Mimesis and Its Romantic Reflections

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mimesis and its romantic reflections

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F r e d e r i c k

B u r w i c k

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The Pennsylvania State University Press University Park, Pennsylvania

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Burwick, Frederick. Mimesis and its romantic reflections / Frederick Burwick. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-271-02037-7 (cloth: alk. paper) 1. Mimesis in literature. 2. Romanticism. I. Title.

809’.912 21; aa05 10-26—dc99

PN56.M536 B87 2001 99-053720

Copyright © 2001 The Pennsylvania State University All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 16802-1003

It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper for the first printing of all clothbound books. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1992.

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Acknowledgments

vii

Abbreviations

ix

Introduction

1

1 Art for Art’s Sake

17

2 Mimesis and the Idem et Alter

45

3 Mimesis of the Mind

77

4 Mimesis, Ekphrasis, Crisis

107

5 Reflections in the Mirror

135

6 Mimesis and the Twice-told Tale

161

Bibliography

185

Index

197

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I first drafted the ideas developed in this book as a resident fellow of the University of California Humanities Research Institute (UC Irvine) in 1991. For their comments and criticism, I am especially grateful to the other fellows: Marian Hobson, Ludwig Pfeiffer, Walter Pape, Elinor Shaffer, and Barbara Stafford. Throughout our collaborative residency, Murray Krieger was always available to help me answer questions about illusion and self-reflexivity and, more importantly, to help me formulate those questions. My analysis of the self-reflexivity of ekphrasis was further developed in discussions with Grant Scott and James Heffernan, and I thank Peter Wagner for inviting me to present an early exposition of that argument at his symposium “Ekphrasis and Intermediality” at Eichstätt, Germany, in May 1993. Responding graciously to frantic long-distance telephone calls begging his help, John Mahoney shared valuable insights drawn from his thorough command of the romantic debate over mimesis. Early versions of Chapters 2, 4, and 5 appeared in John Beer’s Questioning Romanticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); Reflecting Senses: Perception and Appearance in Literature, Culture, and the Arts, which Walter Pape and I edited (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 1995); and Peter Wagner’s Icons— Texts—Iconotexts. Essays on Ekphrasis and Intermediality (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 1996). I am grateful for permission to use these materials. Because this book has been long in development, I owe a grand debt of appreciation to the University of California and to several constituencies of the Research Committee of the UCLA Academic Senate for their willingness to fund this project year after year. When the work was finally ready for publication at Penn State, I was surprised by the largesse of an anonymous member of the UCLA Alumni Association, who provided generous support. My work arrived at Penn State at a time when there was a momentous changingof-the-guard: Philip Winsor, the senior editor who had seen two of my previous books through the press, pledged his support on this one as well, and he

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was able to keep that pledge before his retirement in September 1998. Sanford Thatcher, director, and Shannon Pennefeather, editorial assistant, have made the transition trouble-free. I thank them for maintaining the high standards and painstaking care that makes my work far better in print than when it leaves my computer.

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I use the following abbreviations to identify frequently cited works. These works are cited in full in the Bibliography.

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE BL BL 1907 CL CN CPW C&S LL LS M Sh C Shedd

Biographia Literaria. The 1983 Princeton edition. Biographia Literaria. The 1907 Oxford edition. Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge On the Constitution of the Church and the State Lectures 1808–1819 on Literature Lay Sermons Marginalia Coleridge’s Shakespearean Criticism The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge

THOMAS DE QUINCEY DQ

The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey

FRIEDRICH WILHELM JOSEPH VON SCHELLING KN Methode PdK StI SW

Über das Verhältnis der bildende Künste zu der Natur Vorlesung über die Methode des akademischen Studiums Philosophie der Kunst System des transzendentalen Idealismus Sämtliche Werke

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In Mimesis:The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946), Erich Auerbach moves from Schiller and Goethe to Stendhal and Balzac, passing over those writers whom he labels romantic. They were no longer concerned, he says, with the representation of reality. Instead, they had become preoccupied with the “fragmentation and limitation of the realistic.” To the extent that they made any attempt at all “seriously to represent objects of contemporary society,” their effort was half veiled in the “fantastic or idyllic.” Never comfortable with society, Rousseau found its institutions unethical and sought retreat in nature. The generation that followed him, so Auerbach reasoned, persisted in this rejection of society and continued to nourish their own inner fragmentation and isolation.1 In them representation of reality had given way to individual subjectivism. Imitation, as a way to interpret reality and the social condition through the performative and representative means of literature, had a broad intercultural tradition. Yet it was a tradition that had begun to disintegrate. Auerbach—a German Jew in exile, a professor of romance philology at Marburg driven by the Nazis from his own country—was trying to rejoin the fragments of mimesis.2 Various pieces were being used to reflect factional interests, or to serve as propagandistic instruments of nationalism. Although Auerbach knew that the “fate” which is operative in mimetic fictions is always imposed from without, and is never “a fate which results from the inner processes of the real, historical world,” he hoped that his call for an informed historical and cultural vantage would surmount the potential for ideological abuse.3 It was only a few years after Auerbach’s book was published that Martin Hei1. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur, pp. 399, 406–7, 414–15. 2. Luiz Costa-Lima, “Erich Auerbach: History and Metahistory.” 3. Auerbach, Mimesis, p. 35; idem, “Philology and Weltliteratur,” p. 17: “We must return, in admittedly altered circumstances, to the knowledge that prenational medieval culture already possessed: the knowledge that the spirit [Geist] is not national.”

