still und traurig senkt’ ein Genius / seine Fackel’ (NA, I, 193; ‘Then no ghastly spectre stepped / before the bed of the dying. One kiss / took the last life from the lips, / quietly and sadly a genius lowered / his torch’). Coleridge admired this sympathetic evocation of a historically remote sensibility. The nuanced contrast between the classical and the modern played into his own protean assessment of the ‘Pro & Con between them’. Sometime later Coleridge again referred to the poem and lamented like Schiller that ‘the beautiful Genius with the inverted Torch’ had been turned into ‘a ghastly Skeleton’ (CN, II, 3070).6 The hardening of Coleridge’s English nationalism while abroad – a logical if regrettable consequence of Malta’s isolated position during the recommencement of hostilities with Napoleonic France7 – affected his literary judgements, including his view of Schiller. On the one hand he associated Schiller’s work, particularly his poetry, in an exaggerated way with the sort of elevated expression only the Germanic languages were capable of. Ruminating on the relative merits of the various European languages Coleridge cited from memory a favourite stanza from Schiller’s poem ‘Words of Belief’, beginning ‘Und ein Gott ist, ein heiliger Wille lebt’ (‘And a God is, a holy Will lives’). It was evidence of the ‘Sublimity and Pathos’ that German poetry was capable of, poetry ‘in its higher and purer sense . . . which excites emotion not merely creates amusement’ (CN, II, 2432; cited earlier in CN, I, 1074). That, of course, was the problem with poetry in French. But on the other hand Coleridge also suspected Schiller himself of ignoble French sympathies. Sometime in the summer of 1805, still in Malta, Coleridge lamented: Schiller disgusted with Kotzebueisms deserts from Shakespere. What? cannot we condemn a counterfeit, & yet remain admirers of the

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Coleridge, Schiller and Aesthetic Education

Original? This is sufficient Proof, that the first Admiration was not sound. . . . And now the French Stage, is to be re-introduced / O Germany! Germany! (CN, II, 2598) It is not obvious what news about Schiller sparked this remark. Later in this entry Coleridge fulminates against ‘Coxcombs’ who ‘rise up, & shrill it away in the Grashopper-vale of Reviews’ and it may be that a report in an untraced literary journal gave Coleridge the unpalatable news of Schiller’s defection to French dramatic forms. If so, the picture given was surely false. It is true that Schiller grew increasingly critical of the non-noble or ‘bürgerlich’ style of Kotzebue’s plays, and never more obviously so than in his poem ‘Shakespeare’s Ghost: a Parody’ (‘Shakespears Schatten: Parodie’), first published in The Muses’ Almanac of 1797 and then in Poems, Part 1. On a visit to Hades the poet encounters Shakespeare, who is scandalized to learn that the only sort of characters now appearing on the contemporary stage are ‘priests, financiers, / petty officers, secretaries or hussar officers’ (‘Man siehet bei uns nur Pfarrer, Kommenzienräthe, / Fähnriche, Sekretairs oder Husarenmajors’, NA, IIi, 306). It is true, too, that after Wallenstein Schiller experimented with the more formal conventions associated with French neoclassical theatre. He staged his own hightoned translation of Macbeth in Weimar in 1800 and translated Racine’s Phaedra in 1804–5. His Bride of Messina (1803) is a highly formalized piece of theatre that introduces the chorus back onto the stage. And yet there is little evidence that Schiller’s criticism of Kotzebue lay behind his new interest in neoclassical drama or that this interest led him, in Coleridge’s words, to ‘desert from Shakespeare’. After all, with their historical protagonists and tragic plots Schiller’s later dramas like Mary Stuart and William Tell are as Shakespearean as Wallenstein. Moreover, Schiller’s verdict on contemporary French theatre is unambiguously negative in his poem ‘To Goethe, on the occasion of his production of Voltaire’s Mohomet’ (‘An Göthe, als er den Mahomet von Voltaire auf die Bühne brachte’), published in Poems, Part 1: Denn dort, wo Sklaven knien, Despoten walten, Wo sich die eitle Aftergröße bläht,

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For yonder, where slaves kneel, and despots hold The reins, – where spurious greatness lifts its head, Art has no power the noble there to mould, ’Tis by no Louis that its seed is spread (Bowring, 304). To Schiller, Voltaire’s play embodies everything that his aesthetic humanism was seeking to overturn – convention, foreign influence, rules – and in any case its inclusion in the Weimar repertoire had not been Goethe’s idea but that of his patron, Herzog Karl August. In the poem, formally addressed to Goethe, Schiller diplomatically makes this clear while at the same time articulating again his view of the power of the stage: Erweitert jetzt ist des Theaters Enge, In seinem Raume drängt sich eine Welt, Nicht mehr der Worte rednerisch Gepränge, Nur der Natur getreues Bild gefällt, Verbannet ist der Sitten falsche Strenge, Und menschlich handelt, menschlich fühlt der Held, Die Leidenschaft erhebt die freien Töne, Und in der Wahrheit findet man das Schöne. (NA, IIi, 405) The narrow theatre is now more wide, Into its space a universe now steals; In pompous words no longer is our pride, Nature we love when she her form reveals; Fashion’s false rules no more are deified; And as a man the hero acts and feels. ’Tis passion makes the notes of freedom sound, And ’tis in truth the beautiful is found. (Bowring, 304)

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Da kann die Kunst das Edle nicht gestalten, Von keinem Ludwig wird es ausgesät. (NA, IIi, 404)

Coleridge, Schiller and Aesthetic Education

There is nothing here that Coleridge, even in a prickly mood in Malta, could argue with. Indeed, Schiller anticipates the sort of moral mission for the theatre that Coleridge would promulgate in his literary lectures of the 1810s. In any case, if as seems likely an inaccurate journal report in 1805 gave Coleridge reason to suspect Schiller’s credentials, the suspicion did not last long, for back in England Coleridge was again reading the poems and again making notes from them. One episode that occurred while still abroad and that may have bolstered Coleridge’s estimation of Schiller was his meeting with Wilhelm von Humboldt in Rome in January 1806. Von Humboldt was at the time the Prussian minister at the papal court and regularly entertained guests in his home, not far from where Coleridge was staying. 8 Among the topics the two men discussed was Wordsworth’s poetry, which Coleridge recited and von Humboldt appropriately praised; Coleridge later described the scene in The Friend (I, 510). Von Humboldt also, according to Coleridge, introduced him around this time to the translation work of August Wilhelm von Schlegel (CL, III, 359). Von Humboldt had long been a close friend, supporter and correspondent of Schiller and the two shared a similar commitment to ‘aesthetic education’. Having formulated his own notion of ‘Bildung’ in the 1794 essay ‘Theory of Human Education’ (‘Theorie der Bildung des Menschen’) von Humboldt subsequently read with appreciation Schiller’s Aesthetic Letters and later in 1809 articulated in print its central principle, the cultivation of the whole individual, in terms relevant to the founding of the new university in Berlin.9 Given what we know of their conversations – Wordsworth’s poetry and Schlegel’s translations – it is highly likely that they discovered their shared interest in Schiller both as a poet and a philosopher, and that they would have spoken of his achievements as matters close to their own hearts: for Coleridge the Wallenstein trilogy and for von Humboldt the Aesthetic Letters. If so, Coleridge could have found no more wellinformed advocate of the argument for ‘aesthetic education’.

The Muses’ Almanac and the new aesthetics Soon after he returned to England, Coleridge recommenced his practice of reading, transcribing and translating Schiller’s poetry. Now, though, he was working not only from the two volumes of the collected Poems, which he already possessed, but also from Schiller’s journal

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The Muses’ Almanac for 1797. Coleridge had quoted material from the journal before, but only indirectly (CN, I, 1063), and reading it now directly led to some new discoveries. In May 1807, having spent a winter full of emotional extremes with Wordsworth, his sister and Sara Hutchinson at Coleorton – jealous of the former, dismally in love with the latter, and delighted all the while with the completed Prelude – Coleridge was back in London. He jotted in his notebook a few lines from Schiller, taken from The Muses’ Almanac, on the subject of political freedom: Die beste Staatsverfassung. Diese nur kan ich dafür erkennen, die jedem erleichtert Gut zu denken, doch nie, dass er so denke, bedarf. (CN, II, 3050) The best form of government. I can recognize as such only one that makes it easy for every one to think aright, but never requires that he should think that way. Perhaps in consequence of his two years in the Mediterranean, where he had seen first hand both the success as well as the arrogance and the incompetence of the British military abroad, Coleridge valued the independence alluded to in Schiller’s distich (NA, I, 278). Other extracts from the journal, though, were more deeply and more obviously personal. Coleridge quoted, in cipher, four lines from Goethe’s poem Alexis and Dora (Alexis und Dora), which Schiller had published in his journal. The young Alexis, having already set sail, recalls his parting from his beloved Dora: Auch du blickest vergebens nach mir. Noch schlagen die Herzen für einander doch, ach! anein[-] ander nicht mehr. (CN, II, 3047n) And your gaze, too, follows me in vain; our hearts still beat for each other, but alas! Not any more against each other.

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Coleridge, Schiller and Aesthetic Education

Newly parted from Sara Hutchinson, Coleridge clearly felt that Alexis’s grief echoed his own and that Goethe’s elegiac metre ably measured the pathos of his own situation. The quotation is one of a dozen entries in cipher dwelling on the ‘riddle’ of love. A few months later, having passed the summer in Nether Stowey, Coleridge again picked up his copy of The Muses’ Almanac, again with an eye to his own unhappy, paranoid love. He quoted a distich by Schiller bearing the title ‘Vergiss mein nicht’ (‘Forget-me-not’): ‘Deine liebliche kleinheit, dein holdes auge, sie sagen / Immer, vergiss mein nicht! immer, vergiss nur nicht mein!’ (CN, II, 3131 [23]; ‘Your lovely smallness, your gracious eye, they keep on saying: /Forget me not, forget not thou me’). 10 These lines come from a series of 18 distichs collected by Schiller under the title ‘To the Many’ (‘Vielen’), each of which commemorates a named flower and, by implication, the poet’s beloved. Coleridge transcribed five more of them, under his own title of ‘Blumen moralische’, or ‘Flowers-moral’ – material, perhaps, for ‘The Soother of Absence’. At the same time he transcribed ten lines from the companion piece, ‘To the One’ (‘Einer’), where the flower conceit is dropped and the poet addresses the beloved directly. Thus, for example: ‘Immer war mir das Feld und der Wald und der Fels und die Garten / Nur ein Raum, und du machst sie, Geliebte zum Ort’ (CN, II, 3131 [25]; ‘Field and wood and crag and gardens were always to me / nothing but space, and you, Beloved, make them into a place’). In 1807, as in 1801–2 when he first began quoting Schiller’s distichs in his notebooks, Coleridge was apparently drawn to their expressiveness, their lyrical evocation of love and loss. In particular, following the unconsummated pleasure of Sara Hutchinson’s company at Coleorton, Coleridge used Schiller’s poetry to articulate his own fears and fantasies about his hopeless situation. But his notes from The Muses’ Almanac at this time are not all so self-regarding. They also touch on the new aesthetics that are alluded to on almost every page of the journal. Written in collaboration with Goethe, and published just after several of the major aesthetic essays had appeared in the Horae, The Muses’ Almanac of 1797 contained not only the lyric poetry (like Alexis and Dora) and love distichs already referred to (‘To the Many’ and ‘To the One’), but also nearly 500 distichs that expressed and commented upon Schiller’s concerns about the power of art and the prospect of aesthetic living – themes that had dominated On Grace and Dignity, the Aesthetic Letters and On

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Naïve and Sentimental Poetry. One set of distichs, about 100 of them, appeared under the heading Votive Tablets (Tabulae Votivae) – a reference to his vow to share ‘What God has taught me, and what has helped me through life’ (‘Was der Gott mich gelehrt, was mir durchs Leben geholfen’, NA, I, 291). These set out Schiller’s views on the role of the artist and the relationship between art and reality and bear such individual titles as ‘The Moral Power’ (‘Die moralische Kraft’), ‘Nature and Reason’ (‘Natur und Vernunft’), ‘Truth’ (‘Wahrheit’), ‘Beauty’ (‘Schönheit’) and ‘The Genius’ (‘Der Genius’) (NA, I, 292, 293, 298, 300). Another and by far larger portion of distichs was gathered under the title Xenia (Xenien). Often arch in tone, these express Schiller’s and Goethe’s shared disdain for the current low taste and their hope for a renaissance along classical humanist lines. A good example, poking fun of F. Nicolai, the Berlin writer who had mocked the Horae (and misrepresented the Aesthetic Letters), ran as follows: ‘Briefe über ästhetische Bildung / Dunkel sind sie zuweilen, vielleicht mit Unrecht, o Nickel! / Aber die Deutlichkeit ist warlich nicht Tugend an dir’ (NA, I, 333 [199]; ‘Letters on Aesthetic Education / They are vague at times, perhaps to a fault, O Nichol! / But clarity is hardly one of your virtues’). In short, The Muses’ Almanac of 1797 constituted a unique reader’s guide to Schiller’s opinions, his aesthetic essays and indeed the Weimar experiment he was already committed to. Judging from the sort of transcriptions he made in September 1807 of 21 distichs, drawn from various parts of the journal, Coleridge apparently studied the poetry in this sense, as a way of familiarizing or refamiliarizing himself with the key ideas of Schiller’s theoretical work. One of these was the notion of Schein, or ‘semblance’, which Schiller had developed in the Aesthetic Letters. Art, in that account, is meant not simply to reflect lived experience, nor to contradict it, but rather to offer a selective interpretation or amplification of it. Coleridge copied this distich, from the Xenia, into his notebook: ‘Reine Bach, du entstellst nicht den Kiesel, du bringst ihn dem Auge / Näher, so seh ich die Welt, W – wenn du sie beschreibst’ (CN, II, 3131 [8]; ‘Pure stream, you do not distort the pebble, you bring it nearer the eye / thus I see the world, W – when you describe it’). There is an important addition in Coleridge’s transcription, as Kathleen Coburn has pointed out: what in Schiller’s original is marked by three asterisks (‘so seh ich die Welt * * * wenn du sie beschreibst’, NA, I, 331) Coleridge filled in with the initial ‘W’. Wordsworth, whose Prelude Coleridge had paid

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Coleridge, Schiller and Aesthetic Education

tribute to earlier that year (‘thy work / Makes audible a linkéd lay of Truth’, PW, I, 406), embodied for him the poet’s ability to imitate a given object in a way that ennobled as well as clarified it, rather than simply copying it. It was a view Coleridge would later insist on in Biographia Literaria, notwithstanding Wordsworth’s attempts in Lyrical Ballads to imitate ‘low and rustic life’ (BL, II, 46–52). The title Schiller gave to this distich served to distinguish ‘semblance’ from the strictly mimetic theories favoured in the previous century; he called it ‘The Faithful Mirror’ (‘Der treue Spiegel’). Coleridge gave it his own, ‘Poesie’. Schiller’s notion of ‘semblance’ depends upon a crucial distinction between the object itself or material existence (which in the Aesthetic Letters he called Stoff) and its aesthetic representation (Form). Making the latter out of the former constitutes ‘genius’, as Schiller explained in this quatrain from the Votive Tablets: Der Nachahmer und der Genius Gutes aus Gutem das kann jedweder verständige bilden, Aber der Genius ruft Gutes aus Schlechtem hervor. An Gebildetem nur darfst du, Nachahmer, dich üben, Selbst das Gebildete ist Stoff nur dem bildenden Geist. (NA, I, 300) The Imitator and the Genius Any intelligent person can draw good from good, But the genius calls forth good from bad. You, imitator, can only practice on what is already formed; But genius treats even that as raw material. Coleridge quoted the last line in his notebook, in German (CN, II, 3131 [20]). Schiller’s point is that the artist’s relationship to the object, Stoff, ought not to be measured in terms of faithfulness to the original but rather in terms of transformation. In the distance between reality and its representation lies the work of ‘genius’. This same distance determines the extent of the aesthetic realm. If Coleridge picked up on the notions of Schein here, he also touched on another Schillerian theme, the beauty of moral living. One of the innovations of the essay On Grace and Dignity was to give philosophical weight to the notion of the schöne Seele, or ‘beautiful soul’, whose actions spring spontaneously from its refined moral

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character. It emerges as the crowning achievement of moral life. Whereas ‘dignity’ (Würde) is won by the effort of the will, as reason compels inclination to pass over into duty, ‘grace’ (Anmut) is won by the retirement of the will, once the discord between duty and inclination is finally settled. Distichs throughout The Muses’ Almanac paid tribute to the schöne Seele, particularly by their emphasis on being rather than doing, on feeling rather than thinking and on art rather than law. Coleridge copied several of them from the Votive Tablets into his notebook, in German: Auch in der sittlichen Welt ist ein Adel: gemeine Naturen Zahlen mit dem, was sie thun, Schöne mit dem, was sie sind. Allen gehört, was du denkst, dein eigen ist nur, was du fühlest, Soll er dein Eigenthum sein, fühle den Gott, den du denkst. Über das Herz zu siegen ist gross, ich verehre den Tapfern; Aber wer durch sein Herz sieget, er gilt mir doch mehr. (CN, II, 3131 [12, 18, 19]) In the moral world too there’s nobility: vulgar natures pay with what they do, beauteous ones with what they are. What you think belongs to all; your own is only what you feel. If He is to be really your own, then feel the God which you think. To triumph over the heart is great; I honour such bravery. But I think more of him who triumphs through his heart. That last is probably the neatest summary of On Grace and Dignity that one could possibly expect, combining at once Schiller’s guarded respect for Kant’s stoicism and his desire for a more intuitive approach to moral living. As he did earlier in the essays, here in these distichs Schiller identified the moral ideal by its aesthetic content: being, feeling and the disposition of the heart. Coleridge, in short, found in Schiller’s poetry, and not only his prose, the articulation of the kind of intuitionist ethics he himself sought to espouse. There is a real sense in this notebook entry of September 1807 that Coleridge is coming to terms with some of the fundamental ideas in Schiller’s aesthetics, consolidating what he may have already read some

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Coleridge, Schiller and Aesthetic Education

years before or learned from other sources. Moreover, this rediscovery of Schiller in The Muses’ Almanac occurred crucially during a period of anguished reinvention. Having taken stock of himself and his achievement earlier in the year at Coleorton, and having decided not to seek reconciliation with his wife, he gravitated naturally towards London and a career in lecturing. In the summer he had accepted Humphry Davy’s proposal for a lecture series at the Royal Institution and now in September, coinciding with his notes on Schiller, he wrote to Davy offering to lecture on ‘the Principles of Poetry’. He would speak ‘on the subject of Taste, Imagination, Fancy, Passion, the source of our pleasures in the fine Arts in the antithetical balanceloving nature of man, & the connection of such Pleasures with moral excellence’ (CL, III, 30). As Coleridge struck out on this new venture, which would prove in the end his persistence as a man of letters on the national stage, Schiller was on his mind.

Three translations On three other occasions Coleridge returned to his copy of The Muses’ Almanac – not, though, in order to transcribe Schiller’s German, as in 1807, but rather to translate it or to incorporate it into poetry of his own. Each time brought Coleridge closer to Schiller’s work as a poet and a thinker. Each time saw Coleridge seeking, as he had with Wallenstein in 1800, to naturalize Schiller through an English idiom. Though there is no exact evidence for when Coleridge wrote these translations, it is most likely that they date from around 1807–10, soon after he had acquired the journal. On one occasion, Coleridge translated two distichs that ‘described and exemplified’ the Homeric hexameter and the Ovidian elegiac metre. These were published twice in 1834, without an acknowledgement of his source: once in the literary journal Friendship’s Offering and then in the revised edition of his collected poems. Schiller was acknowledged only ten years later, in the 1844 edition (PW, I, 307–8). In making the translations Coleridge was revisiting a subject of continuing interest to him – metrics – and one on which he had already cited Schiller as an authority (CN, II, 2224). Then his source had been Schiller’s collected Poems; here it was The Muses’ Almanac.11 On another occasion Coleridge’s notebook translation of three distichs from the Votive Tablets brought him up against Schiller’s notion

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of the Spieltrieb or ‘play drive’; the lines eventually formed a poetic tribute to Wordsworth. As Schiller had explained in the Aesthetic Letters, the Spieltrieb enables us through feeling to regard our own self-interest from a distance, banishing prejudice while welcoming the ideal. In The Muses’ Almanac, in a distich called ‘The Qualified Reader’ (‘Der berufene Leser’), Schiller describes that distancing effect in terms of the relationship between the writer and the ideal reader: ‘Welchen Leser ich wünsche? den unbefangensten, der mich, / Sich und die Welt vergißt und in dem Buche nur lebt’ (NA, I, 303). Coleridge offers a neat translation: ‘Whom should I choose for my Judge? the earnest impersonal Reader / Who in the work forgets me and the world and himself’ (CN, II, 3220). Schiller’s ‘unbefangensten Leser’ and Coleridge’s ‘earnest impersonal Reader’ are both figures fully exercising the Spieltrieb, abandoning self-interest for the sake of an aesthetic appreciation of the work and all that it offers. In two subsequent distichs Schiller goes on to describe more fully the right attitude of the reader: not censure but surrender. Die Unberufenen Tadeln ist leicht, erschaffen so schwer; ihr Tadler des schwachen, Habt ihr das trefliche denn auch zu belohnen ein Herz? Die Belohnung Was belohnet den Meister? der zartantwortende Nachklang, Unter der reine Reflex aus der begegnenden Brust. (NA, I, 303)12 Again Coleridge translates, but now he begins to depart from the original, detailing with greater precision the attitude and participation of the reader. Ye who have eyes to detect and Gall to chastise the Imperfect, Have you the Heart too that loves, feels and rewards the compleat. What is the meed of thy Song? ’Tis the ceaseless, the thousandfold Echo Which from the welcoming Hearts of the Pure repeats and prolongs it, Each with a different Tone, compleat or in musical fragments. (CN, II, 3220)

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Schiller’s Poetry in Coleridge’s Notebooks

Coleridge, Schiller and Aesthetic Education

The five hexameters here expand on Schiller’s two distichs in interesting ways. Schiller’s ‘belohnen’ (‘pay tribute’) becomes a more sympathetic and indeed visceral response: ‘loves, feels and rewards’. Similarly enlarging the field, Schiller’s ‘zartantwortende Nachklang’ and ‘begegneden Brust’ (literally, ‘gentle answering echo’ and ‘responding breast’) are rendered in the plural in Coleridge’s ‘thousandfold echo’ and ‘welcoming Hearts’. This numerical expansion coincides with a more skilful increase in complexity, as Schiller’s ‘Nachklang’ (‘echo’) is in Coleridge’s telling repeated and prolonged, ‘Each with a different Tone, compleat or in musical fragments’. It is not just any single response that rewards the poet, then, but a variety of responses, not necessarily congruous with each other and not necessarily even anticipated by the poet. Coleridge was clearly taken by Schiller’s ‘echo’, for he immediately set to work on another translation in which it became the central conceit. Schiller’s distich had now grown into a new poem altogether, addressed to Wordsworth and commemorating his ‘Song’, the Prelude: Ad Vilmum Axiologum This be the meed, that thy Song creates a thousandfold Echo! Sweet as the warble of woods that awake at the gale of the Morning! List! the Hearts of the Pure, like Caves in the ancient Mountains Deep, deep in the Bosom, and from the Bosom resound it, Each with a different Tone, complete or in musical fragments, All have welcom’d thy Voice, and receive and retain and prolong it! This is the word of the Lord! – it is spoken, and Beings Eternal Live and are born, as an Infant – the Eternal begets the Immortal! Love is the Spirit of Life, and Music the Life of the Spirit. (CN, II, 3231; PW, I, 391–2) With its key images of reward for the poet – the answering echo, the responding breast – Schiller’s distich from The Muses’ Almanac clearly stands behind Coleridge’s poem, though given the expanded description of the echo and the many images entirely new (the woods, the caves) not to mention the closing reflections on ‘Life’, Coleridge has evidently outgrown his source. Yet the expansion is nevertheless in tune with the German original and indeed with the

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notion of the Spieltrieb that was implicated in it. Coleridge focuses his attention, like Schiller, on the reader’s creative response to poetry, the imaginative participation through feeling in the unreal though true world of aesthetic semblance (‘All have welcom’d thy Voice, and receive and retain and prolong it!’). Even Coleridge’s playful evocation of the Logos (‘the word of the Lord’ is the word of Axiologum) reiterates in theological language Schiller’s exalted description of the Spieltrieb, which reconciles the eternal with the temporal: ‘it is spoken, and Beings Eternal / Live and are born’. No longer Schiller in any exact sense, Coleridge’s poem is nevertheless filled with Schillerian resonance. On a third occasion (again it is difficult to say when) Coleridge returned to The Muses’ Almanac, this time to look up a poem he had previously quoted from in 1802: ‘The Visit’ (‘Der Besuch’), or ‘Dithyramb’ as Schiller later called it (CN, I, 1128). Coleridge went on to write a complete, free translation of the poem and in 1817 it appeared in Sibylline Leaves under the title, ‘The Visit of the Gods / IMITATED 13 FROM SCHILLER’. Schiller’s poem tells in a light tone how the gods come to visit a humble poet. Not up to the task of entertaining his illustrious visitors at home, he asks instead to be taken up to join their own heavenly revels, where the gods agree to initiate him in a chaotic celebration of Bacchanalian proportions. Throughout, Coleridge’s translation is faithful to the spirit, if not always the letter, of the original, his irregular metre and slightly irreverent diction capturing well Schiller’s dithyrambic manner. As he had when translating Wallenstein as well as the work of other German poets, notably Stolberg, Coleridge improvised, in this case adding an extra line in the middle of each of the three stanzas. In two instances he also made substantive changes to the poem which in effect tone down Schiller’s Dionysian rhetoric. In the second stanza Schiller has the poet address the gods thus: ‘Lend me eternal life / Gods! What can a mortal offer you? / Raise me up as emperor in Olympus’ (‘Leyhet mir euer unsterbliches Leben / Götter! Was kann euch der Sterbliche geben? / Hebet zu eurem Olymp mich empor!’, NA, I, 289). Coleridge ignored the request for eternal life and instead expanded Schiller’s one line about Olympus into four: Me rather, bright guests! With your wings of upbuoyance Bear aloft to your homes, to your banquets of joyance,

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Coleridge’s rendition seems to limit the hubris of the poet: instead of demanding immortality, as in Schiller’s version of events, Coleridge’s poet simply, and repetitively, begs for recognition and inclusion in the revels (a nervousness betrayed, perhaps, in the awkward neologism ‘upbuoyance’). A similar caution seems to lie behind the second alteration. In the final image of the poem, Schiller leaves the poet in a drunken stupor, having been anointed by the gods with divine nectar: ‘It rushes, it sparkles, / The heavenly spring, / The bosom grows quiet, / The eye grows bright’ (‘Sie rauschet, sie perlet, / Die himmlische Quelle, / Der Busen wird ruhig, / Das Auge wird helle’, NA, I, 289). Coleridge’s version conveys no hint of such intoxication. He ends the poem with a declaration by the poet: ‘Thanks, Hebe! I quaff it! Io, Paean, I cry! / The wine of the Immortals / Forbids me to die!’ (PW, I, 311). This, again, seems to signal a withdrawal from the Bacchanalian impulse of Schiller’s poem. But on closer inspection what looks at first like priggishness – Coleridge censoring Schiller’s graphic portrait – turns out to be quite the contrary. The closing lines transform Schiller’s description of the poet’s increasing passivity (‘Der Busen wird ruhig, / Das Auge wird helle’ – ‘The bosom grows quiet, / The eye grows bright’) into first-person declamation, incorporating the claim to immortality that had been avoided in the second stanza (‘The wine of the Immortals / Forbids me to die!’). Coleridge has fashioned Schiller’s languid and harmless poet into something quite different, though to his readers quite familiar: the poet of ‘Kubla Khan’, who awakens dread and fear because of his strange aspect and inspired utterance. Anointed ‘with celestial dew’ (‘mit himmlischem Thaue’) – or having drunk ‘the milk of paradise’? – the poet here does not succumb to lethargy but rather consciously and hubristically lays claim to privilege and divine authority. These changes in the translation reflect Coleridge’s own broader concern with the Bacchic. As John Beer and more recently Anya Taylor have shown, Coleridge pursued the myth in two related though not necessarily compatible ways: Bacchus was at once an image of entrapment in the sensuous, of overindulgence, excess, which would

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lead to punishment; but he was also the god of inspiration and joy, who in the tradition of the Phaedrus might well bestow the blessing of divine madness upon his devotees.14 Like Schiller, though with less ambiguity, Coleridge here comes in on the side of the Platonists and Neoplatonists, honouring Bacchus’s inspiring power with his own dithyramb. Once in 1806 and then again in 1808 Coleridge contemplated a poem about Bacchus in which his drunkenness would be presented allegorically, as reflecting the laudable desire for ‘spiritual wisdom’. Was the Schiller translation, written sometime during this period, an early contribution to that project? That is speculation, but the fact is that Coleridge involved Schiller in his thinking on the subject, appropriating his poetry in the process. Acquainted with the range of his work, both in poetry and in prose, and familiar with the key concepts of his aesthetic, Coleridge could respond to Schiller’s thought in broad and general ways largely on his own terms. That was the case in the early dramas, as Schiller was singled out among the tribe of dramatists of the day, and it was true of the Wallenstein translation as well. As Coleridge’s knowledge of Schiller’s work expanded in the first decade of the nineteenth century, against the backdrop of continued interest in his work among friends and acquaintances, this pattern continued. In subsequent years it would characterize Coleridge’s response to Schiller’s notion of ‘aesthetic education’, which Coleridge did not address directly or borrow from piecemeal, but rather emulated in fundamental ways in his own work on aesthetics.

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Schiller’s Poetry in Coleridge’s Notebooks

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Semblance and Aesthetic Autonomy in Coleridge’s Criticism

In March 1810 Coleridge jotted down a brief but revealing reminder to himself in his notebooks: ‘I wish much to investigate the connection of the Imagination with the Bildungstrieb’ (CN, III, 3744). The specific reference here is possibly to a passage in Schiller’s Aesthetic Letters that considers the different ways ‘der göttliche Bildungstrieb’ (‘the divine impulse to form’) directs itself in the moral world (IX. 6, 58–9; also 331–2). What lay behind Coleridge’s remark was 15 years’ familiarity with Schiller’s work and thought, from his early reading of the plays and his conversations with Beddoes and others in the 1790s to his translation of Wallenstein, his work on the poetry and his study of the aesthetic essays in the first decade of the 1800s. As Coleridge later began to formulate and express his mature aesthetics in the years that followed, in The Friend, Biographia Literaria and the lectures on literature, he continued to draw on Schillerian terms and ideas. The abiding presence of Schiller in Coleridge’s work during these years is the subject of this chapter and the next. Throughout this analysis I construe the relationship between the two thinkers as one of fundamental agreement, based on long familiarity on Coleridge’s part. This needs some explanation. On the one hand, given that previously Coleridge had owned and read so much of Schiller’s work, including many of the aesthetic essays themselves, and moved in circles where his work was highly thought of, it seems we can no longer speak only of affinities and coincidences, as if chance alone or the ‘spirit of the age’ could account for the striking 95

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similarities of their thought. On the other hand, apart from two or three direct borrowings and a number of clear echoes – which have already been mentioned – Coleridge clearly did not rely on Schiller textually in the same way as he did on the Schlegels or on Schelling: there is no question here of plagiarism. Indeed, the scarcity of direct references to Schiller in Coleridge’s writings of the 1810s has led most commentators to presume he did not engage with his work at all. Such a view proceeds, I suspect, from a nervous fixation with sources. Perhaps we have become unaccustomed, even unwilling, to think of Coleridge’s relationship with other thinkers except in terms of either slavish dependence or absolute ignorance. Yet that Coleridge should know Schiller’s work in the 1810s and yet not quote it is entirely understandable if we bear in mind when and what he had read and how he worked. For one, Coleridge had been familiar with Schiller’s writings from a comparatively early age and long before he came to study any other of his other German contemporaries. As I have argued in previous chapters, he was already reading Schiller in the early 1790s, had come across his work again while in Germany, and had translated the centrepiece of Weimar aesthetic humanism, Wallenstein, by 1800 – a year before he sat down and began properly to study Kant and several years before he dealt first hand with Fichte and Schelling. Schiller, in other words, was the first of the German Idealists Coleridge read; the moral bias in his aesthetics, already so like his own, naturally took root in his own thinking before he even had acquired the Idealist language to describe it. Secondly, Coleridge had become familiar with Schiller’s thought partly by way of the aesthetic essays but primarily from non-philosophical sources: the dramas, especially Wallenstein, his poems and distichs, as well as reviews and other miscellaneous prose. These exerted a real influence in Coleridge’s thought, but not in a language that could be readily transcribed into his own philosophical prose. So much the better, in fact: for in the first decades of the nineteenth century British readers still associated Schiller’s name with a discredited and, given the exigencies of war, decidedly outmoded revolutionary political agenda. Coleridge would avoid this political trouble and make the most of Schiller’s work by addressing it in his own native philosophical diction. Finally, it is worth recalling that Coleridge, in the main, handled his sources not as discrete entities, like a scholar, but as fragments of

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some whole that – for better or worse – he sought himself to embody in his own work. He learned from his sources while at the same time seamlessly embellishing and modifying them, hardly caring to distinguish where someone else’s idea left off and his own began. This was how he used Kant in The Friend and Robert Leighton (somewhat more responsibly) in Aids to Reflection. It was also how he used the eighteenthcentury moral philosopher Joseph Butler, whose deontological ethics grounds so much of Coleridge’s thought from the 1790s on, and yet whose name appears only two or three times in all his writings. Schiller clearly fits this pattern. He was a thinker like Butler whom Coleridge knew well and in whom he recognized early on a profound agreement on fundamental issues, but not a thinker he turned to as a specific source for terms or arguments. Coleridge was attracted to Schiller not out of a specific need – as he later was to A. W. Schlegel, for his convenient defence of Shakespeare, or to Schelling, for his transcendental deduction of the imagination – but rather out of selfrecognition. Schiller was a fellow poet and thinker who had worked on a subject of mutual interest. His notion of ‘aesthetic education’ had turned Kantian formalism in the direction of moral life and civil society in a way that Coleridge himself sought to achieve in England, 15 years later. Schiller in this sense came to represent for Coleridge a nascent tradition in post-Kantian thought in which his own work would build on in relation to the British culture of his own day. The fact that he knew so much of Schiller’s work gives us reasonable grounds to consider Coleridge’s aesthetics not only in terms of epistemology and ontology, favoured by Kantian and Schellingian perspectives, but also in relation to questions of moral action and social justice. Here I will be extending in a sense an argument put forward in Paul Hamilton’s book, Coleridge’s Poetics. That book offers a diagnostic account of what went wrong in Coleridge’s theory of poetry, particularly with regard to his philosophy of language, and what turned out all right, indeed salvageable. Hamilton argues that out of the Common Sense tradition Coleridge developed a theory of language based on desynonymization, which linked the complexity of language to the increase in knowledge. As an untranslatable language, poetry naturally exemplified this theory. Coleridge might have made much of this but in volume one of Biographia Literaria he instead opted for a transcendental deduction of the imagination, the implicit radicalism of which led him to bend his idealism out of shape to the point where it

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Semblance and Aesthetic Autonomy

Coleridge, Schiller and Aesthetic Education

was more confusion than argument. According to Hamilton, Coleridge more than makes up for the loss in volume two and in various lectures on literature, where his poetics find more sure expression. What seems to me compelling about this analysis is the way it treats Schelling, and his aesthetic absolutism, his notion of poetry as giving actual knowledge of the world, as an aberration in Coleridge’s thinking. Rather, like Schiller, Coleridge held that poetry does not give actual knowledge of things but rather ‘provides a symbolic expression of the ideal understanding of “the natural Man” which science, political theory and religion all desire’. 1 This perspective has a potentially radical bias. For because it is self-professedly undetermined, free, art can avoid the mistake of giving a reductive account of human experience; in the limitless variety of its formulations it offers a progressive impulse. (Hamilton goes on to argue that later in life Coleridge grew sceptical of this implicit radicalism and suffered his poetics to lapse, not reconciled to his increasingly anti-poetic theological views. In a later chapter I seek to test this view by way of a more liberal reading of On the Constitution of Church and State.) The central preoccupation I seek to identify here is how Coleridge, like Schiller, sought to make aesthetic autonomy purposive by stressing its indirect relationship to moral self-determination. Here it will be necessary to confront a problem that has rankled many critics and has caused a great deal of misunderstanding. On the face of it both Coleridge and Schiller tend to describe the whole process of ‘aesthetic education’ as a kind of experience of sublimity: as the self confronts its own limitless possibilities in the field of art, it is dazzled by its own power of imagination. The actual passage into real moral action is hindered rather than helped by such excessive imaginings and the self thus privileged in this kind of Romantic discourse apparently ends up at a kind of impasse, full of plans, moral plans, but not able to bring them fully into realization. Consequently a kind of melancholy accompanies the otherwise grand formulations of ‘aesthetic education’. This is the point Juliet Sychrava makes in her book Schiller to Derrida.2 For all his plans to reconcile the subjective with the objective, freedom with necessity, the ‘sentimental’ with the ‘naïve’, Schiller cannot work successfully within the dialectic he has erected and ends up privileging the self-conscious over the unmediated, the idealist vision over the realist. No less ‘sentimental’ than Schiller, Coleridge makes the same mistake. While in theory he sees poetry uniting the subjective

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with the objective, really he cannot get past the subjective. ‘Sentimental’ critics like Schiller and Coleridge undermine their own efforts at reconciliation through high art as the sublime experience of self-consciousness leads to an evasion of action and a denial of history. Echoing Jerome McGann in The Romantic Ideology, Sychrava says that literary criticism after Coleridge and Schiller has followed suit, with the result that art is divorced from everyday human endeavour. That larger complaint has to some extent been vindicated: having exposed the parochial foundations of the ‘high Romantic argument’, criticism has risen to the challenge of recovering many of the voices once drowned out. And yet, neither Coleridge nor Schiller are quite so trapped in this negative ‘sentimental’ mode; in fact, particularly in their descriptions of moral life, not only in the aesthetic essays but also the poetry and dramas, both often valorize the ‘naïve’ through the evocation of simple virtue. At a more fundamental level, though, Sychrava’s analysis of the impasse in Schiller and Coleridge’s theory rests on a literalist understanding of ‘aesthetic education’, one that fails to appreciate that its power to transform consists in precisely this abstraction from life. Clearly, the problem of passing from aesthetic contemplation to moral action will admit no easy solution. Resisting then the aestheticist versions of Coleridge and Schiller, which see their vision for aesthetic renewal collapse into debilitating self-consciousness, I suggest that the theory of ‘aesthetic education’, broadly conceived, does find practical fulfilment, but only indirectly, and is often expressed as the life of disinterested affection. Running throughout this analysis is the conviction that what Coleridge and Schiller share is the belief that aesthetic freedom – which Coleridge sometimes calls ‘disinterestedness’ and Schiller ‘pure determinability’ (Bestimmbarkeit) – fosters moral freedom, promoting an attitude open to moral decision-making. Coleridge does not, of course, use Schiller’s term ‘play’ (Spiel) to describe this attitude. Nancy Webb Kelly has argued that the refusal is symptomatic of his desire to provide a certain seriousness to the nascent profession of literary criticism.3 Avoiding that term clearly had its advantages, but as I seek to demonstrate, a commitment to freedom remains an integral part of Coleridge’s account of aesthetic experience. Less explicitly, I argue for the potentially liberating effect of this line of thinking. Though in their arguments for the autonomy of art, Coleridge and Schiller do contribute to the formation of bourgeois

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subjectivity, reluctant to face up to its own historicity or to engage in an actual confrontation with power, nevertheless it seems to me that the interiority espoused by Idealism remains a mode of being irreducible to the terms of moral obedience or economic exchange and so retains an emancipating power. Indeed, the self-reflection that characterizes Idealism’s aesthetic mode offers freedom not only from external determination but also from the self’s own restricting ideas about itself. Here one might usefully bear in mind Adorno’s phrase characterizing this paradox of the bourgeois self’s interiority: ‘with the consummation of his sovereignty he leaves behind the spell of sovereignty’s aim’.4

Coleridge and The Critique of Judgement It was from Kant that Coleridge took what would become the key terms of his own aesthetics, borrowing from the third Critique while at the same time objecting to its reductively subjective bias. It is possible to make some sense of that apparently idiosyncratic response when one recalls that Coleridge had after all been reading Schiller before he read Kant. Like Schiller, as I will argue, he put his own spin on Kantian formalism. One of the greatest lessons Coleridge learned from Kant was, in his words, ‘to treat every subject in reference to the operation of the mental Faculties, to which it specially appertains’ (CL, III, 360). The lesson was taken from the third Critique (a long-time favourite5), where it is given in the context of Kant’s analysis of how we estimate things or the relations of things: judgement. The beautiful and the sublime ought to be studied in relation to the judgement of taste, or aesthetic judgement (a subjective estimation of the finality of an object according to feeling); and nature, or natural phenomena ought to be studied in relation to teleological judgement (an objective estimation of finality according to our concept of the object). This attention to judgement is a late but innovative development in Kant’s critical enterprise, an afterthought that manages to take into account the transcendental deductions that had gone before. For Kant attributes to the faculty of judgement the regulative employment of the ideas of reason, or in other words, the task of applying the maxims of reason to the objects of sense. Judgement is particularly able to perform the task, for it stands between understanding on the one hand and reason on the other.

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How did Kant reach that point? Kant sets out in the first part of the third Critique to discover if it is possible to judge objects independently of our concepts of those objects (Aesthetic Judgement, §1, 41–2). In other words, is it possible for us to have formal judgements of reflection without regard to the categories of the understanding? The answer of transcendental philosophy is yes, and it is in deducing the possibility of this alternative to cognitive experience that Kant establishes the aesthetic. This alternative he calls the synthetic a priori judgement of taste. It is, in the first place, a judgement since it entails the estimation of the representation of an object, and a judgement of taste since it involves the feeling of pleasure. Further, the judgement is synthetic, for it joins the representation of an object with the feeling of pleasure, and also a priori (that is, stands as a universal rule for the judgement and valid for everyone), for it assumes the pleasure is universally valid. The deduction of the judgement of taste draws Kant on to describe a whole and independent realm of experience, the aesthetic, whose determining characteristic is the apprehension, not cognition, of an object’s formal properties. In that realm we demonstrate no interest, either intellectual or moral, for our attention is related not to the actual existence of the object but only to its formal appearance. Further, since that attention is accompanied by pleasure or displeasure, the entire experience is determined by feeling alone and, in fact, ends in feeling as well. In Kant’s words, we enjoy the appearance of finality in an object and rest in that pleasure; our attitude is contemplative (Aesthetic Judgement, §39, 149–50). The pleasure enjoyed during such aesthetic experience can be communicated (this is why we can talk on the subject of art at all) and it may seem that, given enough time and discussion, we will arrive at some objective standards of judgement. But mere communicability cannot promise so much: in fact, in such discussions we are talking not about art at all (that is impossible), but about our feelings about art, those feelings of pleasure or displeasure which make up the aesthetic experience. Aesthetic experience is thus necessarily subjective. I alone enjoy the ‘play’ of the powers of the mind as the imagination hovers between understanding and reason, free at once from both the concepts of the former and the maxims of the latter. This, finally, is the governing characteristic of the aesthetic: freedom. To translate Kant’s terminology: in judging a work of art I do not estimate it according to a preconceived notion of what it should look like, for such a notion does

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not even exist. Nor do I judge it according to a rule about what role it should play, for such rules do not apply to the object. The aesthetic is, according to Kant, the only realm of experience in which we can enjoy absolute freedom. Two consequences emerge from the theory. The first is that art gives us no knowledge of things. The limitation of our ability to know is of course the major theme in Kant’s critical enterprise: the Critique of Pure Reason demonstrated the impossibility of the pure theoretical reason giving us knowledge of things-in-themselves and the Critique of Practical Reason proved how we might act morally in spite of that handicap (which turns out not to be a handicap at all), living the good life as if we had theoretical knowledge of the three most important ideas – God, freedom and immortality. Surely then when it came to aesthetic judgement we could not expect more; in short, it contributes ‘not a whit to the knowledge of things’ (Aesthetic Judgement, ‘Preface’, 5). That conclusion is of course easily and simply deducible from Kant’s preceding epistemological theory: knowledge is the congruence of experience and concepts; aesthetic experience is by definition without concepts; therefore it offers no knowledge. The second consequence of Kant’s line of thinking is more problematic, at least for Coleridge and Schiller: the permanent exclusion of any moral consideration from all aesthetic judgement. Kant’s insistence on aesthetic autonomy, on the independence of aesthetic judgement from any reliance on external validation, in effect put an end to the tradition inherited from antiquity that one might reasonably expect of art a moral end, and in its place began the practice of defining the aesthetic as precisely that which is not moral. That is not to say that it is immoral but rather that it is simply silent on questions of morality and truth. The silence is important. In Kantian aesthetics no provision is explicitly made for a moral consideration to become a part of aesthetic judgement, for the ethical to become a productive part of the aesthetic. But the possibility for such a provision is always present and Schiller’s successful rehabilitation of Kant’s aesthetic in an ethical context, without dishonouring the former or diminishing the latter, proves as much. His Aesthetic Letters can be best read as the third Critique carried to its own, plausible conclusions, particularly those hinted at in the penultimate section 59, ‘Beauty as the symbol of morality’.6 But if Kant at least silently or negatively allows for that development – the indirect relationship between ethics and aesthetics – he

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does not pursue it himself. He characteristically preserves their distinction so carefully won. Only on a few occasions in the third Critique does that distinction between ethics and aesthetics fade, and usually only at the periphery of Kant’s argument. Thus, for example, the assertion that the ideal of beauty should be sought only in the human figure and must consist in the expression of the moral, without which the object could not please ‘universally and positively’ (Aesthetic Judgement, §17, 79). The Laocoon is thus presumably closer to Kant’s ideal of beauty than, say, Apollo Belvedere. And later, while he typically denies that an intellectual interest in art betrays a good person (a virtuoso in taste is often vain and capricious), Kant does allow that an interest in the beauty of nature is the mark of ‘a good soul’ (Aesthetic Judgement, §42, 157). The reverse is also true: converse with nature increases our impulse to seek the good. ‘Imagine a man at the moment when his mind is disposed to moral feeling!’ Kant enthuses, ‘If, amid beautiful natural surroundings, he is in calm and serene enjoyment of his existence, he feels within him a need – a need of being grateful to some one.’7 Does Kant think that natural beauty will so easily improve us morally? Moments such as these are backward glances at an aesthetic theory which the rest of Kant’s Critique is busy rendering obsolete. The search for ideal beauty is an eighteenth-century preoccupation; so also is the prejudice in favour of natural beauty and the notion that we have an inner sense for beauty which matches our moral sense. Kant had met the ideas in his early reading of British moralists like Shaftesbury and Hutcheson and they were important in his ‘pre-critical’ thinking. These occasional attempts to link the aesthetic directly with the ethical are essentially foreign to the movement of the third Critique, which repeatedly affirms their mutual independence. Coleridge agreed fundamentally with this line of thinking. He long upheld the necessity of the aesthetic partaking of, or at least beginning in, subjectivity, and thereby preserving its autonomy – this was central to his theory of art even before he found it approximated in the third Critique (see, for instance, his review of The Monk, in SW & F, I, 159) and it certainly became so afterwards. In the essay On the Principles of Genial Criticism of 1814 Coleridge twice distinguished the ‘BEAUTIFUL’ from the ‘GOOD’ in purely Kantian terms: the former we contemplate while the latter are objects of desire (SW & F, I, 378–80,

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[have] nothing to do with the action as determined by Law, but only with the feelings leading to & accompanying it – . . . To the Poet Adam Bell or Robin Hood are as good men as Alexander or the Duke of Marlborough / The poet lives in an element, in which Property is no further recognized than as it affects the Imagination, or produces states of moral Activity – or Intensity –. (CN, III, 3956) Coleridge is stressing the independence of the aesthetic realm. In that ‘element’ certain laws are indeed observed, but these are laws of its own devising, usually described by Coleridge in Aristotelian terms which comply with Kant’s aesthetic: ideality, probability (not possibility) and harmony (BL, II, 6–7, 45–6, 214–18). What does not apply is the moral law. Poets are not interested in their characters as moral agents, except in so far as their moral standing either determines how we feel about them (‘affects the Imagination’) or interprets their own actions (‘produces states of moral Activity – or Intensity’). The poet is outside the law and therefore cannot pass moral judgement. But much of his own experience of art pushed the limits of that theory. In a notebook entry of around the same time, Coleridge gives an orthodox Kantian definition of taste (disinterested pleasure in the form of an object), then adds: The above is on the supposition of the absence of all moral feeling – Suppose its presence, and then there will accrue an excellence even to the quality of the pleasures themselves, but not only of the refined but likewise even of the grosser – in as much as a larger Sweep of Ideas will be associated with each enjoyment, but with each Idea will be associated a number of Sensations – & consequently, each pleasure will become more the pleasure of the whole Being. (CN, III, 3584) Here Coleridge is suggesting an important alteration to Kant’s aesthetic experience: pleasure increases when moral interest concurs with our apprehension of the aesthetic object. The result is a new kind of

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382–3). In his notebooks Coleridge once put this another way. Poets, he wrote in 1810,

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aesthetic experience, expanded beyond anything Kant allowed for. Elsewhere Coleridge deduces the possibility of that experience in stricter terms: it is the only solution to the problem of finding ‘a Beauty that is not incompatible with an Interest. And at the same time an Interest not incompatible with Beauty.’ Coleridge calls the solution ‘love’, for it is constituted by ‘Beauty + Interest’ (SW & F, I, 422). The same discomfort with Kant’s autonomous aesthetic appears sporadically in Coleridge’s literary criticism. Thus, for example, he announces that ‘Wickedness is no Subject for Comedy. This was Congreve’s great error’ (CM, II, 83). The injudicious depiction of evil in the comic mode is enough to condemn any work of the stage (one might here recall Coleridge’s censure of Volpone, in spite of his overall admiration for Jonson). It also becomes grounds for praise when evil is absent: Coleridge applauds Shakespeare for his ‘moral tact’, as he never permits his audience even for a moment to sympathize with something or someone ‘base’ (CM, I, 43, 393; BL, II, 22). He similarly deems Don Juan ‘susceptible . . . of a sound moral’ and explicitly draws one out of Robinson Crusoe and Macbeth (BL, II, 220; CM, II, 160). In these instances Coleridge’s own reading of literature, his own aesthetic experience, makes it increasingly difficult for him to maintain the aesthetic autonomy as Kant had defined it. There must be more involved than the subjective apperception of unity in diversity, though this is no doubt where the aesthetic begins. In short, Coleridge is trying to extend the domain of aesthetic experience beyond the subjective confines in which Kant had placed it in order to include within its boundaries something objective. ‘A man may be, PERHAPS, exclusively a Poet, a Poet most exquisite in his kind,’ he writes in 1814, tho’ the kind must needs be of inferior worth. (I say, may be: for I can not recollect any one instance, in which I have a right to suppose it.) – But surely to have an exclusive pleasure in poetry, <not being a Poet – > to turn away from all effort, and to dwell wholly in the images of another’s VISION, is an unworthy & effeminate thing. (CN, III, 4232) Coleridge is focusing on the subjective aesthetic experience of an already existing object (avoiding the matter of the creation of the

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aesthetic object, which rightly lies beyond his judgement) and his verdict is severe. However immediately pleasurable it is, such purely subjective aesthetic experience ultimately does not leave us satisfied. It does not allow us to reach full intellectual and emotional potential, to enjoy full moral responsibility; it does not involve that defining factor of every kind of existential experience, ‘the whole soul of man’. In opposing this ‘unworthy & effeminate thing’ Coleridge is suggesting, first, that one should not be an aesthete, addicted to the quick ‘fix’ of aesthetic pleasure, and further, that one should not even look to subjective pleasure as the final end of aesthetic experience, abandoning one’s own effort and vision. The aesthetic is not an end but a beginning. Aesthetic experience is thus subjective only in the first instance, in immediate pleasure; when it implicitly demands that we carry that delight further, as a maxim, its objective element surfaces. The aesthetic, by its own nature, demands that we apply the aesthetic attitude or stance in moral life, there to create our own ‘VISIONS’. The trouble with the Kantian aesthetic is that it is incomplete: strict formalism, however carefully and indeed logically deduced from the independent nature of aesthetic judgement, fails to account adequately for that ‘moral feeling’ which in experience routinely accompanies aesthetic pleasure.

Autonomy in the Aesthetic Letters For Coleridge, then, what Kant’s aesthetic autonomy stands in need of is moral rationalization. There is no question here of collapsing the distinctions so carefully established – between art and the world, aesthetic experience and moral life, judgement and understanding; the challenge is rather to determine how that autonomy could be considered under a purposive aspect. This was precisely the question Schiller had asked himself in 1793 when he began writing the aesthetic essays, his own response to Kantian formalism. What was it about aesthetic autonomy that made it so important to moral life? And how could its influence be conceptualized? Schiller’s argument, both as it is found in the Aesthetic Letters and as it is mediated through related texts, is the direct precursor of Coleridge’s critical engagement with the notion of aesthetic autonomy. For Coleridge, receptive to that argument in the many ways I have already suggested – in Schiller’s poems, his distichs, Wallenstein and of course the essays themselves – it

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represented a workable way past the Kantian dichotomy separating art from action. Schiller’s ‘aesthetic education’ would become, in other words, the conceptual frame for Coleridge’s ‘imagination’. Schiller approached the question of aesthetic autonomy by way of an objective definition of art as ‘semblance’ or Schein, which by virtue of its aloofness would exert an indirect force on the individual will and so contribute to moral action. He touched on this repeatedly in the poetry and explicitly in several essays – in ‘On the Pathetic’ (1793) and in the preface of The Bride of Messina, ‘The Uses of the Chorus’ (1803) – but the most robust and philosophical treatment came in the Aesthetic Letters (1795), where he linked it to a unique anthropology: it is aesthetic ‘play’ that makes us humans. Schiller’s Aesthetic Letters can be divided roughly into three sections. The first nine letters offer a diagnosis of the problem of modernity in terms of alienation, the unwelcome consequence of excessive specialization. This is registered at both the social level (where the desires of individual citizens come into conflict with those of the state) and the individual or psychic level (where the claims of reason battle against those of the senses). Schiller hints in these early letters at what his prognosis will be: the restoration of the wholeness of one’s character through a kind of self-education he calls Bildung. In the next group of letters (letters 10–16) Schiller proposes and to some extent delivers a transcendental deduction of beauty, which he defines as ‘living form’ (lebende Gestalt). On the way he introduces some of the principal terms of his aesthetic, specifically ‘play’ and ‘semblance’ (the latter gets elaborated upon, rather unexpectedly, sometime later in letter 26). In the third and final group of letters (17–27) Schiller brings this insight to bear on the main problem at hand, which is how to raise humanity up to the point where it can realize in practical life a higher idea of itself. The key here is freedom: the freedom enjoyed in aesthetic experience refers us in an analogous way to our moral freedom and thus conditions us to act in accordance with our highest ideals. In line with Schiller’s argument in the Aesthetic Letters, I would like to look first at the central section, with the introduction of the key terms of Schiller’s aesthetic, and then compare them with similar terms developed by Coleridge in Biographia Literaria and The Friend. The transcendental deduction of beauty that stands at the heart of the Aesthetic Letters aims to proceed according to the transcendental

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method Kant had employed in the first Critique, that is, by deducing fundamental truth from first principles rather than inducing it from experience. Schiller begins by evoking a basic problem about our being in the world which he puts in dualistic terms typical of Kant: as creatures of sense, we are clearly part of the world and subject to some degree at least to the same necessity that governs nature; and yet as creatures of reason we seem hardly at home here, possessed rather of an awareness of our own freedom from all natural determination as well as a consciousness of the moral law. This duality is potentially disturbing, even debilitating. Schiller asks then how we negotiate this in daily life, how we survive this duality. There are clearly two options: either we give ourselves over to the reality around us and live as creatures of sense, subordinating that aspiration to freedom to the necessity that seems to govern our condition; or, quite the opposite, we subordinate that outer reality, the world of experience and of nature, to our own ideas of moral self-determination, affirming our own freedom, our own personhood, in the face of a hostile reality. Schiller then gives names to these two strategies or attitudes. The first, in which the intensity of physical experience suspends our own personhood, he calls the Stofftrieb or ‘sense drive’; the second, according to which we abolish all physicality in order to establish for ever the unconditioned existence of our personhood, is called the Formtrieb, or ‘form drive’. It might seem that, given the Platonic tendency in his thought, Schiller would come out in favour of the latter, but that is not the case. The domination of the Formtrieb can lead to a self-regarding and high-minded austerity, a lack of compassion, which in Schiller’s view is as much a denial of one’s humanity as living for the senses alone. The point is, ideally at least, for each drive to be subordinated to the other. That is a tall order to say the least, but Schiller thinks it is possible and he identifies within us another, third drive which aims at precisely that kind of mutual subordination of sense and intellect. This is the Spieltrieb or ‘play drive’. It aims at setting us free from the constraints of both the physical world and the moral world. Schiller then asks what the object is of each of these drives. This is where beauty comes in. While the object of the ‘sense drive’ is the content of life itself and the object of the ‘form drive’ is form, or the idea of life, the object of the ‘play drive’ is beauty, which Schiller now describes, conflating the two, as lebende Gestalt, or ‘living form’ –

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that is, as an abstract principle given concrete reality. I will return to this notion of the Spieltrieb in the next chapter; for now, though, I want to stick with Schiller’s lebende Gestalt, which stands at the centre of his commitment to aesthetic autonomy. So far as the transcendental deduction goes, Schiller’s argument runs into trouble quite quickly. Though it is true that in spite of the term ‘drive’ (Trieb) the three drives have little in common with eighteenth-century faculty psychology, Schiller nevertheless departs from the transcendental method by appealing repeatedly to psychology and experience. And once he starts talking about the function of the drives the transcendental game is up for good. There is an additional problem, too, about the supposed universality of Schiller’s notion of beauty. For one can easily imagine dissenting voices asserting that beauty is more or different than ‘living form’. Indeed, Schiller himself goes on to distinguish between two forms of beauty, ‘melting’ and ‘energizing’, and it is fairly clear that the objective notion of beauty he has already ‘deduced’ applies only to the former. (‘Energizing beauty’, which is generally held by commentators to be analogous to the sublime, is not discussed in the Aesthetic Letters.) That is not to say, of course, that the analysis of the drives ends in failure, only that the argument does not live up to its transcendental ambition. Elsewhere in the Aesthetic Letters, Schiller very interestingly supplements his definition of beauty with the notion of Schein or ‘semblance’. This turns out to be particularly felicitous, for the notion of ‘semblance’ shores up Schiller’s ‘play drive’: we are not so bothered about its shaky transcendental foundations and instead are compelled to accept it as a plausible account of aesthetic experience. The term Schein first appears briefly in the ninth letter (‘Truth lives on in the illusion of art’) and then more fully explained in the penultimate letter 26. The term is not entirely new here. Kant had used it in the Critique of Judgement to refer to a kind of deception, that which misleads us into attributing reality where it is not.8 But Schiller’s sense of Schein as positive, indeed productive, is entirely his own. There had been a hint of it in the letters to his friend Körner in the early 1790s (known as the Kalliasbriefe), when, fresh from reading Kant, he had tried to mount his own transcendental deduction of beauty. At that time he ended up with beauty defined as Freiheit in der Erscheinung or ‘freedom in appearance’, an oblique reference to Kant. In the first Critique Kant had used the term Erscheinung to convey the sense of the Greek word

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‘phenomenon’, that is, a thing made manifest in the world of sense. In the Kalliasbriefe Schiller was using the word similarly, but, in a characteristic divergence from Kant, he connected the world of appearance to aesthetic freedom. What we have, then, in the central section of the Aesthetic Letters and then later in letter 26, is more than we or even Schiller quite bargained for. Not merely the objective standard of taste for beauty (‘living form’) but the objective notion of art altogether, ‘semblance’. Schiller does not then try to defend the notion of Schein along the lines of a transcendental deduction, as he had in the Kalliasbriefe, and that is just as well, since he would be hard pressed to pull it off successfully. Instead he uses common rhetorical strategies that invite an intuitive response. Most of the argument in letter 26, for example, consists of Schiller pointing out that art not characterized by ‘semblance’ is not really art at all, but rather moral teaching or simply factual data (in this sense Schiller is much more of a pragmatist than we might suspect). He writes: But it is in the world of semblance alone that he possesses this sovereign right, in the insubstantial realm of the imagination; and he possesses it there only as long as he scrupulously refrains from predicating real existence of it in theory, and as long as he renounces all idea of imparting real existence through it in practice. From this you see that the poet transgresses his proper limits, alike when he attributes existence to his ideal world, as when he aims at bringing about some determinate existence by means of it. For he can bring neither of these things to pass without either exceeding his rights as a poet (encroaching with his ideal upon the territory of experience, and presuming to determine actual existence by means of what is merely possible) or surrendering his rights as a poet (allowing experience to encroach upon the territory of the ideal, and restricting the possible to the conditions of the actual). (Aesthetic Letters, XXVI.10, 197) This is a clear reminder of how easily, and to Schiller how disastrously, ‘semblance’ might serve utilitarian ends, whether physical or moral. Once art becomes overwhelmingly naturalistic, once concern for the actual existence of the object begins to inform the judgement of it, then semblance loses its independence and we lose the freedom to

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explore. By the same token, though, when art retains its autonomy, and pleasure in the semblance of reality is unaffected by any vestigial longing for reality on its own terms, then, according to Schiller, we experience freedom in its purest sense. The effect of introducing the notion of ‘semblance’ into the main argument of the Aesthetic Letters is to rescue the important notion of the ‘play drive’ and to a lesser extent the objective definition of beauty, which risked being simply dismissed as a failed transcendental deduction. The result is a fairly comprehensive account of art’s potentially liberating function. The drive to ‘play’, to occupy that middle ground between reason and the senses, is fulfilled when we begin to take pleasure in ‘semblance’, to enjoy not the actuality of the object, but the representation of it. Such pleasure is possible because ‘semblance’, liberated from physical constraint on the one hand and moral compulsion on the other, allows one to separate what by nature is joined and join what by nature is separated, to distinguish form from substance, to divide the potential from the actual. In short, it allows for these exploration and testing of possibilities without attributing existence to them. Schiller’s ‘delight in semblance’ (Freude am Schein) thus becomes both the expression of human freedom and the condition of it. Only by way of Schein can one exercise the right of claiming unrestricted freedom. To exercise the ‘play drive’, is to take a certain kind of attitude to the object at hand, to treat it as if it were real while all the while acknowledging that it is not. It is a kind of mock seriousness or mock earnestness that is not really serious or earnest at all.

‘Semblance’ in Biographia Literaria What bearing does this have on Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria? In seeking to establish the moral purposiveness of Kant’s formalist aesthetic – a project carried out in Biographia, the ‘Essay on Method’ in The Friend, and some of the lectures on literature – Coleridge is reworking Schiller’s thesis as set out in the Aesthetic Letters. Crucially, like Schiller’s, it is premised on the autonomy of art, described in terms that vary slightly from those in the Kantian lexicon (in Coleridge’s case ‘illusion’ and ‘imitation’). I want to look briefly at how Coleridge’s familiar arguments for aesthetic autonomy in fact mirror Schiller’s, before turning, in the next chapter, to consider arguments for the notion of ‘play’.

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Semblance and Aesthetic Autonomy

Coleridge, Schiller and Aesthetic Education

Coleridge’s commitment to aesthetic autonomy is signalled in Biographia Literaria at the beginning of the second volume, in the course of his discussion of poetic language. In the preface to Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth had defended natural diction in poetry not on aesthetic grounds, in the sense that we might find pleasure in the representation or copying of everyday speech, but on moral grounds: natural diction, because less under the constraint of civilization, is truer to human emotion. Coleridge points out that Wordsworth’s poetry is best when it violates rather than conforms to this principle since natural diction on its own, like any individual representation unconnected in some way to the species, cannot sustain aesthetic interest. It is the difference from nature that makes poetry interesting. Coleridge then lays his cards on the table: I adopt with full faith the principle of Aristotle, that poetry as poetry is essentially ideal, that it avoids and excludes all accident; that its apparent individualities of rank, character, or occupation must be representative of a class; and that the persons of poetry must be clothed with generic attributes, with the common attributes of the class; not with such as one gifted individual might possibly possess, but such as from his situation it is most probable before-hand, that he would possess. (BL, II, 45–6) Coleridge then goes on to cite a few instances of where Wordsworth, for all his poetic powers, falls short of this principle (too much individuality in ‘Michael’; too much generality in ‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill’ and ‘The Idiot Boy’). The principle laid out here has usually been read as an introductory gambit in Coleridge’s poetics. That is true enough: for after the nod to Aristotle, the discussion of Wordsworth slips into a much fuller explication of Coleridge’s own philosophy of language and leads on, in the next chapter, to the distinction between the language of poetry and that of prose. But one should not lose sight of the broader implications of Coleridge’s point here, particularly for aesthetics: for art to be worth the name it must take a distance from the material it is dealing with, must not simply represent but reflect somehow on that representation and draw the material into communion with universal concerns.

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Coleridge returns to the notion of autonomy in the ‘Critique of Bertram’, a review of Maturin’s play first published in the Courier and then included as the penultimate chapter in Biographia. His defence here of the ideality of art is a good gloss on the passage quoted above: The ideal consists in the happy balance of the generic with the individual. The former makes the character representative and symbolical, therefore instructive; because, mutatis mutandis, it is applicable to whole classes of men. The latter gives it its living interest; for nothing lives or is real, but as definite and individual. . . . ‘Forma formans per formam formatam translucens’ [‘the forming form shining through the formed form’] is the definition and perfection of ideal art. (BL, II, 214–15) The ideality of art consists not in abstraction alone, but in the combination of abstraction with specificity, the coincidence of the universal and the particular. Excess in either of these two factors will ruin aesthetic experience (Coleridge in fact gives examples of both: the tendency towards individual portraiture characteristic of historical painting and the tendency towards abstraction found in the decorative style of Cipriani). We are close here to Schiller’s objective definition of beauty as ‘living form’ (lebende Gestalt): form or abstract principle brought to life as it were through experience, the senses. I have already described how Schiller effectively supplements the definition of beauty as ‘living form’ with the key notion of Schein or ‘semblance’, and in this way finds himself articulating a much broader view of art’s potential. Looking back to Schiller, Coleridge does the same thing with his notion of ‘imitation’ (as distinct from ‘copy’) or ‘illusion’ (as distinct from ‘delusion’). Like Schiller’s, Coleridge’s argument in defence of aesthetic autonomy proceeds by way of a contrast to a mimetic model of art that is shown to be deficient. And he reaches the same conclusion, that art is not about slavishly duplicating nature itself but rather about representing in obviously artificial material the living forms of nature. The first of Coleridge’s pairs of desynonymized terms, ‘imitation’ and ‘copy’, appears towards the beginning of Biographia’s second volume, again in the context of the discussion of Wordsworth’s prosy diction. To strengthen his case for poetic diction as distinct from

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Semblance and Aesthetic Autonomy

Coleridge, Schiller and Aesthetic Education

natural speech, Coleridge contends that ‘the composition of a poem is among the imitative arts; and that imitation, as to opposed to copying, consists either in the interfusion of the SAME throughout the radically DIFFERENT, or of the different throughout a base radically the same’ (BL, II, 72). Here as elsewhere Coleridge ranks ‘imitation’ higher than ‘copy’. The latter is the product of mechanical, not vital forces and hence becomes no more than an attempted and perpetually frustrated return to the natural. In contrast, an ‘imitation’ not only respects nature but acknowledges its difference from nature; it does not rival nature so much as complement it. The first is but naturalism in the extreme; the second a kind of self-conscious idealism. From here it is but a small step to Coleridge’s other pair of desynonymized terms: in aesthetic experience a ‘copy’ or an ‘imitation’ would generate in the viewer either ‘delusion’ or ‘illusion’, respectively. The contrast here picks up on a similar distinction that Schiller makes in the Aesthetic letters between logische Schein or ‘logical semblance’ on the one hand, in which we mistake the aesthetic object for the real thing, and ästhetische Schein or ‘aesthetic semblance’ on the other, in which we immediately perceive the object’s artificiality (Aesthetic Letters, XXVI.5, 192–5). There is no pleasure in the former. The ‘copy’ that refers too meticulously to nature or the art that clings too closely to material reality may for a while convince us it is nature or real life and a certain pleasure results. But once the spell is broken and we see artistry not nature before us, the pleasure dissipates and, what is worse, we feel offended by the ‘delusion’. But in the case of an ‘imitation’ there is no pretence of replicating nature and thus no question of us being deluded by it. Instead, since an ‘imitation’ admits its artificiality, admits its difference from nature, we are invited voluntarily to pretend it is like nature in spite of the difference, invited to entertain the ‘imitation’ by an act of the will. The result is not ‘delusion’ but ‘illusion’, ‘that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith’ (BL, II, 6).

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Aesthetic Education in Biographia Literaria, The Friend and the Lectures on Literature

Coleridge and Schiller’s similar investment in the notion of aesthetic autonomy is only the first step in theorizing the link between art and moral action. The next is to postulate an anthropology asserting that to be human in the fullest sense is to be ‘at play’. Here the moral, and in due course the political, purpose of freedom is made explicit. How Coleridge’s claim, that art leads indirectly to moral benefit, draws on Schiller’s argument for the Spieltrieb is the subject of this chapter. Beginning with an analysis of how the notion of ‘indirection’ presents itself in Biographia as a way to characterize the relationship between aesthetic pleasure and moral action, I then consider some specific instances in related texts where Coleridge reworks Schiller’s argument, sometimes mediated through Schelling. This leads, perhaps inevitably, to an analysis of what Coleridge, like Schiller, makes of the didactic, one of the most popular contemporary literary modes. The assertions about aesthetic autonomy that appear throughout Biographia make it plain that in Coleridge’s view art can have no direct influence on moral life. His characterization of art as ‘illusion’ and Schiller’s as Schein serve to draw the aesthetic further from the realm of practical reason, where the decisions about real moral problems need to be made. But if it is autonomous, how can art have any effect at all – let alone the recuperative effect that is called for? The beginning of a solution to this question can be found in a hint dropped by Coleridge in the Biographia, volume 2. He is faulting Wordsworth for deliberately choosing characters ‘of some low profession’ to deliver his own moral 115

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Coleridge, Schiller and Aesthetic Education

message, in other words, for mistaking the immediate aim of poetry to be truth rather than pleasure. Coleridge concedes that the mistake is understandable since we normally pursue morality above all and expect pleasure only as a result. Yet he insists that in poetry at least the logic is backwards: pleasure necessarily precedes morality. This he calls ‘a small Hysteron-Proteron’ since ‘the communication of pleasure is the introductory means by which alone the poet must expect to moralize his readers’ (BL, II, 131). It seems that a kind of indirection characterizes the relationship between poetry and morality. In aesthetic terms, artists must pursue above all the goal of pleasing, concentrating on the business of drawing disparate forms into a united whole, if ever they hope to teach their audience or move their audience to any kind of action. The effect of aesthetic experience on moral life must be indirect, or else not be aesthetic at all. As usual in the Wordsworth criticism in Biographia, Coleridge articulates the principle he has in mind after he has already made the practical criticism; the theory appears almost as an afterthought. That apparently backwards the way of working has important implications for how we read Coleridge’s text – and I will consider these in due course – but it ought not obscure the principle at hand: art affects moral life only indirectly. Coleridge makes the same point elsewhere and it is clear that his ‘Hysteron-Proteron’ theory of how art relates to action goes back a long way and that by the time of Biographia it is already something of a principle of his criticism. Here are two instances, both from the marginalia. In his preface to his Poems (1800), George Dyer, the amiable Unitarian friend of Coleridge and Lamb, states the conventional view that the immediate object of poetry is to please ‘and that even in solemn subjects poetry is used to render them more engaging and agreeable’. Coleridge, reading that in 1802, objects in the margin: Damned Nonsense! But why does it please? . . . there must be some third power – & that is Beauty, i.e. that which ought to please./ My benevolent Friend seems not to have made an obvious distinction, between end and means – The Poet must always aim at Pleasure as his specific means; but surely Milton did & all ought to aim at something nobler as their end – viz – . . . to cultivate and predispose the heart of the Reader &.c – (CM, II, 355–6)

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As in Biographia 15 years later, aesthetic pleasure is seen as the beginning not the end of the story so far as art’s effect on moral life is concerned. A second instance relates to Milton. While Paradise Lost is Coleridge’s best example of this indirection (BL, II, 133–4), Paradise Regained provides a kind of counter-example. In his Life of Milton (1797) William Hayley dismisses Paradise Regained as a failed epic. Reading that biography in the summer of 1807, Coleridge tries to explain the comparative inferiority of that work: In its kind it is the most perfect poem extant; tho’ its kind may be [of] inferior Interest, being in its essence didactic, to that other sort, in which Instruction is conveyed more effectively because more indirectly, in connection with stronger & more pleasurable Emotions, & thereby in a closer affinity with action. (CM, II, 968) The aesthetic, then, does no more than not offend against the moral law; in other respects it remains neutral towards it and only in so far as it is neutral, offers the greatest aesthetic pleasure and the greatest possibility of effecting action. If in Biographia, as in the marginalia, Coleridge is redefining the relationship between art and morality, admitting a radical distinction while positing a necessary dependence, he sounds more like Schiller than any of the other sources customarily associated with Coleridge’s aesthetics. In ‘On the Grounds of Pleasure in Tragic Objects’ (1792), for example, Schiller draws a strikingly similar distinction, and a similar dependence, between poetry and morality: Ist der Zweck selbst moralisch, so verliert sie das wodurch sie allein mächtig ist, ihre Freiheit, und das, wodurch sie so allgemein wirksam ist, den Reiz des Vergnügens. Das Spiel verwandelt sich in ein ernsthaftes Geschäft, und doch ist es gerade das Spiel, wodurch sie das Geschäft am besten vollführen kann. Nur indem sie ihre höchste ästhetische Wirkung erfüllt, wird sie einen wohlthätigen Einfluß auf die Sittlichkeit haben; aber nur indem sie ihre völlige Freyheit ausübt, kann sie ihre höchste ästhetische Wirkung erfüllen. (NA, XX, 134–5)

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Aesthetic Education in Biographia Literaria

Coleridge, Schiller and Aesthetic Education

If its aim is moral, art loses that through which alone it is powerful, its freedom, and that through which it is universally effective, the appeal of pleasure. Play would become an earnest affair, and yet it is exactly by this play that art can best carry out its activity. Only when art fulfils its greatest aesthetic action, can it have a beneficial influence upon morality; and it can fulfil this action only when it exercises its fullest freedom. (Essays, 362) Coleridge and Schiller seem to agree upon the nature of aesthetic experience: it begins and ends in the perception of form, which is free and therefore pleasurable, and it may influence our moral life only by a feat of indirection. In fact, both go so far as to make the former a necessary condition of the latter. Only so long as aesthetic judgement is formal, pleasure disinterested, and ‘play’ free – in short, only so long as art is autonomous – will art have any bearing on matters of ethics. Schiller and Coleridge are thus similarly rejecting the kind of strict division between aesthetics and ethics constructed by Kant, or rather, similarly guarding the distinction between the two only in order to establish their ultimate interdependence. Seen in this context, the withdrawal of the aesthetic from utility which Coleridge and Schiller championed on several fronts is thus not only fundamental to their shared formalism, but also vital to another, perhaps greater concern: the potential benefit of aesthetic experience to one’s moral life. In short, the aesthetic must be autonomous in order that it may indirectly provide that benefit. But how, specifically, can art have this indirect effect? What is it about art that allows it indirectly to shape moral attitudes, influence decisions, or determine choices? Schiller says that the scope of poetry is ‘the whole of human nature’ (‘Ihr Wirkungskreis is das Total der menschlichen Natur’, from ‘On the Pathetic’, in NA, XX, 219), that by appealing at the same time to our sensuous nature and our reason it addresses altogether the entire person. Coleridge in Biographia, echoing Schiller, says that the poet, ‘described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity’ (BL, II, 5–16). Central to the anthropology advanced here is the commitment to aesthetic freedom, which is what links aesthetic experience indirectly to moral action. For in aesthetic experience we are brought face to face with the idea of freedom and, analogously, to our freedom in the moral world.

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In ‘On the Pathetic’, his greatest statement on tragedy, Schiller famously distinguishes between moral judgement on the one hand, in which we judge an action according to the moral law, and approve or disapprove accordingly; and aesthetic judgement on the other, where we only care about the possibility of moral action, not the actuality. Schiller points out that moral judgement is a constraining and ultimately sobering experience, for we continually run up against the restricting forces of our nature and so must acknowledge the limitations of our freedom. Aesthetic judgement, by contrast, is a liberating experience because in art we are free to disregard the constraints of nature and the rule of law; we do not care whether the tragic hero does right or not, only that he or she act powerfully, that in the face of great obstacles he or she acts with great force of will. Schiller makes the same point about freedom in the third and final set of the Aesthetic Letters, the letters 17–27, especially 19–23, but here he makes the innovative move of linking it to moral action. In the earlier letters, discussed in my previous chapter, Schiller brought forward and defended the autonomy of the aesthetic in terms of the transcendental deduction of beauty as ‘living form’ (lebende Gestalt) and the notion of Schein or ‘semblance’. Here Schiller now asks how the aesthetic can be educative. His thinking in these letters goes something like this. The world we live in, the reality in which we find ourselves, is by necessity limited in a number of ways. Clearly, he says, it is determined physically and morally, otherwise there would just be empty infinity and that is obviously not the case (so much we can glean from simply being conscious). Schiller then states that given this state of affairs, the point is not to escape from this world but rather to live in it in a way that is most human, in a way that is most true to ourselves. That goal, he says, is to live rationally through the exercising of our free will, in other words, to be not only creatures of sense but also of reason. Now how do we get there? We know (from the earlier letters) that we possess the Stofftrieb and the Formtrieb, the drive towards sense and that towards law, but neither on its own is of much use. For we cannot simply sense our way towards rationality: the Stofftrieb is as it were directed to materiality only and we cannot get beyond phenomena simply by observing it. But we cannot just think our way towards this goal either, for if the Formtrieb annihilates the physical altogether we would cease to exist.