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degger declared that mimesis in the arts propagated fundamental deceptions about Being. Although it may not be altogether fair to identify Heidegger’s former endorsement of National Socialism with the Nazi atrocities that had driven Auerbach from his country, his denunciation of so-called mimetic realism was most certainly informed by his belated recognition of the propagandistic abuse of its fictions. Our habituation to a mimetic way of thinking, he announced in 1953, had led us to neglect the essential difference between Being and beings. Precisely because it focused on how ideas might be manifest or replicated in things, the philosophical inquiry into the nature of Being ignored the ontology and pursued with fascination the phenomenal appearance in being. Instead of looking for the informing physical energy, we reenact our anthropocentrism and accept the world of phenomenal appearances as an imitation of our ideas.4 It was this very insistence on the mimetic illusion of “reality” that brought about the modern and postmodern confrontation with the constitutive pretenses of art, philosophy, and the social sciences. The potential for deception, although exploited by the mimetic tradition in the arts, is actually located, as Jacques Derrida has demonstrated, in the redoubling of language. The constitutive structures of language are all the more difficult to assess because we can refer to them only from the inside. So thoroughly does language substitute for being that even when we think we are referring to an external world of things, our language is referring only to itself. The strategy of Derrida’s deconstruction is to show how the mimetic presumptions of a text can be detected and exposed from within the illusory structure of signs and symbols. He opposes not imitation per se, but imitation that does not recognize its own redoubling, or which presumes that there is an original out there for it to copy.5 The generation of the physical world of being is a redoubling movement in which matter and energy take on shapes and forms that can be seen and named. In the Poetics (1451a.24), Aristotle posits mimesis as a consequence of physis (ingenium, instinct). The physis is first redoubled as its energy manifests itself in nature, and is then redoubled once more in the mimetic sign that records its intelligible presence: “Physis is revealed in mimesis,” writes Derrida, “or in the poetry which is a species of mimesis, by virtue of the hardly apparent structure which constrains mimesis from carrying to the exterior the fold of its redoubling.”6 The “fold,” hidden within the denotation, is the differential that Derrida ex4. Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 164. 5. Jacques Derrida, “La double séance,” in La Dissémination. 6. Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, p. 237.

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poses. When a judgment of taste asserts itself as a logical judgment, which it never can be, the manifestation might be judged paradoxical. The nonconceptual, after all, is now said to resemble the conceptual—a mimetic act. “There is no contradiction here,” Derrida says, “which is not reappropriated by the economy of physis as mimesis.”7 Among its manifold possibilities, physis may enter into human activity as mimesis, an activity of determining and representing which Aristotle will allow only to human beings. Responding to the declaration in the Poetics that “imitation is natural to man from childhood” and that the human being “is the most imitative creature in the world” (1448b.6–9), Derrida observes that Aristotle has thus located human activity within mimetic redoubling: “The power of truth, as the unveiling of nature (physis) by mimesis, congenitally belongs to the physics of man.”8 From his observation that only human beings imitate, through his poetic principle that “man imitates man,” Aristotle seeks to reinforce his presumption that in the drama a mimetic relation between the act and the human being would be disclosed. Rather than reveal the truth of Being, Derrida suggests, the mimetic act only redoubles the figurations of self. Because writing produces only signs or traces for what is not present, it always defers direct reference to what it represents. The sign pretends to a sameness which it offers only in its difference. This mode of reference which defers in and through difference is what Derrida calls différance. Unless there is an awareness of différance, the “folding” of the physis within the mimetic structure of textuality remains unread. The redoubling in Plato’s Republic (book 10) involves two modes of mimesis. In one, the idea manifests itself in reality. In the other, the artist replicates the reality. The danger, according to Plato, is that the viewer may confuse the two. But Derrida sees a more fundamental confusion: Plato’s “double inscription of mimesis” privileges eikastic representation, for example, in Timaeus and Laws, where the eikon is identified as the true likeness of the idea in the real and condemns fantastic representation, for example, in the Republic and Ion, where the phantasma or eidolon are dismissed as the sensedeceptions of the poet or artist.9 Derrida’s deconstruction of mimesis would be disturbing enough if it had gone no further than Plato in exposing the fantastic images of poet and artist. But he also deconstructs Plato’s eikastic images, which are only representations of a textual ontology (i.e., of an ideal that is only textual, only itself a mimetic 7. Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, p. 76; Derrida cross-references his comments on mimesis in The Truth in Painting, pp. 47–48, 76, 110, 377, to his essay “Economimesis.” 8. Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, p. 237. 9. Derrida, “Economimesis,” p. 67; idem, Dissemination, pp. 186–87.

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redoubling). Because mimetic activity is essentially textual, an attempt to give external representation to experience, the human being is always caught up in différance. The mimetic gesture expresses only the absence, the difference, not the sameness it seeks to produce. If the disparity were simply of the sort that Plato attributes to names and signs (Cratylus; Phaedrus 242c), then the difference could be resolved simply by relying on the capacity of mind to divine the truth. Thus it might be argued that proper education, intellectual discipline, and alert and informed perception could overcome the naive confusion of the signifier with the thing signified. What Derrida demonstrates is that this supposed capacity to penetrate or transcend the limitations of the sign-system is itself defined by the same self-referential textual ontology. Where the mimemes are plural, as Derrida discovers them to be in Mallarmé’s Mimique, their constant destabilizing means that they could be held to be part of the movement of différance. Mallarmé takes as his text the text of the mime. The mime’s text is the body, inscribing itself through gesture and facial expression. In this originary, performative act, the mime might be said to present rather than represent. Because he performs what he means, the mime’s text could then be perceived as overcoming the usual absence of referentiality. This would seem to recapture, Derrida recognizes, the orginal Greek sense of :4:,ÇFhÓ4. Mallarmé’s mime might thus be the one to unveil the truth of Being. Derrida, however, emphatically denies the possibility. He grants Mallarmé’s point that the mime is indeed mimicking, but he is mimicking nothing (no thing): in Derrida’s words, this mimicry “is difference without reference, or rather reference without a referent.” Yet it is precisely in revealing nothing that “the differential structure of mimicry or mimesis” is preserved. Because it is the business of the mime to unveil absences rather than presences, he is not entangled in the double bind of Plato’s metaphysics: “This ‘materialism of the idea’ is nothing other than the staging, the theatre, the visibility of nothing or of the self. It is a dramatization which illustrates nothing.”10 Because there is “nothing outside of the text,” Mallarmé’s mime has a singular advantage in imitating nothing. In an equally devastating attack, René Girard attributes the social mechanism of victimization and violence to the insidious and compelling power of mimesis. Mimetic representation inculcates a desire for the object and implicates its appropriation. Imitation thus fosters rivalry. “When any gesture of appropriation is imitated,” Girard says, “it simply means that two hands will reach for the 10. Derrida, Dissemination, pp. 206–8.