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Aesthetic freedom / moral freedom

Coleridge, Schiller and Aesthetic Education

(In fact, Schiller demonstrates precisely this triumph of the Formtrieb in the suicides and executions of his most noble tragic figures, like Max Piccolomini in Wallenstein and Mary Stuart, as if the only way they can achieve the pure rational moral life is by annihilating their human existence.) The point is, we need to take a kind of gradual approach, where we can be free from the determination of the physical world, though not entirely, and free too from moral determination, again not entirely – or in other words, to maintain the determinability of the psyche but under false pretences, to enter a space where the psyche is not immediately subject to moral and physical constraint. Here is where art comes in, for it offers this momentary freedom from both physical and moral determination. It offers release from physical constraint without actually destroying life and it offers the experience of freedom without the obligation to obey the moral law: He must learn to desire more nobly, so that he may not need to will sublimely. This is brought about by means of aesthetic education, which subjects to laws of beauty all those spheres of human behaviour in which neither natural laws, nor yet rational laws, are binding upon human caprice, and which, in the form it gives to outer life, already opens up the inner. (Aesthetic Letters, XXIII.8, 169) We should not underestimate the power of being thus undetermined. For, according to Schiller, in this experience we recognize something of our divine nature and we are drawn to acknowledge that in obeying the moral law we are not acting in fear of some threatening force from outside (Aesthetic Letters, XXIV.7, 179) but rather acting in accordance with the ‘holy will’ within. Art, in other words, by virtue of its autonomy, gives an experience of absolute freedom and this experience is transferable to the moral world. Summing up the argument in the preface to the Bride of Messina, written some eight years after the Aesthetic Letters, Schiller put the matter simply thus: Die wahre Kunst aber hat es nicht bloß auf ein vorübergehendes Spiel abgesehen, es ist ihr ernst damit, den Menschen nicht bloß in einen augenblicklichen Traum von Freiheit zu versetzen, sondern ihn wirklich und in der That frei zu machen, und dieses dadurch,

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daß sie eine Kraft in ihm erweckt, übt und ausbildet, die sinnliche Welt . . . in eine objecktive Ferne zu rücken, in ein freies Werk unsers Geistes zu verwandeln, und das Materielle durch Ideen zu beherrschen. (NA, X, 8–9) Genuine art . . . does not have as its object a mere transient game. Its serious purpose is not merely to translate the human being into a momentary dream of freedom, but actually to make him free. It accomplishes this by awakening a power within him, by using and developing this power to remove to a distance of objectivity the sensory world . . . to transform the sensory world into a free creation of our spirit, and to control the material world through ideas.1 What Schiller is describing is the ‘serious purpose’ of ‘play’ or Spiel (‘es ist ihr ernst damit’), the experience of creating the rules that constrain us and of then voluntarily obeying them. How does Coleridge rework this argument? At a fundamental level he agrees with Schiller’s view that the goal of human life is to live rationally. Both characterize such a life as fulfilling the demands of the moral law not out of a sense of duty and certainly not out of fear but rather creatively, out of self-respect and self-possession. Furthermore, Coleridge sees with Schiller the obstacles for fulfilling such a goal: on the one hand a tendency to give in to the sensuous, to see oneself as determined in physical terms – by the natural world, by history, by contemporary events (a view Coleridge attributes in The Friend to materialists or ‘physiocrats’); on the other hand, the tendency to give oneself up to the tyranny of the moral law, seen as a stern law that compels obedience while denying our feeling and sensuous nature (a view Coleridge attributes in his marginalia to Kant). To give in, in either case is to deny one’s freedom of will. The need, then, is to remind oneself of one’s freedom from both in order to return to life to live rationally, out of desire not obedience. And like Schiller, Coleridge sees art as an important means for achieving this transformation. That is just the point Coleridge makes in Biographia, again in the context of his discussion of Wordsworth’s rustic language and characters. Both tend too much to the literal and the individual and in contrast Coleridge defends the ideality of art, which aims at the generic. This has the effect of freeing us from external determination. He takes

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They neither sought in comedy to make us laugh merely; much less to make us laugh by wry faces, accidents of jargon, slang phrases for the day, or the clothing of common-place morals. . . . Nor did they condescend in tragedy to wheedle away the applause of the spectators, by representing before them fac-similes of their own mean selves in all their existing meanness, or to work on their sluggish sympathies by a pathos not a whit more respectable than the maudlin tears of drunkenness. Their tragic scenes were meant to affect us indeed; but yet within the bounds of pleasure, and in union with the activity both of our understanding and imagination. They wished to transport the mind to a sense of its possible greatness, and to implant the germs of that greatness, during the temporary oblivion of the worthless ‘thing we are,’ and of the peculiar state in which each man happens to be, suspending our individual recollections and lulling them to sleep amid the music of nobler thoughts. (BL, II, 46n) The point is, aesthetic experience offers us an experience of negative freedom, freedom from determination. We are momentarily released from the prejudices, the tendency to disbelieve, the awareness of self and we are cast instead into a ‘temporary oblivion’. And in that ‘oblivion’, free from moral and physical determination, that state of aesthetic indeterminacy, we are brought to an awareness of our moral freedom. Like Schiller, then, Coleridge sees that the link between aesthetic response (our pleasure in the object) and will (our action in the world) is that freedom from determination (‘sleep’, ‘play’). In this indirect way we are made open to a ‘sense of possible greatness’. One has to stress here that for Coleridge, as for Schiller, there is no question of emptying art of its content in order to achieve this effect. Their thinking did not in this sense anticipate highly formalist art forms – though both agreed that of all the arts music came closest to freeing itself of content. Rather, the aesthetic is characterized by an attitude of the mind ready to recognize a given manifestation as an ‘illusion’. For his part, Schiller had advanced his notion of ‘semblance’ – that is, art as ideal and not anywhere real, as ‘living form’ – as the object of certain need or drive in us, the Spieltrieb. Unlike lived experience or life itself on

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for example the works of ‘the elder dramatists of England and France’ (Shakespeare, presumably, and Molière):

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the one hand (Stoff ), and the consciousness of the moral law on the other (Form), which satisfy very different but similarly earnest aspects of our personality, aesthetic ‘semblance’ satisfies our drive to step out of either world and be subject to neither the claims of sense nor the claims of duty. Coleridge does precisely the same thing. His Spieltrieb is nothing other than ‘that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith’. It is that willingness to submit oneself to the conditions laid out by another in which one suspends normal judgement and agrees instead to accept the facts on foreign terms. It satisfies our desire to set aside normal life and attribute reality to something that obviously is not, in a kind of contract with the artist. Coleridge writes, ‘the poet asks only of the reader, what as a poet he is privileged to ask: viz. that sort of negative faith in the existence of such a being, which we willingly give to productions professedly ideal’ (BL, II, 214). Coleridge’s use of the word ‘faith’ here is a good clue to how important this notion is. Faith, as he often argues, is not simply given and received; it is an act of the will and a repeated one at that, which must continually affirm its content. Likewise the suspension of our tendency to disbelieve aesthetic representation, to see through ‘illusion’, must be consciously maintained. The point is, like Schiller’s Spieltrieb, Coleridge’s ‘negative faith’ is expressly unmindful of the demands of sense and understanding (namely, that the object be real) and the demands of practical reason (that it conform to the moral law), and instead steers a path between the two.

Biographia and beyond: Schelling or Schiller? Coleridge’s distinction between ‘illusion’ and ‘delusion’, his insistence on the ideality of art, his characterization of the imagination as ‘temporary oblivion’ – all those points, in fact, where Coleridge’s theory most resembles, indeed emulates, Schiller’s work – these all occur in sections of Biographia where he is dealing specifically with Wordsworth’s poetry. They are moments of theoretical clarity that arrive in the midst of what Coleridge calls ‘practical criticism’. Schiller’s argument for ‘aesthetic education’, in other words, seems to come more to the fore when Coleridge’s mind is on practical matters, and figures only marginally in more strictly theoretical discussions, such as those in Chapters 5–13. That is not coincidental. Schiller’s uneven presence in Biographia tells us a lot about how Coleridge works, both in that

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Aesthetic Education in Biographia Literaria

Coleridge, Schiller and Aesthetic Education

text and elsewhere. I want to mention two lessons that can be drawn from it. One is that the theory and practice of Coleridge’s criticism are not so obviously divided into two rival camps, the German–philosophical– idealist theory of things (which gets into such a muddle at the end of volume one) and the British–common sense–empirical practical criticism of Wordsworth (which steals the show). As we have seen, in the criticism of Wordsworth, Coleridge invokes principles which are very clearly Schillerian in spirit, even sometimes in letter, and this attests to a real continuity between his Idealism on the one hand and his practical criticism on the other. There is a ‘division’ here in Coleridge’s thinking, running through both his practical and theoretical work, and not simply between them. 2 Secondly, Coleridge’s close similarity to Schiller in the second volume of Biographia marks the survival of Idealism’s moral agenda in spite of the failure of the transcendental deduction of the imagination in Chapters 12 and 13 and all its attendant problems. This needs some explanation. We know from close textual analysis and historical research that Coleridge wrote the philosophical chapters (that is, 5–13) after the chapters on his life (1–4) and Wordsworth’s poetry (14–22). 3 The immediate occasion for writing this new material was the need to work the text up into two volumes and it represented a welcome opportunity for Coleridge to say more about his own philosophical development. It also gave him the chance to do something he had been wanting to try for a while, that is, a transcendental deduction of the imagination, to prove once and for all from first principles how the imagination functioned, universally, and to demonstrate how it could be considered under a purposive aspect. In this Coleridge’s ambition was just like that of other post-Kantians, like Schiller, Schelling and Fichte, though of these only Schelling realized that ambition. Schelling’s justification for aesthetic experience was developed early in his career, in his System of Transcendental Idealism (System des transcendentalen Idealismus, 1800), written under the twin influences of the Jena Romantics’ aesthetic absolutism and Schiller’s Aesthetic Letters. The free play of art, he argued, which combines both the sensible and the intelligible, the conscious and the unconscious, permits the ideal to be perceived within the real; art is nothing less than a revelation of the Absolute. In the story that Schelling tells of consciousness coming to knowledge of itself, the encounter with art or ‘aesthetic intuition’

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(ästhetische Anschauung) is thus the ticket out of a life of ignorance into a life of self-knowledge, where the claims of necessity and freedom no longer pull in different directions, where subjectivity no longer feels estranged from itself. ‘Aesthetic intuition’ itself is thus an ambitious species of productive intuition that claims to deliver the highest kind of knowledge. Like ‘intellectual intuition’ (intellectuelle Anschauung), it is involved in raising subjectivity to the level of objectivity, but unlike that organ of philosophical insight, ‘aesthetic intuition’ is potentially at least the activity of all rational beings. It is more democratic, and can thus claim universal validity: ‘Art brings the whole man, as he is, to that point, namely to a realization of the highest, and this is what underlies the eternal difference and the marvel of art.’4 Coleridge used Schelling’s argument in Biographia Literaria when setting out as far as he could the transcendental deduction of the imagination, but soon regretted it. One immediate problem was Schelling’s claim that reality was not regulated by ideas but constituted by them and that the organ of that transcendent insight was the aesthetic. This amounted to an effacement of the Kantian distinction between the phenomenal and noumenal worlds, the very distinction which after all underpinned Coleridge’s dualistic view of the world. For, crucially, if art could see through their apparent difference, then there was really no way of telling where the Absolute began and where it left off. This entailed much larger metaphysical problems for Coleridge. In making ‘aesthetic intuition’ the means of transcendent insight, Schelling assumed that God, freedom and immortality were in effect concretely knowable, that the original unity of subject and object could be readily experienced. But for Coleridge the unknowableness of God needed to be preserved; God’s position as the real external guarantor of the moral rationality of the world could not be questioned by a line of thinking which saw itself in a continuum with him. Additionally, Schelling’s aesthetic absolutism seemed to dismiss radical evil and paid little attention to moral responsibility and agency. Coleridge ended by rejecting, in letters and marginalia, what he called the pantheism of Schelling’s thought – largely, as Thomas McFarland has shown, on moral grounds.5 Coleridge’s transcendental deduction failed and the failure certainly signalled the end of the sciential ambitions of a certain tendency in post-Kantian Idealism. But it did not undermine the Idealist aesthetic altogether. That theoretical work was already written into the criticism

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Aesthetic Education in Biographia Literaria

Coleridge, Schiller and Aesthetic Education

of Wordsworth in the second volume of Biographia – like the notions of ‘illusion’ and ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ and arguments for the ‘ideality’ of art. This work would constitute the continued force of Coleridge’s post-Kantian Idealist aesthetic. In fact, the failure on Coleridge’s part to remain faithful to Schelling’s transcendental deduction in volume one points up the reliance of the Idealist aesthetic elsewhere in Biographia on the less rigorous, more flexible, indeed more intuitive method of Schiller. For Coleridge, as for Schiller, the dream of an objective standard of taste passed without fulfilment – the inter-subjective basis for aesthetic experience could only be postulated, not proven – but that did not mean abandoning the shared enterprise, namely, to make plain the potential moral purpose of the autonomous aesthetic sphere established by Kant. The commitment to the ideality of art, in other words, was not fundamentally compromised by the fact that it did not have transcendental status. In short, despite the evident failures, Coleridge managed in Biographia to convey the potential of art indirectly to affect moral life, while neatly disguising these Schillerian terms of reference in the criticism of Wordsworth’s poetry. After Biographia Literaria Coleridge continued to work on this problem in post-Kantian aesthetics, often finding his way back to Schiller’s argument via Schelling or reflections of his own. As in Biographia, Schiller in these cases emerges as the unseen partner in Coleridge’s attempt to think past the confines of Kantian formalism while still maintaining his commitment to aesthetic autonomy. One such occasion is the lecture of 10 March 1818, often referred to as On Poesy or Art. The syllabus promised a lecture on ‘The reciprocal Relations of Poetry and Philosophy to each other; and of both to Religion, and the Moral Sense’, as if Coleridge had Schiller in mind from the outset. When he came to prepare it, though, the text to hand was an essay by Schelling, On the Relation of the Plastic Arts to Nature (Über das Verhältniss der bildenden Künste zu der Natur, first given as a lecture in 1806 and published in 1807). As he had earlier in his System of Transcendental Idealism of 1800 and the lectures on art given in 1803–4, Schelling here sets out to defend the epistemological and moral consequences of aesthetic experience. He begins by casting doubt on mimetic theories of aesthetic production: that is merely to copy the dead forms for nature (natura naturata). But aestheticism is no better and Schelling expresses suspicions of the ‘outer harmony’ that can so easily be achieved in a

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work of art and so easily praised by the formalist critic. Form ought never distract us from what is truly beautiful, he says, namely, essence. In fact, the final goal of art is the consumption of form by something greater than itself, which Schelling calls ‘the universal, the vision and expression of the indwelling spirit of nature’ (natura naturans).6 Essence, Schelling later asserts, outgrows form (‘das Wesen überwächst wohl die Form’) in order to reveal the ‘spirit of nature’, the Naturgeist. In his notes for his own lecture, Coleridge similarly argues that art transcends its own formal presentation, that, in other words, it bears the trace of external determination: The Idea that puts the forms together, can not be itself form – It is above Form, is its Essence, the Universal in the Individual, Individuality itself – the Glance and the Exponent of the indwelling Power – (Lects Lit, II, 223) That statement, near the heart of Coleridge’s argument, is clearly drawn from the Schelling text. What is particular about this situation, though, is how close Schelling actually stands to Schiller, whose work of the previous decade he clearly knew. For one, Schelling’s dialectical approach in the essay mirrors that of Schiller in the Aesthetic Letters, where the reasoning proceeds by way of propositions and counterpropositions. Schelling also works through the same presuppositions that ground the Aesthetic Letters, notably, the inadequacy of representations of outward nature and, equally, the insufficiency of any theory of art that defines beauty exclusively according to formal properties. Moreover, Schelling’s argument here for the purposiveness of art, as revealing a single true essence or in Coleridge’s words ‘the indwelling power’, runs in parallel to the thrust of Schiller’s work in general: that far from being an end in itself, aesthetic autonomy is the condition by which art can indirectly produce moral effects. In fact, later in the essay Schelling asserts explicitly this connection between the moral and the aesthetic. With a nod in the direction of Schiller’s essay On Grace and Dignity, he defines beauty as ‘the perfect permeation of moral goodness with sensuous charm’. 7 The presence of Schiller’s arguments here complicates the story normally told of Coleridge’s exclusive reliance on Schelling. At the time of his 1818 lecture, Coleridge had already begun to grow suspicious of the

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pantheism implicit in Schelling’s system and would soon break ranks entirely from his Naturphilosophie. Nevertheless, in planning his lecture on ‘The reciprocal Relations of Poetry and Philosophy to . . . Religion, and the Moral Sense’, Coleridge did draw on Schelling – not, though, to repeat the mistake in Biographia Literaria of identifying intelligence with nature, but rather to pursue further the argument for art’s purposiveness that dominated Schelling’s essay. And for that argument Schelling – and Coleridge – had Schiller to thank. On another occasion, also around 1818, Coleridge can again be found reworking Schiller’s argument in his own terms: in the ‘Essays on Method’ included in the revised edition of The Friend (material salvaged from the corrupted version published in John Stoddart’s Encyclopaedia Metropolitana). Again Coleridge conceptualizes art in terms of a relationship between ‘idea’ and ‘form’ – though now no longer under Schelling’s influence. In setting out on the subject of ‘Method’, Coleridge soon departs from the practical business of organizing an encyclopaedia in order to observe how different kinds of material demand different kinds of methodological approaches. Things, he says, relate to each other in a variety of ways and we have to alter our perspective accordingly. Having introduced ‘Method’ as ‘the relations of things’, Coleridge begins to describe two kinds of relations: ‘Law’ and ‘Theory’. Relations according to ‘Law’ have to do with the fundamental ideas of things, ideas that not only originate in the mind but also continue to exist in and for the mind alone. In its ideal form this ‘Law’ comprehends all possibilities and thus all true science depends upon relations that proceed according to it. Its method is intuitive (Friend, I, 459–60). Relations according to ‘Theory’ are different: they are found between existing forms and qualities of objects and reveal to the discerning eye an established order. The method of ‘Theory’ is experimental. ’Law’ and ‘Theory’ correspond to Coleridge’s ‘Reason’ (contemplating immediate truths and ultimate ends, so far as that is possible) and ‘Understanding’ (arranging and judging the various parts of material reality), as set out in The Statesman’s Manual (SM, 60–1). But they also rework Schiller’s distinction between the Formtrieb and Stofftrieb. For as ‘Law’ is about discerning things eternal and immutable, the Formtrieb is about preserving freedom, acquainting ourselves with objective laws, knowing all possibilities unbound by individuality and time. And just as ‘Theory’ has to do with materiality, time-bound and mutable, Stofftrieb is about incessant change; it is the drive to limit and contain

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by surfeit of sensation (Aesthetic Letters, XII, 78–83). Thus Schiller’s Triebe might be understood as an application in psychological terms of Coleridge’s philosophical principles of method: both are necessary to life but lead in opposite directions. Proceeding dialectically, Coleridge then tries to establish what lies between his ‘Law’ and his ‘Theory’: Between these two lies the Method in the FINE ARTS, which belongs indeed to this second or external relation, because the effect and position of the parts is always more or less influenced by the knowledge and experience of their previous qualities; but which nevertheless constitute a link connecting the second form of relation with the first. For in all, that truly merits the name of Poetry in its most comprehensive sense, there is a necessary predominance of the Ideas (i.e. of that which originates in the artist himself), and a comparative indifference of the materials. (Friend, I, 464) At least ideally – and, like Schiller, Coleridge has no qualms about being prescriptive rather than descriptive – poetry does not proceed according to the sensuous and inconstant relations of ‘Theory’, nor according to the pure and eternal forms of ‘Law’, but rather according to relations that participate in both. Or, to replace Coleridge’s terms with Schiller’s, the arts are undeniably, even necessarily, Stoff or matter (the ‘knowledge and experience of their previous qualities’) and equally, even ultimately in a certain way, Gestalt or form (those predominant ‘Ideas’). Translated into psychological terms, this ‘Method in the FINE ARTS’ that unites matter and form becomes something like the Spieltrieb, that balance of sensuous and formal drives. It gives rise to an area of free space, an intermediate plane where we can play with possibilities without either committing ourselves fully to sensuous experience or submitting ourselves openly to moral responsibility. Perhaps it is in this context that Coleridge’s description of the ‘imagination’ is best understood: it is that effort ‘to reconcile opposites and to leave a middle state of mind more strictly appropriate to the imagination than any other when it is hovering between two images: as soon as it . . . is fixed on one it becomes understanding and when it is waving between them attaching itself to neither it is imagination’ (Lects Lit, I, 311).

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Coleridge, Schiller and Aesthetic Education

The programme for ‘aesthetic education’ that I have been sketching leaves little room for didactic art. In fact, Schiller and Coleridge spent a great deal of their critical energy in battling contemporary forms of didactic writing and these objections, though less theorized than the arguments we have looked at so far, nevertheless form an important part of their case for ‘aesthetic education’. Most obviously, objecting to didacticism gave both thinkers scope to rearticulate a notion of aesthetic ‘play’. It also, though, entailed a certain amount of self-incrimination: after all, Coleridge and Schiller were themselves the authors of some blatantly didactic poetry. The highly influential work of eighteenth-century theorists like James Beattie and Alexander Gerard, which characterized art as a path to virtue, helped to popularize the moralizing mission of art, and their theory was accordingly accompanied by the growing production throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries of didactic literature, both in Britain and on the continent. This agenda was especially evident in collections of ‘moral tales’, books written for the moral education of children by such well-known figures as Anton Wall and Maria Edgeworth, as well as in Christian epics, such as Richard Cumberland’s Calvary and Klopstock’s Der Messias (The Messiah). It was also plain in the efforts of such figures as Hannah More, seeking to instruct the working class via cheap and affordable moral verse, and Anna Letitia Barbauld, whose series The British Novelists was to disseminate a moral view of the world compatible with the seriousness of rational Dissent. This body of work had real and important consequences, particularly in establishing new reading audiences among the working class and children, in helping to foster the Sunday School movement and in offering access to a public discourse for women writers. But there was, inevitably, a confrontation with the aesthetic idealism of Coleridge and Schiller. For them, sacrificing aesthetic autonomy for the sake of communicating a given moral truth was as objectionable as the vice such stories or poems aimed to dispel. Coleridge made that point in a lecture in 1808: I infinitely prefer the little books of ‘The Seven Champions of Christendom’, ‘Jack the Giant Killer’, etc., etc. – for at least they make the

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child forget himself – to your moral tales where a good little boy comes in and says, ‘Mama, I met a poor beggar man and gave him the sixpence you gave me yesterday. Did I do right?’ – ‘O, yes, my dear; to be sure you did.’ This is not virtue, but vanity; such books and such lessons do not teach goodness, but – if I might venture such a word – goodyness. (Lects Lit, I, 107–8)8 The point is, whatever the virtue is of giving to beggars, simply going over the facts does nothing to improve the heart. Concepts of themselves do nothing to encourage good action and stories that make the attempt do not deserve to be described in aesthetic terms. Schiller, for his part, makes the same complaint about didactic poetry. In On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry, he instances Haller, Kleist and Klopstock as culpable in this regard: ‘Involuntarily imagination crowds out sense and thought feeling, and they close their eyes and ears to sink into internal reflection’ (Elias, 129; ‘Unwillkührlich drängt sich die Phantasie der Anschauung, die Denkkraft der Empfindung zuvor, und man verschließt Auge und Ohr, um betrachtend in sich selbst zu versinken’, NA, XX, 452). What is objectionable is that the poets cease to represent their subject and instead give themselves over to reflecting upon it. There is an intrusion of the concepts of the understanding that immediately deadens the poetry: ‘thus cold thought . . . deadens the living creation of poetic power, and reflection disrupts the secret labor of feeling’ (Elias, 132; ‘so entseelt der kalte Gedanke eben so oft wieder die lebendige Schöpfung der Dichtungskraft, und die Reflexion stört das geheime Werk der Empfindung’, NA, XX, 455). Coleridge, too, would criticize Klopstock for the same reason (BL, II, 133–4). But didacticism in poetry was not a problem from which they were themselves immune. It is the bane of ‘sentimental’ poets, those whose acute self-consciousness impels them to introduce their own reflections into their work. The ‘sentimental’ poet can, in other words, be too sentimental and end up spoiling everything; the ‘naïve’ poet, on the other hand, who does not presume to interfere conceptually with the work in progress, is much less likely to make that sort of mistake. The risk of didacticism constitutes an important qualification, then, of Schiller’s otherwise determined defence in On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry of modern poetic consciousness. Left unchecked, it will tend to nullify the aesthetic altogether in an excess of thought.

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Aesthetic Education in Biographia Literaria

Coleridge, Schiller and Aesthetic Education

As ‘sentimental’ poets given to precisely this kind of excess, both Coleridge and Schiller act out their own worst fears. In his great poems on philosophical themes, for example, such as ‘The Gods of Greece’, ‘The Artists’ or ‘The Ideal and Real Life’, Schiller struggles to hold in check the tendency to conceptualize. When he is successful, the result is a compelling lyric, such as ‘The Ideals’ (1796). But when he is not, a didactic voice takes over, as in these lines from ‘The Walk’ describing the French Revolution: Deiner heiligen Zeichen, o Wahrheit, hat der Betrug sich Angemaßt, der Natur köstlichste Stimmen entweiht, Die das bedürftige Herz in der Freude Drang sich erfindet, Kaum giebt wahres Gefühl noch durch Verstummen sich kund. Auf der Tribune prahlet das Recht, in der Hütte die Eintracht, Des Gesetzes Gespenst steht an der Könige Thron. (NA, IIi, 312–13, ll. 157–62) All thy holy symbols, oh Truth, Deceit has adopted, And has e’en dar’d to pollute Nature’s own voices so fair, That the craving heart in the tumult of gladness discovers; True sensations are now mute and can scarcely be heard. Justice boasts at the tribune, and Harmony vaunts in the cottage, While the ghost of the law stands at the throne of the king. (Bowring, 214) Coleridge might have called that sermoni propriora (which Lamb translated as ‘properer for a sermon’). Art that teaches a lesson rather than lingers in possibilities, that addresses the moral sense instead of the passions, that in short is instructive rather than playful, is not in fact art at all and would more suitably serve its pedagogical aim if it took the form of a sermon. What one must remember about that tart phrase, though, is that before Coleridge ever applied it to the work of Bowles or Dyer he used it to describe a poem of his own, ‘Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement’ (PW, I, 106).9 Like Schiller, Coleridge often overcame that tendency in his poetry, or else, as in the conclusion of ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, employed it with apparent irony, but certainly not always. In ‘Fears in Solitude’ for instance Coleridge lapses, notoriously, into a diatribe against the French:

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Stand forth! be men! repel an impious foe, Impious and false, a light yet cruel race, Who laugh away all virtue, mingling mirth With deeds of murder; and still promising Freedom, themselves too sensual to be free, Poison life’s amities, and cheat the heart Of faith and quiet hope, and all that soothes, And all that lifts the spirit! (PW, I, 260–1, ll. 139–46) The right response to that is a literal one: to join the army. However much of an embarrassment these sorts of passages are to his theoretical objection to didacticism, Coleridge by no means excised them; indeed, he went on publishing them alongside his more obviously successful poems throughout his lifetime. ‘The Destiny of Nations’, that early poem so replete with concepts of the understanding, was first published in full in Sibylline Leaves (1817). In short, in their work as both theorists and poets, Coleridge and Schiller characterized didacticism as a kind of pitfall into which the ‘sentimental’ poet in particular was liable to fall. This complicates our picture of the sort of ‘high Romanticism’ Coleridge and Schiller can be said to stand for. Juliet Sychrava, for example, has argued that Coleridge and Schiller established a dominant way of thinking that valued only aesthetic interiority, and in doing so discounted the ‘naïve’ genius of John Clare and various women poets. 10 But is that entirely true? In exposing the imminent threat of didacticism for the modern poet, Coleridge and Schiller sought in fact to curb the ‘sentimental’. The very fact that by their own standards their poetry sometimes indulged in too much self-reflection, too much thought – it was not, as it were, ‘naïve’ enough – suggests the very limitations of that dominant mode. In other words, their objections to the didactic articulate, and their own didactic poetry illustrates, the potential shortcomings of modern, ‘sentimental’ poetry. So far I have been considering the didactic as a kind of style, characterized by obvious moral or conceptual content, that art can fall into for various reasons: moral-mindedness, as in the case of Klopstock’s biblical epic and ‘moral tales’ for children; or a kind of crippling interiority, as in the case of some Idealist poetry. Objecting to it, as Coleridge and Schiller do, does not necessarily amount to an argument

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Aesthetic Education in Biographia Literaria

Coleridge, Schiller and Aesthetic Education

for ‘aesthetic education’. But the didactic can also figure in terms of judgement, as a criterion for determining whether a given piece of art is good or not. Coleridge and Schiller argue against the didactic in this sense, too. And in resisting literalistic and moralistic ways of reading, both begin to articulate in more positive terms the key idea of their aesthetic, ‘play’. This can be seen in the episode when Coleridge crossed swords with Anna Letitia Barbauld over the morality of Fielding’s Tom Jones. With a classical education given by her father, a dissenting minister, Barbauld was one of the most well-read, outspoken and industrious literary figures of the period. True to the rationalist Dissenting tradition in which she was brought up, she retained a stern moralist’s view of art that admitted nothing other than the right as a criterion for judgement. Her pronouncements rankled Coleridge, even provoked him, and he often invoked them as straw men in the course of making his own arguments. Such was the case when she famously complained that ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ had no moral. Coleridge’s laconic reply – that quite on the contrary it had too much (TT, I, 273) – was not so much a refutation of her view, or an expression of regret about the last lines of the poem, as an ironic refutation of the criterion of her judgement: poems are not supposed to have morals. He said the same of Tom Jones. On repeated occasions Barbauld had deprecated Fielding’s novel for giving too clear and absorbing a picture of vice; by contrast, she paid tribute to the morality of Richardson’s novels on the grounds that they accurately described human feeling.11 Whenever Coleridge could he countered this view – in conversation, letters, lectures, and once, while perusing the novel around 1816–17, in marginalia: this novel is, and, indeed, pretends to be, no exemplar of conduct. . . . I do loath the cant which can recommend Pamela and Clarissa Harlowe as strictly moral, though they poison the imagination of the young with continued dose of tinct. lyttae, while Tom Jones is prohibited as loose. I do not speak of young women; – but a young man whose heart or feelings can be injured, or even passions excited, by aught in this novel, is already thoroughly corrupt. There is a cheerful, sun-shiny, breezy spirit that prevails everywhere, strongly contrasted with the close, hot, day-dreamy continuity of Richardson . . . I dare believe, that no young man who consulted his heart & Conscience only, without adverting to what the World

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would say – could rise from the perusal of Fielding’s Tom Jones, Joseph Andrews, And Amelia, without feeling himself a better man – at least, without an intense conviction that he could not be guilty of a base Act. (CM, II, 692–3) It is not immediately clear why Coleridge thinks, presumably, that young women readers can be corrupted by Tom Jones while young men cannot be – this is an instance of the way arguments for ‘aesthetic education’ can unwittingly reflect conventional presumptions about gender differentiation, a topic I will return to at greater length in a later chapter. Coleridge’s broader contention here is that Tom Jones does not offer models for action, either good or bad, that might be followed or indeed emulated in real life: we do not rise from the reading ready to go into action at all. Readers, so far from being compelled to identify with the extraordinary events themselves, are drawn rather to reflect upon their own freedom from the determination under which the characters, especially Tom himself, are constrained and compelled to exert their own independence. For Coleridge, one’s approach to Tom Jones is a good indication of what can be expected from art. If the judgement is morally grounded, the novel is likely to disappoint. By contrast, if it is aesthetic, attentive to the play between fiction and real life, the novel offers readers a sense of freedom from themselves. Coleridge made the same distinction publicly, in the 1808 lectures on the principles of poetry. He named Barbauld explicitly as someone who was asking the wrong questions of art, and again defended Fielding against Richardson. He also invoked Shakespeare alongside Fielding as one whose art frees us from self-interest. This is the report of the lecture by Henry Crabb Robinson: R[ichardson] . . . evinces an exquisite perception of minute feeling but there is a want of harmony, a vulgarity in his sentiment. He is only interesting. Sh[akespeare]: on the contrary, elevates and instructs – instead of referring to our ordinary situations and common feelings, he emancipates us from them and, when most remote from ordinary life, is most interesting. I should observe this depreciation of the interesting in poetry is one of the most characteristic features of the new German criticism. It is always opposed by Schiller, etc., to the beautiful and is considered as a very subordinate merit

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Aesthetic Education in Biographia Literaria

Coleridge, Schiller and Aesthetic Education

indeed. . . . C. took occasion on mentioning R[ichardson] to express his opinion of the immorality of his novels. ‘The higher and lower passions of our nature are kept thro’ 7 or 8 volumes on a hot-bed of interest.’ Fielding is far less pernicious, ‘for the gusts of laughter drive away Sensuality’. (Lects Lit, I, 118) For Coleridge Shakespeare exemplifies this suspended drive to grasp material reality, this withdrawal of personal interest from aesthetic experience. Precisely because he does not appeal to our own experience can he awaken a far wider interest in the poetry, one that transcends any personal preoccupation. Coleridge’s term ‘interesting’ here seems to describe two different things: impersonal, objective interest in all life beyond our own (which Shakespeare invites) and personal interest in our own ‘ordinary life’ (which Shakespeare disregards). The first is the province of art, for it permits entry into a free realm of possibilities; the second is the province of pedagogy, acquainting limitless possibility with liability and contingency. It is not directly involved in aesthetic experience and thus rightly opposed to the beautiful. The mention of Schiller here is striking, though it is not, as one might first expect, a remark made by Coleridge himself. It is rather a line of commentary by Robinson who in reporting on the lecture to Mrs Clarkson adds for her benefit a word about ‘the new German criticism’. Widely read in German Idealist aesthetics, having recently spent a year studying in German universities, Robinson was well placed to observe Coleridge’s and Schiller’s similar dismissal of ‘the interesting in poetry’. By coincidence, they even drew on the same illustrations. In his lectures on aesthetics in 1793, Schiller had compared Fielding and Richardson on the same grounds that Coleridge would: Ein Charakter ist dann schön, wenn er uns mehr Liebe als Achtung einflößt, wie der Charakter Cäsars gegen den des Cato, welcher mehr abschreckende demüthigende Strenge zeigt, oder wie der des Tom Jones gegen den des Grandison. Daher verwechselt man oft Handlungen der Neigung, weil sie der Nature weniger zu kosten scheinen, mit den schönen. Die Sinnlichkeit muß auch bei moralischen Handlungen frei erscheinen, ob sie es gleich nicht ist; Freiheit erwirbt auch hier das Prädikat der Schönheit. (NA, XXI, 73)

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A character is beautiful when he inclines us to love rather than to esteem, as for example the character of Caesar as opposed to that of Cato, which is distinguished by a more forbidding and humbling austerity, or the character of Tom Jones as opposed to that of Grandison. Hence it is that one often confounds the beautiful with actions arising from inclination, since they seem to cost Nature less. Sensuousness must appear free also in relation to moral actions, if it is not the same; freedom acquires also here the predicate of beauty. The point about Tom Jones is that in contrast to Richardson’s unimpeachable Grandison, he does not invite a studied moral response so much as an aesthetic one, love. With Fielding we exercise aesthetic judgement and this provides a neat instance of the condition of the beautiful, namely freedom from moral determination. It is not surprising that in listening to Coleridge’s lecture Robinson should think of Schiller. In opposing the didactic in art and championing instead the disinterestedness characteristic of aesthetic experience, Coleridge naturally found himself reworking Schiller’s argument. For like Coleridge, and perhaps even more fiercely than him, Schiller insisted that any attempt to enlist art into the service of pedagogy would compromise such aesthetic experience. As he argued in his essay ‘On the Grounds of Pleasure in Tragic Objects’, moral art is no longer free: Die wohlgemeinte Absicht, das Moralischgute überall als höchsten Zweck zu verfolgen, die in der Kunst schon so manches Mittelmäßige erzeugte und in Schutz nahm, hat auch in der Theorie einen ähnlichen Schaden angerichtet. Um den Künsten einen recht hohen Rang anzuweisen, um ihnen die Gunst des Staats, die Ehrfurcht aller Menschen zu erwerben, vertreibt man sie aus ihrem eigenthümlichen Gebieth, um ihnen einen Beruf aufzudringen, der ihnen fremd und ganz unnatürlich ist. (NA, XX, 134) The admirable intention of pursuing the morally good as the highest aim, which in art has already produced and defended much mediocrity, has also in theory caused similar damage. To assign this high place to the arts, to demand on their behalf the favour of governments and the respect of all people, is to drive them out of their

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Aesthetic Education in Biographia Literaria

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The result of such a mistaken, ultimately utilitarian approach to art might be something like a national theatre. The notion of a particularly German drama that would, like that of ancient Greece, improve civic pride as much as public taste had in fact been the subject of some debate in the 1780s. And in an early essay from that period (written before he had read Kant) Schiller himself declared his enthusiastic and optimistic support for the plan.12 But ten years later he withdrew the support. The reversal points to his increasing impatience with the didactic. No doubt Greek poetry owed its appeal and perhaps even its excellence to the national themes it specialized in, but as he explained in ‘On the Pathetic’, this ‘advantage’ of national interest nevertheless rendered the poetry didactic: Wehe dem griechischen Kunstgenie, wenn es vor dem Genius der neuern nichts weiter als diesen zufälligen Vortheil voraus hätte, und wehe dem griechischen Kunstgeschmack, wenn er durch diese historischen Beziehungen in den Werken seiner Dichter erst hätte gewonnen werden müssen! Nur ein barbarischer Geschmack braucht den Stachel des Privatinteresse, um zu der Schönheit hingelockt zu werden. (NA, XX, 219) So much the worse for Greek genius, if it had nothing on modern genius but this accidental advantage, and so much the worse for Greek taste, if it needed to find in the works of its poets such links with national history. Only a barbarous taste needs the prick of personal interest to find beauty alluring. (Essays, 165) To Schiller this materialistic conception of aesthetic experience, the pernicious effect of didacticism in art, is epitomized in the notion of a contemporary national theatre. Its dependence upon personal interest and its self-proclaimed goal of instruction and improvement – in short, its utilitarian foundation – violates everything he deems integral to aesthetic experience. In thus rejecting the national theatre, along with all

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particular sphere in order to force upon them a calling that is foreign and quite unnatural. (Essays, 361)

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forms of didacticism, Schiller again withdraws the aesthetic from notions of utility and, like Coleridge, demands the freedom and independence of aesthetic experience. Schiller drove that point home in his theory of tragedy and in his own historical dramas. In ‘On Tragic Art’, he argued that we must not expect the events of a historical tragedy to be factual. It would be ridiculous to demand historische Wahrheit, or ‘accuracy’ as Coleridge might translate the term, from the poet whose task it is to move and thereby delight us (‘zu rühren, und durch Rührung zu ergötzen’), not to give instruction (‘unterrichten’) (NA, XX, 166–7). In practice Schiller stuck to his theory: his Wallenstein trilogy is true to the spirit of Wallenstein’s career – his ambition, his astrology, his reluctance to reveal his own hand, his loyalty to those around him, his naïve trust in Octavio and Butler, are all more or less accurate – and yet the main interest of the play, the conflict between Wallenstein’s toying with rebellion on the one hand and the force of external events on the other, is hardly history proper, more the product of the playwright’s creation. In subsequent dramas Schiller went even further, actually defying history in the name of poetic licence: his Mary Stuart, for instance, is granted an audience with Elizabeth, contrary to all the historical evidence, and Joan of Arc is not burnt at the stake but ascends into heaven. These departures from history are rather extreme and Schiller himself, judging from the defensive tone in his letters about The Maid of Orleans, felt they needed special pleading. But even though they are startling, most of these liberties are admitted by audiences, on Schiller’s own grounds. As Coleridge said in his lectures, ‘pure historic drama had its own laws’ (Lects Lit, II, 286). To sum up, ‘aesthetic education’ functions as a way of rescuing the modern self from its fear of external determination. By regaining psychic balance through the experience of the aesthetic, one re-emerges into moral relations with greater poise. I have pointed out how Coleridge and Schiller similarly articulated this indirect relation between the aesthetic and the ethical. And by evoking a sense of Schiller’s aesthetic education in volume two of Biographia Literaria (the Wordsworth criticism) and in the lectures on literature, I have suggested that while this is not a question of plagiarism, Coleridge nevertheless developed his own aesthetic in the tradition of Schiller’s thought which he knew very well. Just how far this had become a part of his own thinking becomes clear when one reads the later literary lectures, where Coleridge claims

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In the education of children . . . much is effected by works of imagination; – that they carry the mind out of self, and show the possible of the good and the great in the human character. The height, whatever it may be, of the imaginative standard will do no harm; we are commanded to imitate one who is imitable. We should address ourselves to those faculties in a child’s mind, which are first awakened by nature, and consequently first admit of cultivation, that is to say, the memory and the imagination. . . . In the imagination of man exist the seeds of all moral and scientific improvement. . . . The imagination is the distinguishing characteristic of man as a progressive being; and I repeat that it ought to be carefully guided and strengthened as the indispensable means and instrument of continued amelioration and refinement. (Lects Lit, II, 192–3) With its emphasis on self-transcendence and progress, this assertion restates the conclusions of Schiller’s ‘aesthetic education’. What Coleridge was promoting in these lectures and in Biographia Literaria, like Schiller in the Aesthetic Letters, essays and later historical tragedies, is a radical education that, by acquainting us with possibilities, provides us with the ground for human change. The kind of autonomous aesthetic that both thinkers developed is ultimately connected to human action, but only indirectly – an indeterminate space of ‘free play’, an area where activity is unfettered by physical or moral constraints the result of which would be pleasure, not utility.

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that the imagination acquaints us with human potential and, particularly when evoked in children, becomes the means of reaching beyond given limitations:

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Speaking in 1831, Coleridge once expressed the paradox that in the liberal market economy the arts rarely thrive, in spite of the social and political freedom they might enjoy: The darkest despotism on the continent has done more for the cultivation and elevation of the Fine Arts, than the English Government. A great musical composer in Germany and in Italy is a great man in society; a dignity and rank is universally conceded to him. Without that sort of encouragement and patronage such arts as music and painting never will come to great eminence. In this country there is no reverence for the Fine Arts, and the base spirit of a money-amassing philosophy would meet any proposition for the fostering of Art by the commercial maxim of Laissez faire – Paganini indeed will make a fortune, because he can actually sell his notes; but Mozart himself might have languished in a garret for any thing that would have been done for him here. (TT, I, 224) The apparent inability of liberal government to foster the arts was, to Coleridge, particularly grating in Britain since it prided itself on the ancient personal freedoms preserved in the constitution. But that is not to say that ‘despotism’ was any sort of solution. Coleridge’s point is that the liberal market economy deals only in monetary value and so cannot take into its calculations the worth of aesthetic artefacts – with predictably disastrous consequences. 141

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Coleridge’s ‘Aesthetic State’

Coleridge, Schiller and Aesthetic Education

There is a crucial distinction at work here between ‘cultivation’ and ‘civilization’, between human achievement which escapes commerce (Mozart) and that which constitutes it (Paganini). The implication is that if after all ‘cultivation’ is to be both preserved and fostered, one must intervene to some extent in the market economy, to interrupt the cash valuation of aesthetic production and to assert its cultural worth. In The Friend (1809–10, 1818) Coleridge would call upon government to take that responsibility and in the Lay Sermons (1816, 1817) he would ask the landed interests to do so; later in Church and State (1829) the task of cultivating the nation independent of commercial interests would fall to a newly conceived body of educators, the ‘clerisy’. The subject of this chapter is how, in Coleridge’s view, ‘aesthetic education’ was to be carried out on a national scale. In earlier chapters I showed how much of Schiller’s work was available to Coleridge and how his own aesthetics developed out of a concern he shared with Schiller for theorizing art’s indirect moral effects. My argument here is that Coleridge’s mature social thought continues to build on Schiller’s argument for the humanizing, indeed socializing, effects of aesthetic experience. Such a claim is self-evidently true on a superficial level, for both Coleridge and Schiller, like many other thinkers in the period, maintained that art is more or less a good thing and that it is in the interests of the nation as much as the individual to cultivate and foster it on a broad scale. But I shall pursue that claim in greater particularity. I want first to consider Schiller’s own argument for Bildung as a social and political force and to identify some of the ambiguities and implications of it. Then I shall turn to Coleridge, invoking the Schillerian heritage implicit in some of the key notions of his mature social thought, specifically his distinction between ‘cultivation’ and ‘civilization’ and (in the next chapter) the notion of the ‘clerisy’. Realigning Coleridge’s thought in this period with the Idealist tradition helps to uncover the liberal potential in much of his political and religious views. Though in one regard his opinion, like Schiller’s, mirrored the prejudice of the age: women were largely excluded from the ‘Aesthetic State’. In pursuing such a claim there can be no question, though, of effacing the obvious historical, intellectual and temperamental differences that separated the social thought of both men. Schiller wrote his Aesthetic Letters in the wake of the violence of the French Revolution and his programme aimed at restoring social order in a way that would contain the extremism of both reactionary monarchism and violent republicanism.

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Coleridge, by contrast, writing more than 20 years later, confronted a very different range of social pressures: the post-war depression, the spread of industrialization and the rise in the ‘commercial spirit’ on the one side, parliamentary reform and Catholic emancipation on the other. There is a gap, too, between Schiller’s aesthetic humanism and Coleridge’s religiously grounded social thought, though as I shall argue Schiller was neither so hostile to religious ‘culture’, nor Coleridge so fully Anglican, as some commentators suggest. Also, Schiller’s unsystematic reflections on social and political matters, often indirectly conveyed in the aesthetic essays and tending towards utopian formulations, contrast markedly with Coleridge’s more voluminous and more direct pronouncements on public themes. It is precisely because of such differences, though, that instead of simply noting where the two agree, I characterize Coleridge’s relationship to Schiller in terms of the continuity and elaboration of a specific tradition, one that Coleridge had known from the early part of his career. Coleridge in his mature social thought drew on Schiller’s project, but he also redefined it. In reworking the notion of Bildung in terms of ‘cultivation’, ‘civilization’ and the ‘clerisy’, he gave the tradition a direction of his own choosing, extending and elaborating it as he deemed appropriate in Britain on the eve of reform. Coleridge’s ‘Aesthetic State’ differs from Schiller’s but it is also in a sense a completion of it, as the political ambiguities of the Aesthetic Letters give way to the specific ‘reforms’ of Church and State.

Bildung and politics Heidi Robinson has argued that Schiller’s English readers have repeatedly and routinely misunderstood his notion of Bildung, interpreting it exclusively in the sense of ‘self-cultivation’ and disregarding its larger social and political designs.1 That argument is convincing and remains pertinent, for in spite of recent work in English by Lesley Sharpe, F. J. Lamport and others, Schiller’s reputation among scholars who are not Germanists remains for the most part that of a naïve Idealist caught in the Romantic cult of the self. In the interests of resisting such inaccurate aestheticist versions of Schiller’s work which are still current in AngloAmerican scholarship of the period and of reasserting its potential radicalism, I would like to demonstrate the implicit social significance of Schiller’s commitment to the ‘Aesthetic State’. For as Eric Meyer, Richard Gray and others have argued, in its attention to the non-literal,

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non-discursive aspect of our experience of art, Schiller’s theory enacts a resistance to received forms of self-knowledge and opens up the possibility of non-repressive forms of association.2 Schiller comes round to describing his view of the Staat des schönen Scheins, the ‘state of aesthetic semblance’, only at the very end of the Aesthetic Letters. Earlier, as I have outlined in the previous chapters, Schiller sketches a programme for reform based on the awakening and development at the individual level of the ‘play drive’, which he describes as the delight in aesthetic semblance. This will restore psychic balance and presumably lead to social harmony. In the penultimate letter Schiller begins to describe that process in more concrete terms: the individual gradually gains independence from materiality both in the physical and economic sense (which he calls äussere Freiheit or ‘outer freedom’, that is, the freedom to engage in non-work related activity), and in the mental sense (which he calls innere Freiheit, or ‘inner freedom’, that is, the ability to find pleasure in things admittedly not real). As the ‘play drive’ or Spieltrieb develops and strengthens, the individual not only finds pleasure in the aesthetic object but is emboldened actually to create it, and hence is born the nachahmende Bildungstrieb or the ‘shaping spirit of imitation’ (Aesthetic Letters, XXVI.7, 194–5). Schiller then asks what would happen if this occurred not simply discretely in individuals but collectively. This is the subject of his final letter: the transition from subjective aesthetic experience to the ‘Aesthetic State’. First Schiller points out that, in spite of all that he has said about the autonomy of the aesthetic, there is really no need to fear that a fully developed ‘play drive’ will distract one from the more pressing concerns of social and political life. We are, as he says, chained to the world and the whole point about aesthetic experience is that it recognizes this bond without limiting us to it. If the aesthetic draws us out of the world momentarily, it nevertheless sends us back to it empowered. Schiller then sketches in anthropological terms the three stages of social development through which humanity is seen to progress. First there is the instinctual life of mere compulsion, in which humanity is driven to satisfy physical want through whatever nature provides. The second stage is reached when a surplus in material provisions permits humanity to look around and notice not only things but the appearance of things. Transcending at least the moment of immediate need, humanity begins to take a passive, physical pleasure

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in the surroundings and in small objects fashioned out of nature. Schiller calls this the sinnliche Spieltrieb, or the ‘physical play drive’, a delight in the association of ideas, in grotesque shapes, glaring contrasts and songs full of feeling (Aesthetic Letters, XXVII.4, 210–11). Having begun to take pleasure in the forms of things around, humanity then feels the urge not only to find but to cause this pleasure, first through possessions and then through character. The birth of this impulse, the ästhetische Spieltrieb, or the ‘aesthetic play drive’, is the third and final stage. Humanity now takes delight in the form only of objects, without any reference to their use and function (hence, for instance, the goblets, clothing, adornments, festivities of the ‘ancient Germans’) and now it delights in formalizing even activities and moral character (hence dance, gesture and song). Schiller’s thumbnail sketch of the development of the arts is not particularly innovative (it echoes themes common in Enlightenment universal history), but he then makes the unique contribution of arguing for certain beneficial social consequences. Most immediately, the appreciation of form has the benefit of putting an end to the antagonism between the sexes that had developed out of the ‘fickle caprice of desire’: for now physical compulsion is transmuted into love and the desire to possess by force is transmuted into the wish to win by charm: Now weakness becomes sacred, and unbridled strength dishonourable; the injustice of nature is rectified by the magnanimity of the chivalric code. He whom no violence may alarm is disarmed by the tender blush of modesty, and tears stifle a revenge which no blood was able to assuage. Even hatred pays heed to the gentle voice of honour; the sword of the victor spares the disarmed foe, and a friendly hearth sends forth welcoming smoke to greet the stranger on that dread shore where of old murder lay in wait for him. (Aesthetic Letters, XXVII.7, 213–15) In these striking images Schiller offers a clear picture of the sort of new social ethos that ‘aesthetic education’ would presumably bring about, an ethos privileging beauty, and consequently characterized by the virtues of modesty, gentleness and kindness. In their power to move the heart to sympathy, these virtues disarm violence and calm the passions in extraordinary ways. For all the exuberance of his imagery, though, Schiller’s argument has a certain logic and it has to do with freedom.

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For the whole point of ‘aesthetic education’ is to encourage the development of the ‘play drive’, and the ‘play drive’ is ultimately an outward-looking disposition, one intent not simply on taking aesthetic pleasure in things but finding satisfaction in occasioning that pleasure for others, both through created objects and through a beautiful character. In this light, compulsion and violence would necessarily be counterproductive. As Schiller puts it, in any social interaction one ‘must be willing to concede freedom because it is freedom he wishes to please’. It is this freedom in the social world that makes the ‘Aesthetic State’ unique. Schiller makes this point by contrasting the ‘Aesthetic State’ not with historical reality or for that matter the contemporary political scene, as one might expect, but rather with two other modes of experience, corresponding to the sensuous and moral part of one’s being, which he calls the dynamische Staat, or the ‘dynamic state’, and the ethische Staat, or the ‘ethical state’ (Aesthetic Letters, XXVII.9, 214– 15). Both are characterized by different kinds of compulsion. In the ‘dynamic state’ one enters into contact with others for the sake of survival or at any rate out of self-interest, and this generally involves the exclusion of some others as well as the loss of self-determination. In this ‘state’ we act only as individuals under the constraints of physical necessity. The ‘ethical state’, by contrast, is entered when we recognize our status as creatures of reason and when consequently we must own that our individual fancies must be brought before the judgement seat of universal law. In this ‘state’ we cease to see ourselves as individuals and exist instead as so many members of the single human genus. Only in the ‘Aesthetic State’ does one enjoy complete freedom, freedom from the tyranny of the senses as much as from the universality of the moral law. Here we exist as both individuals and as the genus. Here sensuous nature shows itself willing to be tutored by reason, while the stern voice of duty lightens the censorious tone of its demands in the confidence that nature can be brought to obey them. In this harmony of nature and reason there can be no distinction of class, property or intelligence: all are equal citizens. Schiller concludes, ‘Here, therefore, in the realm of Aesthetic Semblance, we find that ideal of equality fulfilled which the Enthusiast would fain see realized in substance’ (Aesthetic Letters, XXVII.11, 19). That hasty, non-political account of the aesthetic is perhaps not quite the conclusion that we are expecting, given the tendency of

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Schiller’s thinking thus far. For from the outset, Schiller conceives the aesthetic in potentially radical terms as a solution to the social and political problem of alienation. By the end of the Letters, though, the radicalism is not much more than a vague gesture in the direction of social change. Perhaps, as Walter Benjamin once suggested, Schiller is compromising on his politics for the sake of his highminded friend Goethe.3 At any rate, his imprecision at this crucial juncture is problematic. No less than his critics, Schiller recognizes this propensity to vague prescription and makes one last attempt at drawing his conclusions. A permanent escape from political reality is, after all, the last thing he has in mind in extolling the pleasure of aesthetic freedom. To ground his argument in social reality, Schiller states in the concluding paragraph of the Aesthetic Letters that such a Staat des schönen Scheins, the ‘state of aesthetic semblance’ does really exist: As a need, it exists in every finely attuned soul; as a realized fact, we are likely to find it, like the pure Church and the pure Republic, only in some few chosen circles, where conduct is governed, not by some soulless imitation of the manners and morals of others, but by the aesthetic nature we have made our own; where men make their way, with undismayed simplicity and tranquil innocence, through even the most involved and complex situations, free alike of the compulsion to infringe the freedom of others in order to assert their own, as of the necessity to shed their Dignity in order to manifest Grace. (Aesthetic Letters, XXVII.12, 19) In a way Schiller is backing away from the more fulsome account of the ‘Aesthetic State’ he had offered just a little earlier, where the power of beauty to disarm violence is seen as irresistible, resulting in a utopia of equality and freedom. Now the benefits are more modest, more local, more difficult to detect. In political terms, though, the picture here is closer to lived experience. Schiller’s ‘few chosen circles’, characterized by the freedom from compulsion and by the unaffected unity of grace and dignity, are meant to exist. But committing the ‘Aesthetic State’ to some kind of actual existence, as he does here, exposes Schiller to a whole new set of questions about its membership and activities. Do you need money to join? What role

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will women play? When he first published the letters in the Horae in 1795, Schiller concluded with a promise to draft a model constitution of the ‘Aesthetic State’ (Aesthetic Letters, 300; NA, XXI, 277). That intention is a good indication that he took seriously the practical implications of his argument; though the fact that the constitution never appeared indicates, conversely, how difficult it is to describe the status and function of the ‘Aesthetic State’ – as much for Schiller as for later commentators. In spite of one’s first impression, then, that the final letter neatly caps the argument, Schiller’s concluding remarks turn out to be tentative and his reasoning as a whole unfinished. And this exposes what seems to be the weakest point in the Aesthetic Letters: the failure to think through in explicit terms the social implications of the theory of Bildung. Aesthetic experience risks remaining the subjective appreciation of the beautiful. But what if we read the Letters not in isolation but in relation to Schiller’s other work in the 1790s? I want to look now at four subjects raised but left unresolved in the Aesthetic Letters, and consider how Schiller handles them in other contexts. There, it often turns out, his ‘aesthetic education’ is determinedly social. One problem is that Schiller describes the ‘Aesthetic State’ almost exclusively in terms of what Lesley Sharpe has called ‘the harmony model’, in which strife and discord are subordinated to unity and tranquillity. A good indication of this is Schiller’s shift in the use of the term Freiheit, or ‘freedom’. Whereas earlier in the Letters he tends to use it in the Kantian sense of moral self-determination, in the later letters he describes it as exclusively aesthetic, the freedom of harmony and habituation as exercised only in the world of art. That shift is characteristic of a crucial tension that runs throughout Schiller’s work: on the one hand an impulse away from the world, driven by a Pietistic and post-Revolution suspicion of nature and its supposedly beneficial effects (the sublime); and on the other an impulse towards the world, driven by a humanist confidence that nature would do far more to help than to hinder humanity’s moral progress, if only we attend to it (the beautiful). 4 While the former tends to dominate in the tragedies, like Wallenstein and Mary Stuart, the latter dominates the major aesthetic essays, certainly at any rate by their conclusions. That is true, for example, not only of the Aesthetic Letters, but also of On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry, where Schiller

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similarly proposes a ‘class of men’ who through taste would preserve ‘the beautiful unity of human nature’ (‘das schöne Ganze menschlicher Natur’), keeping in balance the ‘naïve’ and ‘sentimental’ (Elias, 174; NA, XX, 490). Here, as at the conclusion of the Letters, one has the feeling that at best Schiller is simply not considering the alternatives, obstacles and objections that ought to be considered in relation to his hasty conclusions; at worst, that he is ignoring complexities that he had earlier been so careful to point out. At any event, the sublime seems to drop out of the picture. Clearly then, as Wilkinson and Willoughby put it, ‘Schiller’s hierarchy of values fluctuates’ (Aesthetic Letters, 300). In fact, the description of the ‘Aesthetic State’ in terms of harmony and balance is explicitly resisted in an essay written soon after the Aesthetic Letters, called ‘On the Necessary Limitations in the Use of the Beauty of Form’ (‘Über die nothwendigen Grenzen beim Gebrauch schöner Formen’, 1795). In an unusually sceptical tone, Schiller suggests that ‘taste’ can be an obstacle to the communication of knowledge and a hindrance in making moral decisions. (The subject of this essay is hinted at in Aesthetic Letters, XXVI.5, 194–5.) Another blow to rational optimism is dealt in his final aesthetic essay, which I will return to in due course, ‘On the Sublime’ (‘Über das Erhabene’, 1801). Placed in the context of Schiller’s thought, the beauty of the ‘Aesthetic State’ is a good deal more provisional than the Aesthetic Letters leads us to believe. There is another surprise that comes at the end of the Aesthetic Letters and this has become another problem for interpreting Schiller’s project: the apparent permanence of the ‘Aesthetic State’. Throughout the Letters Schiller seems to be presuming that the whole project of ‘aesthetic education’ would be provisional, that it would function only as a means for achieving the rational goal of psychic balance and social harmony. But with the eulogizing of the beauty of moral life and the institutionalizing of aesthetic educators in the final letter, Schiller moves towards the view that ‘aesthetic education’ is not just the means of achieving the good life but the goal itself, that it is to be a permanent state, the end-point or completion of human moral progress. H. G. Gadamer described this problem succinctly when he said that by the end of the Aesthetic Letters, education through art had become education to art.5 On the surface that might appear to be just a case of inconsistency or excessive rhetoric, but Gadamer says it is symptomatic of a more

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serious problem: the tendency in post-Kantian aesthetics to extol the subjective value of imaginative experience while ignoring its potential to serve historical understanding. Schiller’s mistake, indeed Romanticism’s mistake by this account, was to stress too exclusively the autonomy of art, valuing only its expressive function at the expense of its truth-telling potential. In other words, by insisting on the distinction between the experience of art from that of the world (which Gadamer called ‘aesthetic differentiation’), Romanticism abandoned art’s claim to truth and, by implication, gave up ground to scientific thinking. 6 Certainly Gadamer is right to take Schiller’s autonomy of the aesthetic as a turning point in our understanding of art and to link that with Romanticism’s insistence on the expressive rather than cognitive function of aesthetic experience. And yet in reading Gadamer’s critique of the Aesthetic Letters one suspects that he has only one aspect of Schiller in his sights, the heavily aestheticized Schiller, and that the socially and historically minded Schiller, for whom the return to reality was as important as the momentary abstraction from it, is somehow not taken into account. To Gadamer, ‘aesthetic education’ is no more than an education in improved taste – an understandable view, perhaps, given the fuzziness of Schiller’s formulations, particularly towards the conclusion of his aesthetic essays. But elsewhere, Schiller easily evades such criticism, insisting on the provisional, transitional character of aesthetic autonomy. He makes so much of the aesthetic only because it can affect moral life, because it does connect to the historical and social world, and because incidentally it might do so at an indefinite point in the future. Schiller makes that point in On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry: ‘culture’ develops as a transitional stage in the progress of humanity from nature to rationality. ‘Man cannot progress other than by civilizing himself’, he insists (Elias, 113; NA, XX, 438). From this perspective even the ‘ills of civilization’ are to be endured as ‘the natural conditions of the only good’ (Elias, 101; ‘allen Übeln der Kultur mußt du . . . als die Naturbedingungen des Einzig guten respektiren’, NA, XX, 428). Reminding ourselves of Schiller’s emphasis on the provisional character of aesthetic autonomy, and the transitional status of ‘aesthetic education’, may help us see past the aesthetic absolutism implied in the last of the Aesthetic Letters. A third problem for interpreters concerns the practical business of getting the project of ‘aesthetic education’ off the ground. When he

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does treat the matter at all, Schiller tends to revert to historical or anthropological terms, implying that the passage from the state of nature to the ‘Aesthetic State’ is more or less natural, an irresistible development of humanity. That seems facile. One must, after all, enjoy a certain degree of material independence in order to develop aesthetic culture and then to reap the benefits. What about those who lack such wealth? Though Schiller is vague on this point in the Aesthetic Letters, he does touch on the matter in the original letters to his patron, Herzog von Augustenburg. Most people, he admits in a letter of 11 November 1793, must spend their lives working to provide for their material needs; they do not have the leisure to pursue the ‘work of the spirit’ (Geistarbeit) and when they do find themselves momentarily free from care, they are content simply not to think at all but rather to profess the formulaic beliefs proffered by the church and the state. Hence, he says: Man wird . . . immer finden, daß die gedrücktesten Völker auch die borniertesten sind; daher muß man das Aufklärungswerk bey einer Nation mit Verbesserung ihres physischen Zustandes beginnen. Erst muß der Geist vom Joch der Nothwendigkeit losgespannt werden, ehe man ihn zur Vernunftfreiheit führen kann. Und auch nur in diesem Sinn hat man Recht, die Sorge für das physische Wohl der Bürger als die erste Pflicht des Staats zu betrachten. Wäre das physische Wohl nicht die Bedingung, unter welcher allein der Mensch zur Mündigkeit seines Geistes erwachen kann; um seiner selbst willen würde es bey weitem nicht soviel Aufmerksamkeit und Achtung verdienen. Der Mensch ist noch sehr wenig, wenn er warm wohnt und sich satt gegeßen hat, aber er muß warm wohnen, und satt zu essen haben, wenn sich die beßre Natur in ihm regen soll. (NA, XXVI, 298–9) One always finds that oppressed people are the most narrowminded; and therefore the work of bringing enlightenment to a nation must begin with the improvement of their physical condition. Their spirit must be set free from the yoke of necessity before one can lead them to rational freedom. And only in that sense can one rightfully regard caring for the physical welfare of the people as the primary duty of the state. If physical welfare were not the

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condition by which alone man could be aroused to maturity of spirit, then for his own sake it would hardly be worth so much attention and care. A man remains of small account, if he is no more than warm and well-fed; but he must be warm and well-fed if his better nature is to stir in him. This is an implicit correction of Kant. In his essay ‘What is Enlightenment?’ (‘Was ist Aufklärung?’), Kant had suggested that most people forgo the life of reason out of laziness and cowardice. Schiller here blames it on the absence of material well-being. He calls for a degree of state intervention, though of a limited kind and based on a specific motivation. It is a sign of how much Schiller is committed to his project of ‘aesthetic education’ that such intervention is sanctioned only on the grounds that it is necessary for Bildung to take place in the first place, and not on the grounds of, say, revolutionary politics (equal opportunity or political freedom), or for that matter on the counter-revolutionary principles of the paternalist state (providing for material well-being as a means of social engineering, or limiting social mobility). Seeing that the population is well-housed and well-fed, then, is part of a larger social project leading to rational emancipation rather than either anarchy or regulation. The efforts of such praktische Kultur (‘practical culture’) will lead in due course to the state of theoretische Kultur (‘theoretical culture’), where the real Geistarbeit (‘work of the spirit’) begins (NA, XXVI, 300). When Schiller came to write up these letters for the Horae edition of the Aesthetic Letters he left this passage out. That seems to accord with Schiller’s ambition in the Letters to conduct his argument as far as possible along the lines of a transcendental deduction, in which material like this on practical matters would appear too much of a distraction. It may have appeared, too, to be too close to private advice to his patron, von Augustenburg. Whatever his reasons, the effect was to leave a gap in the practical considerations of the Aesthetic Letters. A fourth problem for interpreters of the Letters concerns the relationship of the ‘Aesthetic State’ to religion. This is, perhaps, not so unexpected: rarely in his aesthetic essays or indeed in his correspondence, does Schiller describe Bildung with reference to religion, the Judaeo-Christian tradition or contemporary theological debate.

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In this he is much more guarded than Goethe, the free thinker who engaged Christianity in public debate throughout his career. Many critics have taken this reserve as evidence of Schiller’s latent atheism or at any rate a certain scepticism and they point to other features of his work that suggest the same: the relativizing of Christianity in the early Philosophical Letters, the pessimistic meditation on death in the early poem ‘Resignation’ and the criticism of Christianity in ‘The Gods of Greece’.7 Then there is the famous statement to Goethe that the poet ‘needs no deity, no immortality to hold and support him’ (‘braucht keine Gottheit, keine Unsterblichkeit um sich zu stützen und zu halten’, NA, XXVIII, 258–9). As for the Bible: ‘It seems to me true only when it is naïve; in anything that appears consciously written I suspect a meditated purpose and a later source’ (‘Mir ist die Bibel nur wahr, wo sie naiv ist; in allem andern, was mit einem eigentlichen Bewußtseyn geschrieben ist, fürchte ich einen Zweck und einen späteren Ursprung’, NA, XXIX, 63). But if, as Manfred Misch and others have pointed out, it is an insistence on self-determination – ‘Bistimme dich aus dir selbst’ is his motto8 – that drives Schiller from doctrinaire and paternalist forms of Christianity and makes him distrust the power of the institutional church, that same insistence leads him to champion a purer spiritual authenticity, one grounded as much in his own Pietistic inheritance as in his commitment to Enlightenment rationality. 9 Hence his attraction to the sort of reasoned faith espoused by Kant in Religion Within the Bounds of Reason Alone, which Schiller welcomed at its publication in early 1793 (NA, XXVI, 219–21, 235). Hence, too, the appeal to a pure religion in his distich of 1797, ‘My Belief’ (‘Mein Glaube’), first published in The Muses’ Almanac of 1797: ‘Welche Religion ich bekenne? Keine von allen, / Die dur mir nennst! “Und warum keine”? Aus Religion’ (NA, IIi, 320; ‘Which religion do I confess? Not one / That you’ve named. “Why not?” For religion’s sake’). The spiritual authenticity Schiller claims here cannot be named; it is, presumably, only lived. Schiller’s aesthetic rationalism, too, aspires to such spiritual authenticity. This is evident in the few instances where Schiller does consider Bildung in relation to religion. In one of the later letters to von Augustenburg, 3 December 1793, Schiller concedes that in so far as the more immediate question of knowing and performing one’s duty is concerned, the aesthetic plays a role similar to that of the religious: ‘to

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serve as a surrogate of true virtue, and to secure the lawfulness of action where the dutifulness of one’s feelings and convictions cannot be expected’ (‘zu einem Surrogat der wahren Tugend zu dienen, und die Gesetzmäßigkeit der Handlungen da zu sichern, wo die Pflichtmäßigkeit der Gesinnungen nicht zu hoffen ist’, NA, XXVI, 331). The point is that since it is next to impossible to act strictly out of a sense of duty one must be brought round to it by concrete teaching that moves the heart as much as it addresses the mind. By appealing to the moral in the context of the sensuous both religion and art perform that function.10 Here religion is considered, like the aesthetic, in terms of its usefulness to establishing and directing the moral life, that is, as a means. But in Schiller’s view there is something about religion, and about Christianity in particular, that figures as an end. In a letter to Goethe of 17 August 1795, Schiller describes that end thus: Ich finde in der christlichen Religion virtualiter die Anlage zu dem höchsten und edelsten, und die verschiedenen Erscheinungen derselben im Leben scheinen mir bloß deßwegen so widrig und abgeschmackt, weil sie verfehlte Darstellungen dieses höchsten sind. Hält man sich an den eigenthümlichen Charakterzug des Christenthums, der es von allen monotheistischen Religionen unterscheidet, so ligt er in nichts anderm als in der Aufhebung des Gesetzes oder des Kantischen Imperativs, an deßen Stelle das Christenthum eine freye Neigung gesetzt haben will. Es ist also in seiner reinen Form Darstellung schöner Sittlichkeit oder der Menschwerdung des heiligen, und in diesem Sinn die einzige aesthetische Religion. (NA, XXVIII, 27–8) I find in the Christian religion the tendency toward the highest and most noble – and its various appearances in real life seem to me all the more adverse and fatuous because they are such unsuccessful representations of that aspiration. Consider the single trait of Christianity that distinguishes it from all other monotheistic religions: it lies in none other than the sublation of the Law or of the Kantian imperative, which Christianity would replace by free inclination. It is then in its pure form the representation of aesthetic morality, of the incarnation of the divine, and in this sense it is the only aesthetic religion.

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Morality, as Schiller had argued earlier in On Grace and Dignity (1793), consists not in the formal obedience of the moral law based on rational assent to principle (Kant’s categorical imperative), but rather in the heartfelt, unpremeditated inclination to do good. And here Schiller points to Christianity, ‘in its pure form’, as representing the same goal. The figure of the Logos, ‘the incarnation of the divine’ who fulfils the law naïvely, exemplifies the freedom in obedience that Schiller seeks to articulate in his own aestheticized moral philosophy, the resolution of duty and inclination that characterizes the ‘Aesthetic State’. In one of his last philosophical poems, ‘The Four Ages of the World’ (‘Die vier Weltalter’, 1802), that view of Christianity is put into the mythological context of the development of human consciousness. Having described in turn the ages of the Arcadians, the heroes and the poets, ‘the Minstrel’ (der Sänger) then depicts the incarnation, which inaugurated the fourth and final age from which future harmony will eventually emerge: ‘The fugitive lusts of the sense were suppress’d, / And man now first grappled with thought in his breast’ (Bowring, 116) (‘Verbannt ward der Sinne flüchtige Lust, / Und der Mensch griff denkend in seine Brust’, NA, IIi, 195). In Schiller’s account, Christianity marks the beginning of reflection, characteristic of ‘sentimental’ or modern consciousness. The poem is hardly a straightforward comment on historical forms of Christianity – from which Schiller here, as elsewhere, keeps himself at a polite distance – but it does at the very least suggest how Schiller can, as in the letter to Goethe, turn to philosophical Christianity in the context of Bildung, both as a moment in the development of aesthetic consciousness and as emblematic of the ‘Aesthetic State’ itself. I have dwelt on this at some length in order to stress a point that is only rarely made: that Schiller was conscious of the relationship between ‘aesthetic education’ and religion and that he tended to describe it in complementary rather than antagonistic terms. And this was not just a question of theory. Reflecting on the relationship once in 1804 led Schiller to make remarks on some of the practical issues surrounding ‘aesthetic education’. The occasion was a letter of 16 July to his friend Karl Friedrich Zelter. Zelter, the Berlin composer, conductor and teacher, had first come in contact with Schiller in 1796, when he set some of his lyrics to music. The two collaborated on The Muses’ Almanac in the late 1790s and remained in close contact,

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corresponding on musical and more broadly aesthetic matters until Schiller’s death in 1805. By then Zelter had been drawn into the Weimar circle and he went on to become a lifelong friend of Goethe (their correspondence was published posthumously, in 1833–34). Zelter studied music under Karl Friedrich Fasch and throughout the 1790s acted as accompanist at his Berlin Singakademie, a club that met weekly a private houses. In 1800, at Fasch’s death, he became the director and went on to broaden its repertoire and eventually to establish the academy as an institution. In 1804, responding to a suggestion by the Prussian minister, von Hardenberg, Zelter proposed the establishment of an academy for the study of music, and in particular church music, and sent a copy of his plans to Goethe. Schiller read the proposal and welcomed it. Religion had long fostered the arts and now might well benefit in turn by having it studied more carefully, particularly in Berlin. Berlin hat in den dunkeln Zeiten des Aberglaubens zuerst die Fackel einer vernünftigen Religionsfreiheit angezündet; dies war damals ein Ruhm und ein Bedürfniss. Jetzt, in den Zeiten des Unglaubens, ist ein anderer Ruhm zu erlangen, ohne den ersten einzubüssen, es gebe nun auch die Wärme zu dem Lichte, und veredle den Protestantismus . . . (NA, XXXII, 154) In the dark age of superstition Berlin was first to light the torch of rational freedom of religion; it was at that time a glory and a necessity. Now, in the age of unbelief, there is another glory to obtain, without forfeiting the first; it would now lend warmth to light and improve Protestantism . . . The idea seems to be that the institutionalized study of music would have a positive effect not only on the Enlightenment project (adding warmth to its light, feeling to its reason) but on the dominant form of religion, Protestantism. Schiller goes on in the letter to suggest that the spirit of the times demands the establishment of such institutions, and he points to the re-establishment of Catholicism in France, the return to religion among Protestants and even to current trends in philosophy (he names Schleiermacher) as evidence that the time to rethink religion is now.

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Schiller’s ‘Aesthetic State’, then, is an idea at once more ambiguous and more nuanced than one might first suppose, presenting problems of interpretation that demand recourse to arguments, definitions and opinions developed outside the Aesthetic Letters themselves. The point that I want to draw from this analysis is not, though, the coherence of Schiller’s thinking on the subject – I agree with Lesley Sharpe that Schiller’s mind is often divided – but rather the context of its formation. In particular, there is a good deal more to his view of the humanizing and socializing function of the aesthetic than we are given in the last of the Aesthetic Letters. For one thing, rather obviously perhaps, the ‘Aesthetic State’ is part of Schiller’s broader social thought that he touches on in many other parts of his writing, in letters, poems and other essays. But the social aspect of Bildung is also part of a discourse that Schiller carries on, even perhaps instigates, with his contemporaries: not only with von Augustenburg, the original recipient of the aesthetic letters, but with Goethe in Weimar and Zelter and Wilhelm von Humboldt in Berlin. That discourse would, even as it only began to develop, bear fruit in clearly identifiable ways: in Goethe’s Bildungsroman, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, 1795–96), in von Humboldt’s educational reforms in Prussia and the founding of the University of Berlin in 1810, and Zelter’s founding of the Königliches Institut für Kirchenmusik in 1819. These are only some of the more prominent instances. The point is, Schiller’s ‘Aesthetic State’ is not an isolated aspect of his aesthetic theory but rather stands in a nascent tradition of aesthetic Bildung that from early days found expression in distinct cultural forms.

‘Cultivation’ and the state It is in relation to this discourse about the ‘Aesthetic State’, then, as it is expressed through several of Schiller’s writings as well as among the work of his contemporaries, that I want to consider Coleridge’s notion of ‘cultivation’. In so far as that notion sees art as free from interference, as commanding certain resources and implying certain values, it stands in the mainstream of that Schillerian tradition. And in so far as it seeks to institutionalize ‘aesthetic education’ and to formulate it in explicitly Christian terms, Coleridge’s notion stands as an offshoot of that tradition. In the spirit, and to some extent in the letter, Coleridge’s own account of the

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‘Aesthetic State’ – expressed in his notion of ‘cultivation’ and the ‘clerisy’ – is formulated along Schillerian lines. In Germany the term Kultur or ‘culture’ entered critical discourse in the mid-eighteenth century along with the rising interest in the study of Kulturgeschichte, or ‘cultural history’. By the end of the century, influenced in large part by J. G. Herder’s Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of Mankind (Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, 1784–91), that field of study took as its subject not just political and social history that made up civilizations of the past but also the thoughts, philosophies and aesthetic achievements that constituted different – and by Herder’s account, discrete – worldviews, in other words, their ‘culture’. In England, the development of the notion of ‘culture’ took place somewhat later and though it was not originally driven by the rise in historical consciousness it shared from the outset the need to distinguish some aspects of human achievement from others. As Raymond Williams has pointed out, the English word ‘cultivation’ grew out of its common agricultural sense (that of tending or caring for something) in the mid-nineteenth century, answering a pressing need to distinguish intellectual and aesthetic accomplishment from material and economic developments and, to some extent, serving as a refuge from the calculations of trade and industry. 11 Coleridge first used the term ‘cultivation’ in this sense around 1818, in new material he added to the third edition of The Friend (I, 494, 500, 502) – though it is clear that even in the first edition of 1809–10 and the Lay Sermons of 1816–17 he had something similar in mind – and went on to develop the notion, distinguishing it from ‘civilization’, in the last major work, On the Constitution of Church and State (1829). Coleridge spells out his idea most clearly, though, in a little known manuscript essay on universal history, drawn up for the young James Gillman in 1826. Coleridge is describing the state of barbarism, defined by the absence of both ‘civilization’ and ‘cultivation’. Taken together, these alone provide ‘the means of National and individual progression’. ‘Civilization’, he says, consists of ‘the accumulation of Knowledge and Experience from age to age, and of the Disposition thereto – Letters, Books, Printing, Men of Learning, Men of Science, Artists’. Schools, too, ‘for the different Ranks of Society’, to the extent that they teach this practical knowledge, are part of this civilizing process. The point is, the process consists of providing the material

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1. the development of the 3 principles, by which Human Nature is distinguished from the Brute, and which therefore ought to be developed in all Men alike, – the Rational, the Moral, and the Religious Principles – 2. Respect and reverential Tenderness, toward Women, or the equal rights, reciprocal Benefits, and Mutual Dependence of the Sexes; 3. the exclusive Sovereignty of Law, so that every Individual at the Age of reason has a Sphere for the exercise of his Free-agency, into which no other Individual is permitted to intrude, in all points necessary to his Well-being and Progressive Improvement as a responsible Creature destined for a State after Death. (SW & F, II, 1354) With regard to the first of these, Coleridge seems to have in mind a system of education that would take on the task of moral instruction. This, by contrast to the civilizing mission of schools, would not be class-based but rather offer ‘the Opportunities of moral education and religious instruction for all in all ranks’. The second constituent, ‘Tenderness, toward Women’, seems to involve some kind of gender equality (I will return to this more fully in the next chapter). The third, the sovereignty of law, is of all the most clearly political. It is linked to the two fundamental principles of Coleridge’s mature thought – freedom before the law and the right of property – both of which must be protected by the state through legislation. ‘Cultivation’ cannot develop, in other words, where personal liberty and private property are not permitted. But when Coleridge distinguishes ‘cultivation’ from ‘civilization’ he does not mean to separate them: in the absence of one or the other, of either material prosperity and increasing knowledge on the one hand, or of moral and spiritual values on the other, neither the individual nor society can make any sort of progress. Like the ‘understanding’, which is taken up with conceptualizing the world of experience, and the ‘reason’, which determines our place in it, ‘civilization’ and ‘cultivation’ need each other. It is a fact though, Coleridge explains, that the forces of ‘civilization’ are naturally ‘progressive’

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basis for personal and social development. ‘Cultivation’, by contrast, is concerned more with edification than with knowledge per se, with obligations and duties rather than with facts. It consists of

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and thus tend to dominate human endeavour, with disastrous consequences. Accordingly, they need to be held in check by a lively ‘cultivation’ of values, which is by nature ‘permanent’ (C & S, 24). That sounds like a Burkean sort of project. Coleridge’s notion of ‘cultivation’ seems to operate, like Burke’s reverence for historical institutions, in the name of a conservative ideology, as a defensive strategy to protect certain core values from the corrupting influence of new wealth. Or does it? In Burke’s more thoroughgoing conservatism these institutions inculcate values from above, promulgating from a position of power a set of traditions that have been derived from history and sanctioned by civil authority. But Coleridge’s notion of ‘cultivation’ is less content-laden and lacks such authority; it is also more dependent on personal resources. And it is in this last respect in particular that it comes closest to the liberal notion of Bildung. For like Schiller’s ‘aesthetic education’, Coleridge’s ‘cultivation’ is a process of development that takes place at the individual level through the character. Such an emphasis on subjective development comes up repeatedly in the lectures on education (Lects Lit, I, 105–9, 582–9, 593–5) and in The Friend: Alas! how many examples are now present to our memory, of young men the most anxiously and expensively be-schoolmastered, be-tutored, be-lectured, any thing but educated; who have received arms and ammunition, instead of skill, strength, and courage; varnished rather than polished; perilously over-civilized, and most pitiably uncultivated! (Friend, I, 500) By contrast, Coleridge goes on to say, ‘cultivation’ proceeds ‘from within’; it ‘may be trained, supported, fed, excited, but can never be infused or impressed’. It is not only the subjective bias of that educational programme, its lack of syllabus as it were, that aligns it with the Schillerian tradition of Bildung, but also its breadth. The moral qualities Coleridge here refers to – ‘skill, strength, and courage’ – are to be drawn out across a whole range of human attributes. This is what makes education ‘liberal’. Writing to the young James Gillman in 1826, Coleridge draws out the consequences of such an education: competence across a range of activities is really a training in self-determination:

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And what is a liberal Education? That which draws forth and trains up the germ of free-agency in the Individual – Educatio, quae liberum facit: and the man, who has mastered all the conditions of freedom, is Homo Liberalis . . . all knowledge, I say, that enlightens and liberalizes, is a form and a means of Self-knowledge. (CL, VI, 629–30) The notion of ‘cultivation’ operative here – as an education in freedom – shares with Schiller’s ‘aesthetic education’ the ambition to develop in an undetermined and unimpeded way all aspects of one’s personality. And like Schiller’s, Coleridge’s line of reasoning is that this sort of development, if practised on a wide scale throughout society, will be a way to manage the errant forces that characterize ‘civilization’. Coleridge hopes to see ‘cultivation’ and ‘civilization’ working in harmony. But such a balance is hardly a foregone conclusion, not least because ‘cultivation’ is persistently the weaker partner. Unless the process of ‘cultivation’ is deliberately fostered, the risk remains high that a materially progressive nation will slip into barbarism (Coleridge’s frequent example is Rome on the eve of invasion). He argues that it is incumbent upon the state to do something about maintaining ‘cultivation’. A local solution would be for the state actually to support art production financially, and Coleridge implies something of that sort in the remarks on Mozart and Paganini quoted at the outset of this chapter. A more global solution would be to alter the responsibilities of the state altogether. This is what Coleridge seems to have in mind when he spells out the positive ‘ends’ of government in The Friend (I, 251–62) and A Lay Sermon (216–17). It ought to help people find employment, ensure that they can enjoy some leisure, facilitate their access to expertise and professional associations and offer them, too, the hope for improving their own lot and that of their children. The final purpose of government with respect to the individual is the development of those faculties which are essential to his human nature by the knowledge of his moral and religious duties, and the increase of his intellectual powers in as great a degree as is compatible with the other ends of social union, and does not involve a contradiction. (Friend, I, 253)