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same object simultaneously: conflict cannot fail to result.”11 Like Derrida, Girard locates the fundamental mimetic act in a concealed redoubling. In the chapter from Rasselas titled “The Wants of Him who Wants Nothing,” Samuel Johnson has his hero call out for “something to desire.”12 Unlike hunger, desire requires an external stimulus. This Johnsonian moral truth is crucial to Girard’s declaration of the mimetic nature of desire. We desire because we see others desire, and we desire what they desire.13 Desire thus has a triangular structure. Praising Amadis of Gaul, Don Quixote declares “that whoever imitates him best will come closest to perfect chivalry.” Don Quixote desires whatever Amadis might desire. Amadis thus becomes the invisible mediator of desire. The subject’s relationship to the object of desire, whether it be to possess the barber’s basin or to vanquish the windmills, is merely a mirroring gesture, a way of enacting the deeper desire to be like Amadis.14 In order to enact the desire for the object, the subject forgets that this desire is only a mimetic act. The desire becomes “real,” felt and experienced as one’s own. In this moment, the mediator becomes the rival. Whether they desire similar objects or the very same object, they both perform the same act. What began in admiration is transformed into rivalry. To complete the process of the imitation, it is necessary to eradicate the traces of difference: to annihilate what one imitates. This is the “mimetic crisis,” the source of violence. Paradoxically, the attempt to assure social order initiates social disorder as well. As the role model for the child, the adult gives the injunction, “Imitate me!” Hidden within this injunction, however, is the secret countermand, “Don’t imitate me!” (which means, Girard explains, “Do not appropriate my object”; or averting the double bind of role model, “Do as I say, not as I do”). What Freud tried to explain as the Oedipal conflict, Girard identifies as a virtually universal double bind present in all human relationships, not merely that of father and son. “If desire is allowed to follow its own bent,” he declares, “its mimetic nature will almost always lead it into a double bind.”15 To break the deceptive hold of redoubling, Derrida proposed the deconstruction of texts. By disclosing the differential structure of language, where reflexivity masquerades as referentiality, Derrida shows that all efforts at mimetic representation are caught in an infinite regress of textuality. To alleviate the violence of “mimetic desire,” according to Girard, society has encouraged two 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

René Girard, To Double Business Bound, p. 201. Samuel Johnson, Rasselas, in Works of Samuel Johnson, 4:15. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, p. 145. René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, pp. 1–5. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, pp. 146–49, 170–72.

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modes of revealing the potential victimization: religion and art. The revealed mimesis of religion and art allows for a conscious understanding of the concealed mimesis of human desire. The sacrifice is to religion what tragedy is to art: a surrogate crisis, a “ritualized mimesis” that functions “to keep the conflictual mimesis from beginning afresh” and destroying the social order.16 Unlike Heidegger and Derrida, Girard recognizes a redemptive function in the ritualization of “mimetic desire.” He argues, not that it is possible to step outside the textual system, but rather that within that system certain presentations of mimetic desire expose its origin and its destructive power. The novel, no less than the liturgy, defuses the potential violence by exhibiting the whole course of its causality. By affirming this positive function of traditional mimesis, Girard may seem to have joined forces with Auerbach. Girard, however, makes no claims for an international, intercultural tradition. The rituals of sacrifice and tragedy are meaningful only in terms of the immediate community. This is why violence breaks forth unchecked when the community disintegrates. Also at odds with Auerbach, Girard recognizes a romantic mimesis and describes an internal as well as an external mode of mediation. In the objective mode, characters openly announce the nature of their desires. In the subjective mode, characters disguise and often misconstrue their desires.17 Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, a novel which Auerbach considers representative of the epoch of “modern tragic, historically grounded Realism” (Mimesis, p. 404), is for Girard a prime example of the romantic. In narrating Jean Sorel’s illusions, Stendhal does not ignore the displacement of the mediator; rather, he transplants the triangular structure of desire into the mind of the “romantic vaniteur,” who then attributes all of its workings to his own mind. Thus for Girard romantic mimesis is characterized by a spontaneous creation, “a ‘parthenogenesis’ of the imagination.”18 In spite of the modernist and postmodernist critiques of mimeticism, and the prevailing suspicion of its ontological and ideological entrapment, contemporary art has yet to abandon altogether the pretenses of realistic representation. Nevertheless, a postmodernist author, rather than repeat the cliché that the work “holds up a mirror to reality,” is more apt to claim that the work examines the dark side of the mirror and exposes what is going on behind the backs of our illusory self-images. The critique of mimeticism is actually as old as the mimetic tradition itself. As Derrida noted, Plato put forth two discreet 16. Ibid., pp. 148–49. 17. Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, pp. 9–27. 18. Ibid., pp. 17–18.