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As for what exactly one might expect the government to do in this regard, The Friend is not very clear. Presumably, given what Coleridge says later on the subject, it would involve at least furnishing the material conditions under which that process of ‘cultivation’ might take place. Coleridge is anticipating his formulation of that goal in On the Constitution of Church and State: ‘cultivation’ is ‘the harmonious development of those qualities and faculties that characterize our humanity’ (42–3). Schiller, too, had seen that ‘aesthetic education’ needed to be fostered at a conscious level, in particular and practical ways, and in his correspondence he had sometimes gone further to sketch out a role for the state in giving individuals the means and opportunity for Bildung to take place. Crucially, though, both Coleridge and Schiller limit the scope of state involvement. The state is called on to help foster the process of ‘cultivation’ for the sake of the individual not the citizen, and though it may pay off in the shape of social stability, the goal remains moral goodness and not civic obedience. ‘Aesthetic education’ is not an education in civic values. That is potentially a radical argument. Coleridge’s notion of ‘cultivation’, like Schiller’s ‘aesthetic education’, exposes the inability of the emerging forms of capitalism to assume moral and spiritual responsibilities, and then offers to fill the gap by appealing to and fostering aesthetic judgement. ‘Cultivation’ is meant to offset the philistinism of the market economy. But that solution itself is ambiguous, for in so far as it consists of abandoning, albeit temporarily, the political sphere for the aesthetic, it risks lapsing into political quietism or, even worse, extending and reinforcing the very bourgeois hegemony it had set out to scrutinize. That was in effect Georg Lukács’s complaint about Schiller’s ‘aesthetic education’: for all its potential to criticize economic inequalities, it remained too beholden to its Kantian Idealist heritage to act on that potential.12 Instead, it remained sceptical of real revolution, committed to changing individuals rather than their material conditions. The Aesthetic Letters constitutes an escape from politics rather than an encounter with it. Coleridge is as vulnerable to this charge as Schiller. Though in The Friend he advocates a fairly liberal, interventionist programme of social services, he is reluctant to follow this up with a critique of the status quo. As John Colmer has pointed out, the laissez-faire economics maintained by the British government guaranteed none of the safeguards Coleridge seemed to be looking for (such as employment,

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leisure and hope for improvement), and yet The Friend blithely asserts that ‘all three are realized under our Government to a degree unexampled in any other old and long peopled country’ (I, 262). 13 Even hope is seen as a value in itself – occasioning ‘more happiness than even its fulfilment’ (I, 253) – rather than the grounds for political or social change. As for the final and presumably most important ‘end’ of government, providing opportunity for ‘genius and heroic power’ in its citizens, Coleridge admits that current provisions are inadequate but he does not specify the ‘means of improvement’ that could turn the situation around. The only hint of his real discontent is in the affecting anecdote about ‘the poor vine dresser’ who at the end of a day’s toil strives ‘to provide for his moral and intellectual appetites . . . by philosophical research’ and is pronounced useless by the market economy (Friend, I, 300): the individual is not to be judged only in terms of his economic contribution to society. At least at this point in The Friend Coleridge is reluctant to push too far the notion he has been toying with: that the aesthetic could serve as an independent position from which to critique the economics of modernity. And in such a mood, as Terry Eagleton said of Schiller, ‘the aesthetic would seem less to transfigure material life than to cast a decorous veil over its chronic unregeneracy’.14 But like Schiller’s Bildung, Coleridge’s notion of ‘cultivation’ does not always fall into the service of such a reactionary ideological purpose, nervously avoiding the concerns of social justice. The irony, indeed the ambiguity, of ‘cultivation’ is that the very same aloofness from political activism that exposes it to the charge of complacency also enables it to regard sceptically and dispassionately the power of laissez-faire economics and to count its human cost. Aesthetic distance can, after all, prove to be a powerful tool for critique. It is this very presumption – that one makes aesthetic judgements apparently independently of social and economic determinants – that has endeared the Schillerian tradition of ‘aesthetic education’ to a whole range of thinkers on the political left, including Herbert Marcuse, Frederick Jameson and Jürgen Habermas. For in spite of the risks of collusion with bourgeois ideology, Bildung functions progressively by articulating human potentialities that contemporary society routinely falls short of fulfilling.15 At its most socially aware, Schiller’s aesthetic functions best at this level of critique through utopian vision. Reducible to neither, the aesthetic exposes the antagonism

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between the claims of sense on the one hand and those of reason on the other, the economic order on the one hand, with its ambition for order and control, and the experience of the population on the other, with their desire for self-determination. This is the hidden radical potential of ‘aesthetic education’: to overcome that antagonism through ‘play’. Coleridge’s own critique along these lines appears not in The Friend but in A Lay Sermon, where he blames contemporary political and economic ills on the ‘commercial spirit’. This had grown excessive, he argues, because the forces that would otherwise keep it in check had been disregarded: philosophy, religion and respect for authority. Coleridge launches into a critique of the economic order and then articulates a solution in aesthetic terms. The ‘counter-charm to the sorcery of wealth’, he says, should be ‘Religion’, but religion in a broad sense: I speak of Religion merely as I should of any worldly object, which . . . leaves less room in [one’s] mind for other pursuits: except that this must be more especially the case in the instance of Religion, because beyond all other Interests it is calculated to occupy the whole mind, and employ successively all the faculties of man; and because the objects which it presents to the Imagination as well as to the Intellect cannot be actually contemplated, much less can they be the subject of frequent meditation, without dimming the lustre and blunting the rays of all rival attractions. It is well known . . . that Poetry tends to render its devotees careless of money and outward appearances, while Philosophy inspires a contempt of both as objects of Desire or Admiration. But Religion is the Poetry and Philosophy of all mankind; unites in itself whatever is most excellent in either, and while it . . . calls into action and supplies with the noblest materials both the imaginative and the intellective faculties, superadds the interests of the most substantial and homefelt reality to both, to the poetic vision and the philosophic idea. (LS, 196–7) There are two things to say about this interesting passage, all the more extraordinary for occurring in this most conservative of pamphlets. One is that the ‘religion’ Coleridge has in mind here is a kind

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of poetry and philosophy, only better, or at any rate more encompassing, and so more suited to the task of awakening us to the fact that we are not determined exclusively by economic interests, but can imagine new and alternative futures to those we have inherited. Because it invites universal participation, ‘religion’ offers opportunity indiscriminately, irrespective of class or formal education. In this sense Coleridge’s ‘religion’ is not unlike Schiller’s, as suggested in the letter to Augustenburg of 3 December 1793 quoted earlier: it performs the task of ‘aesthetic education’ in the purest sense, but in a more general democratic way. ‘Religion’ in this sense is not about dogma but perspective, and this is the second point to make. What it shares with poetry, as with philosophy, is the tendency to alienate us from ourselves. Coleridge’s ‘religion’ here is a version of Schiller’s aesthetics of alienation, by which subjectivity is driven out of itself to an indeterminate realm of possibilities. That may in fact turn out to be an escape from political activity, but it is not necessarily an escape from the claims of social justice. For the whole point of ‘religion’ in this sense, like Schiller’s ‘aesthetic education’, is that it provides a space outside the demands of the market economy in which responsibilities to others and to oneself are more plainly recognized. Reading Coleridge’s notion of ‘cultivation’ in relation to Schiller reminds us of the larger problem, characteristic of modernity, that it is meant to address: the gap between material prosperity on the one hand and the sense of personal fulfilment on the other. It helps identify the potential radicalism of his argument while at the same time recognizing the political ambiguity of any project for reform based on aesthetic disinterestedness.

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The Clerisy and Aesthetic Education

Coleridge’s argument about ‘cultivation’ and ‘civilization’ is that if humanity was going to make any moral progress at all both would have to be present. The forces of ‘civilization’, directed at the creation of wealth, more or less take care of themselves, but the forces of ‘cultivation’ need looking after. The ‘cultivation’ of the self is of course the ideal, but clearly this option is available only to the man of leisure and there are not many of these. At the same time, while the state is called on to provide at least the conditions under which even the working class might engage in such ‘self-cultivation’, at least to some degree, Coleridge has no intention of signing over the burden of responsibility to the state. Some other solution needs to be found. Who, in other words, would be in charge of administering this ‘cultivation’? And how would their authority be certified and then maintained? Schiller, as I pointed out in the previous chapter, had put aesthetic educators in charge, but he did not say who they were or what they would do. Coleridge, for his part, puts the ‘clerisy’ in charge. With a name and a fairly clear mission, the ‘clerisy’ embodies Schiller’s vague notion of ‘some few chosen circles’ that, like the pure church and the pure republic, would exemplify the ideals he had been setting. Coleridge, in other words, makes explicit what is implied in the Aesthetic Letters: an institution or class of educators especially responsible for ‘aesthetic education’. In On the Constitution of Church and State Coleridge sets out his argument for the ‘clerisy’ in dialectical terms, demonstrating, like Schiller, the need for a third group to mediate between two distinct and opposing forces. According to Coleridge, the constitution of the 167

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state consists of the balance between two opposing tendencies within it: ‘permanence’ and ‘progression’ (C & S, 24–5). The first aims to preserve laws, traditions and institutions as they have been handed down by history. It is exemplified among large landowners who naturally have an interest in passing on their own property to their families and indeed subsequent generations. The other, ‘progression’, throws its energy into diffusing new knowledge, developing expertise and bringing about technical innovations. Much of this depends upon personal initiative and so this tendency prizes personal freedom much more highly than inherited traditions and conventions. Its propagators are found among the merchants, manufacturers, retailers and various kinds of professionals. These two forces do battle on the national stage, most obviously in Parliament, with the Lords on the one hand (acting in the interests of ‘permanence’) and the Commons on the other (acting in the interests of ‘progression’). Coleridge then introduces his main theme, which is the appearance between these two poles of a mediating force, ‘the third great venerable estate of the realm’, which he calls the ‘National Church’, or ‘clerisy’.

Cultivating the nation As Ben Knights has shown, the idea of such a class goes back some years in Coleridge’s thinking, at least to the late 1810s and early 1820s, when at Highgate he himself begins to play something of a role as public man of learning, conducting classes for young men of promise and interest. He notes the need for a more formal or at least formalized kind of tuition, and mentions the need for such a ‘permanent learned class’ that would act ‘as a germ of civilization and cultivation in every Parish’ (CM, I, 356).1 In Aids to Reflection (1824) Coleridge specifies what he has in mind: A Learned Order must be supposed to consist of three Classes. First, those who are employed in adding to the existing Sum of Power and Knowledge. Second, and most numerous Class, those whose office it is to diffuse through the community at large the practical Results of Science, and that kind and degree of knowledge and cultivation, which for all is requisite or clearly useful. Third, the Formers and Instructors of the Second – in Schools, Halls, and Universities, or through the medium of the Press. The second Class includes

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not only the Parochial Clergy, and all others duly ordained to the Ministerial Office; but likewise all the Members of the Legal and Medical Professions. (AR, 295n) This stratification might be glossed thus: first, research institutes, then a national network of teachers and instructors, and finally teacher training colleges. Coleridge’s thought on the subject throughout the 1820s is fairly consistent: education in the liberal arts carried out by a permanent learned class. It reaches a kind of crescendo in On the Constitution of Church and State, where the ‘clerisy’ is defined as ‘the learned of all denominations; – the sages and professors of the law and jurisprudence; of medicine and physiology; of music; of military and civil architecture; of the physical sciences . . . in short, all the so called liberal arts and sciences’ (46). One of the distinctive features of the work of the ‘clerisy’ is the absence of any curriculum. Coleridge does not say what they are supposed to teach and in fact he goes out of his way to say it is not to consist in doctrine. He also insists that the intelligentsia he is describing is not to be confused with Christianity itself, which is concerned with that state ‘not of the world’ (55). Though in its own right the Christian church is understood to have beneficial effects on society and, moreover, offers itself in some ways as a model for the ‘clerisy’ – Coleridge calls this ‘a blessed accident, a providential boon’ – it has no authority over the ‘clerisy’ and in any case history records plenty of instances where the ‘clerisy’ or ‘National Church’ had nothing to do with Christianity (Coleridge points to ‘the Levitical Church in the Hebrew Constitution, the Druidical in the Celtic’). The ‘clerisy’, in other words, might learn from Christianity but is not to be identical to it. The primary role of this loose collection of intellectuals, teachers and researchers is to mediate between the forces of ‘permanence’ and of ‘progression’, between landed and personal interest. The way it would do so is through education, taking received knowledge and traditions (‘permanence’) but updating and improving them for current and future application (‘progression’). The task would be, in Coleridge’s words: to preserve the stores, to guard the treasures, of past civilization, and thus to bind the present with the past; to perfect and add to

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the same, and thus to connect the present with the future; but especially to diffuse through the whole community, and to every native entitled to its laws and rights, that quantity and quality of knowledge which was indispensable both for the understanding of those rights, and for the performance of the duties correspondent. (C & S, 43–4) That comes close to civic education, but nevertheless remains distinct from it. The educative role of the ‘clerisy’ is not to train citizens in their rights and duties, but rather to offer the more general moral and scientific teaching which is ‘indispensable’ for any civic activity at all. The education it offers takes place outside the political forum where the forces of ‘permanence’ and ‘progression’ battle for dominance, or rather, takes place antecedent to it, appealing to individuals and individual needs in order to keep those two forces in balance. The intellectuals that make up the ‘clerisy’ are the ‘points of relative rest’ that make harmony possible (TT, I, 284–5). All this activity would need to be paid for and Coleridge comes up with plans for funding. He observes that nations, in parcelling out land for individual or private ownership, will commonly set aside a certain portion for its own general improvement. This portion or ‘reserve’, which Coleridge calls confusingly the ‘Nationality’, generates the wealth with which to fund the education programmes (C & S, 35). It is not quite clear who would be in charge of this endowment. Certainly Coleridge does not think the state would have anything to do with it, since its main task is to uphold freedom of thought and preserve the right to personal property. It would apparently go to the National Church, that is, the established Church of England, who would distribute it accordingly. But then as Coleridge repeatedly protests, the ‘clerisy’ is much more than the parochial clergy and properly speaking the wealth ought to go to ‘members of the permanent learned class’. Would the National Church actually siphon off funds for the support of members of the ‘clerisy’ who were not, after all, in holy orders? That seems unlikely. As John Colmer has pointed out, Coleridge here has, unwittingly perhaps, pointed to the need for state intervention in the distribution of the national wealth (C & S, 50–1n).2 In outline at least, Coleridge’s project is broadly Schillerian, particularly in its dialectical reasoning. Schiller had set up a dialectic

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between sense, nature and necessity on the one hand and intelligibility, reason and freedom on the other, both being requisite to social stability and improvement, while each threatening to negate the other. In Schiller’s terms, the solution lies in a programme of ‘aesthetic education’ administered in a rather unorganized way by people of taste, who would reconcile the one with the other. Coleridge similarly sets up a dialectic, between the forces of ‘permanence’ and ‘progression’, that would be mediated by the educative work of the ‘clerisy’. In line with Schiller, Coleridge’s project is committed to a liberal education, aimed not at civic education but rather at training the individual into acting freely, out of self-determination. But in grouping Schiller’s aesthetic educators under a single name, giving them specific responsibilities and positioning them in relation to an institutional structure, Coleridge goes much further than Schiller ever did. In fact, with its commitment to social harmony, On the Constitution of Church and State aims to instantiate the notion of Bildung by making it the centre of a cautious programme for reform and in so doing it dispels many of the ambiguities that Schiller had left unresolved at the end of the Aesthetic Letters. The role of nature, for one. Schiller was never quite sure whether nature would help or hinder aesthetic and moral ‘cultivation’, sometimes calling for it to be suppressed, brutally, in order for moral dignity to find expression (especially in the tragedies), sometimes seeing it as spontaneously and irresistibly bringing about moral regeneration (as in some of the Aesthetic Letters). Coleridge’s ‘clerisy’ goes some way to settling the matter: nature, he says, is no reliable guide in ‘cultivating’ the nation. The natural antagonistic forces in society, ‘permanence’ and ‘progression’, would battle each other to the death if left on their own and so the intervention of that third class, the class of teachers and educators, is a necessary antidote to the anarchic forces of nature. Then there is the ambiguity surrounding the provisional status of ‘aesthetic education’ itself. Schiller, as I have argued, tended for the most part to think of the process as a transitional one – the man of nature progressing through the ‘Aesthetic State’ to freedom – but sometimes he seems to describe that ‘Aesthetic State’ as an end rather than a means and his ‘education through art’ became ‘education to art’. With Coleridge there is no such ambiguity. With their role in educating, in preserving the traditions of the past and adapting

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them for the future, the ‘clerisy’ plays a crucial, indeed indispensable, role in the development of the nation, but it is unquestionably meant to be a transitional role, one that is fulfilled not in itself but in ‘the harmonious development of those qualities and faculties that characterise our humanity’ (C & S, 42–3). Finally, religion. Occasionally in the aesthetic essays and more often in correspondence Schiller had suggested how his ‘aesthetic education’ and religion performed the similar task of bringing people out of themselves and reconciling them to the moral law. Coleridge makes the same point but much more explicitly and in a sense more radically, too: in the cultural educative role of the ‘clerisy’ one sees the whole force of religion brought to bear on the needs of the nation, though not in the shape of doctrine or even for that matter in religious practice, but rather in the shape of an aesthetic attitude. In short, Coleridge’s later social thought does not just engage with Schiller and the Schillerian tradition of Bildung, as a way to curb the excesses of the state, to counter the resistance to reform, to balance the advance of commercial spirit – it is in some sense a fulfilment of possibilities first articulated by Schiller. But there is a price to pay. In giving Schiller’s aesthetic educators a name, status and resources, Coleridge establishes an elite that risks being absorbed into established forms of power. This is hardly his desired outcome. The ‘clerisy’ is meant to hold in check those two opposing forces, and in this way perform the potentially radical task of indirectly regulating social forces. It would serve, as Nigel Leask has argued, as a kind of mystery religion in the best sense of the term, an ‘internal theocracy’, preserving the cultural resources of the nation for the time when they could be distributed widely and openly and begin performing their invigorating function.3 But that project depends on the separation of the ‘clerisy’ from civic life and once that intellectual elite steps out of the political arena, there is no obvious way back in. The masses of the population, for whom the whole enterprise is to be undertaken in the first place, need to undergo a rudimentary education at least before the gifts of ‘cultivation’ might be shared, and there is no mechanism in place for that sort of education. With nowhere to go, the elite turns in on itself and, like a degenerate mystery religion, instead of spreading knowledge encourages reverence for it. In this scenario, Coleridge’s ‘clerisy’ no longer mediates between ‘permanence’ and ‘progression’ but

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rather lets itself be absorbed by the former. In due course it finds itself reinforcing the very imbalance it was meant to correct, participating, in Leask’s words, ‘in the separation against which it had been projected’.4 In the end, only a remnant remains, true to its calling but without effect. There is an interesting lesson here. This tendency of the ‘clerisy’ to degenerate into a kind of mystery religion, preserving cultural artefacts for their own sake, enacts a threat that accompanies any effort of ‘aesthetic education’: the threat, namely, that once such a programme is given institutional reality, the independence and neutrality that enable it to play a mediating role can no longer be maintained. For as soon as a class of people is formally held responsible for the ‘cultivation’ of the nation, it forms an interest in establishing its own legitimacy and accordingly restricts membership, protects its intellectual advantage and ultimately closes itself off from civic life. One can see this threat already at work in Schiller’s formulation of the theory of ‘aesthetic education’, particularly in the implicit restriction on those who can participate. The advance from the physical to the ‘Aesthetic State’ depends, after all, upon a material surplus which is guaranteed only by the efficient use of labour, that is, by the very division of labour it is meant to overcome. The potential inability of the ‘Aesthetic State’ actually to communicate its wisdom, let alone effect political and social change, is implicitly evoked in Schiller’s poem about the Greek mystery religion, ‘The Veiled Statue at Sais’ (‘Das verschleierte Bild zu Sais’, published, like the first of the Aesthetic Letters, in the Horae in 1795). At the climax of the poem, the would-be initiate gives in to his natural curiosity and, violating an express injunction to the contrary, lifts the veil behind the secret mystery: ‘Nun, fragt ihr, und was zeigte sich ihm hier?’ Ich weiß es nicht. Besinnungslos und bleich So fanden ihn am andern Tag die Priester Am Fußgestell der Isis ausgestreckt. Was er allda gesehen und erfahren Hat seine Zunge nie bekannt. Auf ewig War seines Lebens Heiterkeit dahin, Ihn riß ein tiefer Gram zum frühen Grabe. (NA, I, 256)

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Would you inquire what form there met his eye? I know not, – but, when day appear’d, the priest, Found him extended senseless, pale as death, Before the pedestal of Isis’ statue. What had been seen and heard by him when there, He never would disclose, – but from that hour His happiness in life had fled for ever, And his deep sorrow soon conducted him To an untimely grave. (Bowring, 193) Possessed of the truth but unable to communicate it, the initiate appears now as the mute object of our fearful reverence (‘Close your eyes in holy dread for he on honey dew hath fed, and drunk the milk of Paradise’). This is the fate of a programme for ‘aesthetic education’ when those responsible abandon their disinterestedness. In the control of such an elite, ‘cultivation’ no longer serves an emancipatory function but rather a narrow ideological one. Coleridge’s attempt to make aesthetic educators into a distinct and identifiable class stands as the logical extension of Schiller’s argument, while at the same time demonstrating, unwittingly perhaps, the perils, indeed contradictions, that accompany such a project. Is there then no way to implement ‘aesthetic education’ without ‘cultivation’ giving up its liberating function for an ideological one? It is uncertainty about this very question that had led Schiller to speak so delicately and ambiguously about the ‘Aesthetic State’ in the last of the Aesthetic Letters, and that now leads Coleridge in On the Constitution of Church and State to insist, repeatedly and implausibly, that he is talking only about the idea after all, and not the fact. I have already suggested ways in which Schiller, outside the Aesthetic Letters, attempted to articulate his project in more concrete terms. Coleridge, too, does not back off from such a challenge. In a notebook entry written after the publication of Church and State, he reflects on the possibility of the ‘clerisy’ functioning in a way that would in fact inhibit the ideological use of knowledge and thus enable it to reassert its mediating role. The context is a proposal of his own design for a society of learning, something he calls ‘The Human Society for the Defence, Extension and Advancement of the Humanities – i.e. of whatever being common to

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cultivated Man, and the ground-work and precondition of his rights and duties, as the Member of a particular State, contra-distinguished from his animal Nature’. That is nothing new: like the ‘clerisy’, it would be a collection of intellectuals whose goal is the ‘cultivation’ of the people. But how might one restrict its interest in its own power? Coleridge’s answer is to make the ‘clerisy’ international: A Society for opposing National Antipathies, and the discouragement of all writings (ex. gr. Quarterly Review) tending to kindle or feed hostile . . . feelings between the Members of the same Christendom and for the promotion of mutual Love, esteem and instruction. The maxim of the Society to be – It is impossible, that any Nation in that state of advancement, in which France, N. America and G. Britain exist, can have any true interest which is not the interest of the other and of the whole civilized world. Likewise, that the better time will come, when a different Government will no longer be supposed to constitute or imply a different Nation or Country – but Laws, Manners, Religion and Language. And further, that the three first are all tending to become more and more one and the same throughout Christendom. . . . Likewise, a British and Foreign Human Society of Science and Literature, whose Duty it would be to watch over, record, and make known Works and Discoveries, where ever published, and as soon as published to form a center of Correspondence for the Man of Genius and Science in all countries &c.5 Coleridge’s innovation here is to offer safeguards against the usurpation of intellectual material by ideological and nationalist interests. For one, the forum in which debate is to be held is international. In this way the ‘clerisy’ is drawn out of its own circumstances in a given nation in order to build contact with their counterparts in other nations. It will even participate in the breaking down of international boundaries and facilitate political integration of different nations. A second safeguard is that the forum for cultural debate will be public, open to scrutiny from all sides. The Society will ‘watch over, record’ the work of the ‘clerisy’, publishing as well as protecting it in order to make it known abroad and to encourage contacts and correspondence. The model Coleridge seems to have in mind

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here is not a mystery religion at all but an intellectual free market, an international and public forum through which the ‘clerisy’ might ably maintain its mediating function, countering laissez-faire economics on the one hand and the landed interests on the other. It is a model that looks back to Schiller as much as it looks forward to Mill.

Women in the ‘Aesthetic State’ Do women have any role to play in such an enterprise? Are they, too, aesthetic educators? Coleridge admits women as members of the ‘clerisy’, but he is careful to grant them a subordinate status to that of men. This is evident in his own attitude to his precocious and learned daughter, Sara. In 1830, when she was 27 years old, Coleridge gave to her a polyglot edition of Virgil. In it he indicated his desire that it should in due course be passed on to her daughter, should she have one, who might receive it as a Memento provided by her maternal Grandfather, that her dear Mother’s accomplishments and her unusual Attainments in Ancient and Modern Languages, were not so much nor so justly the objects of Admiration, as their co-existence in the same Person with so much piety, simplicity and unaffected Meekness – in short, in a mind, character and demeanour so perfectly feminine.6 Coleridge’s comment starts out with an enthusiastic recognition of his daughter’s achievements and potential as a scholar – at the age of 19 she had published a translation of Martin Dobrizhoffer’s Latin Account of the Abipones, which Coleridge much admired – but there is no question in his mind that by virtue of her sex she inhabits an inferior sphere of rational activity. The coexistence of her intellectual achievements with certain feminine moral ideals (‘piety, simplicity and unaffected Meekness’) signals the exclusion of Sara Coleridge from the ranks of the highest order of intellectual achievers, those who are distinguished not by their piety but by their possession of the ‘philosophic imagination’. It is here that Coleridge offends most, as Heather Jackson has pointed out: not in reiterating the sexist attitudes of his age, but in denying to the female ‘what he valued most in himself, the highest powers of the mind’. 7

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That denial is grounded in an idealized notion of the female that runs throughout Coleridge’s social thought. This has been accounted for in psychological and cultural terms by several critics, who argue, rightly I think, that such a denial serves to bolster the position of the male Romantic writer.8 While it is clearly self-serving, however, Coleridge’s denial of female genius has a logic of its own, bound up with the notion of Bildung I have been tracing. One way to expose that logic – and to determine whether his notion of ‘aesthetic education’ is fundamentally gender-specific – is to look at it in the context of Schiller’s own formulations. For in Schiller’s idealization of the female as pure nature and her consequent expulsion from the highest order of the ‘Aesthetic State’ (even while her best qualities are absorbed into that order), we see the outlines of Coleridge’s own reasoning. The context for Schiller’s thought on the subject lies in the re-evaluation of the role of the female during the 1790s, occasioned to some extent by the liberating force of the French Revolution and, more fundamentally, by the emergence of the urban middle class and the increase in medical and scientific knowledge.9 The emerging discourse of aesthetics registered the new reflections on gender, on the one hand highly valuing certain qualities commonly thought of as feminine, like feeling, imagination, taste, while on the other insisting on a differentiation of spheres. Edmund Burke, writing in midcentury, famously articulated that fundamental distinction in terms of ‘the beautiful’ (characterized as diminutive and cohesive, the province of the female) and ‘the sublime’ (characterized as fearful and powerful, the province of the male). Kant reinforced such associations later in his pre-critical work, Observations on the Feeling of the Sublime and the Beautiful (Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen, 1766) and the later Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht, 1798) where the formulation was tinged by a distrust, evidently picked up from Rousseau, about women’s education. While the male seeks to realize his own goals, said Kant, the female aims to realize nature’s, and since education would tend to get in the way of nature, it ought to be carefully monitored, even avoided. Such attitudes reappear in Schiller’s work of the 1790s: Burke’s gender differentiation in terms of the sublime and beautiful, Rousseau’s thesis that the female cannot think in abstractions, and Kant’s

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view that the female expresses nothing less (and nothing more) than nature’s teleology. What is distinctive in Schiller’s aesthetics, as critics like Silvia Bovenschen and Hannelore Scholz have pointed out, is how clearly and fully the female acts as an ideal for everything he values.10 And that will have important consequences for female participation in ‘aesthetic education’. But why idealize woman? At the centre of Schiller’s argument with Kant’s moral philosophy is the conviction that the highest virtue consists not in overcoming one’s inclinations but rather in bringing them into line with practical reason. While of course there would always linger wayward thoughts and inclinations that one would have to keep in check and in due course master and control, Schiller nevertheless holds that the goal of moral life is to approach a state of affairs where duty is performed unconsciously, out of habit rather than deliberation – in his word, ‘gracefully’. Such a state is achieved by what he calls the schöne Seele, or ‘beautiful soul’. In On Grace and Dignity, Schiller associates this grace specifically with the female: she embodies this ideal of natural virtue not only literally in her body but also figuratively in her character. Auch der Beytrag, den die Seele zu der Grazie geben muß, kann bey dem Weibe leichter als bey dem Manne erfüllt werden. Selten wird sich der weibliche Charakter zu der höchsten Idee sittlicher Reinheit erheben, und es selten weiter als zu affektionirten Handlungen bringen. Er wird der Sinnlichkeit oft mit heroischer Stärke, aber nur durch die Sinnlichkeit widerstehen. Weil nun die Sittlichkeit des Weibes gewöhnlich auf Seiten der Neigung ist, so wird es sich in der Erscheinung eben so ausnehmen, als wenn die Neigung auf Seiten der Sittlichkeit wäre. Anmuth wird also der Ausdruck der weiblichen Tugend seyn, der sehr oft der männlichen fehlen dürfte. (NA, XX, 289) In woman, more easily than in man, the soul itself contributes to grace. The character of woman rarely rises to the supreme ideal of moral purity, and would rarely go beyond acts of affection. Her character would often resist sensuousness with heroic force, but only by means of sensuousness. Yet precisely because the moral nature of woman is generally on the side of inclination, the effect

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is the same as when the inclination is on the side of duty. Grace, then, would be the expression of feminine virtue, an expression that masculine virtue often lacks. (Essays, 204–5) By this account, the female moral agent has considerably less work to do than her male counterpart. She is not expected to perform the more challenging and indeed more rewarding task of overcoming contrary inclinations in order to realize that ‘supreme ideal of moral purity’ (‘die höchste Idee sittlicher Reinheit’). But if dignity is beyond her reach, that is not because of moral degeneracy but quite the reverse, a natural goodness. For her inclinations, good in themselves, need not be ruled rationally. Instead of suppressing, resisting or overcoming them, she must simply express them as they are found. Having in effect internalized the moral law, and thus done away with the need for reflection and struggle, Schiller’s female moral agent inherits the moral prize that the male can earn only by an effort of self-mastery. She embodies the goal for which the male must fight. Though he never wrote essays on the subject – as did his friend Wilhelm von Humboldt, whose essays on sexual difference were published in the Horae11 – Schiller nevertheless held distinct views and often made these the subject of his poems and distichs. A number of them stress the role of women as embodying a moral ideal, along the same lines expressed in On Grace and Dignity: ‘Female Judgement’ (‘Weibliches Urtheil, 1797), ‘The Ideal of Woman’ (‘Das weibliche Ideal’, 1797) and ‘The Virtue of Woman’ (‘Tugend des Weibes’, 1797). Though he never seemed to think of this in terms of social emancipation as, for instance, some of the early Romantics, who welcomed Mary Wollstonecraft’s call for female education, Schiller did consider his views as advancing a more positive re-evaluation of the role of woman. In ‘The Ideal of Woman’, he praises ‘Amanda’ for her lack of reflection which is, in fairly unambiguous terms, a good thing: Dünke der Mann sich frey! Du bist es, denn ewig nothwendig Weißt du von keiner Wahl, keiner Nothwendigkeit mehr. Was du auch giebst, stets giebst du dich ganz, du bist ewig nur Eines, Auch dein zärtester Laut ist dein harmonisches Selbst. (NA, I, 287)

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Man may think himself free! thou art so, – for thou never knowest What is the meaning of choice, – know’st not necessity’s name. That which thou givest, thou always giv’st wholly; but one art thou ever, Even thy tenderest sound is thine harmonious self. (Bowring, 279) True to character, the female here is naïve, not so much unable to make moral choices as unmindful of the need to. And in her moral simplicity she thus represents what her interlocutor strives to achieve. In theory, at least, such a position seems to invite reciprocity. For in her natural inclination to goodness, the female possesses something the male lacks. Schiller often invokes this gender dialectic in his writings on aesthetics: in, for instance, his distinctions between ‘architectonic’ and ‘gracious’ beauty (On Grace and Dignity) and between ‘energizing’ beauty and ‘melting’ beauty (Aesthetic Letters and On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry). But this dialectic also occurs in his poems on women, most obviously in ‘The Sexes’ (‘Die Geschlechter’, 1797) but also in ‘The Dance’ (‘Der Tanz’, 1796, 1800), both of which celebrate the bringing together of two opposites and their mutual subordination to each other. More often than not, though, in this sort of reciprocity it is the male who stands to gain. That is certainly the case in ‘The Praise of Woman’ (‘Würde der Frauen’, 1796, 1800). Alternate stanzas describe the sublime male – selfish and proud, spending his days in ceaseless strife – and the beautiful female – calm and free, lovingly tending the home. Her ‘dignity’ (Würde) consists not in climbing up to his heights but rather in drawing him back and out of his turmoil. This is the concluding sextet of the revised version (1800): Aber mit sanft überredender Bitte Führen die Frauen den Scepter der Sitte, Löschen die Zwietracht, die tobend entglüht, Lehren die Kräfte, die feindlich sich hassen, Sich in der lieblichen Form zu umfassen, Und vereinen was ewig sich flieht. (NA, IIi, 206)

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But, with her eloquence winning, yet yielding, Woman, the sceptre of love gently wielding, Quenches the smouldering embers of strife; Each ling’ring emotion of hatred effaces, Compels the late foes to unite their embraces, Rivets the transient pleasures of life. (Bowring, 231) In calling the male back from the terrors of the sublime to the more familiar and familial regions of the beautiful, the female does after all participate in a kind of reciprocity. Where would he be, one wonders, without her service? But the exchange is not mutual. The idealized female is called upon to give but receives nothing in return, while the male partner undergoes moral transformation. It is the idealization itself that stands in the way of balance, as Friedrich Schlegel once noted. ‘The representation is idealized,’ he remarked of this poem, ‘only in the wrong direction, not towards truth but away from it’ (‘die Darstellung [ist] idealisiert; nur in verkehrter Richtung, nicht aufwärts, sondern abwärts, ziemlich tief unter die Wahrheit hinab’).12 The untruth of Schiller’s idealization is that it ignores what for the male is the strangeness of the female other, the strangeness upon which alone actual reciprocity can be based. Possessed of such an ideal, the male abandons mutual exchange and opts instead simply to internalize the feminine qualities of which he stands in need. That is the option Schiller advocates, albeit implicitly, in his essay ‘On the Necessary Limits in the Use of Beauty of Form’ (‘Über die nothwendigen Grenzen beim Gebrauch schöner Formen’, 1795). He takes as his premise the widely held assumption that in the female all knowledge is necessarily mediated through feeling. And so while naturally capable of recognizing the form of truth, she cannot engage in any meaningful way with ‘scientific knowledge’ (Wissenschaft). The male, on the other hand, naturally grasps the concept, but tends to neglect the form. His thought is relentlessly abstract. He must learn to supplement his abstract mental processes with a feminine attention to detail: Das Geschäft also, welches die Natur dem andern Geschlecht nicht bloß nachließ, sondern verbot, muß der Mann doppelt auf sich nehmen, wenn er anders dem Weibe in diesem wichtigen

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Punkt des Daseyns auf gleicher Stuffe begegnen will. Er wird also so viel, als er nur immer kann, aus dem Reich der Abstraktion, wo Er regiert, in das Reich der Einbildungskraft und Empfindung hinüber zu ziehen suchen, wo das Weib zugleich Muster und Richterinn ist. Er wird, da er in dem weiblichen Geiste keine dauerhaften Pflanzungen anlegen kann, so viele Blüthen und Früchte, als immer möglich ist, auf seinem eigenen Feld zu erzielen suchen, um den schnell verwelkenden Vorrath auf dem andern desto öfter erneuern, und da, wo keine natürliche Ärnte reift, eine künstliche unterhalten zu können. (NA, XXI, 17) As, therefore, nature has not only dispensed but cut off the other sex from this task [inquiry after truth], man must give a double attention to it if he wishes to vie with woman, and to be equal to her in what is of great interest in human life. Consequently he will try to transfer all that he can from the field of abstraction, where he is master, to that of imagination, of feeling, where woman is at once a model and a judge. The mind of woman being a ground that does not admit of durable ‘cultivation’, he will try to make his own ground yield as many flowers and as much fruit as possible, so as to renew as often as possible the quickly fading produce on the other ground, and to keep up a sort of artificial harvest where natural harvests could not ripen. (Essays, 237) The task is for the male to cultivate feminine qualities, like imagination and feeling, in order to humanize his abstract ways of thinking. In place of the reciprocity of the sexes, brought together out of mutual need, Schiller looks towards a kind of male androgyny, as the male learns to cultivate the feminine within, rather than rely on the female without. Such a project is the feminine face of male Bildung. Where does that leave the female in relation to Schiller’s ‘aesthetic education’? Given her role as an ideal, it is hard to see that she has any part in it. On the one hand, she has nothing to learn, for in possessing morality by virtue of her naturally pure impulses, she has already realized the goal for which the male is striving: like the child referred to at the beginning of On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry, the

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female is already what the male aims to become through ‘aesthetic education’. On the other hand, she has nothing to contribute. For not having gone through a process of Bildung herself, not having developed reflection, exercised judgement or practised aesthetic distance, she has little to teach others about such things. Though she stands as an emblem of Bildung’s ambitions, the female nevertheless remains unconscious of its secret workings: she is the object of ‘aesthetic education’, but not its subject. That exclusion is made even more absolute by the fear that an education in reflection would actively threaten the naturalness of female virtue. Schiller considers this eventuality in On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry. Dem andern Geschlecht hat die Natur in dem naiven Charakter seine höchste Vollkommenheit angewiesen. Nach nichts ringt die weibliche Gefallsucht so sehr als nach dem Schein des Naiven. . . . Weil aber die herrschenden Grundsätze bey der weiblichen Erziehung mit diesem Charakter in ewigem Streit liegen, so ist es dem Weibe im moralischen eben so schwer als dem Mann im intellektuellen mit den Vortheilen der guten Erziehung jenes herrliche Geschenk der Natur unverloren zu behalten; und die Frau, die mit einem geschickten Betragen für die große Welt dieses Naive der Sitten verknüpft, ist eben so hochachtungswürdig als der Gelehrte, der mit der ganzen Strenge der Schule Genialische Freyheit des Denkens verbindet. (NA, XX, 425) It is to the opposite sex that nature has assigned the naïve character in its highest perfection. Woman’s desire to please manifests itself nowhere so much as in seeking the appearance of naivety. . . . But since the leading principles of feminine education are in perpetual conflict with this character, it is as difficult for a woman morally as it is for a man intellectually to preserve this magnificent gift of nature intact along with the advantages of a good education; and the woman who combines naivety of manner with a demeanor appropriate for society, is as worthy of the highest esteem as the scholar who joins the genius’ freedom of thought with all the rigors of the schools. (Elias, 98)

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Elsewhere, Schiller names this ‘appearance of simplicity’ (‘der Schein des Naiven’) as the defining characteristic of genius. But whereas for the (male) genius such simplicity is the ground of his creative work, the basis for further endeavour, for Schiller’s ideal female it is itself an end. She stands at the conclusion of a natural teleology that is threatened rather than encouraged by education, experience and knowledge. These she may seek, but only as a dilettante.13 Coleridge reworks the logic of this line of thinking, idealizing the female to the point where her participation in Bildung seems not only unnecessary but immoral. Like Schiller, he bases this idealization on the naturalness of female virtue, an absence of striving in the attempt to live according to the moral law. Whereas Schiller called this natural virtue ‘grace’ or ‘simplicity’ (Anmut, Naivität), Coleridge calls it being ‘characterless’, a term he reaches for when trying to identify the most appealing feature of Shakespeare’s female characters. This is how he describes it in the first lecture of the 1818–19 series: Shakespeare saw that the want of prominence . . . was the blessed beauty of the woman’s character, and knew that it arose not from any deficiency, but from the more exquisite harmony of all the parts of the moral being constituting one living total of head and heart. He has drawn it, indeed, in all its distinctive energies of faith, patience, constancy, fortitude, – shown in all of them as following the heart, which gives its results by a nice tact and happy intuition, without the intervention of the discursive faculty, – sees all things in and by the light of the affections, and errs, if it ever err, in the exaggerations of love alone. (Lects Lit, II, 270)14 Coleridge’s ‘characterlessness’ consists in the absence of ambition and force, owing to the withdrawal of discursive thought. But this very ‘want of prominence’ in the female is in moral terms a gain, since it allows the real ‘energies’ that constitute femaleness to find expression (faith, patience, and so on). Above all, it allows the female, protean-like, to shift sympathies where required, however distant from her own circumstances. In her harmonious moral character there is no resistance to the moral law but rather easy conformity to it.

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In one of the later notebooks Coleridge describes this natural virtue as if it were a kind of implicit knowledge of the divine, an intuition of the highest of human ideals. He is wondering how a mind that is normally taken up with the senses could be brought to a higher, spiritual consciousness. It must be through some sort of educative process, gaining knowledge of divine ideas, of ‘an other world that now is’. Then he pauses: the Question started up in my mind – but must this knowledge be explicit, and be conveyed in distant conceptions. If so, what shall I think of such a Woman as Mrs Gillman? Can I deny that she lives with God? – . . . and I received the solution of my difficulty, flashlike, in the word, BEAUTY! In the intuition of the Beautiful! – This too is spiritual – . . . Far other the pleasure which the refined Sensualist, the pure Toutos-kosmos [’this worldly’] Man, received from a fine Landscape – for him it is what a fine specimen of Calligraphy would be to an unalphabeted Rustic – To a spiritual Woman it is Music – the intelligible Language of Memory, Hope. (CN, IV, 5428) In Coleridge’s reasoning here the unthinking, unsuspecting Mrs Gillman, whose family home in Highgate he shared for the last 18 years of his life, appears as a welcome interruption. Unlike the worldly male, ‘the Toutos-kosmos Man’, who can take pleasure in beauty only by formalist analysis and must work, presumably, to see it any other way, the natural female (Mrs Gillman) possesses a kind of naïve hermeneutic strategy that lets her get straight to the matter. Without effort she recognizes the beautiful landscape for what it really is, ‘the short-hand, Hieroglyphic of Truth’. In her simplicity Mrs Gillman stands as a disruption in Coleridge’s mature thought. So much of his Christian apologetics consists in the call for one to enter an educative process that, through self-examination and reflection, would lead to a renewed faith. Now all that is called into question by the existence of a female who, though not reflecting, is nevertheless possessed of spiritual knowledge. Reasoning, in other words, becomes redundant in the presence of a female sensibility that experiences truth without understanding concepts. Like Schiller’s idealized female, Coleridge’s ‘characterless’ female embodies the natural virtue that is after all the goal of moral life.

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Possessing virtue without reflection, the ‘characterless’ female stands as a symbol of what her male partner seeks to achieve for himself. In particular, the ‘energies’ that constitute her femaleness are sought by the male, who lacks them. Sexual difference, as Coleridge conceives it, thus occasions reciprocity between the sexes, which he tends to explain in dialectical terms borrowed from his work on polar logic: ‘Love is the Yearning of the whole Person after a union with that, which is felt necessary to it’s completion’ (CL, IV, 914). 15 The notion of reciprocity operative here clearly puts both sexes in a position of mutual dependence, or ‘co-adunation’. Each, Coleridge writes, ‘retains its individualizing contra-distinguishing qualities, and yet eminenter, in a certain transcendent mode, acquires the virtues of the other – the rich tenderness, the woman elevation &c – the Sublime & the Beautiful’ (CN, III, 4158). Such mutual exchange is familiar from Schiller as the male acquires the ‘virtue’ of ‘tenderness’ (Schiller’s Anmut, or ‘grace’) and the female ‘elevation’ (Würde, or ‘dignity’), both benefiting from the attempt to overcome sexual difference through mutual exchange. But as with Schiller, there is a limit to that reciprocity. For however appealing it may be, the natural virtue of the female, and in particular the absence of discursive reasoning which makes it possible, compromises her status as a receptive partner. She can give, but she cannot take. ‘Every man wishes for Desdemonas, Ophelias,’ Coleridge admits, ‘creatures who, though they may not always understand you, do always feel you and feel with you’ (TT, I, 208). While in other contexts Coleridge repeatedly seeks to unite feeling with thinking, to reconcile sentiment with reason, here in relation to the role of the female that old dichotomy is reinforced. This has a twofold effect. Because the woman feels but does not think, she can through sympathy humanize the abstractions of her male partner. But for this very same reason she cannot, in turn, benefit from intellectual exchange. In fact the more she feels for the man the less she can think with him. In other words, the condition under which alone she can enter into partnership – her lack of understanding – prevents her from finding advantage in that partnership. This is where the ‘polar logic’ breaks down, the female partner contributing to a process of male Bildung without participating in it herself. Where does that leave women in relation to Coleridge’s class of cultivators, the ‘clerisy’? Surprisingly, Coleridge has liberal views on

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women’s political and social freedom: they should be allowed to hold onto their maiden names after marriage, for example (CM, V, 97), and they should not be arbitrarily excluded from political power (Friend, I, 195–6). Furthermore, though it may be ‘contrary to decorum’ that women sit in Parliament, yet they should be permitted to vote (TT, I, 420). In fact, it is one of the defining characteristics of a civilized and cultivated state that it recognizes ‘the equality of Women to men in social and domestic Life’ (SW & F, II, 1354). Given the tenor of these sorts of comments, I think it is clear that women have a place in the work of ‘cultivation’, a role to play as members of the ‘clerisy’. In this sense at least Coleridge’s thinking tends to be more liberal than Schiller’s, who could not conceive a public role for women that did not compromise their domestic duties. But if women play a role in the ‘Aesthetic State’, it is nevertheless a subordinate one. Again, the model of reciprocity, through which sexual difference is meant to find expression, turns out to be onesided. For though Coleridge admits that women have been ‘good poets, historians, mathematicians, romancers, novelists’, no woman can be ‘a philosopher or metaphysician’ (TT, I, 462). Coleridge grants women a certain professional status but not the most eminent status of all, that of the genius, the poet-philosopher, the independent thinker and only original, creative power. One particular instance of the way this reciprocity turns into exclusion is in Coleridge’s notion of androgyny. Though a ‘strong’ mind possesses the virtue of manly single-mindedness (‘with imposing, undoubting, Cobbett-like manners’), he says, it is nevertheless as often to be wrong as right; a ‘great’ mind, by contrast, should include feminine virtues, too, and must therefore be ‘androgynous’ (TT, II, 190–1). Premised on the sharing of qualities rather than on a static division between the sexes, Coleridge’s notion of androgyny seems liberating. The mind of a male or female can be ‘great’; it all depends on how fully it incorporates the qualities of the other sex. True, as Virginia Woolf pointed out, Coleridge developed this theory not out of any particular desire to advance the cause of women intellectuals, but nevertheless she managed to incorporate it into her own early feminist agenda. 16 Criticism since has tended to see this as a female-friendly development in Coleridge’s thought. But is it? Heather Jackson has argued, almost reluctantly, that it is not and

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There is the Woman in the Man – tho’ not perhaps the Man in the Woman. . . . Why, I have inserted the dubious ‘perhaps’ – why, it should be less accordant with truth to say, that in every good Woman there is the Man as an Under-song, than to say that in every true and manly Man there is a translucent Under-tint of the Woman – would furnish matter for a very interesting little Essay on sexual Psychology. At present, it is enough to say, that the Woman is to look up to the Man, not in herself but out of herself. The Man looks out of himself for the realization and totalization of that in himself, which in himself dare not be totalized or permitted to be on the surface. 17 Coleridge’s androgyny is, then, a male androgyny. While the female must look outside herself for what she lacks, the male looks inward to develop what is already there. Instead of engaging with the female, male genius develops inner feminine qualities. The ‘great’ mind, it turns out, is that of a feminized male, and cannot be that of a masculinized female. 18 The logic of this line of thinking that is common to both Coleridge and Schiller reflects how Romanticism, as it has been historically received, values femaleness while excluding the female. The natural virtue and characterlessness of the female, which male Romantic genius seeks to emulate through force of reflection, become the grounds for excluding the female herself from participation in Bildung. As Christine Battersby has demonstrated, that double bind is characteristic of the notion of genius present throughout much of the Western philosophical tradition: ‘On the one hand . . . the driving force of genius was described in terms of male sexual energies. On the other hand, the genius was supposed to be like a woman: in tune with his emotions, sensitive, inspired.’19 Both accounts leave little room for real women to lay claim to genius.

Imagined female figures This exclusion of the female seems to feature not only in the theoretical work, but in the poems and dramas as well, where the model of

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points to a notebook entry where Coleridge makes his intentions clear:

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reciprocity breaks down under the pressure of a narrowly defined role for female companions. They often participate in another’s feelings without the chance to develop their own. Don Carlos, Max Piccolomini, Wallenstein, William Tell, in the case of Schiller; Kubla Khan, the speakers in ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’ and ‘Dejection: An Ode’, in the case of Coleridge: these are male poet-philosophers of genius who, though embodying feminine qualities of sympathy and sentiment, nevertheless remain aloof from their female companions, who can only regard from afar as they go alone to their own sublime end. When they do figure in their own right – like Sara in ‘The Aeolian Harp’ or Laura in Schiller’s ‘Laura’ poems – it is often as a symbol of natural virtue, the mute reproof of anxious male striving. But not all the female figures in Coleridge and Schiller spring from this mould. Both poets represent female figures who must confront their own fate and then take a moral decision either to avoid or embrace it. So far from embodying natural virtue and acting from instinct, they must struggle to achieve self-knowledge, and can thus be seen to enter a process of Bildung. This is the case with Schiller’s Joan of Arc, in his historical tragedy The Maid of Orleans (1801): though deeply and suddenly in love with the English commander, Lionel, she feels she must leave him in order to play her destined role on the national stage, leading her people in battle. After a great struggle, she chooses to act in defiance of her nature, her natural inclination, and abandons her beloved. The scene in which she contends with these opposing claims is not drawn from history: Schiller invents it to heighten the pathos of her situation by lending dignity to her character. There is a comparable scene in Mary Stuart (1800) when Elizabeth agonizes over the fate of Queen Mary, which lies in her hands: should she give in to sisterly feeling and release her, or secure political stability and protect her own crown by having her executed? Of course, in defiance of her feeling, she chooses the latter. The most worthy of Schiller’s female heroes, though, is Mary Stuart herself. Repeatedly, in the face of Elizabeth’s hauteur and cruelty, she summons the strength to argue against the injustice of her imprisonment and to discredit her selfish motives. Though condemned to death at the end, she is not defeated and leaves to embrace her fate by choice with the greatest dignity, laying claim to moral freedom in the face of necessity, which by Schiller’s standards is the most sublime of achievements.20

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The Clerisy and Aesthetic Education

Coleridge, Schiller and Aesthetic Education

Even Wallenstein’s Thekla, though no hero of this order (she is meek and without personal ambition), has her moments of sublime moral anguish. She sees the forces of disaster gathering about her father, Wallenstein, and recognizes that his future is hers, too. In a song-soliloquy she articulates the necessity of this gloomy situation in a way that has her participating in the sublime. This is Coleridge’s translation of the song she sings: The cloud doth gather, the greenwood roar, The damsel paces along the shore; The billows they tumble with might, with might; And she flings out her voice to the darksome night; Her bosom is swelling with sorrow; The world it is empty, the heart will die, There’s nothing to wish for beneath the sky: Thou Holy One, call thy child away! I’ve lived and loved, and that was to-day – Make ready my grave-clothes to-morrow. (Piccolomini, II.vi, 24–33, in PW, II, 653) The song here, so early in the tragedy (this is after all only the second of ten acts), has a clear dramatic purpose: to stop the action, heighten the pathos and foreshadow the imminent disaster. Of all the female characters in the tragedy, Thekla alone not only recognizes here the awful, imminent turn in the family’s fortunes but she embraces it. Whereas her mother remains largely ignorant of events, and her scheming aunt tries at all costs to manipulate them to favourable ends, Thekla throws herself into them, accepting all their dire consequences. Her plea for a quick end looks forward to the final desperate act of her lover Max Piccolomini, his sublime suicide. At least some of Schiller’s tragic female characters, then, break the mould: more often than not they must struggle against their natural inclinations, their naïve natural virtue, to achieve the moral end for which they are destined. Coleridge, too, has his Joans of Arc, female figures who are not, after all, characterless, but rather creative, selfdetermining, self-conscious. And is not ‘damsel with a dulcimer’ in ‘Kubla Khan’ one of them? Unlike the ‘woman wailing for her demon lover’, who expresses in inarticulate sounds the violence of natural desire, the ‘damsel’ sings of a mythic geography with such

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art that the male poet – notwithstanding his pretension to absolute genius – cannot match it in his own verse. She is, as Tim Fulford has argued, ‘cultivation’; she possesses in her instrument the means of moral and social improvement that characterize the ‘Aesthetic State’. The value of natural virtue is similarly questioned in ‘Christabel’. Christabel herself, a schöne Seele if ever there was one, cannot recognize evil when it appears, and remains vulnerable to it, precisely because of her ‘cloistered virtue’, her purity, simplicity and naivety. As for Geraldine, though associated with the primal forces of nature, she is in no way virtuous. The point is, if Coleridge can theorize about the natural virtue of women, their characterlessness as he calls it, he can certainly imagine the opposite. What are we to make of this? Though both Coleridge and Schiller describe Bildung as a nearly exclusive male activity, yet in their poems and dramas they have female figures entering into the process of ‘aesthetic education’, taking their place in the ‘Aesthetic State’. There are pragmatic reasons for this: after all, the female figure who embodies natural virtue is not very interesting on stage and makes for only a certain kind of lyric poetry. Displacement also accounts for these anomalies, as male poets indulge possibilities in imaginative and literary terms which they would not tolerate in social and political life. But the strength and attraction of these figures mean that they cannot be fully accounted for in terms of either literary pragmatism or a psychological symptomology. There is an authenticity in these female figures that can, after all, be construed as normative. In an analogue to the male Romantic genius, who achieves a dignified status by absorbing ‘feminine’ qualities into himself, the female figures imagined here achieve a similar state of self-determination through the development of such ‘masculine’ qualities as assertion and creativity ex nihilo – Mary Stuart’s noble self-justification; the damsel ‘singing of Mount Abora’. The imaginative reality of what Coleridge and Schiller both judged in theoretical terms to be impossible suggests that, in spite of themselves, the reciprocity of the sexes which they had theorized need not be to the exclusive advantage of the male; and that the ‘Aesthetic State’ could admit either sex into its ranks. Bildung need not be – though it often has been – a prerogative of men.

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The Clerisy and Aesthetic Education

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9

The evocation of ‘aesthetic education’ in the previous chapters has depended on two distinct notions of the historical. First, I have put forward the case for a historical connection between Coleridge and Schiller. Through his first-hand knowledge of contemporary German philosophy and literature and, more specifically, his reading of many Schiller texts and the translating of Wallenstein, Coleridge knew of Schiller’s argument for ‘aesthetic education’ and it informed his own work on the subject. Second, I have argued that both Coleridge and Schiller think of Bildung itself as functioning historically. In terms of the individual, Bildung is seen as an emancipatory impulse that permits moral self-determination and signals the progressive recovery of psychic balance. In social terms, it is a stabilizing force, the ‘Aesthetic State’ mediating disinterestedly between opposing political interests in order to help shape a cultured and civilized nation. In this epilogue I would like to supplement this argument with a further reflection on history in another sense altogether, arising from the particularity of how both Coleridge and Schiller handle the subject. For not only do they think of Bildung in historical terms, as functioning in time and over time, but they also think of history itself as if it were a kind of Bildung, the unfolding of an educative process leading in due course to fulfilment. Both explicitly draw on the notion of Bildung as a model according to which we can understand history, which accordingly appears as a redemptive and rational series of events, the progress of which consists in realizing the inner potential of humanity through an applied process of selfdevelopment. Schiller follows this line of thinking in relation to 193

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Epilogue: Bildung and History

Coleridge, Schiller and Aesthetic Education

Enlightenment ‘universal history’ (Universalgeschichte); Coleridge in the context of redemption history. Both, though, find it difficult to maintain this way of thinking consistently. For the notion of Bildung operative in their rationalist philosophy of history is premised on a radical moral freedom that is by definition anti-teleological. As a process rather than a contentdriven programme, Bildung cannot say where exactly it is headed, only that it is on its way and moving by its own energies. As Schiller and later Coleridge discover, history read in terms of Bildung will never be able to articulate its own goal, let alone claim to have realized it. Possessing a purpose but unable to disclose it to itself, history thus appears to its participants as a sublime object – redemptive but inscrutable. What such an analysis calls for is not a comparison of Coleridge and Schiller’s theories of the sublime, work which has in any case already been undertaken. As Elinor Shaffer pointed out, Coleridge’s ‘revolution’ in the standard of taste was to run the beautiful into his definition of the sublime; like Schiller he thought of them as connected rather than, as in the Kantian model, two quite separate kinds of aesthetic experience.1 There are differences, too, for Coleridge never linked the sublime to a theory of tragedy, as Schiller did, and, as Raimonda Modiano demonstrated, Coleridge’s sublime avoids the wholehearted negation of nature that Schiller’s aspires to. 2 Instead of a history of the sublime, what is required here is an attentiveness to Romantic historiography in which the sublime, specifically the negative sublime, plays a part. Here again the radical potential of ‘aesthetic education’ can be seen. It has been suggested, for instance by Linda M. Brooks, that a material ‘remainder’ is ever present in Coleridge and Schiller’s experience of the sublime, fatally compromising the aspiration to rational wholeness.3 What I would like to suggest is that this very failure attests in fact to the infinite possibilities implied by ‘aesthetic education’; it is a reminder that Bildung’s goal is realized not in a universal order but in the opening up of individual freedom through which actual moral and political choices can be made.

Schiller’s sublime history Schiller had embarked upon his aesthetic essays of the 1790s fully committed to a rationalist philosophy of history, a position he had

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set forth in his inaugural address at the University of Jena in 1789, ‘What is Universal History and Why do We Study It?’ (Was heißt und zu welchem Ende studiert man Universalgeschichte?). There he describes the purpose of historical studies: to bring together fragments of knowledge and reduce them to a series in which could be perceived the march of reason. Though it may appear chaotic at first glance, on closer analysis historical change turns out to be nothing other than the record of human rationality, developing progressively towards universality. Subsequently, in the third of the Aesthetic Letters, Schiller argues that the growth of rationality depends upon the development of aesthetic judgement; and the whole of human history itself is conceived as a process of Bildung. Such confidence in the progressive nature of history is thrown into doubt in Schiller’s last aesthetic essay, ‘On the Sublime’ (‘Über das Erhabene’). He began work on the essay in 1793, around the same time as ‘On Tragic Art’, ‘Of the Sublime’ and ‘On the Pathetic’, but whereas these essays were published almost immediately in the New Thalia, ‘On the Sublime’ did not appear until much later, in the third volume of the Shorter Works in Prose (1801). That delay, and the fact that there is a notable shift in tone part-way through, has led critics to the view that it was altered substantially later on, possibly in the time just before going to press, in 1801. 4 The second half of the essay may have been written around the time Schiller was working on Wallenstein, for it bears the traces of the grim view of history evident in that tragedy. The essay begins with a largely Kantian account of the sublime. There is, Schiller observes, a disparity between, on the one hand, the aspiration to live a life free from external determination and, on the other, the inability to set ourselves above the defining influence of nature. Now we might get around this by trying to master nature through applied science, though that seems impossible to achieve in all circumstances. Another, more plausible, way forward would be to acknowledge that determination and, instead of resisting it, treat it as a reminder of the fact that we really are morally free beings. Schiller says that aesthetic judgement helps us in this, particularly our judgement of the sublime, which he defines as that enjoyment we take in knowing ourselves above and free of nature. What happens, Schiller asks, when we confront a sublime object in nature? We relate to it first according to our ‘power of apprehension’ (Fassungskraft, the

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Epilogue: Bildung and History

Coleridge, Schiller and Aesthetic Education

cognitive faculty) and try to make an image of it, but of course we cannot and instead we feel overwhelmed. But we do not necessarily fly off in terror, as well we might. Instead we refer the object to our ‘vital power’, that of judgement (Lebenskraft, which is governed by the will) and morally as it were we surpass the apparently unbounded (and terrifying) aspect of the object (NA, XXI, 42; Elias, 198). We conclude from this kind of exercise that we are not wholly determined by natural forces. So far, Schiller’s thesis is a reworking of Kant’s mathematical sublime, which he had set out in the Critique of Judgement. As Thomas Weiskel put it, Kant’s purpose there was not so much to define the sublime as to tell us what it is for, namely, enabling us to recognize our freedom. 5 By treating the sublime not as an abstract question but in relation to the problem of conceptualizing our (superior) relationship to nature, Schiller emphasizes the educative thesis implicit in Kant’s description of judgements of the sublime. Like his theory of tragedy, which we looked at in Chapter 3, Schiller’s notion of the sublime exemplifies his view that aesthetic experience has the positive effect of reminding us of our moral freedom. Part-way through the essay, Schiller rather abruptly turns to a different kind of sublime. Having considered how the imagination is frustrated by the excesses of nature, he now asks what happens when the understanding is thwarted in its attempt to conceive reality. That looks like Kant’s dynamical sublime, but Schiller, it turns out, has something slightly different in mind. What happens, he asks, when we are confronted all of a sudden with a gap in the rational order of the world? In particular, what happens when we look to history for evidence of progress and find none? Die Welt, als historischer Gegenstand, ist im Grunde nichts anders als der Konflikt der Naturkräfte unter einander selbst und mit der Freyheit des Menschen und den Erfolg dieses Kampfs berichtet uns die Geschichte. So weit die Geschichte bis jetzt gekommen ist, hat sie von der Natur (zu der alle Affekte im Menschen gezählt werden müssen) weit größere Thaten zu erzählen, als von der selbständigen Vernunft. . . . Nähert man sich nur der Geschichte mit großen Erwartungen von Licht und Erkenntniß – wie sehr findet man sich da getäuscht! Alle wohlgemeynte Versuche der Philosophie, das, was die moralische Welt fodert, mit dem, was

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die wirkliche leistet, in Uebereinstimmung zu bringen, werden durch die Aussagen der Erfahrungen widerlegt, und so gefällig die Natur in ihrem Organischen Reich sich nach den regulativen Grundsätzen der Beurtheilung richtet oder zu richten scheint, so unbändig reißt sie im Reich der Freyheit den Zügel ab, woran der Spekulations-Geist sie gern gefangen führen möchte. (NA, XXI, 49–50) The world, as an historical subject matter, is basically nothing but the conflict of natural forces among themselves and with man’s freedom; history reports to us the outcome of this battle. As history has thus far developed, it has much greater deeds to recount about nature (in which all human emotions must be included) than about independent reason which has asserted its power only in a few exceptions to the natural law. . . . Should one approach history with great expectations of illumination and knowledge – how very disappointed one is! All the well-intentioned attempts of philosophy to reconcile what the moral world demands with what it actually performs are contradicted by the testimony of experience, and, as amiably as nature in her organic realm is guided, or appears to be guided, by the regulative principles of judgement, in the realm of freedom she as impetuously tears off the reins by which the speculative spirit would gladly lead her. (Elias, 206–7) Throughout much of his critical writing, Schiller tacitly remains faithful to the rationalist account of history he sketched in his 1789 inaugural address at Jena. Here, though, that faith is no longer upheld. The confidence that Enlightened inquiry can discern in history the progressive and necessary development of reason must crumble, suggests Schiller, when faced with the testimony of history itself. For the many events in history of which we can be sure all point to the fact that in the running battle between freedom and nature it is nature that still has the upper hand; in history, the occasional triumph of reason is an exception, not the rule. Such a pessimistic view of history is found, too, in Wallenstein, where the general’s moral decision either to obey the Emperor or to rebel is, because delayed, determined instead by historical events beyond his control.

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Epilogue: Bildung and History

Coleridge, Schiller and Aesthetic Education

Reason, so far from governing history, is rather subverted by it. No wonder Hegel, in writing of Wallenstein, decried Schiller’s philosophy of history.6 At least with regard to ‘On the Sublime’, though, this is not the end of the story. Schiller’s irrational history is ‘sublime’ because it calls forth a certain kind of judgement or attitude in us when we recognize it as such. In other words, confronted with the apparent irrationality of human history, we are driven instead to adopt a different attitude towards human knowledge. Wenn er es hingegen gutwillig aufgibt, dieses gesetzlose Chaos von Erscheinungen unter eine Einheit der Erkenntniß bringen zu wollen, so gewinnt er von einer andern Seite reichlich, was er von dieser verloren gibt. Gerade dieser gänzliche Mangel einer Zweckverbindung unter diesem Gedränge von Erscheinungen, wodurch sie für den Verstand . . . übersteigend und unbrauchbar werden, macht sie zu einem desto treffendern Sinnbild für die reine Vernunft, die in eben dieser wilden Ungebundenheit der Natur ihre eigne Unabhängigkeit von Naturbedingungen dargestellt findet. . . . Unter dieser Idee der Freyheit, welche sie aus ihrem eigenen Mittel nimmt, faßt also die Vernunft in eine Einheit des Gedankens zusammen, was der Verstand in keine Einheit der Erkenntniß verbinden kann, unterwirft sich durch diese Idee das unendliche Spiel der Erscheinungen, und behauptet also ihre Macht zugleich über den Verstand als sinnlich bedingtes Vermögen. (NA, XXI, 48–9) If . . . [one] willingly abandons the attempt to assimilate this lawless chaos of appearances to a cognitive unity, he will abundantly regain in another direction what he has lost in this. It is precisely the entire absence of a purposive bond among this press of appearances by which they are rendered unencompassable and useless for the understanding . . . that makes them an all the more striking image for pure reason, which finds in just this wild incoherence of nature the depiction of her own independence of natural conditions. . . . Thus reason combines in a single unity of thought within this idea of freedom, which she supplies from her own resources, what understanding can never combine in a unity of experience; by this idea she subordinates the infinite play of

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The lesson from our experience of history as chaotic, ‘sublime’, incomprehensible, is that this is hardly a loss, since it reinforces the awareness of our being not only historically but morally determined. Again, the educative function of sublime experience asserts itself in terms of a scepticism concerning human knowledge and a reassertion of moral independence. Rationality, which cannot be discerned in history or nature, can after all be found in the mind. It would be wrong, though, to think of this as a flight from history, or a denial of it; after all, Schiller’s dynamical sublime depends fundamentally on a confrontation with the inscrutable facts of the human past. With his emphasis on confrontation and triumph, Schiller’s theory thus stands at the apex of the tradition of the ‘negative’ sublime – ‘negative’ in the sense that it consists in the negation at a sudden moment of self-cognition of the destructive powers outside the self which threaten to overpower it.7 Schiller’s reflections on the sublime, like his theory of tragedy, introduces an interesting complication in his thought. Whereas so often the model for his aesthetics is that of reconciliation, here his model is antagonism. Schiller’s sublime is premised upon a fundamental division between nature and history on the one hand and rational freedom on the other. In fact, he holds to the distinction so resolutely that it leads him to speculate at one point – rather alarmingly – that apparently the only moral option, the only way to be true to what he calls one’s ‘spiritual mission’ (Geistesberuf), is through selfinflicted death. Such is, after all, the chosen fate of Max Piccolomini. Tormented by divided loyalties – owing allegiance both to the Emperor and to his adoptive father, the rebel Wallenstein – he seeks his own death by riding alone into the vanguard of the enemy army. 8 Schiller subsequently grows nervous about the implications of that thought and he ends his essay ‘On the Sublime’ with a characteristic return to the themes of balance and reconciliation. Ultimately, he says, ‘aesthetic education’ would see the subordination of the sublime to the beautiful. Such assertions, though, appear inconclusive, as Raimonda Modiano and others have argued.9 In spite of bold attempts to suppress it, the feeling lingers that antagonism is

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appearances to herself, and simultaneously asserts her power over the understanding as a sensuously limited faculty. (Elias, 205–6)

Coleridge, Schiller and Aesthetic Education

constituent of human experience and only by way of sublime experience can such antagonism be rationally handled. In the end, the notion of history put forward in ‘On the Sublime’ is not assimilated into the model of reconciliation Schiller seeks to impose on reality, but remains outside it, a chaotic succession of events determined largely by the forces of nature, rarely by the hand of reason. And yet from this perspective, apparently a pessimistic one, history is nevertheless a kind of Bildung – perhaps even more plausibly so than when Schiller conceives of it in strictly rationalist terms. For the development in question is not one that can be articulated in terms of specific goals, such as the working out of reason or the development of a certain kind of humanity, but consists rather in the development of a certain kind of perspective, one that continually confronts material determination and yet resists reduction to it, a perspective that acknowledges its own fictionality – in so far as it originates in the self and is not deduced from the facts of history – and yet is not divorced from lived experience, drawn as it is from the desire to attribute meaning to human action. In refusing to read history as the story of Bildung, Schiller in effect opens up the possibility of a more radical understanding of ‘aesthetic education’; instead of finding its credentials in the events of the past, it is rather seen as responsible for lending meaning to the past.10 This is the understanding of Bildung that Coleridge, too, would later adopt in his philosophy of history – a process of humanization not discernible in history, not discernible as history, and yet without which the past would be unthinkable.

Coleridge, Bildung and providential history Coleridge has a great deal to say about history, especially in his later works. First, in the Lay Sermons (1816–17), he considers the discipline of history and suggests that in order to think about the past at all one must have an a priori idea of how it is structured. Later, in the notebooks of the 1820s, he begins to speculate on that structure itself. Driven by a renewed interest in myth and inspired by his recent reading of Vico, Coleridge offers several schematic accounts of the whole of the human past, from the first day of creation to the formation of the modern state, in each case incorporating the biblical story of salvation into a larger picture of a redemptive historical process. 11

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It is at this point in his speculations that Coleridge, like Schiller, begins to conceive of history itself as Bildung writ large, as a process of ‘cultivation’, mediated by the figure of the Logos. Whereas elsewhere Coleridge’s ‘cultivation’ is an affair either of the individual, in the sense that one seeks to develop the whole of one’s personality in a self-educative process, or of the nation, since as he argues political stability depends on at least some portion of the population being ‘cultured’, here it is a question of the whole of humanity and its development over time, the process of it realizing with ever greater degrees of consciousness its own idea of what it ought to be. Coleridge’s term for ‘cultivation’ in this temporal sense is ‘individuation’, a term he first used in his Hints Towards the Formation of a More Comprehensive Theory of Life (1816). The occasion was the Hunterian debate in the 1810s, in which prominent medical men, notably John Abernethy and William Lawrence, argued over the alleged vitalism of the prominent surgeon John Hunter, stressing respectively the speculative and pragmatic aspects of his work. Coleridge sought to aid Abernethy’s case by writing an essay on the Theory of Life, drawing Naturphilosophie into the debate in a way that authorized an idea of life not deduced from empirical observation: I define life as the principle of individuation, or the power which unites a given all into a whole that is presupposed by all its parts. The link that combines the two, and acts throughout both, will, of course, be defined by the tendency to individuation. (SW & F, I, 510–11) Coleridge’s point is to define life not by offering a set of characteristics, a kind of checklist of what it is, but rather by evoking an a priori idea of what it does. As the tendency to ‘individuation’, life is the passage or movement from latency, or potentiality, to actuality. Coleridge retains the notion of ‘individuation’ as a way to characterize life in the physical world and he often repeated it in the 1820s (e.g. CM, I, 580–1; SW & F, II, 1028). Then in the later notebooks he develops the notion, working it into a kind of universal history. What does that historical process of development look like more specifically? At first, individuality is present in us only as potentiality; over time it is actualized, as humanity identifies itself at successive levels of singularity: first, very generally, as universal humanity,

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Epilogue: Bildung and History

Coleridge, Schiller and Aesthetic Education

then as race, family and state, and finally as pure personality. At this point – and only at this point, as perfectly ‘individuated’ humanity – it sees in itself the image of universality. The final moment thus constitutes a kind of return to the beginning. These, then, are the five ‘states’ through which ‘Mankind must pass in order to acknowledge and bring forth the full idea of Humanity’, as Coleridge explains them in a note of 1830: 1. Universal represented in the Individual = Mankind, Adam & Eve, Man & Woman . . . – at once an Individual and the Kind – Homo publicus, a universal Person . . . 2. The Race – purification by destruction, and the preparation for the Selecting of the Mortal by distinction – Noah, and his 3 Sons . . . 3. The Family. Abraham & the Patriarchs. – 4. The State, Nation, People. Moses and the Law. – 5. The Universal individually, the Sun in the whole countless Multitude of Drops, entire in each.12 Each step involves a kind of purification, as humanity gradually abandons its anonymity in order to adopt an increasingly particularized identity. Coleridge’s illustrations come directly from Hebrew history, though his theory is meant to apply to the entire human past. As revealed truth, the sacred history found in Scripture is a key to the past, offering tangible clues to the ‘whole History of the World’ which otherwise would remain shrouded in darkness.13 But the clues always need interpretation. Coleridge’s theory of five stages is such an interpretation, one that emphasizes as much the historical actuality of the events themselves as their mythical significance. His universal history is thus the actual story of humankind’s increased personality and at the same time the mythical story of individual consciousness overcoming its own indeterminacy. It is at this fifth and final stage, in the sketch just quoted, that Coleridge’s notion of the Logos comes into play. As the union of divine idea and mundane image, it demonstrates the possibility of personality in an absolute sense. It furnishes the condition by which humanity, through identification with it, passes from the penultimate to the final stage in this process of ‘individuation’. That is what makes this history, this ‘cultivation’, redemptive. ‘The Logos’, as Coleridge describes it around 1823–24,

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is the substantial-Idea . . . in whom all Ideas are contained and have Being: it is the Idea of God. The Divine Idea assumed the form of Man, and thus became the Idea of the Divine Humanity. . . . The Word was incarnate, and became the Divine Ideal of Human Kind, in which alone God loved (or could love) the World. (CM, III, 545) Coleridge’s universal history returns repeatedly to this question of identity. The idea of humanity at the heart of his history is nothing other than the identity of humanity as an image of the divine idea, realized through increase of consciousness over time. But that identity can only fully be realized by affinity to the Logos, the already revealed image that is indistinguishable from idea. In other words, humanity, which knows itself only as an image sundered from idea, regards the Logos as its ideal self; identifying with it is the crucial moment in its passage to complete self-consciousness. 14 Having come this far, to the point of inviting us to reconceive ‘cultivation’ as the process of humanity developing progressively, redemptively, over time, Coleridge makes the awkward discovery that he is unable fully to describe that process. The claims made on behalf of history cannot be validated by an appeal to it and the past accordingly appears to him, as it did to Schiller, as a sublime object. The reason for such a failure of imagination, Coleridge admits, is that there is no pure language or entirely consistent symbolic system at our disposal with which to describe history as he supposes it to be. At best, the mind can only consider these ideas in terms of contraries. Reflecting upon atonement in one of his notebooks, for example, Coleridge asks how a ‘Power Divine’ could possibly restore the finite will without the latter ceasing to be what it is, ‘a self determining Principle’: I find it most difficulty [sic] to express myself in words: and for the majority of my readers I almost despair of conveying my thoughts intelligibly – How indeed should it be otherwise? Since words are necessarily general and all reasoning by words, all discourse of reason, is more or less a reasoning by analogy. (CN, IV, 4998 f15) Coleridge’s complaint here is that the language of the ‘Understanding’ is necessarily inadequate to the task of explaining the ideas of

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Epilogue: Bildung and History

Coleridge, Schiller and Aesthetic Education

‘Reason’ and yet there is no other. The only way to get around the problem is to admit, from the outset, that in forming images or symbols of ideas according to the universal forms of logic one is bound to encounter contradictions. These contradictions may accordingly suggest the presence of an idea; they ‘may excite the mind to the intuitive act, or produce the inward assurance that the Truth had been contemplated’ (CN, IV, 5288).15 But such an outcome has no empirical claim to certainty. Coleridge’s idea of history as ‘individuation’, as a process of ‘cultivation’ over time, is thus accompanied by a kind of scepticism regarding the very possibility of its being fully told. The Logos is the necessary condition of humanity realizing its idea of itself and yet it cannot be represented at the level of human understanding except in contradictory terms. This no-win situation seems regrettable, but Coleridge does not himself regard it as such. If anything, the inability of the imagination to furnish an adequate representation of the Logos seems to throw open another possibility: the sublime encounter, which in turn furnishes a kind of negative knowledge. Such an encounter is described in one of the later notebooks as an abortive Effort of the Imagination, striving to present to itself the absolute Will, or necessary Antecedent to all Being, in its own form – which being impossible, the striving itself with the continually repeated rejection and flux of phantom shapes becomes the substitute for a form. (CN, IV, 5406 f90 v ) Each imaginative construct which does not fully represent the object constitutes a moment of sublimity. Coleridge’s point here is not that by repeating such attempts at representation we might finally hit on an adequate one, either by trial and error or by mere accumulation of effort. It is not the representation itself that is at issue, but rather the act of mind by which its inadequacy is determined. In sublime experience the mind is familiarized with the inadequacy of all possible representations; it is consequently reconciled in some sense to the availability of only the ‘substitute for a form’ of the idea rather than the form of the idea itself. Recognizing the unrepresentability of the object turns out to be a kind of negative knowledge, as the self is prepared for the possibility

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of confronting what it knows already it cannot symbolize. In another of the later notebooks, Coleridge calls this recognition a way of ‘purifying the temple of the mind from Idols in order to prepare for the Epiphany of the Ideas’. This is the most, he goes on to say, that any speculative thought can offer: the Negative, the insight into the not-truth, the not possible of A. B. C. D. and so on S.T.W. is all that the ablest and most gifted Reasoners can help others to. The positive, the X Y Z they must find for themselves, or meet in themselves. All Ideas are Felicities. The most that can be done by Volition of Thinking, is but like bringing out Stars from the blue sky or in the rifts between sombring Clouds, on a Summer Evening. (CN, IV, 5215 f26) In this illustration, the generated images of stars (or ideas) would be ‘Idols’: not symbols of stars, but symptoms rather of the impossibility of representing them. For Coleridge, then, the attempt to represent human history itself as the redemptive process of ‘cultivation’ could not, strictly speaking, be brought to a satisfying conclusion: while it remains true at the level of thought, it cannot be proven in fact. Like Schiller, who had admitted in the last of his aesthetic essays that the past bore few traces of the ameliorative effects of Bildung, that in fact it appeared to be an inconclusive battle between nature and rationality, a muddle defying understanding, Coleridge discovers that the schematic account of the human past is something that cannot after all be understood or imagined, only entertained. This appearance of the sublime figure of history at the end of their reflections on ‘aesthetic education’ is an important gloss on that whole project of Bildung that I have been tracking so far. While to a large extent Coleridge and Schiller describe it in terms borrowed from the aesthetics of the beautiful – as seeking psychic balance, reconciling discordant qualities, enabling social and political concord – their problematic attempts to imagine Bildung in relation to time has thrown up the possibility that it entails some kind of break with the natural order, as if history, and nature, are after all inhospitable to the moral destiny of humanity. Rather than seeking cooperation with the status quo, Bildung must in this latter view attempt to overcome it.

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Epilogue: Bildung and History

Coleridge, Schiller and Aesthetic Education

Antagonism, though, has therapeutic value. For Bildung understood exclusively in terms of the beautiful fails to recognize the hostile forces that stand in the way of self-understanding – like convention, parochialism, sexism – and naïvely lapses into quietism, insouciant about its past or its future. But a more knowing, ‘sentimental’ Bildung, sceptical of the rational order it has inherited, finds that since this is not the best of all possible worlds, change is necessary. Schiller’s notion of history, because it is so unsettling, is actually empowering in so far as it forbids complacency with regard to the given state of affairs and implicitly demanding positive change. Coleridge’s notion of redemptive history functions similarly: because unimaginable, it demands not assent but rather reflection, opening out onto a horizon where faith and action are simultaneously made possible. For both Coleridge and Schiller, Bildung in this richer sense, as antagonistic, cannot therefore be fulfilled in realizing a single, universal agenda but rather entails developing an attitude of selfinterrogation and a practice of social action. Recovering that radical potential in ‘aesthetic education’ is crucial to a fuller understanding of the breadth of this tradition in British and German Romanticism and to assessing its continued vitality.

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1

Schiller and the Young Coleridge

1. For the details of Schiller’s career and thought I am drawing on a number of works including Lesley Sharpe, Friedrich Schiller: Drama, Thought and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Walter Schafarschik, Friedrich Schiller (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 1999); F. J. Lamport, German Classical Drama: Theatre, Humanity, and Nation, 1750–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); and T. J. Reed, The Classical Centre: Goethe and Weimar, 1775–1832 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), and SchillerHandbuch, ed. Helmut Koopmann (Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner, 1998). 2. Schiller later revised the essay and published it in his Shorter Works in Prose under the title ‘The Stage Considered as a Moral Institution’ (‘Die Schaubühne als eine moralische Anstalt betrachtet’). 3. See David Pugh, ‘“Die Künstler”: Schiller’s Philosophical Programme’, Oxford German Studies, 18/19 (1989–90), 13–22. 4. See J. M. Ellis, Schiller’s ‘Kalliasbriefe’ and the Study of his Aesthetic Theory (The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1969). 5. See Paul Robinson Sweet, Wilhelm von Humboldt: a Biography, 2 vols (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1978–80) and W. H. Bruford, The German Tradition of Self-Cultivation: ‘Bildung’ from Humboldt to Thomas Mann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), ch. 1; also E. S. Shaffer, ‘Romantic Philosophy and the Organization of the Disciplines: the Founding of the Humboldt University of Berlin’, in Romanticism and the Sciences, ed. Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 38–54. 6. Norbert Oellers, Schiller: Geschichte seiner Wirkung bis zu Goethes Tod, 1805– 1832 (Bonn: Bouvier, 1967). 7. For Schiller’s reception in England see Frederic Ewen, The Prestige of Schiller in England, 1788–1859 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932) and Robert Pick, Schiller in England, 1787–1960: a Bibliography (Leeds: English Goethe Society, 1961); also Violet Stockley, German Literature as Known in England, 1750–1830 (London: Routledge, 1929) and F. W. Stokoe, German Influence in the English Romantic Period, 1788–1818 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1926). 8. For earlier scholarly discussions of Coleridge’s German reading in this period see Werner W. Beyer, ‘Coleridge’s Early Knowledge of German’, Modern Philology, 52 (1954–55), 192–200; A. C. Dunstan, ‘The German Influence on Coleridge’, MLR, 17 (1922), 272–81; H. M. Goodman, ‘The German Influence on Samuel Taylor Coleridge’, Ph.D. thesis (University of Florida, 1957); Fritz Wieden, ‘S.T. Coleridge’s Assimilation of Ideas from Schiller’s 207

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Notes

9.