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accounts of mimesis, approving its formal functions and rejecting its appeal to the senses. By the eighteenth century, so many corollaries had been added to the doctrine of imitation that Alexander Pope’s seemingly simple precept, “First follow Nature,” implicated a broad array of propositions. To imitate human action, as Aristotle proposed, had come to mean as well to imitate those poets who had already succeeded in the endeavor. To imitate ideal form, as Plato advocated, had been replaced by the requirement to imitate those formal principles on which the best tragedies, the best epics, the best elegies, had been constructed. Because poets and artists were thus expected to follow their predecessors, the new standards of taste tended to subordinate and devalue originality.19 In reaction to the eighteenth-century emphasis upon imitating past masters, a number of critics began to plead the cause for originality. Edward Young, in his Conjectures on Original Composition (1759), scorned imitation as a “meddling ape,” capable only of lulling us into the languor of one “who listens to a twicetold tale,” while “our spirits rouze at an Original.” The valorization of the self, which had its rise in the shift toward democratic politics, is evident in the introspective modes of romantic literature as well as in the insistence on the original rather than the derived.20 Although originality, in the aesthetics and criticism of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, was esteemed in terms of the value accorded to the individual self, the ground for validating originality was gradually redefined in reaction to mass production and industrialization. By the mid-nineteenth century, such critics as John Ruskin and William Morris recognized the threat of commodification. It was necessary, they argued, to reaffirm the value of individual creativity and to return the production of the artifact to the artist and artisan. There were those, of course, who still asserted that all originality had given us was original sin. To cast out tradition would mean to relinquish traditional values. The most complete and perfect imitation possible, as affirmed by the Cambridge Platonists, is that rational act by which we repeat in our own mind the idea of God.21 Why abandon, for the sake of originality, that credo which had centered the ethos of religious life in the imitatio Dei or the imitatio Christi? This question has recently been repeated by William Schweiker in his Mimetic Reflection (1990). He argues that in literature and the arts, no less than in religion, imitation failed because it could not keep its promise. Because its final 19. W. J. Bate, “The English Poet and the Burden of the Past, 1660–1820,” in Aspects of the Eighteenth Century, p. 251. 20. Thomas McFarland, “The Originality Paradox,” in Originality and Imagination, pp. 1–30. 21. Ralph Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe, 1:583–86.

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goal, the identity and sameness, was unattainable, imitation was seen as a false criterion that called attention to the incapacity of representation. Rather than reconciling “consciousness in language,” the pretense to imitation “actually broke them apart.” But if we delete “imitation” from our postmodern discourse, Schweiker asks, “what vocabulary can we use to help us interpret ourselves and our world?” His answer is that we must restore the term as a viable concept by emphasizing “not iconic copying but the praxis of figuration.”22 This point is essentially the same as the one made by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In the context of that earlier version of the debate now confronting postmodernism, Coleridge had insisted upon the difference between copy and imitation. In Chapter 3, “Mimesis of the Mind,” I shall call attention to the influence of Schelling in Coleridge’s exposition of the distinction between copy, as mechanical replication, and imitation, as an exposition of the mental process of apprehension. Crucial to this romantic definition of imitation is the shaping presence of the mind. The mediating self is revealed in and through the external artifact. If the debate over the nature and function of mimesis, over its use and abuse, has thus persisted through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, what are we to make of the various declarations of its disintegration and demise? Auerbach, in 1946, rallied a defense of mimesis by recounting a tradition of responsible social criticism in the representation of reality. Heidegger, in 1953, accused that same mimetic tradition of perpetuating a grand metaphysical deception. That very year, in The Mirror and the Lamp, M. H. Abrams claimed that attention to mimetic representation was replaced during the romantic period by an expressive mode of creativity in the arts. René Wellek supported that argument in his 1955 volume on The Romantic Age (A History of Modern Criticism, II), where he links “the rise of an emotional concept of poetry” to “the implied rejection of the imitation theory.”23 Another explanation of the decay of mimesis has been advanced by John Boyd, S.J. In 1968, Father Boyd laid the blame on “the noetic impact of the Enlightenment and its dehumanizing rationalism.” The mimesis of the later eighteenth century took too seriously its own models of the representational capacities of the mind. As he defined its cognitive function, mimesis is metonymic rather than metaphoric. Aristotle had divined that “intense metonymy” which informs the mimetic relation between art and culture. The metonymy of mimetic representation involves “one or another form of vol22. William Schweiker, Mimetic Reflection, pp. 12–13. 23. René Wellek, The Romantic Age, p. 2.

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untarism,” rather than an absolute and necessary “realism.” For two thousand years mimesis persisted “as a small but compelling metonym of the state of Western cultural history.” To be sure, the mighty monument erected by the Greeks had already been rechiseled by the pragmatic and rhetorical concerns of the Roman theorists, and further modified by the scholasticism and religious humanism of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. When the essential metonymy that held the structure together was finally washed away by the insistent “scientism” of the Enlightenment, the romantics abandoned the ruins of imitation and began to worship at the shrine of subjectivism.24 But was it another shrine? Perhaps, as John L. Mahoney suggested, the romantics were content to refurbish what they found in the ruins: “If imitation in its classical roots means the capturing of what is essential in the events and actions of human life, can it not now mean the capturing of what is central in the imaginings and emotions?” Rather than pit the expressive against the mimetic, as Abrams and Wellek had done, Mahoney sought to recognize a mimetic validity in representations of the “inner life.”25 Although the romantic doctrine of mimesis may well be disparaged for falling away from a positivist affirmation of external reality, romantic poetry and philosophy did make a relevant and lasting contribution to the exposition of the self. Nor was the turn from an outer to an inner reality a radical revision of the mimetic tradition. When Aristotle stipulated that a character be shown responding, doubting, deliberating, choosing, as requisite to the “imitation of human action,” he certainly provided a ground for the subjective experience. In order to give serious deliberation to the problems of mimesis as imitation of the mind’s apprehension of reality, romantic critics frequently turned to the phenomenological and transcendental philosophers of the age. My opening chapters will give particular attention to the contributions of Friedrich Schleiermacher, Friedrich Schelling, Georg Friedrich Hegel, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Thomas De Quincey. Reacting to discoveries in physical and physiological optics, they all recognized the fallibility of the senses. If the means of perception and the media of representation are unreliable, then any attempt to define imitation in the arts will obviously be complicated by disjuncture. Acknowledging that representation is constantly baffled (the senses are fallible; the aesthetic illusion is not long sustained; the organic whole is realized only in fragments; validity is only contrived), romantic critics, making a virtue of necessity, developed a number of strategies for coming to terms with dis24. John D. Boyd, The Function of Mimesis and Its Decline, pp. 298–307. 25. John L. Mahoney, The Whole Internal Universe, p. 3.