10. 11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

Notes

Early Writings’, in Analecta Helvetica et Germanica: eine Festschrift zu Ehren von Hermann Boeschenstein, ed. Achim Arnold et al. (Bonn: Bouvier, 1979), 170–81; Elizabeth M. Wilkinson, ‘Coleridge und Deutschland’, Forschungsprobleme der vergleichenden Literaturgeschichte (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1958), II, 7–23; and L. A. Willoughby, ‘Coleridge and his German Contemporaries’, PEGS, 10 (1934), 43–62 and ‘Schiller in England and Germany’, PEGS, 11 (1935), 1–19. David Fairer, ‘Coleridge in Conversation: Sonnets by Various Authors (1796)’, paper presented at the Coleridge Summer Conference, 20 July 2000. See Donald G. Priestman, ‘Godwin, Schiller and the Polemics of Coleridge’s Osorio’, Bulletin of Research in the Humanities, 82 (1979), 236–48. For related discussions of the play see John David Moore, ‘Coleridge and the “Modern Jacobinical Drama”: Osorio, Remorse, and the Development of Coleridge’s Critique of the Stage, 1797–1816’, Bulletin of Research in the Humanities, 85 (1982), 443–64, and Daniel Watkins, ‘In that New World: the Deep Historical Structure of Coleridge’s Osorio’, Philological Quarterly, 69 (1990), 495–515. Neil Vickers discusses this review in connection with Beddoes’s wide-ranging scholarly interests in ‘Coleridge, Thomas Beddoes and Brunonian Medicine’, European Romantic Review, 8 (1997), 47–94. Giuseppe Micheli and René Wellek, The Early Reception of Kant’s Thought in England, 1785–1805 and Immanuel Kant in England, 1793–1838 (London: Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1993), 47–54. Carl August Weber, Bristols Bedeutung für die englische Romantik und die deutsch–englischen Beziehungen (Halle: Niemeyer, 1935), 92–115; see also Beyer, ‘Coleridge’s Early Knowledge of German’. Shaffer, ‘Kubla Khan’ and the Fall of Jerusalem: the Mythological School in Biblical Criticism and Secular Literature, 1770–1880 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975); Dorothy A. Stansfield, ‘A Note on the Genesis of Coleridge’s Thinking on War and Peace’, The Wordsworth Circle, 17 (1986), 130–4; Vickers, ‘Coleridge, Thomas Beddoes and Brunonian Medicine’, passim. Monthly Review, n.s., 21 (1796), 574. Beddoes is translating, and slightly abbreviating, the opening paragraph from the essay: In der Tat scheinen die Zeitumstände einer Schrift wenig Glück zu versprechen, die sich über das Lieblingsthema des Tages ein strenges Stillschweigen auferlegen und ihren Ruhm darin suchen wird, durch etwas anders zu gefallen, als wodurch jetzt alles gefällt. Aber je mehr das beschränkte Interesse der Gegenwart die Gemüter in Spannung setzt, einengt und unterjocht, desto dringender wird das Bedürfnis, durch ein allgemeines und höheres Interesse an dem, was rein menschlich und über allen Einfluß der Zeiten erhaben ist, sie wieder in Freiheit zu setzen und die politische geteilte Welt unter der Fahne der Wahrheit und Schönheit wieder zu vereinigen. (NA, XXII, 106)

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Notes 209

2

Coleridge and Weimar Classicism

1. For Coleridge’s studies in Göttingen see Clement Carlyon, Early Years and Late Reflections (London: Whittaker, 1836), Willoughby, ‘German Contemporaries’, 47–50 and Weber, Bristols Bedeutung, 164–74. Schiller’s work does not appear among the books that Coleridge borrowed from the university library: Alice D. Snyder, ‘Books Borrowed by Coleridge from the Library of the University of Göttingen 1799’, Modern Philology, 25 (1927– 28), 377–80. See also Wilkinson’s note, ‘Coleridge’s Knowledge of German as Seen in the Early Notebooks’ in CN, I, Appendix ‘A’. 2. Luigi Marino, Praeceptores Germaniae: Göttingen 1770–1820 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1995). For some contemporary accounts of life in Göttingen in the period, see ‘Selige Tage im Musensitz Göttingen’: Stadt und Universität in ungarischen Berichten aus dem 18. and 19. Jahrhundert, ed. István Futaky (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1991). 3. The circumstances of this translation are discussed in the second section of the next chapter, pp. 52–3 . 4. For the full circumstances surrounding Coleridge’s translation, see Joyce Crick’s edition of The Piccolomini and Wallenstein’s Death in the Bollingen edition of Poetical Works, ed. J. C. C. Mays, and ‘Coleridge’s Wallenstein: Two Legends’, MLR, 83 (1988), 76–86; see also Walter Grossman, ‘The Gillman–Harvard Manuscript of Schiler’s Wallensteins Tod’, Harvard Library Quarterly, 11 (1957), 319–45, and B. Q. Morgan, ‘What Happened to Coleridge’s Wallenstein’, Modern Language Journal, 43 (1959), 195–201. 5. F. J. Lamport, ‘Wallenstein on the English Stage’, German Life and Letters, 48 (1995), 124–47; Joyce Crick, ‘William Poel’s Wallenstein-Moment’, in Cousins at One Remove, ed. Richard Byin (Leeds: Northern Universities Press, 1998), 42–60. 6. ‘Some Editorial and Stylistic Observations on Coleridge’s Translation of Schiller’s Wallenstein’, PEGS, 54 (1983–84), 37–75; and ‘Coleridge’s Wallenstein: Available Dictions’, Second Hand: Papers on the Theory and Historical Study of Literary Translation, ALW Cahiers, 3 (1985), 128–60. On Coleridge as translator, see also Jibon Krishna Banerjee, ‘Coleridge’s English Rendering of Schiller’s Plays’, The Aligarh Journal of English Studies, 13 (1988), 103–13 and Matthew Scott, ‘The Circulation of Romantic Creativity: Coleridge, Drama, and the Question of Translation’, Romanticism on the Net, 2 (May 1996), online. 7. ‘Coleridge’s Wallenstein Translation as a Guide to his Dejection Ode’, The Wordsworth Circle, 18 (1987), 132–6. 8. In the Theatre of Romanticism: Coleridge, Nationalism, Women (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 63–93; see also her article: ‘Command Performances: Burke, Coleridge, and Schiller’s Dramatic Reflections on the Revolution in France’, The Wordsworth Circle, 23 (1992), 117–32.

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17. Vickers makes this conjecture in ‘Coleridge, Thomas Beddoes and Brunonian Medicine’, 57.

Notes

9. The Robbers and Wallenstein, trans. F. J. Lamport (Hardmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), 166–7. 10. As Carlson says, the play ‘dramatizes the tragedy of Romantic proposals for change’ (‘Command Performance’, 124). 11. Leonard M. Mackall, ‘Coleridge Marginalia on Wieland and Schiller’, Modern Language Review, 19 (1924), 346.

3

British Germanophiles

1. Monthly Review, 33 (Oct. 1800), 127–31; other reviews appeared in Critical Review, 30 (Oct. 1800), 175–85 and in British Critic, 18 (Nov. 1801), 542–5. See Coleridge: the Critical Heritage, ed. J. R. de J. Jackson (London: Routledge, 1970), 62–6. Coleridge later attributed one of the reviews to Anna Letitia Barbauld and blamed her for turning public opinion against his Wallenstein translation (TT, I, 573). 2. See also Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and Their Writers, ed. Edith J. Morley, 3 vols (London: Dent, 1938), III, 107. Scott quoted from it on several occasions in Guy Mannering (1815), for which Coleridge thanked him in the 1818 Friend (I, 122 and 428–9n), and Hazlitt praised the work in Spirit of the Age, in Works, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols (London: Dent, 1930–34), XI, 35. For Tieck see CL, V, 269. See also Ashton, German Idea, 189 n.3. 3. ‘Wallenstein, translated by Coleridge’, Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, 14 (1823), 377–97. Ten years later, Abraham Hayward praised Coleridge’s Wallenstein in the preface to his own translation of Faust (London: Edward Moxon, 1833), xiii. 4. Julie A. Carlson, ‘Unsettled Territory: the Drama of English and German Romanticism’, Modern Philology, 88 (1990), 43–56. For the Anti-Jacobin Review’s ‘veritable press campaign’ against German philosophy, directed in part by John Gifford’s Weimar contact James Walker, see Giuseppe Micheli, Early Reception, 88–94; also André Rault, ‘Die Spanier in Peru oder die Deutschen in England: Englisches und deutsches Theater, 1790– 1810’, Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Ernst-Moritz-Arndt Universität, 32 (1983), 83–9. The story was slightly different in America: a pirated edition of the first part of Coleridge’s translation, The Piccolomini, was published in New York in 1805. 5. For an earlier discussion of some of this material, see Ewen, Prestige of Schiller, ch. 2. 6. The German Museum, 1–3 (1800–1). Further references are included in parentheses in the text. There are very few existing copies, which accounts in part for the critical neglect of this important work in the history of the reception of German ideas in early nineteenth-century Britain. For one commentary to which my own is partly indebted, see Lieselotte Blumenthal, ‘Geisweiler und Weimar: zur Rezeption deutscher Dichter in England um 1800’, Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft, 11 (1967), 14–46. For Peter Will, see John Alexander Kelly, German Visitors to English Theatres in

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210

7. 8. 9. 10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

the Eighteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1936), 158–61 and for Willich, see Micheli, Early Reception, 88–91. Blumenthal, ‘Geisweiler und Weimar’, 32–3. Crick, ‘Two Legends’, 81. Quoted in Kelly, German Visitors, 161. See Elke Ritt, Mary Stuart, a tragedy (1801) von Joseph Charles Mellish: die autorisierte englische Blankversübersetzung von Schillers Maria Stuart: Analyse und Text nebst einer Biographie des Übersetzers und handschriftlichem Dokumentationsmaterial (Munich: Tuduv, 1993). ‘What are the Particular Effects of the Stage?’ Montly Mirror, 8 (1799), 357–60 and 9 (1800), 42–6. Bernd Bräutigam has demonstrated how this essay aims to refute J. J. Rousseau’s claim that art cannot effect social change, ‘Rousseaus Kritik ästhetischer Versöhnung: eine Problemvorgabe der Bildungsästhetik Schillers’, Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft, 31 (1987), 137–55. Translations of German Poems, trans. anon. [Benjamin Beresford] (Berlin: H. Frölich, 1801). Annual Review, 4 (1805), 639. British Critic, 25 (1805), 684–5. The Gentleman’s Magazine, 75 (1805), 493, 581. Monthly Magazine, 21 (1806), 46–7. The German is as follows: Den kindlichen Charakter, den das Genie in seinen Werken abdrückt, zeigt es auch in seinem Privat-Leben und in seinen Sitten. Es ist schaamhaft, weil die Natur dieses immer ist; aber es ist nicht decent, weil nur die Verderbniß decent ist. Es ist verständig, denn die Natur kann nie das Gegentheil seyn; aber es ist nicht listig, denn das kann nur die Kunst seyn. Es ist seinem Charakter und seinen Neigungen treu, aber nicht sowohl weil es Grundsätze hat, als weil die Natur bey allem Schwanken immer wieder in die vorige Stelle rückt, immer das alte Bedürfniß zurück bringt. Es ist bescheiden, ja blöde, weil das Genie immer sich selbst ein Geheimniß bleibt, aber es ist nicht ängstlich, weil es die Gefahren des Weges nicht kennt, den es wandelt. Wir wissen wenig von dem Privatleben der größten Genies, aber auch das weniger, was uns z. B. von Sophokles, von Archimed, von Hippokrates, und aus neueren Zeiten von Ariost, Dante und Tasso, von Raphael, von Albrecht Dürer, Zervantes, Shakespear, von Fielding, Sterne u. a. aufbewahrt worden ist, bestätigt diese Behauptung. (NA, XX, 424–5)

The Monthly Magazine does not include Schiller’s list of examples. 17. H. C. Robinson, On Books and Their Writers, I, 77. See also CL, III, 407. Biographical essays of the 1820s continued to link Schiller’s ill health with his study of Kant. See, for example, Specimens of the German Lyric Poets, trans. Benjamin Beresford (London: Boosey and Sons, 1822), 81: ‘he became entangled in the maze of Kant’s philosophy, and, by overstrained intellectual exertion, brought on that illness, which occasioned his

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Notes 211

18.

19. 20. 21. 22.

Notes

premature death’, and ‘German Authors No. II: Schiller’, New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal, 1 (1821), 206–22. ‘On the Genius of Schiller and the Robbers’ and ‘On the German Literature, and the Genius of Schiller’, The Universal Magazine, 8 (1807), 29–32 and 307–10, respectively. The Universal Magazine, 9 (1808), 283–6. The Universal Magazine, 12 (1809), 277–8 (‘Ode to Joy’) and 186–8, 270–3, 443–6 and 13 (1810), 10–13 (The Criminal from Lost Honour). The Universal Magazine, 12 (1809), 28–30, 92–4, 384–6 and 463–6. The Universal Magazine, 12 (1809), 92–3. The German original runs thus: in so fern sich das Gemüth nur in seinem sittlichen Handeln vollkommen unabhängig und frey fühlt, in so fern ist es freylich der befriedigte Trieb der Thätigkeit, von welchem unser Vergnügen an traurigen Rührungen seinen Ursprung zieht. Aber so ist es auch nicht die Menge, nicht die Lebhaftigkeit der Vorstellungen, nicht die Wirksamkeit des Begehrungsvermögens überhaupt, sondern eine bestimmte Gattung der erstern, und eine bestimmte, durch Vernunft erzeugte Wirksamkeit des letztern, was diesem Vergnügen zum Grund liegt. (NA, XX, 152–3)

23. William Mudford, Nubilia in Search of a Husband (London: J. Ridgeway, 1809), 413. 24. The Scots Magazine and Edinburgh Literary Miscellany, 72 (1810), 426–8, 577–80. 25. For Schiller’s later reception see ‘Account of Wieland, Goethe, Schiller etc. by a Late Traveller’, Monthly Magazine, 50 (1820), 108–9, which notes that Schiller’s ‘literary and moral treatises present analysis and observations which equally affect by their shrewdness and their profundity’. See also William Taylor, ‘The German Student, No. XX: Schiller’, Monthly Magazine, 52 (1821), 223–6, 392–5 and ‘Schiller’s Intellectual System’, Monthly Magazine, 53 (1822), 25–8; also De Quincey, ‘Superficial Knowledge’, London Magazine, 10 (1824), 27–8; and Carlyle, ‘Schiller’s Life and Writings – Part III’, London Magazine, 10 (1824), 22–3 and his Life of Schiller (London: Taylor and Hessey, 1825). Some of these are discussed in the editors’ introduction in Aesthetic Letters, cxxxiii–cxcvi. 26. Crabb Robinson in Germany, 1800–1805, ed. Edith J. Morley (London: Humphrey Milford, 1929), 100. See also Crabb Robinson’s journal entry for the day, in Hertha Marquardt, Henry Crabb Robinson und seine deutschen Freunde: Brücke zwischen England und Deutschland im Zeitalter der Romantik (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1964–67), 341–2. For a discussion of Crabb Robinson in Germany see Ernst Behler, ‘Schellings Ästhetik in der Überlieferung von Henry Crabb Robinson’, Philosophisches Jahrbuch des Goerres-Gesellschaft, 83 (1976), 133–83. 27. It can be translated literally thus: ‘Greekness, what was it? Understanding, measure, clearness! / Wherefore I would have thought, a little patience, gentlemen, before you start talking to us of Greece.’

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28. As David Vallins has shown, Coleridge’s interest in the role of feeling in moral life was part of a larger project aimed at integrating psychological experience with rational discourse more generally. See Coleridge and the Psychology of Romanticism (London: Palgrave, 1999). 29. The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. Ernest De Selincourt: The Middle Years, 1812–20, rev. Mary Moorman and Alan G. Hill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), III, 13.

4

Schiller’s Poetry in Coleridge’s Notebooks

1. There are two variants in Coleridge’s transcription, apart from capitalization: in the second distich Coleridge brings the phrase ‘Mir grauet’ (‘I shudder’), which Schiller has in the first line, into the second; and in the fourth distich, Coleridge has ‘was der Körper den Lebenden’ (‘what the body [is] to the living’) in place of Schiller’s ‘was der Körper den Liebenden’ (‘what the body [is] to lovers’). Here Coleridge universalizes Schiller’s metaphor – though it is impossible to say whether this was deliberate. Some of these distichs reappeared in published form (SW & F, I, 315 and LS, 174). 2. This and all subsequent translations of Coleridge’s transcriptions are taken from the editorial notes accompanying CN. 3. The poem originally appeared in Der Teutsche Merkur and Schiller had published a revised version, toning down the implicit criticism of Christianity, in the first volume of his Poems in 1800. 4. Coleridge in Malta and Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 151, 267. 5. Edoardo Zuccato, Coleridge in Italy (New York: St Martin’s Press – now Palgrave, 1996), ch. 1. 6. Coleridge may have had in mind, too, Schiller’s distich ‘The Genius with the Inverted Torch’ (‘Der Genius mit der umgekehrten Fackel’): ‘Lieblich sieht er zwar aus mit seiner erloschenen Fackel,/ Aber, ihr Herren, der Tod ist so aesthetisch doch nicht’ (‘Admittedly, he looks lovely with his extinguished torch / But Death, gentlemen, is not so aesthetic’, NA, I, 286). 7. See my article ‘Coleridge’s Francophobia’, Modern Language Review, 95 (2000), 924–41. 8. Sultana, Malta and Italy, 386–7. 9. See Shaffer, ‘Romantic Philosophy’. 10. The number in square brackets is given by the editor of the Coleridge notebooks for the sake of convenience; neither Coleridge nor Schiller numbered the distichs. 11. Evidence for Coleridge’s source occurs in the second distich, where he follows a variant that appears only in The Muses’ Almanac (NA, I, 285; compare IIi, 150, 324). 12. The two distichs can be translated literally as follows: ‘The Incompetent/ To censure is easy, to create is difficult; you who censure the weak/have you also the heart to pay tribute to the accomplished?’ and ‘Recompense/ What rewards the master? the gentle answering echo/from pure reflex, out of the responding breast’.

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Notes

13. It appeared in all subsequent editions of his collected poems. Coleridge’s source in 1802 had been Schiller’s Poems, Part 1; the title he gives to the translation in Sibylline Leaves confirms that he was later reading the poem in The Muses’ Almanac, where it is entitled ‘The Visit’. 14. Bacchus in Romantic England: Writers and Drink, 1780–1830 (Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave, 1999), 119–25.

5 Semblance and Aesthetic Autonomy in Coleridge’s Criticism 1. Coleridge’s Poetics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), 132. 2. Schiller to Derrida: Idealism in Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), chs 1–3. 3. Nancy Webb Kelly, ‘Homo Aestheticus: Coleridge, Kant and Play’, Textual Practice, 2 (1988), 200–18. 4. Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Athlone Press, 1997), 197. 5. See, for instance, Robinson, Diary, I, 305. 6. Though, characteristically, Schiller’s work is not so committed as Kant’s to transcendental argumentation. See Dieter Henrich in ‘Beauty and Freedom: Schiller’s Struggle with Kant’s Aesthetics’, in Essays in Kant’s Aesthetics, ed. Ted Cohen and Paul Guyer (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 237–57 and also Eva Schaper, ‘Friedrich Schiller: Adventures of a Kantian’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 4 (1964), 348–62 and ‘Schiller’s Kant: a Chapter in the History of Creative Misunderstanding’, in Studies in Kantian Aesthetics (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1979), 99–117. Paul de Man argues that Schiller’s residual empiricism makes for a more thoroughgoing idealism than Kant’s, in a lecture called ‘Kant and Schiller’, in Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 129–62; for a reading of this lecture in relation to the reception of de Man, see Marc Redfield, ‘De Man, Schiller, and the Politics of Reception’, Diacritics, 20 (1990), 50–70. 7. Critique of Teleological Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1928), §25, 112. 8. See the editors’ note on Schein in Aesthetic Letters, 327–9.

6 Aesthetic Education in Biographia Literaria, The Friend and the Lectures on Literature 1. ‘On the Use of the Chorus in Tragedy’, in The Bride of Messina, William Tell, Demetrius, trans. Charles E. Passage (New York: Ungar, 1962), 4–5. 2. See Seamus Perry, Coleridge and the Uses of Division (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999). 3. Daniel Mark Fogel, ‘A Compositional History of the Biographia Literaria’, Studies in Bibliography, 30 (1977), 219–34.

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4. System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), trans. Peter Heath (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1978), 233. 5. Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 153. For a recent discussion of Coleridge’s use of Schelling, see Tim Milnes, ‘Eclipsing Art: Method and Metaphysics in Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 60 (1999), 125–47. 6. F. W. J. Schelling, ‘Concerning the Relation of the Plastic Arts to Nature’, trans. Michael Bullock, in Herbert Read, The True Voice of Feeling: Studies in English Romantic Poetry (London: Faber and Faber, 1953), 332. 7. Schelling, ‘Plastic Arts’, 347. 8. For other instances of Coleridge’s animadversions on didactic children’s literature, see Lects Lit, I, 278–9 and SW & F, II, 970–1. On moralism in art, see Friend, II, 217–21 (not in the 1818 edition) and BL, II, 185–90. 9. Richard T. Martin, ‘Coleridge’s Use of sermoni propriora’, The Wordsworth Circle, 3 (1972), 71–5. 10. Schiller to Derrida, Ch. 3. 11. See the references to Barbauld’s views in Lects Lit, I, 118–19 n. 17. 12. ‘On the Effects of a Permanent Theatre’ (1784): ‘When a central tendency reigns in all our dramas, when our poets become one, united in a single alliance to further this goal . . . then will we become a Nation’, in NA, XX, 99 (Essays, 338).

7

Coleridge’s ‘Aesthetic State’

1. Heidi Robinson, ‘Der gesellschaftsfeindliche “innere” bzw. “ganze Mensch”: Mißdeutungen in der englischen Rezeption und Überlieferung von Schillers Kulturtheorie’, Arcadia: Zeitschrift für vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft, 15 (1980), 129–48. 2. Eric Meyer, ‘Reconstructing Aesthetic Education: Modernity, Postmodernity, and Romantic Historicism’, in Intersections: Nineteenth-Century Philosophy and Contemporary Theory, ed. Tilottama Rajan and David L. Clarke (New York: State University of New York Press, 1995), 286–301; Richard T. Gray, Stations of the Divided Subject: Contestation and Ideological Legitimation in German Bourgeois Literature, 1770–1914 (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995), Ch. 3; and Lore Metzger, ‘The Role of Feeling in the Formation of Romantic Ideology: the Poetics of Schiller and Wordsworth’, in Sensibility in Transformation: Creative Resistance to Sentiment from the Augustan to the Romantic Age, ed. Syndy McMillen Conger (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1990), 172–94. See also Josef Chytry, The Aesthetic State: a Quest in Modern German Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). 3. Walter Benjamin, ‘Goethe’, in Selected Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone et al., ed. Michael W. Jennings et al. (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Belknap Press, 1996–), II, 176. 4. Sharpe, Friedrich Schiller, Ch. 6, 7. 5. Gadamer, Hans Georg, Truth and Method, 2nd edn. (London: Sheed & Ward, 1979), 74.

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Notes

6. For a close analysis of Gadamer’s critique of Schiller see Constantin Behler, Nostalgic Teleology: Friedrich Schiller and the Schemata of Aesthetic Humanism (Berne: Peter Lang, 1995), 23–37; on Gadamer’s relationship to historicism see Paul Hamilton, Historicism (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 81–98. 7. See Manfred Misch, ‘Schiller und die Religion’, in Schiller Heute, ed. Hans-Jörg Knoblock and Helmut Koopmann (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1996), 27–43. 8. Quoted in Misch, ‘Religion’, 207. 9. See Arthur William McCradle, Friedrich Schiller and Swabian Pietism (Berne: Peter Lang, 1986); also David Pugh, Dialectic of Love: Platonism in Schiller’s Aesthetics (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996). 10. See also ‘The Uses of Aesthetic Morals’ (1796), in NA, XXI, 28–37 (Essays, 119–28); also the notes for the lectures on aesthetics in 1792–3, in NA, XXI, 68–9. 11. Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1958), xvi. 12. Georg Lukács, ‘Zur Ästhetik Schillers’, in Beiträge zur Geschichte der Ästhetik (Berlin: Aufbau, 1954), 11–96. 13. John Colmer, Coleridge: Critic of Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), 110. 14. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 117. 15. For their discussions of Schiller see Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: a Philosophical Enquiry into Freud (Boston: Beacon, 1955); Frederic Jameson, Marxism and Form (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971); and Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1987). Lesley Sharpe summarizes the arguments in Schiller’s Aesthetic Essays, 86–94.

8

The Clerisy and Aesthetic Education

1. See also CL, V, 138 and CN, IV, 4800. Ben Knight, The Idea of the Clerisy in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), Ch. 1. 2. Colmer, Coleridge: Critic of Society, 158. 3. Nigel Leask, The Politics of Imagination in Coleridge’s Critical Thought (Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave, 1988), Ch. 19. 4. Leask, Politics of Imagination, 218. See also T. M. Holmes, ‘Property and Politics in Schiller’s Theory of Aesthetic Education’, Oxford German Studies, 11 (1980), 27–39. 5. Inquiring Spirit: a New Presentation of Coleridge from His Published and Unpublished Prose Writings, ed. Kathleen Coburn, rev. edn. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), 343–4. 6. Quoted in H. J. Jackson, ‘Coleridge’s Women, or Girls, Girls, Girls are Made to Love’, Studies in Romanticism, 32 (1993), 580. Coleridge’s comment, evidently not unique, is unwittingly echoed in the entry for Sara Coleridge in the Dictionary of National Biography (1st edn): ‘The unanimous testimony

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7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13. 14. 15.

of her friends represents her as an almost perfect woman, uniting masculine strength of intellect to feminine grace and charm.’ Jackson, ‘Coleridge’s Women’, 585. For Coleridge’s relationship to the feminism of his day, see Anya Taylor, ‘Coleridge, Wollstonecraft, and the Rights of Women’, in Coleridge’s Visionary Languages: Essays in Honour of J. B. Beer, ed. Tim Fulford and Morton D. Paley (Cambridge: Brewer, 1993), 83–98. Alan Richardson, ‘Romanticism and the Colonization of the Feminine’, in Romanticism and Feminism, ed. Anne K. Mellor (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 13–25; Anne K. Mellor, Romanticism and Gender (London and New York: Routledge, 1993); Tim Fulford, Romanticism and Masculinity: Gender, Politics and Poetics in the Writings of Burke, Coleridge, Cobbett, Wordsworth, De Quincy, and Hazlitt (Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave, 1999). Lesley Sharpe, ‘Über den Zusammenhang der tierischen Natur der Frau mit ihrer geistigen: Zur Anthropologie der Frau um 1800’, Anthropologie und Literatur um 1800, ed. Jürgen Barkhoff and Eda Sagarra (Munich: Iudicium, 1992), 213–25. For contemporaries theories of female education, see Pia Schmid, ‘Weib oder Mensch, Wesen oder Wissen?: Bürgerliche Theorien zur weiblichen Bildung um 1800’, in Geschichte der Mädchenund Frauenbildung, ed. Elke Kleinau and Claudia Opitz, 2 vols (Frankfurt and New York: Campus, 1996), I, 327–45. Silvia Bovenschen, Die imaginierte Weiblichkeit: Exemplarische Untersuchungen zu kulturgeschichtlichen und literarischen Präsentationsformen des Weiblichen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1979); Hannelore Scholz, Widersprüche im bürgerlichen Frauenbild: Zur ästhetischen Reflexion und poetischen Praxis bei Lessing, Friedrich Schlegel und Schiller (Weinheim: Deutscher Studien, 1992). See also Ursula Naumann, ‘“Für einer Zeitung Gnadenlohn”? Schillers Gedicht Die berühmte Frau und Sophie Ludwigs Buch Juda oder der erschlagene Redliche’, Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie, 109 (1990), 16–26. Von Humboldt’s essays are: ‘Sexual Difference and its Influence on Organic Nature’ (‘Über den Geschlechtsunterschied und dessen Einfluss auf die organische Natur’, 1794) and ‘Male and Female Form’ (‘Über die männliche und weibliche Form’, 1795), both in the first volume of Werke, ed. Andreas Flitner and Klaus Giel, 5 vols (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1960–81). See also Sweet, Von Humboldt, I, 161–72. In contrast to Schiller, von Humboldt describes sexual differences without making qualitative distinctions and sets out a transsexual ideal in which difference does not figure. Review of The Muses’ Almanac for 1796, in Kritische Friedrich-SchlegelAusgabe, ed. Ernst Behler, 35 vols (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1958– 79), II, 6. For Schiller’s theory of dilettantism, see ‘Über den Dilettantismus’, in NA, XXI, 60–2. Coleridge similarly refers to this absence of character in Lects Lit, I, 555–6, 573, 594–5. For similar reflections on ‘the insufficingness of the self for itself’ see also ‘The Improvisatore’, PW, I, 465. Jackson relates this interest in sexual difference to Coleridge’s polar logic, in her article ‘Coleridge’s Women’.

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Notes

16. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London: Grafton, 1977), 94. 17. Quoted in Jackson, ‘Coleridge’s Women’, 598. 18. See Jean Watson, ‘Coleridge’s Androgynous Ideal’, Prose Studies, 6 (1983), 36–56; Anthony Harding, Coleridge and the Idea of Love (London: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 95–101; Sonia Hofkosh, Sexual Politics and the Romantic Author (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); and Diane Long Hoeveler, Romantic Androgyny: the Women Within (London: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990). 19. Christine Battersby, Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics (London: Women’s Press, 1989), 103. 20. See Kari Lokke, ‘Schiller’s Maria Stuart: the Historical Sublime and the Aesthetics of Gender’, Monatshefte, 82 (1990), 123–41.

9

Epilogue: Bildung and History

1. Elinor S. Shaffer, ‘Coleridge’s Revolution in the Standard of Taste’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 28 (1969–70), 213–21. 2. Modiano, Coleridge and the Concept of Nature, 108. 3. Linda M. Brooks, ‘Sublime Suicide: the End of Schiller’s Aesthetics’, in Friedrich von Schiller and the Drama of Human Existence, ed. Alexej Ugrinsky (New York: Greenwood, 1988), 91–101, and ‘Sublimity and Theatricality: Romantic “Pre-Postmodernism” in Schiller and Coleridge’, Modern Language Notes, 105 (1990), 939–64. 4. See the editorial commentary in NA, XXI, 328–9 and Elias, 52. Further references are to the German text in the Nationalausgabe and the English translation by Elias. 5. Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 41. 6. G. W. F. Hegel, ‘Über Wallenstein’, in Schillers Wallenstein, ed. Fritz Heuer and Werner Keller (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1977), 15–16. 7. See Weiskel, Romantic Sublime, Ch. 2. 8. See Ilse Graham, Schiller: a Master of the Tragic Form: His Theory in His Practice (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1975). 9. Raimonda Modiano, Coleridge and the Concept of Nature, 108. 10. This is a point Hayden White makes with respect to Schiller’s essay in ‘The Politics of Historical Interpretation: Discipline and De-Sublimation’, Critical Inquiry, 9 (1982), 125–6. 11. For related discussion of Coleridge’s views on history and historiography, see Mary Anne Perkins, ‘Coleridge, Language and History’, in Coleridge’s Visionary Languages: Essays in Honour of J. B. Beer, ed. Tim Fulford and Morton D. Paley (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1993), 181–94, and Coleridge’s Philosophy: the Logos as a Unifying Principle (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), 255–8; Myfanwy J. Lloyd, ‘The Historical Thought of S. T. Coleridge: the Later Prose Works’, D.Phil. thesis (University of Oxford, 1998) and my

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article, ‘Romanticism and Coleridge’s Idea of History’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 60 (1999), 717–35. 12. Notebook 43, fols 38, 39v (BL Add. MS 47538). Cf. Notebook 44, fol. 21 (BL Add. MS 47539): Naturally, the Humanity developed in the form and under the conditions of a one People, a Nation, a State or Commonwealth – this is the clue, this the guiding and enlightening Idea of the Dispensation of Moses, of the Epoch of the great Redemptive Process formed by the Law. The Individuality as the kind in Adam, the Race in Noah, the Family in the Patriarchs, the State or Nation in Moses, and the kind in each Individual in the Christian Church. See also Perkins, Coleridge’s Philosophy, 260. 13. Notebook 39, fols. 15–16 v (BL Add. MS 47534). 14. For a further discussion of this notion of history, see Graham Davidson, Coleridge’s Career (Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave, 1989), 234 and Perkins, Coleridge’s Philosophy, 259. 15. See similar formulations in CN, IV, 4774, 5216, 5288, 5294, 5377.

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Adorno, Theodor W., Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Athlone, 1997). Ashton, Rosemary, The German Idea: Four English Writers and the Reception of German Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). —— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: a Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). Banerjee, Jibon Krishna, ‘Coleridge’s English Rendering of Schiller’s Plays’, The Aligarh Journal of English Studies, 13 (1988), 103–13. Barnouw, Jeffrey, ‘Das “Problem der Aktion” und Wallenstein’, Jahrbuch der Deutschen Schillergesellschaft, 16 (1972), 330–408. Battersby, Christine, Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics (London: Women’s Press, 1989). Beach, Joseph Warren, ‘Coleridge’s Borrowings from the German’, Journal of English Literary History, 9 (1942), 36–58. Beer, John, Coleridge’s Poetic Intelligence (London: Macmillan – now Palgrave, 1977). Behler, Constantin, Nostalgic Teleology: Friedrich Schiller and the Schemata of Aesthetic Humanism (Berne: Peter Lang, 1995). Behler, Ernst, German Romantic Literary Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). —— ‘Schellings Ästhetik in der Überlieferung von Henry Crabb Robinson’, Philosophisches Jahrbuch des Goerres-Gesellschaft, 83 (1976), 133–83. Benjamin, Walter, Selected Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone et al., ed. Michael W. Jennings et al. (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Belknap Press, 1996– ). Beyer, Werner W., ‘Coleridge’s Early Knowledge of German’, Modern Philology, 52 (1954–55), 192–200. Blumenthal, Lieselotte, ‘Geisweiler und Weimar: Zur Rezeption deutscher Dichter in England um 1800’, Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft, 11 (1967), 14–46. Borchmeyer, Dieter, Macht und Melancholie: Schillers Wallenstein (Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum, 1988). —— Tragödie und Öffentlichkeit: Schillers Dramaturgie im Zusammenhang seiner ästhetisch–politischen Theorie und die rhetorische Tradition (Munich: Fink, 1973). —— Weimarer Klassik: Portrait einer Epoche (Weinheim: Beltz, 1994, 1998). Bovenschen, Silvia, Die imaginierte Weiblichkeit: Exemplarische Untersuchungen zu kulturgeschichtlichen und literarischen Präsentationsformen des Weiblichen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1979). Bowie, Andrew, Aesthetics and Subjectivity: From Kant to Nietzsche (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990). 221

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Selected Bibliography

Selected Bibliography

Bowie, Andrew, From Romanticism to Critical Theory: the Philosophy of German Literary Theory (London and New York: Routledge, 1997). Bräutigam, Bernd, ‘Rousseaus Kritik ästhetischer Versöhnung: eine Problemvorgabe der Bildungsästhetik Schillers’, Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft, 31 (1987), 137–55. Brooks, Linda M., ‘Sublime Suicide: the End of Schiller’s Aesthetics’, in Friedrich von Schiller and the Drama of Human Existence, ed. Alexej Ugrinsky (New York: Greenwood, 1988), 91–101. —— ‘Sublimity and Theatricality: Romantic “Pre-Postmodernism” in Schiller and Coleridge’, Modern Language Notes, 105 (1990), 939–64. Bruford, W. H., The German Tradition of Self-Cultivation: ‘Bildung’ from Humboldt to Thomas Mann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). Burwick, Frederick, ‘Coleridge, Schlegel, and Animal Magnetism’, in English and German Romanticism: Cross-Currents and Controversies, ed. James Pipkin (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1985), 275–300. —— ‘On Stage Illusion: From Wordsworth’s Marginalia to Coleridge’s Lectures’, The Wordsworth Circle, 19 (1988), 28–37. Carlson, Julie, ‘Command Performances: Burke, Coleridge, and Schiller’s Dramatic Reflections on the Revolution in France’, The Wordsworth Circle, 23 (1992), 117–32. —— In the Theatre of Romanticism: Coleridge, Nationalism, Women (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). —— ‘Remorse for Jacobin Youth’, The Wordsworth Circle, 24 (1993), 130–3. —— ‘Unsettled Territory: the Drama of English and German Romanticism’, Modern Philology, 88 (1990), 43–56. Carlyon, Clement, Early Years and Late Reflections (London: Whittaker, 1836). Cassirer, Ernst, ‘Schiller und Shaftesbury’, Publications of the English Goethe Society, 11 (1935), 37–59. Chrisman, William, ‘Coleridge’s Wallenstein Translations as a Guide to his Dejection Ode’, The Wordsworth Circle, 18 (1987), 132–6. Chytry, Josef, The Aesthetic State: a Quest in Modern German Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). Coffman, Ralph J., Coleridge’s Library: a Bibliography of Books Owned or Read by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987). Cohen, Ted, ‘Why Beauty is a Symbol of Morality’, Essays in Kant’s Aesthetics, ed. Ted Cohen and Paul Guyer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 221–36. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, Aids to Reflection, ed. John Beer (London and Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994). —— Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and Walter Jackson Bate, 2 vols (London and Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983). —— Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956–71). —— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. H. Coleridge, 2 vols (Oxford, 1912). —— Essays on His Times, ed. David V. Erdman, 3 vols (London and Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978).

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Selected Bibliography

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Kant, Immanuel, The Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911). —— The Critique of Teleological Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1928). —— Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, trans. John T. Goldthwait (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960). —— Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone, trans. Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson (New York: Harper, 1960). Kelly, John Alexander, German Visitors to English Theatres in the Eighteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1936). Kelly, Nancy Webb, ‘Homo Aestheticus: Coleridge, Kant and Play’, Textual Practice, 2 (1988), 200–18. Knights, Ben, The Idea of the Clerisy in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978). Kooy, Michael John, ‘Coleridge’s Francophobia’, Modern Language Review, 95 (2000), 24–41. —— ‘Romanticism and Coleridge’s Idea of History’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 1999 (60), 717–35. Lamport, F. J., German Classical Drama: Theatre, Humanity, and Nation, 1750– 1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). —— ‘Wallenstein on the English Stage’, German Life and Letters, 48 (1995), 124–47. Leask, Nigel, The Politics of Imagination in Coleridge’s Critical Thought (Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave, 1988). Lessons of Romanticism: a Critical Companion, ed. Thomas Pfau and Robert F. Gleckner (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998). Lloyd, Myfanwy J., ‘The Historical Thought of S. T. Coleridge: the Later Prose Works’, D.Phil. thesis (University of Oxford, 1998). Lockridge, Laurence S., Coleridge the Moralist (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977). —— The Ethics of Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Lokke, Kari, ‘Schiller’s Maria Stuart: the Historical Sublime and the Aesthetics of Gender’, Monatshefte, 82 (1990), 123–41. Lukács, Georg, ‘Schiller’s Theory of Modern Literature’, in Goethe and His Age, trans. Robert Anchor (London: Anchor, 1968). —— ‘Zur Ästhetik Schillers’, in Beiträge zur Geschichte der Ästhetik (Berlin: Aufbau, 1954), 11–96. McCradle, Arthur William, Friedrich Schiller and Swabian Pietism (Berne: Peter Lang, 1986). McFarland, Thomas, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969). Mackall, Leonard M., ‘Coleridge’s Marginalia on Wieland and Schiller’, Modern Language Review, 19 (1924), 344–7. Marcuse, Herbert, Eros and Civilization: a Philosophical Enquiry into Freud (Boston: Beacon, 1955).

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Selected Bibliography

Selected Bibliography

Marino, Luigi, Praeceptores Germaniae: Göttingen 1770–1820 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1995). Marquardt, Hertha, Henry Crabb Robinson und seine deutschen Freunde: Brücke zwischen England und Deutschland im Zeitalter der Romantik (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1964–67). Martin, Richard T., ‘Coleridge’s Use of sermoni propriora’, The Wordsworth Circle, 3 (1972), 71–5. Mellor, Anne K., Romanticism and Gender (London and New York: Routledge, 1993). Metzger, Lore, ‘The Role of Feeling in the Formation of Romantic Ideology: the Poetics of Schiller and Wordsworth’, in Sensibility in Transformation: Creative Resistance to Sentiment from the Augustan to the Romantic Age, ed. Syndy McMillen Conger (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1990), 172–94. Meyer, Eric, ‘Reconstructing Aesthetic Education: Modernity, Postmodernity, and Romantic Historicism’, in Intersections: Nineteenth-Century Philosophy and Contemporary Theory, ed. Tilottama Rajan and David L. Clarke (New York: State University of New York Press, 1995), 286–301. Micheli, Giuseppe and René Wellek, The Early Reception of Kant’s Thought in England, 1785–1805 and Immanuel Kant in England, 1793–1838 (London: Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1993). Milnes, Tim, ‘Eclipsing Art: Method and Metaphysics in Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 60 (1999), 125–47. Misch, Manfred, ‘Schiller und die Religion’, in Schiller Heute, ed. Hans-Jörg Knoblock and Helmut Koopmann (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1996), 27–43. Modiano, Raimonda, Coleridge and the Concept of Nature (London: Macmillan – now Palgrave, 1984). Moore, John David, ‘Coleridge and the “Modern Jacobinical Drama”: Osorio, Remorse, and the Development of Coleridge’s Critique of the Stage, 1797– 1816’, Bulletin of Research in the Humanities, 85 (1982), 443–64. Morgan, B. Q., ‘What Happened to Coleridge’s Wallenstein?’ Modern Language Journal, 43 (1959), 195–201. Naumann, Ursula, ‘“Für einer Zeitung Gnadenlohn”? Schillers Gedicht Die berühmte Frau und Sophie Ludwigs Buch Juda oder der erschlagene Redliche’, Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie, 109 (1990), 16–26. Oellers, Norbert, Schiller: Geschichte seiner Wirkung bis zu Goethes Tod, 1805– 1832 (Bonn: Bouvier, 1967). The Origins of Modern Critical Thought: German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism from Lessing to Hegel, ed. David Simpson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Orsini, Gian N. G., Coleridge and German Idealism (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969). Park, Roy, ‘Coleridge and Kant: Poetic Imagination and Practical Reason’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 8 (1968), 335–45. Perkins, Mary Anne, ‘Coleridge, Language and History’, in Coleridge’s Visionary Languages: Essays in Honour of J. B. Beer, ed. Tim Fulford and Morton D. Paley (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1993), 181–94.

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Perkins, Mary Anne, Coleridge’s Philosophy: the Logos as a Unifying Principle (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994). Perry, Seamus, Coleridge and the Uses of Division (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999). Pick, Robert, Schiller in England, 1787–1960: a Bibliography (Leeds: English Goethe Society, 1961). Priestman, Donald G., ‘Godwin, Schiller and the Polemics of Coleridge’s Osorio’, Bulletin of Research in the Humanities, 82 (1979), 236–48. Pugh, David, ‘Aesthetic and Moral Autonomy in Schiller’s Gedankenlyrik’, in Revolution und Autonomie, ed. Wolfgang Wittkowski (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1990), 314–25. —— Dialectic of Love: Platonism in Schiller’s Aesthetics (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996). —— ‘“Die Künstler”: Schiller’s Philosophical Programme’, Oxford German Studies, 18/19 (1989–90), 13–22. —— ‘How Enlightened are Schiller’s Aesthetics?’, in Impure Reason: Dialectic of Enlightenment in Germany, ed. W. Daniel Wilson and Robert C. Holub (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993), 166–84. Rault, André, ‘Die Spanier in Peru oder die Deutschen in England: Englisches und deutsches Theater, 1790–1810’, Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der ErnstMoritz-Arndt Universität, 32 (1983), 83–9. Rea, Thomas, Schiller’s Dramas and Poems in England (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1906). Redfield, Marc, ‘De Man, Schiller, and the Politics of Reception’, Diacritics, 20 (1990), 50–70. Reed, T. J., The Classical Centre: Goethe and Weimer, 1775–1832 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). —— Schiller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). Richardson, Alan, ‘Romanticism and the Colonization of the Feminine’, in Romanticism and Feminism, ed. Anne K. Mellor (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 13–25. Ritt, Elke, Mary Stuart, a tragedy (1801) von Joseph Charles Mellish: die autorisierte englische Blankversübersetzung von Schillers Maria Stuart: Analyse und Text nebst einer Biographie des Übersetzers und handschriftlichem Dokumentationsmaterial (Munich: Tuduv, 1993). Robinson, Heidi, ‘Der gesellschaftsfeindliche “innere” bzw. “ganze Mensch”: Mißdeutungen in der englischen Rezeption und Überlieferung von Schillers Kulturtheorie’, Arcadia: Zeitschrift für vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft, 15 (1980), 129–48. Robinson, Henry Crabb, Crabb Robinson in Germany, 1800–1805, ed. Edith J. Morley (London: Humphrey Milford, 1929). —— Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson, ed. Thomas Sadler, 3 vols (London: Macmillan – now Palgrave, 1869). —— On Books and Their Writers, ed. Edith J. Morley, 3 vols (London: Dent, 1938). Schafarschik, Walter, Friedrich Schiller (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 1999). Schaper, Eva, ‘Friedrich Schiller: Adventures of a Kantian’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 4 (1964), 348–62.

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Selected Bibliography

Selected Bibliography

Schaper, Eva, ‘Schiller’s Kant: a Chapter in the History of Creative Misunderstanding’, in Studies in Kantian Aesthetics (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1979), 99–117. —— ‘Taste, Sublimity, and Genius: the Aesthetics of Nature and Art’, in The Cambridge Companion to Kant, ed. Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 367–93. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Josef, ‘Concerning the Relation of the Plastic Arts to Nature’, trans. Michael Bullock, in Herbert Read, The True Voice of Feeling: Studies in English Romantic Poetry (London: Faber and Faber, 1953), 323–64. —— The Philosophy of Art, trans. Douglas W. Scott (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). —— System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), trans. Peter Heath (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1978). Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich, Essays, Aesthetical and Philosophical, trans. anon. (London: Bohn, 1884). —— Kleinere prosaische Schriften von Schiller. Aus mehrern Zeitschriften vom Verfasser selbst gesammelt und verbessert, 4 parts in 2 or 4 vols (Leipzig: Cotta, 1792–1802). —— Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, trans. L. A. Willoughby and Elizabeth M. Wilkinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967). —— Naïve and Sentimental Poetry and On the Sublime, trans. Julius A. Elias (New York: Ungar, 1966). —— ‘On the Use of the Chorus in Tragedy’, in The Bride of Messina, William Tell, Demetrius, trans. Charles E. Passage (New York: Ungar, 1962), 3–12. —— Poems of Schiller Complete: Including all his Early Suppressed Pieces, trans. Edgar Alfred Bowring (London: Parker, 1851). —— The Robbers and Wallenstein, trans. F. J. Lamport (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979). —— Werke und Briefe (Nationalausgabe), ed. Julius Petersen et al. (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1943– ). Schiller-Handbuch, ed. Helmut Koopmann (Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner, 1998). Schiller Heute, ed. Hans-Jörg Knobloch and Helmut Koopmann (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1996). Schillers Wallenstein, ed. Fritz Heuer and Werner Keller (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1977). Schlegel, Friedrich von, Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, ed. Ernst Behler, 35 vols (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1958–79). Schmid, Pia, ‘Weib oder Mensch, Wesen oder Wissen?: Bürgerliche Theorien zur weiblichen Bildung um 1800’, in Geschichte der Mädchen- und Frauenbildung, ed. Elke Kleinau and Claudia Opitz, 2 vols (Frankfurt and New York: Campus, 1996), I, 327–45. Scholz, Hannelore, Widersprüche im bürgerlichen Frauenbild: Zur ästhetischen Reflexion und poetischen Praxis bei Lessing, Friedrich Schlegel und Schiller (Weinheim: Deutscher Studien, 1992). ‘Selige Tage im Musensitz Göttingen’: Stadt und Universität in ungarischen Berichten aus dem 18. und 19. Jahrhundert, ed. István Futaky (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1991).

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Selected Bibliography

Selected Bibliography

Weber, Carl August, Bristols Bedeutung für die englische Romantik und die deutsch–englischen Beziehungen (Halle: Niemeyer, 1935). Weiskel, Thomas, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). Wellek, René, Immanuel Kant in England, 1793–1838 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1931). White, Hayden, ‘The Politics of Historical Interpretation: Discipline and De-Sublimation’, Critical Inquiry, 9 (1982), 113–37. Wieden, Fritz, ‘S.T. Coleridge’s Assimilation of Ideas from Schiller’s Early Writings’, in Analecta Helvetica et Germanica: eine Festschrift zu Ehren von Hermann Boeschenstein, ed. Achim Arnold et al. (Bonn: Bouvier, 1979), 170–81. Wilkinson, Elizabeth M., ‘Coleridge und Deutschland’, Forschungsprobleme der vergleichenden Literaturgeschichte (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1958), II, 7–23. —— and L. A. Willoughby, ‘“The Whole Man” in Schiller’s Theory of Culture and Society: On the Virtue of a Plurality of Models’, in Essays in German Language, Culture and Society, ed. Siegbert S. Prawer et al. (London: Institute of German Studies, 1969), 177–210. Williams, Raymond, Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1958). Willoughby, L. A., ‘Coleridge and his German Contemporaries’, Publications of the English Goethe Society, 10 (1934), 43–62. —— ‘Schiller in England and Germany’, Publications of the English Goethe Society, 11 (1935), 1–19. —— ‘Wordsworth and Germany’, in German Studies Presented to H. G. Fiedler (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938), 432–58. Wordsworth, William, The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. Ernest De Selincourt: The Middle Years, 1812–20, rev. Mary Moorman and Alan G. Hill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970). Zuccato, Edoardo, Coleridge in Italy (New York: St Martin’s Press – now Palgrave, 1996).

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230

Marxist critique of, 15, 99–100, 162–3 and radicalism, 98–100, 162–5, 206 and religion, 152–6, 164–5 and Schelling, 123–8 and Schiller’s poetry, see under Schiller, poetry and philosophy Schiller’s theory of, 14–16, 30–1, 35, 40, 50–1, 59–60, 82, 107–11, 119–21, 143–57; and aesthetic educators, 167, 171–3; and the Aesthetic State, 40, 144–57, 162; beauty, 16, 107–9, 111; form drive (Formtrieb), 108, 119–20, 128–9; and grace and dignity, 147, 180, 186; indirect relationship between art and morality, 117–18; play drive (Spieltrieb), 91, 108–9, 111, 115, 122–3, 144–5; semblance (Schein), 14, 85–6, 91, 107, 109–11, 113, 122, 144, 146; sense drive (Stofftrieb), 108, 119, 128–9; and tragedy, 40, 56, 119, 139, 148; and Wallenstein, 39–44, 120, 139 social and political aspects, 143–65, 167, 172–4 and the state, 43, 141–2, 151–2, 161–2, 170 and women, see separate entry see also aesthetic judgement, beautiful soul, Bildung, clerisy, cultivation, culture, didacticism, freedom, history, indirection, play, pleasure, woman/women

Adorno, Theodor, 100 aesthetic autonomy, 98 Coleridge on, 102–6, 111–14, 126–7, 140 and didacticism, 130–1 Gadamer on, 149–50 relation to politics, 163–4 Schiller on, 118, 120–1, 140, 150 aesthetic education Coleridge and, 5, 7, 42–4, 84–8, 97–100, 106–7, 121–6, 139–40, 157–65, 167–76; comparison with Schiller, 117–18, 121–3, 128–9, 130–40, 142–3, 157–8, 160–4, 170–2; cultivation, 157–65; ideality of art, 112–13, 121–2, 126; imitation/copy, illusion / delusion, 113–14, 122–3; indirect relationship between aesthetics and ethics, 115–18; liberal education, 160–1; poetic faith, 123; and radicalism, 163–5; role of the clerisy, 167–76; and Schelling, 123–8; state intervention, 161–3, 170; theory of imagination, 107, 129; in Biographia Literaria, 111–18, 121–6; in The Friend, 128–9, 160, 161–3; in A Lay Sermon, 164–5; in his lectures on literature, 126–8, 135–6, 160; in On the Constitution of Church and State, 158, 162, 167–76 distinct from civic education, 162, 170 economic aspects, 141–2, 161–3 Gadamer’s critique of, 149–50 231

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Index

Index

aestheticism Coleridge on, 105–6 Schiller accused of, 99–100, 143–4, 150 Schiller on, 126 aesthetic judgement, 100–1 distinguished from moral judgement, 119 and politics, 163–4 see also Kant, Critique of Judgement Aesthetic Letters, see under Schiller, works, also under aesthetic education, Schiller’s theory of aesthetic pleasure, see pleasure aesthetic representation, 109–14 Aesthetic State, 141–65 see also aesthetic education, clerisy, cultivation alienation, 107 Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, 35–7 androgyny, 187–8, 218 n. 18 Annual Review, 52 Anti-Jacobin Review, 46, 52 Ariosto, Ludovico, 64 Aristotle, 103 poetry essentially ideal, 112 art, relation to ethics, see aesthetic education, also indirection Ashton, Rosemary, 2, 4, 6 Atheneum, 20 autonomy of art, see aesthetic autonomy Bacchus, 91–3 Barbauld, Anna Letitia, 130, 210 n. 1 The British Novelists, 130 on the moral of ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, 134 on the morality of Tom Jones, 134 Barruel, Abbé, 34, 47 Battersby, Christine, 188, 218 n. 19 beautiful soul (schöne Seele), 61, 78, 86–7, 146, 178, 191 Beddoes, Thomas, 5 and Kant, 28–9 reviews Schiller’s Horae, 28–31 Beer, John, 3, 92

Benjamin, Walter, 147 Beresford, Benjamin, 52, 211 n. 12, 211 n. 17 biblical history, 202–3 Bildung, 7, 8, 85 and Christianity, 153–5 and history, 193–206 misunderstood, 143 as a social and political force, 142, 148 Wilhelm von Humboldt’s theory of, 82 and women, see separate entry see also aesthetic education Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich, 34, 48 Blumenthal, Lieselotte, 48, 211 n. 7 Bowles, William Lisle, 25 Brooks, Linda M., 2, 194, 218 n. 3 Bürger, Gottfried August, 36, 48 Coleridge and, 36 Schiller’s review of his Poems, 11–12, 36–7, 62 Burke, Edmund, 43, 177 Butler, Joseph, 97 Carlson, Julie A., 2, 39, 46, 209 n. 8, 210 n. 4 Carlyle, Thomas, 52, 57 children / childhood, 59–60, 182 children’s literature, 130–1 Christianity, 2–3, 49, 64–5, 71–2, 143 Chytry, Josef, 215 n. 2 Cipriani, Giovanni Battista, 113 civilization, see under cultivation clerisy, 7, 142, 158, 167–76 absence of curriculum, 169 and aesthetic education, 170–2 compared to mystery religion, 172–4, 176 and ideology, 174–6 origin of the notion of, 168–9 relation to the state, 170, 173–4 and women, 176, 186–8 Coburn, Kathleen, 35

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Coleridge, Samuel Taylor and aesthetic autonomy, see separate entry and aesthetic education, see separate entry aesthetics, understood not only in epistemological but moral terms, 2, 97–8 and Barbauld, 134–6 and Beddoes, 28–31 and Christianity, 2–3, 64–5, 71–2, 79, 125, 143, 169, 219 n. 12 on the clerisy, see separate entry on copy and imitation, 113–14 and cultivation, see separate entry on delusion and illusion, 114 and didacticism, see separate entry on Fielding, 134–6 on France, 79–81, 132, 213 n. 7 on Goethe, 26, 35, 67, 68; transcribes lines from Alexis and Dora, 83–4 in Göttingen, 29, 33–7 and historiography, see history and Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 82 on imagination, 107, 129, 140, 164 and Kant, 34, 72, 103–6; on his ethics, 59–61, 87, 121; on his aesthetics, 103–6; critique of aesthetic autonomy, 104–6, 118 and liberal politics, 26 on literary criticism and morality, 105–6 and metrics, 75–6 on naturalism, 114 on poetic diction, 112, 113–14 and religion, 164–5 and Schelling, 97, 98, 123–8 and Schiller, grounds for comparison, 2–6, 95–100; Schiller’s works in his library, 5; no extant marginalia, 4; identifies with Schiller, 6–7; and The Robbers, 23–6; plans to translate Schiller’s works,

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26; compares Schiller to Shakespeare, 26, 39, 79–80; compares Schiller to Wordsworth, 26; acquires works while in Germany, 34; reads his review of Bürger’s Poems, 36–7; translates Wallenstein, 33, 38–44, 48–9; reacts to Schiller’s dramas, 46; transcribes and translates distichs from The Muses’ Almanac, 69–71, 83–91; acquires Poems, part 2 (1803), 73–4; and the study of metrics, 75–7; on Schiller’s supposed francophilia, 79–82; refers to Schiller while in Malta and Italy, 75, 78–82; Schiller’s aesthetics reflected in his poetry, 84–8, 96; adapts Schiller’s distichs in praise of Wordsworth, 85–6, 90–1; translates hexameters, 88; reads Schiller before studying Kant and Schelling, 96, 100; see also aesthetic education and Schiller’s aesthetic essays, 3–6, 28–31, 34, 36–7, 58–65, 84–8; Aesthetic Letters, 29–30, 62; On Grace and Dignity, 4, 46, 60–2; On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry, 4, 46, 59–60, 62, 64–5; Shorter Works in Prose, 34, 61–2; see also aesthetic education and Schiller’s poetry, 5, 67–93, 96; ‘The Bards of Ages Past’, 73; ‘The Dance’, 76–8; ‘Dithyramb’, 72, 91–3; ‘The Glove’, 73, 78; ‘The Gods of Greece’, 74, 78–9; ‘The Hostage’, 75; ‘The Ideals’, 75; ‘Laura at the Piano’, 74; ‘Sayings of Confucius’, 72; ‘The Sharing of the Earth’, 73, 78; ‘The Unknown Maiden’, 72; ‘The Victory Feast’, 75; ‘The Words of Belief’, 71–2, 79

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Index

Index

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor – continued and Schlegel, A. W., 63–5 as sentimental poet, 131–2 on Shakespeare, 37, 105, 135–6 travels in Germany, 33–7 use of sources, 4, 6, 63–5, 95–100, 123–4 on women, see separate entry on Wordsworth’s poetry, 112, 115–16, 121, 123, 125–6 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, works Aids to Reflection, 97, 168–9 Biographia Literaria, 7, 37, 54–5, 76, 104; and aesthetic education, 111–18, 121–6; and Schelling, 123–6; transcendental deduction of the imagination, 97, 124–6; see also aesthetic education ‘Christabel’, 191 ‘Dejection: An Ode’, 25, 39, 189 ‘Destiny of Nations’, 132 ‘Fears in Solitude’, 132–3 The Friend, 7, 111, 142, 158; and Aesthetic Letters, 128–9, 161–3 ‘Kubla Khan’, 25, 174, 190–1 A Lay Sermon, 7, 142, 158, 161, 164–5 Lectures 1808–1819 on Literature, 7, 111, 126–8, 135–6, 160, 184 Lyrical Ballads, see separate entry On the Constitution of Church and State, 7, 98, 142–3, 158, 162; compared to Aesthetic Letters, 167–76 On Poesy or Art, 126–7 On the Principles of Genial Criticism, 103–4 Osorio, compared to Schiller’s The Ghostseer, 26–7 Poems on Various Subjects, 25 review of M. G. Lewis, The Monk, 26, 103 Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 132; compared to Schiller’s The Ghostseer, 27; its moral, 134 Sibylline Leaves, 73, 91–3

Sonnets by Various Authors, 25 The Statesman’s Manual, 128, 158 Theory of Life, 201 ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’, 189 ‘To the Author of “The Robbers”’, 25–6 ‘To W. Wordsworth’, 25 Wallenstein, Coleridge’s translation of, 5, 33, 38–44, 48–9; its moral, 44; its reception, 45–6, 49; see also under Schiller, works Coleridge, Sara, 176–7, 216 n. 6 Colmer, John, 162–3 Congreve, William, 105 Constant, Benjamin, 58 Cooper, Anthony Ashley, Earl of Shaftesbury, 11, 103 Cotta, J. F., 29, 49 Crick, Joyce, 2, 38–9, 48–9, 209 nn. 4, 6 cultivation, 7, 43–4, 142, 157–65 Coleridge on, 157–65, 167 and civilization, 142, 158–62 and state sponsorship, 141–2, 150–2, 161–2, 167 and history, 201, 204–6 and ideology, 174–6 Cumberland, Richard, 130 Davidson, Graham, 219 n. 14 Davy, Humphry, 88 De Man, Paul, 214 n. 6 De Quincey, Thomas, 57–8 despotism, 141 determinism, 42, 59 didacticism, 130–9 and aesthetic education, 130, 134–9 and children’s literature, 130–1 Coleridge on, 117, 130–1, 134–6 Coleridge and Schiller as didactic poets, 131–3 Schiller on, 131, 136–9 and sentimental poetry, 131–4 sermoni propriora, 132

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disinterestedness, 99, 135–8, 165, 174 Dunstan, A. C., 4, 207 n. 8 Dyer, George, 16–17 Eagleton, Terry, 163 Edgeworth, Maria, 130 education, 159–61 Eichhorn, Johann Gottfried, 34, 48–9 Ewen, Frederic, 4, 207 n. 5, 210 n. 5 Fairer, David, 25, 208 n. 9 feeling, 101, 106 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 16, 48, 96, 124 Fielding, Henry, 134–6 compared to Richardson, 135–6 Tom Jones, 134–5 form drive (Formtrieb), see under aesthetic education, Schiller’s theory of France, 79–81 freedom, 15, 22, 40–4, 59 aesthetic freedom, 101–2, 107, 110–11, 118, 120, 122, 135 relationship to moral freedom, 119–23, 144–6, 148–9 French Revolution, 10, 23–4, 28, 50 and Aesthetic Letters, 35, 96 and Wallenstein, 39, 42–3 French theatre, 79–82 Fulford, Tim, 191 Gadamer, Hans Georg, 149–50 Garve, Christian, 48 Geisweiler, Constantin, 47 Geisweiler, Maria, 47 genius, 54–5, 176, 183–4, 187–8, 191 The Gentleman’s Magazine, 53 The German Museum, 5, 47–52, 57, 210 n. 6 publishes work by and on Schiller, 48–52 reports on the Weimar Court Theatre, 51–2 and Wallenstein, 48–9, 53

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Gillman, Anne, 185 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 2, 16–19, 21–2, 33, 48, 57, 67–8, 153 and Coleridge, see Coleridge, on Goethe and Schiller, see Schiller, and Goethe Alexis and Dora (Alexis und Dora), 83–4 Götz von Berlichingen, 16 Iphigenia in Tauris (Iphigenie auf Tauris), 22 Roman Elegies (Römische Elegien), 16–17 The Sorrows of Young Werther (Die Leiden des jungen Werthers), 16 Torquato Tasso, 16 Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Apprenticeship (Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre), 16–17, 157 Göttingen, 33–4, 48, 209 n. 2 Coleridge in, 29, 33–7 Grace and Dignity, see under Schiller, works: On Grace and Dignity Gray, Richard T., 143–4 Greece (ancient), 74, 79 Habermas, Jürgen, 163 Hagedorn, F. von, 68, 74, 76 Hamilton, Paul, 2, 4, 7, 97–8, 216 n. 6 Harding, Anthony, 3, 218 Hartley, David, 28 Hazlitt, William, 46 Hegel, G. W. F., 198, 218 n. 6 Henrich, Dieter, 214 n. 6 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 17, 33, 48, 55, 57, 158 Heyne, C. G., 34 historical tragedy, 139 history, 8, 158, 193–206 aesthetic education and, 150, 193–206 Coleridge on, 200–5 irrational, 196–8 and Logos, 201–4

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Index

history – continued redemptive, 201–3 Schiller on, 194–200 as sublime, 194, 198–200, 204–5 universal history, 12–13, 194 Homer, 64 Humboldt, Alexander von, 48 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 17, 23, 50 ‘The Limits of State Action’, 50 meets Coleridge, 82 On Schiller and the Course of his Intellectual Development, 17 ‘Theory of Human Education’, 82 Hutcheson, Francis, 103 Hutchinson, Sara, 70, 83–4 idealism, 3, 6, 43, 45, 58, 96 ideology, 99 Iffland, August Wilhelm, 22–3 imagination Coleridge’s theory of, and Schiller, 107, 129, 140, 164 Coleridge’s transcendental deduction of, 97, 124–6 see also aesthetic education imitation, 109–14 indirection Coleridge on, 115–18, 121–3 Schelling on, 127 Schiller on, 117–18, 119–21 individuation, 201–3 Jackson, H. J., 176, 187–8, 217 n. 15 Jameson, Frederick, 163 Jena Romantics, 16, 20–1 Jonson, Ben, 105 Kant, Immanuel, 2, 3 aesthetics, 100–6, 177, 196 British reception of, 28–9, 48 and Coleridge, see under Coleridge, and Kant moral philosophy, 59–61, 178 and Schiller, see under Schiller, and Kant on women, 177–8 Kant, Immanuel, works

Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 177 Critique of Judgement, 13, 29, 100–6, 109; beauty as symbolic of morality, 102–3, 214 n. 6; relationship between aesthetics and ethics, 103; the sublime, 196 Critique of Practical Reason, 13, 102 Critique of Pure Reason, 13, 28–9, 102 Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 59 ‘Idea for a Universal History’, 13, 48 Observations on the Feeling of the Sublime and the Beautiful, 177 Perpetual Peace: A Philosophic Sketch, 29 Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone, 61, 153 ‘What is Enlightenment?’, 152 Kelly, Nancy Webb, 2, 99 Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb, 36, 48, 67, 130–1 Knights, Ben, 168 knowledge, relation to aesthetics, 2, 97–8, 102 Körner, Christian Gottfried, 13, 109 Kotzebue, August von, 22–3, 35, 47, 79–80 Lamport, F. J., 6, 207 n.1, 209 n. 5 Leask, Nigel, 172–3 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 10–11, 22, 52, 67 Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, see under Schiller, works, also under aesthetic education, Schiller’s theory of Lewis, M. G., 24, 26 Lichtenberg, G. C., 48 Lloyd, Myfanwy J., 218 n. 11 Lockhart, John Gibson, 46, 57 Lockridge, Laurence, 3 Logos, 155, 201–4 Lukács, Georg, 162–3

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Lyrical Ballads, 36–7, 39, 76, 112 Schiller’s possible influence on the preface, 36–7 Malta, 75, 78–82 Marcuse, Herbert, 163 Marino, Giambattista, 76 Maturin, Charles Robert, 113 McFarland, Thomas, 3, 125 Mellish, Joseph, 48–9, 51, 211 n. 10 Metastasio, Pietro, 75 Metzger, Lore, 215 n. 2 Meyer, Eric, 143–4 Mill, John Stuart, 176 Milnes, Tim, 215 n. 5 Milton, John, 117 modernity, 1, 6, 107, 163, 165 Modiano, Raimonda, 2, 194, 199, 218 n. 2 The Monthly Magazine, 5, 53–5, 57, 211 n. 16 The Monthly Mirror, 50 The Monthly Review, 28–31, 46 morality, relation to art, see aesthetic education, also indirection, didacticism More, Hannah, 55–7, 130 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 141–2, 161 Mudford, William, 56–7 music, 122, 141 Naïve and Sentimental Poetry, see under Schiller, works, On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry Naturphilosophie, 29, 127–8, 201 Nicolai, F., 85 Noehden, Georg Heinrich, 24 Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), 16 Orsini, G. N. G., 3 Paganini, Niccolo, 141–2 pantheism, 74, 127–8 Pantisocracy, 24

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Peace of Amiens, 46 Perkins, Mary Anne, 218 n. 11, 219 n. 14 Perry, Seamus, 3, 214 n. 2 philosophy, relation to literature, 5, 39–40, 55–6, 58, 84–8, 96, 164 see also didacticism plagiarism, 95–100 play, 39, 45, 101 Coleridge’s reluctance to use the term, 99 distinguished from ‘real life’, 42–4 man only free when at, 115 radical potential of, 164–5 Schiller on, 118, 120–2 see also aesthetic education play drive (Spieltrieb), see under aesthetic education, Schiller’s theory of pleasure, aesthetic, 14, 40, 56, 79, 88, 101, 116–17, 146 Coleridge on, 105–6 politics, see under Aesthetic State, also aesthetic education Priestley, Joseph, 28 Pugh, David, 6, 207 n. 3 radicalism, 163–4 see also under aesthetic education Ratzeburg, 33 Reed, T. J., 207 n. 1 representation, aesthetic, 109–14 Richards, I. A., 3 Richardson, Samuel, 135–6 Ritt, Elke, 211 n. 10 The Robbers, see under Schiller, works Robinson, Heidi, 143, 215 n. 1 Robinson, Henry Crabb, 46, 136, 211 n. 17 meets Schiller in Weimar, 5, 57–8, 212 n. 26 translates Schiller’s poem ‘The Genius’, 52 Romantic irony, 20–1 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 177, 211 n. 11

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Index

Index

Schaper, Eva, 214 n. 6 Schein, see under aesthetic education, Schiller’s theory of Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von, 3, 16, 20, 97, 123–8 Coleridge and, 123–8 compared to Schiller, 12, 124, 127–8 natura naturans, natura naturata, 126–7 On the Relation of the Plastic Arts to Nature, 126–7 System of Transcendental Idealism, 124–6 Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich von and aesthetic education, see under aesthetic education, Schiller’s theory of attitude towards nature, 15–16 and Christianity, 2–3, 49, 74, 79, 143, 152–6, 213 n. 3 his classicism, 60, 74, 79 and Coleridge, see under Coleridge, and Schiller and didacticism, see separate entry on Fielding and Richardson, 136–7 and French neoclassical drama, 80–2 and the French Revolution, 10, 18, 23, 35, 39 on genius, 54–5, 183–4 and Goethe, 50, 52, 57–8, 80–1, 147, 153, 157 and history, see separate entry and Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 17, 23, 50, 82, 157 and Kant, 13–14, 60–1, 71, 87, 108; on aesthetics, 102–3, 106–7, 109–10, 118, 214 n. 6; on moral philosophy, 60–1, 178; on religion, 153; on social justice, 152; on the sublime, 195–6; on women, 177–8 life and work, summary of, 10–23; his early writings, 10–11; his

liberal politics, 11; and Neoplatonism, 11; early interest in art and morality, 11–12; move to Jena, 12; interest in history and historiography, 12–13; in ill health, 13, 55, 211 n. 17; reaction to Kant, 13–14; writes major aesthetic essays, 14–16; friendship and collaboration with Goethe, 16–17; friendship with W. von Humboldt, 17; begins to write poetry again, 17–20; relations with Jena Romantics, 20–1; returns to writing for the stage, 21–2; lifelong interest in art and social action, 22–3; his death, 22, 53, 55 ; his posthumous reputation, 23 naïve and sentimental poetry, theory of, 15, 64–5, 98–9, 131–3; see also under works: On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry poetry and philosophy, 5, 12, 18–19, 20, 55–6, 58, 68–9, 84–8, 96, 131–2 reception of, in Britain, 23–4, 28–31, 38, 46–58, 143, 212 n. 25, 215 n. 1 and religion, 2–3, 50 and Weimar classicism, 16–17, 21–2, 39 on women, see separate entry Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich von, works Aesthetic Letters (Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen), 14, 50–1, 59, 62, 82, 84–5, 89, 95, 107–11, 144–57, 180; and aesthetic freedom, 119–20; and French Revolution, 35, 142; and Kant, 102–3, 106; and Schelling, 124; and Wallenstein, 39–44; see also aesthetic education

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Anthology for 1782 (Anthologie auf das Jahr 1782), 10, 74 ‘The Artists’ (‘Die Künstler’), 12, 132 ‘The Bards of Ages Past’ (‘Die Sänger der Vorwelt’), 73 The Bride of Messina (Die Braut von Messina), 22, 52, 80 Cabal and Love (Kabale und Liebe), 10, 24 The Criminal from Lost Honour (Der Verbrecher aus verlorener Ehre), 11, 49, 56, 62 ‘The Dance’ (‘Der Tanz’), 76–8, 180 distichs, 83–8 ‘Dithyramb’ (‘Dithyrambe’), 19, 72–3, 91–3 Don Carlos, 10, 12, 24, 54–5 Fiesco (Die Verschwörung des Fiesco zu Genua), 10–11, 24 ‘The Genius with the Inverted Torch’ (‘Der Genius mit der umgekehrten Fackel’), 79, 213 n. 6 The Ghostseer (Der Geisterseher), 26–7, 37, 49 ‘The Glove (‘Der Handschuh’), 73 ‘The Gods of Greece’ (‘Die Götter Griechenlandes’), 12, 74, 78–9, 132, 153 The History of the Thirty Years’ War (Geschichte des Dreißigjährigen Kriegs), 12, 13, 49 Horae (Die Horen), 17, 19–20, 23, 29–31, 50, 55, 67 ‘The Hostage’ (‘Die Bürgschaft’), 20 ‘The Ideal and Real Life’ (‘Das Ideal und das Leben’), 18, 132 ‘The Ideal of Woman’ (‘Das weibliche Ideal’), 179–80 ‘The Ideals’ (‘Die Ideale’), 18, 132 Kallias Letters (Kalliasbriefe), 13–14, 109–10 ‘Laura at the Piano’ (‘Laura am Klavier’), 74 Macbeth (Shakespeare), 22, 80

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The Maid of Orleans (Die Jungfrau von Orleans), 22, 52, 57, 139, 189 Mary Stuart (Maria Stuart), 22, 49, 80, 120, 139, 189 The Muses’ Almanac (Musenalmanach), 5, 18–20, 23, 37, 60, 67, 69, 71–3, 82–8, 153, 155 ‘Ode to Joy’ (‘An die Freude’), 56, 73 ‘On the Effects of a Permanent Theatre’ (‘Was kann eine gute stehende Schaubühne eigentlich wirken?’), 11, 50 On Grace and Dignity (Über Anmut und Würde), 15, 17, 29, 50, 60–1, 84, 86–7, 155, 178–80 ‘On the Grounds of Pleasure in Tragic Objects’ (‘Über den Grund des Vergnügens an tragischen Gegenständen’), 14, 117–18, 137–8 On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry (Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung), 15, 30, 50, 54–5, 59–61, 64–5, 84–5, 180, 182; and the Aesthetic State, 148–50; and didacticism, 131–2; and women, 182–3 ‘On the Necessary Limits in the Use of Beauty of Form’ (‘Über die nothwendigen Grenzen beim Gebrauch schöner Formen’), 29–30, 62, 149, 181–2 ‘On the Pathetic’ (‘Über das Pathetische’), 14, 29, 62, 107, 118–19 ‘On the Sublime’ (‘Über das Erhabene’),14, 30, 49, 62, 195–200 ‘On the Uses of the Chorus’ (‘Über den Gebrauch des Chors in der Tragödie’), preface to The Bride of Messina, 22, 107, 120–1

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Index

Index

Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich von, works – continued ‘On Tragic Art’ (‘Über die tragische Kunst’), 14, 30, 56, 139 Phaedra (Racine), 22, 80 Philosophical Letters (Philosophische Briefe), 11, 153 Poems (Gedichte), 5, 21, 52, 56, 67, 71–8 ‘The Praise of Woman’ (‘Würde der Frauen’), 180–1 ‘The Renowned Wife’ (‘Die berühmte Frau’), 73 review of Bürger’s poems, 11–12, 36–7, 62 The Robbers (Die Räuber), 6, 9, 24, 37, 53, 55 ‘Sayings of Confucius’ (‘Spruch des Confucius’), 72 ‘The Sexes’ (‘Die Geschlechter’), 180 ‘The Sharing of the Earth’ (‘Die Teilung der Erde’), 73, 78 Shorter Works in Prose (Kleinere prosaische Schriften), 5, 17, 29, 37, 49, 52, 55–6, 61–2 ‘To Goethe, on the occasion of his production of Voltaire’s Mahomet’ (‘An Goethe’), 80–2 ‘To the Many’ (‘Vielen’), 83–4 ‘To the One’ (‘Einer’), 84 ‘The Unknown Maiden’ (‘Das Mädchen aus der Fremde’), 19, 72–3 ‘The Veiled Statue at Sais’ (‘Das verschleierte Bild zu Sais’), 173–4 ‘The Victory Feast’ (‘Das Eleusische Fest’), 75 Votive Tablets (Votivtafeln), 19, 69–71, 86–91 ‘The Walk’ (‘Der Spaziergang’), 18, 35, 132 Wallenstein, 12, 21–2, 38–44, 80, 120, 139, 190, 197–9; Coleridge’s translation of, 38–44; other translations, 48–9, 52–3; reception in Britain, 38, 48–9, 51–3

‘What is Universal History and Why do We Study It?’ (‘Was heißt und zu welchem Ende studiert man Universalgeschichte?’), 13, 195, 197 William Tell (Wilhelm Tell), 22, 52, 80 ‘Words of Belief’ (‘Die Worte des Glaubens’), 19, 71–2, 79 Xenia (Xenien), 19, 60, 85–6 Schlegel, August Wilhelm von, 3, 16, 46, 48, 63–5, 82, 97 Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, 63, 65 Schlegel, Friedrich von, 3, 16, 20, 48, 65, 181 Schleiermacher, Friedrich Daniel, 156 schöne Seele, see ‘beautiful soul’ Scott, Walter, 46 sentimental poetry, see Schiller, On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry sermoni propriora, see didacticism Shaffer, Elinor S., 3, 29, 194, 207 n. 5, 208 n. 15, 218 n. 1 Shaftesbury, Earl of, see Cooper, Anthony Ashley Shakespeare, William, 26, 39, 79, 105 Sharpe, Lesley, 4, 6, 148, 157, 207 n. 1 Sicily, 75, 78 Smith, Charlotte, 25 Solger, Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand, 3 Sotheby, William, 58, 78 Southey, Robert, 24 Spieltrieb, see under aesthetic education, Schiller’s theory of Staël, Mme Germain de, 22, 57–8 De l’Allemagne, 57 Stoddart, John, 24, 58, 128 Stolberg, F. L., 68, 74, 76, 91 Strozzi, Giovanni Battista, 75–6 sublime, 25–6 Coleridge on, 194 Schiller’s theory of, 16

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and Schiller’s theory of tragedy, 40, 194 Sychrava, Juliet, 2, 98–9, 133 Taylor, Anya, 3, 92, 214 n. 14, 217 n. 7 Taylor, William, 5, 28, 36, 52, 57 Teutscher Merkur, 12, 34 Tieck, Ludwig, 46 Tom Jones, see under Fielding tragedy, Schiller’s theory of, 16, 40, 56, 119 relation to history, 139 The Universal Magazine, 49, 55–7 Vallins, David, 213 n. 28 Vickers, Neil, 29, 208 n. 12 Vico, Giambattisti, 200 Voss, J. H., 68, 74, 76 Wall, Anton, 48, 130 Wallenstein, see under Schiller, works, see also under Coleridge, works Weimar, 48, 51–2, 57–8 Weimar Court Theatre, 5, 21–2, 33, 37–8, 51–2, 57–8 Weiskel, Thomas, 196 Wellek, René, 3, 208 n. 14 White, Hayden, 218 n. 10 Wieland, Christoph Martin, 33, 35, 48, 57 Wilkinson, Elisabeth M., 4, 35, 37 Will, Peter, 47–8 Williams, Raymond, 158 Willich, Anton, 47

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Willoughby, L.A., 4, 35, 37 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 179, 217 n. 7 woman / women, 7, 35, 176–91 and aesthetic education, 142, 176–7, 182–4, 189, 191 characterless, 184, 186 and clerisy, 176, 186–8 Coleridge on, 176–7, 184–8 idealization of, 177, 181–8 naïve, 179–85 and natural virtue, 177–9, 184–5, 189–91 and polar logic, 186 relation to androgyny, 187–8 Schiller on, 177–84 and tragedy, 189–90 Woolf, Virginia, 187–8 Wordsworth, Dorothy, 33 Wordsworth, William, 2, 24, 26, 46, 68, 76, 82, 112 on Bürger’s Poems, 36 Coleridge praises in verse, 85–6, 90–1 discusses Schiller’s ‘Gods of Greece’, 34 on Schiller’s ‘entrails’, 55 Schiller’s possible influence on the preface to Lyrical Ballads, 36–7 travels with Coleridge to Germany, 33 see also Coleridge, on Wordsworth’s poetry Zelter, Karl, 155–7 Zuccato, Edoardo, 76, 213 n. 5

10.1057/9780230596788 - Coleridge, Schiller and Aesthetic Education, Michael John Kooy

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