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juncture. It is precisely the confrontation with what defies imitation and representation that gives to the romantic doctrine of mimesis its relevance to present-day criticism. Nor did the romantic poets neglect the traditional modes of representation. When Auerbach asserted that they made no serious attempt “to represent objects of contemporary society,” he could not have been thinking of the profound literary response to the French Revolution and the rise and fall of Napoleon. The striking scenes of the Revolution recounted in Wordsworth’s Prelude, or the ball in Brussels and the advent of the battle at Waterloo narrated in Byron’s Childe Harold, can scarcely be surpassed for vivid descriptive detail in re-creating the historical moment. Examples could be drawn from Continental romanticism as well, from Victor Hugo, Théophile Gautier, Heinrich von Kleist, or Achim von Arnim. Auerbach seems to acknowledge that “the representation of reality” as he endeavors to trace it through European literature is conspicuous in the works of Kleist, and later Georg Büchner, whom he therefore considers at odds with other romantic writers. Furthermore, the changes that they might have brought about, he says, were thwarted because they were given no opportunity to develop. To call attention to the powerful descriptive passages in romantic literature, however, is not to say that Auerbach, and the many others who shared his opinion, held without reason to a mistaken conviction that the romantics had spurned the mimetic tradition and were no longer interested in representing the objects of society. The reason, to some extent, is obvious. The romantics were preoccupied with the self. The rise of individualism, a major factor in the political turmoil of the age, was also manifest in the literary exploration of the individual consciousness and the individual experience. The paradox, of course, was that the very self-assessment crucial to the social changes then taking place would be appraised by critics of subsequent generations as self-indulgent escapism. Having reaped all the advantages of the new definition of the self, the critics then forgot the urgency and poignancy of that endeavor to lay claim to previously uncharted regions of subjectivity. The Byronic exile and the Wordsworthian recluse both spoke directly to the concerns of their time, and not merely as advocates or apologists for the retreat into the self. When the Byronic hero declared that “to fly from, need not be to hate mankind,” he was making a declaration of independence that gave his contemporaries a new image of self-assertion. A less obvious reason, certainly not one expressly pondered by Auerbach, is that the province and techniques of mimesis were being redefined in romantic literature. Self-awareness, with its alert attention to the subjective apprehension

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of external reality, involved an attendant concern with the representation of the interior processes of perception. It also led to a suspicion about the pretenses of mimesis, especially that version of mimesis which seemed to favor the external and material. Plato’s notion that music is the most, sculpture the least mimetic of the arts (Laws 397a–b, 400d–401a) gave priority to ideas rather than things. In Aristotle’s Poetics the mimetic doctrine is set forward with the insistence that “the imitation of human actions” depends upon proairesis rather than merely praxis; mimesis must reveal, that is, the interior response, deliberation, and choice that precedes and determines the external action. Thus Schelling appeals to a venerable classical tradition when he tries to redeem the mimetic doctrine from that mode of definition which had limited it to representation of a merely external reality. Johann Joachim Winckelmann was right, Schelling asserts, that art is essentially mimetic, but Winckelmann made the mistake of directing that mimetic activity to external nature. What art imitates is not the external world, Schelling clarifies, but how the mind perceives the external world. Coleridge repeats this distinction in “On Poesy and Art” from his 1818 lecture series (LL 2:217–25), where he lays claim to it as his own by ridding his text of the telltale reference to Winckelmann. Sir Joshua Reynolds was right, Coleridge announces in a bold stroke of originality, the function of art is mimetic, but it imitates how the mind beholds, not simply what it beholds.26 Romanticism, in terms of the twentieth-century denunciation of mimetic and expressive theories, is therefore doubly damned. Mimetic theory is damned because by pretending to reveal the true attributes of human nature and the constitutive forms of culture, it has perpetuated conventions contaminated by the dominant ideology. The romantic endeavor to redefine the function of art as the expression of the individual artist simply relocated the same proprietary ideology. The one no less than the other has served the dominant ideology by furthering, even if unwittingly, the self-centered, self-serving politics of possession. It has been a major preoccupation of recent criticism to expose the rhetoric and the semiotics of entrapment which inform the arbitrary pretense of the natural sign. While attention to textuality and intertextuality may well reveal an inherent deception which has masked itself as “representation” of human nature, it is also true that the self-reflexive aesthetics of romanticism often anticipated such critical exposure, calling attention to the deception and the26. Coleridge goes on to borrow Schelling’s distinction between Poesy and Art, announcing that he has personally “cherished the wish” to desynonymize the words as genus and species. LL 2:219. Schelling’s account of the dissemination of “Poesie” and “Kunst” as genus and species—in StI and PdK §64, in SW 3:618, and 5:473–74—is also evident in Coleridge’s “Principles of Genial Criticism” (1814, in BL), and in Lecture 1, 1811–12, in LL 1:185–97.

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matizing the entrapment. Skepticism and incredulity coexist, or at least alternate with, illusionism and that “willing suspension of disbelief which constitutes poetic faith.” In Christian Dietrich Grabbe’s comedy, Jest, Satire, Irony, and Deeper Meaning (Scherz, Satire, Ironie, und tiefere Bedeutung, 1822; published 1827), the poet Ratpoison (Rattengift) struggles to write a poem. Many a poet of German romanticism (Ludwig Tieck, Joseph von Eichendorff, Friedrich Schlegel) had written a poem about writing a poem. Ratpoison, totally destitute of ideas, decides to write a poem about not being able to write a poem. With mimetic representation drastically limited—“I sat at my desk and chewed quills”—he grasps desperately for some “Calderonian” and “Homeric” metaphors to camouflage the nothingness of a poetic elaboration “on the thought, that I can find no thoughts.”27 This negative version of the trope ridicules the solipsistic entrapment of self-reflexivity. Writing a poem about not being able to write a poem was not, of course, merely an invention of Grabbe’s farcical imagination. Coleridge, in “Dejection: An Ode,” had already recorded the plight—“My genial spirits fail”—and how he had struggled to drive off the “viper thoughts, that coil around my mind.” A timely visit from the Devil enables Ratpoison to escape the entrapment of his non-inspiration. Coleridge manages his escape by addressing his more fortunate auditor. Each of the first three chapters in this work presents a foundational concept in the understanding and application of mimesis during the romantic period. Each of the subsequent three chapters explores one of the grand tropes or thematic provinces of self-reflexivity through which the mimetic process not only informs but becomes the very subject matter of the literary work. It is fitting, therefore, that the first concept to be examined is “l’art pour l’art.” This is a concept, to be sure, that many readers will associate, not with the art, literature, or criticism of the early nineteenth century, but with the arguments of Baudelaire and Gautier in the 1840s, or with the Aestheticism and Decadence of the fin de siècle. In fact, the phrase was first used in 1804 in Germany by an Englishman speaking to a Frenchman. Henry Crabb Robinson, who attended Schelling’s lectures on the philosophy of art at Jena, met with Madame de Staël and Benjamin Constant in Weimar, and he used the phrase “l’art pour l’art” in explaining to 27. Christian Dietrich Grabbe, Scherz, Satire, Ironie, und tiefere Bedeutung, in Gesammelte Werke, pp. 19–82: “Ach, die Gedanken! Reime sind da, aber die Gedanken, die Gedanken! Da sitze ich, trinke Kaffee, kaue Federn, schreibe hin, streiche aus und kann keinen Gedanken finden, keinen Gedanken!—Ha, wie ergreife ich’s nun?—Halt, halt! Was geht mir da für eine Idee auf?—Herrlich! Göttlich! Eben über den Gedanken, das ich keinen Gedanken finden kann, will ich ein Sonett machen, und wahrhaftig dieser Gedanke über die Gedankenlosigkeit ist der genialste Gedanke, der mir nur einfallen konnte! Ich mache gleichsam eben darüber, daß ich nicht zu dichten vermag, ein Gedicht!”

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Constant Schelling’s appropriation of the Kantian idea of “disinterestedness.” Kant had sought to make aesthetic judgment a matter of reason rather than feeling. Schelling, however, wanted to grant to the artistic endeavor a reconciliation of subject and object. It was this movement that had such a profound influence on Coleridge and, presumably through Coleridge, on Wordsworth. The second foundational concept is idem et alter, as elaborated by both Coleridge and De Quincey in their effort to explain that difference was not a failure in artistic representation but rather the essential attribute of success. The mimetic process provides visible evidence of the artist’s transforming power of imagination. Coleridge claimed that he had the idea of idem et alter from Philo of Alexandria. De Quincey, whose reformulation idem in alio emphasizes the projection of the identity of perception into the work, calls it “the great catholic principle” of art. The third foundational concept is the palingenesis of mind as art, as propounded by Schelling and Coleridge. Coleridge’s reference to poetry and art in the “Principles of Genial Criticism” (1814) echoes Schelling’s account of poesie and art as genus and species; in his lecture “On Poesy and Art,” Coleridge further elaborates in Schelling’s terms the infinite power of poesie and its finite immanence in art as organic process. This chapter examines Coleridge’s oft-repeated distinction between “copy” and “imitation,” documents Coleridge’s indebtedness to Schelling, and shows how they both argued in behalf of an external realization in art, a mimesis, of the mind’s own interior reflections. In Chapter 4, I turn to a discussion of how the object of mimesis can be the mimetic process itself. If art is the product of mimesis, then a poem about a painting or a sculpture is a mimesis of a mimesis. Ekphrasis is the classical term for this self-reflexive mode of representing in the verbal arts an artifact of the visual arts. The focus in this chapter is on De Quincey’s use of ekphrasis, especially in the culminating “Dream Fugue” of The English Mail-Coach, where the statue of a Dying Trumpeter winds a stony trumpet. The statue acts, while the helpless opium-eater remains in the bondage of his dream; the statue’s dreadful blast proclaims from the field of battle the human sacrifice to the gods of war and empire. The poetic exposé of the conflict, aesthetic and ideological, is neither a skeptical breakdown of the poetic endeavor nor an ironic breaking-outof the reflexivity of art imitating art imitating art; it is, rather, a confession of deadly entrapment as painful as Coleridge’s “Dejection: An Ode.” In Chapter 5, I examine how the poets make an effective trope for the mind’s reflective capacities by describing actual reflections in a mirroring surface. In Biographia Literaria and “On Poesy and Art,” as noted in Chapter 3, Coleridge sought to reassert the leverage of mimetic objectivity in romantic subjectivity

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and to reinstate imitation within the activity of imagination. Once the reliability of representation had been called into doubt, many poets began to scrutinize the fallibility of perception and the fragility of subjective experience. Far from being neglected, the tropes of “imitation” and the “mirror” were brought forth as key witnesses in interrogating the claims of mimesis. One characteristic of romantic poetry, then, is the tentative nature of representation and the instability of images. Yet there is a remarkable persistence in their instability. When Coleridge, for example, thematizes the mimetic act in “The Picture, or the Lover’s Resolution,” the very act of denying images seems to render them more tenable and certainly not less vivid. A recurrent motif in Wordsworth’s writings is how scenes of nature work their “influence upon the mind of the spectator.” Reflections often prompt us to ponder both the internal and external aspects of visual experience. Often, too, they reveal possible connections between mimetic description and poetic invention. In the sixth and final chapter, I examine the phenomenon of the “twice-told tale,” which allows the author to create a bifurcated narrative structure in which one telling of a story provides a critique on another. This is literary selfreflexivity pushed to its most expansive dimensions. Ekphrasis, as discussed in Chapter 4, thematizes the mimetic act by describing the presence of a visual artifact within the verbal medium and at the same time attempting to conjure its making, or trying to involve us in beholding the details of its palpable form. The ekphrastic endeavor, as in Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1819), forces language to expose the limits of its own mimetic pretenses. As seen in Chapter 5, a storyteller might also posit within the descriptive landscape a mirroring surface in which narrative events are reflected. Most readers, as Sir Walter Scott knew in telling “My Aunt Margaret’s Mirror” (1828), would need no very broad hint to recognize that such a “literary” mirror had thus been enlisted as both fictive instrument and self-defining symbol of the narrative. Another mode of thematizing mimesis occurs in a literary work which represents the production of a literary work. The bifurcated novel and the twice-told tale allow for more elaborate variations, contradictions, and paradoxical tensions, and they also thematize the very act of storytelling. Whereas other modes of narrative necessarily rely on a presumed reality outside the novel that is mimetically reflected in the telling, the twice-told tale reflects itself. One version of the tale inevitably stands in some kind of mirror-relation to the other. The reader readily observes the differences, but may well be baffled in trying to explain whether one or both of the mirrored images are distorted. Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn (1799), E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Kater Murr (1820/21), and James Hogg’s Confessions of a Jus-

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tified Sinner (1824) are three novels of the romantic period which develop their irony through a structural bifurcation that exposes the mimetic pretenses of the storytelling. Although denounced for its deception and mystification, mimesis has a tenacious claim on an artist’s endeavor to communicate. The mimesis of romantic self-reflexivity may be an entrapment, but so is the breakdown of communication, and so is the servitude to an institutionally imposed ideology. The romantics themselves thought they could escape servile repression by declaring an “art for art’s sake.” They saw in the tropes of self-reflexivity a declaration of independence, whereby artists could celebrate individual creativity. Their poetry would hold up a mirror to the mind, or place another mirror before the mirror of painting or sculpture. If occasionally in a perverse pique or an ironic gesture they attempted to shatter one mirror or the other, it was only with the result that every splinter remained to catch new reflections.

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In spite of its prominence in the Aestheticism of France and England, the concept of l’art pour l’art, with its presumed freedom from moral purpose, actually had its origin in Germany. It is perceived as being a term that came into usage with Gautier and Baudelaire, was imported into England by Pater, and reached its culmination in the Decadence of the fin de siècle. Crucial to the concept is its resistance to, or defiance of, social values. In the 1890s, “art for art’s sake” offended Victorian morality. A

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century earlier, amidst the repressive censorship throughout Europe during the 1790s, the aesthetics of “disinterestedness” and the self-determination of art were argued in the writing of Kant, Schiller, and Schelling. The first recorded use of the phrase “l’art pour l’art” was in a conversation between a Frenchman and an Englishman in Weimar, Germany. The circumstances of their encounter must be told, because it was largely through their circle of influence that the concept of l’art pour l’art was disseminated. The date was February 10, 1804. The Englishman was Henry Crabb Robinson, whose parents were Dissenters and who was therefore denied an education in the public schools or the universities of England. In his desperation to acquire an education, Robinson traveled to Germany in 1800, where in the course of the next five years he met with Goethe, Schiller, and Herder, and at the University of Jena studied philosophy under Schelling. The Frenchman was Benjamin Constant, who, in 1803, left France in exile with Germaine de Staël after both of them had incurred the disfavor of Napoleon. In January 1804, Constant and de Staël settled in Weimar, where they met Robinson. Because both Constant and Robinson kept written accounts of their meetings and conversations, it is possible to document, at least in part, their discussion of the aesthetics of Kant, Schiller, and Schelling.1 After a conversation with Schiller, Constant recorded that, in contrast with that of France, the fugitive poetry of Germany is a totally different genre, with a totally different depth. He goes on directly to recount his conversation with Robinson, whom he describes as a student of Schelling’s work on Kantian aesthetics. Constant gives a synopsis of his “very clever notions” (“idées très énergiques”): “Art for art’s sake, with no purpose, for any purpose perverts art. But art achieves a purpose which is not its own.”2 Because Robinson spoke French to Constant, the phrase l’art pour l’art may have been coined by either of them. Analogous to Kant’s Ding an sich, Schelling had posited Kunst an sich.3 1. John Wilcox, in “The Beginnings of L’art pour l’art,” recounts part of the story (he consults only one of the two diaries). He focuses on “a misunderstanding of Kant” as the source of the concept. Both Constant and Robinson, however, call attention to Schiller and Schelling, who provide the more pertinent transformation of Kantian “disinterestedness” into “art for art’s sake.” 2. Benjamin Constant, Journal Intime de Benjamin Constant et Lettres à sa famille et à ses amis: “(20 Pluviôse [ 10 February] 1804). J’ai la visite de Schiller. C’est un homme de beaucoup d’esprit sur son art, mais presque uniquement poète. Il est vrai que les poésies fugitives des Allemands sont d’un tout autre genre et d’une tout autre profondeur que les nôtres. J’ai une conversation avec Robinson, élève de Schelling. Son travail sur l’Esthétique de Kant a des idées très énergiques. L’art pour l’art, sans but, car tous but dénature l’art. Mais l’art atteint au but qu’il n’a pas.” 3. During his visit to Berlin in May 1802, Schelling apparently had seen the manuscript of August Wilhelm Schlegel’s lectures “Über schöne Literatur und Kunst.” On 3 September 1802, he writes to Schlegel to request a copy and to tell him of his intended lectures on the philoso-

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If Robinson had attempted a literal translation, l’art en elle-même, Constant might well have substituted the more graceful l’art pour l’art. Did Constant simply file this phrase silently away in his Journal intime? The next recorded reference to l’art pour l’art does not occur until Victor Cousin delivered his lectures at the Sorbonne in 1818. But Robinson’s kernel of Kantian aesthetics was nurtured in one of the most influential books of the age, de Staël’s De l’Allemagne (1810).4 Not Constant, but de Staël was responsible for the proliferation of the ideas about the self-determined purposiveness of art and its necessary freedom from political and moral constraint. In De l’Allemagne, de Staël, without repeating Constant’s phrase, insists upon the inherent, rather than the imposed, “purpose” in the a priori aesthetics of Kant, as well as in Schelling’s notion of art as synthesis of mind and matter. But the conversation between Constant and Robinson had been a starting place, and they had also spoken of art with no purpose (“sans but”), art that nevertheless achieves a purpose not its own (“Mais l’art atteint au but qu’il n’a pas”). As can be seen from similar formulations in Robinson’s letters, as well as in his notes on Schelling’s lecture series “Philosophie der Kunst,” these are the very words he would have used in attempting to explain in French Kant’s insistence that art achieves purposiveness without a purpose (“Zweckmäßigkeit ohne Zweck”). phy of art at Jena: “Wie es wirkliche oder empirische Dinge giebt, giebt es auch eine kirkliche oder empirische Kunst—auf diese bezieht sich die Theorie;—aber wie es intellectuelle Dinge, Dinge an sich giebt, giebt es auch eine Kunst an sich, von der die empirische nur die Erscheinung ist, und diese ist das, wodurch es eine Beziehung der Philosophie auf Kunst giebt. . . . Ich werde nicht sowohl die Kunst als das Ein und Alles in der Form und Gestalt der Kunst ableiten. Es ist ganz einfach zu denken, daß das Universum, wie es als organisches Ganzes, ebenso auch als Kunstganzes und Kunstwerk im Absoluten liege. Die Musik, die Rede, die Malerei—alle Künste haben wie die Kunst überhaupt ihr An sich im Absoluten.” F.W.J. von Schelling, Briefe und Dokumente, 2:435–36. 4. Others have told parts of this story before me. On the origins and early use of the phrase l’art pour l’art, see Gene Bell-Villada, “The Idea of Art for Art’s Sake” and Art for Art’s Sake and Literary Life; Albert Cassagne, La Théorie de l’art pour l’art en France chez les derniers romantiques et les premiers réalists; Rose Frances Egan, “The Genesis of the Theory of ‘Art for Art’s Sake’ in Germany and England”; L. M. Findlay, “The Introduction of the Phrase ‘Art for Art’s Sake’ into English”; Iredell Jenkins, “Art for Art’s Sake”; Louise Rosenblatt, L’Idée de l’art pour l’art dans la littérature anglaise pendant la période victorienne; Irving Singer, “The Aesthetics of ‘Art for Art’s Sake’ ”; and Wilcox, “The Beginnings of L’art pour l’art.” These accounts, although they acknowledge Kant as progenitor, do not trace the debt to A. W. Schlegel and Schelling. Nor do they acknowledge the role of de Staël’s De l’Allemagne in disseminating the concept. On the other hand, the best treatments of Robinson and of de Staël in Germany do not give attention to l’art pour l’art; see Henry Crabb Robinson, Crabb Robinson in Germany, 1800–1805, and Ernst Behler, “Schellings Ästhetik in der Überlieferung von Henry Crabb Robinson” and Madame de Stael und Benjamin Constant in Weimar: 1803–1804.

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During his sojourn in Germany, from 1800 to 1805, Robinson kept a daily record of his experiences.5 Beginning in November 1802, Robinson attended the lectures of Friedrich Schelling, where, as he informed his brother, he would weekly hear “the modern Plato read for a whole hour his new metaphysi[c]al Theory of Aesthetick Or the Philosophy of the Arts” and for another hour on “Speculative Philosophy.” The following June, Robinson confessed how difficult an initiation it had been: “I then plagued myself literally with the new Philosophy of Schelling, which I could not then understand.” In the meantime, however, he had acquired respectable expertise. His letters on the philosophy of Kant, published in the Monthly Register, exhibit a confident command of the arguments and structure of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft.6 His notes on Schelling’s lecture series “Philosophie der Kunst” were thorough and reliable (they are also the best available record of the 1802–3 series of lectures, which although given for a second time at the Universität Würzburg in 1804–5, were never prepared for publication in Schelling’s lifetime).7 A copy of these notes was in the hands of Karl August Böttiger, school director in Weimar (ridiculed by Goethe and Schiller as “Magister Ubique”), who showed them to de Staël. Desiring Robinson as her personal tutor in Schelling’s philosophy, she requested Böttiger to invite him to visit her: “Madame de Staël, from whose lips flow spirit and honeyed speech [Geist und Honigrede], wishes to make your acquaintance, dearest Sir and Friend. She longs for a philosophical conversation with you, and is now busied with the Cahier [notes] on Schelling’s ‘Aesthetics,’ which I possess through your kindness. She has, indeed, translated some portions of them with admirable skill” (Böttiger’s letter as translated by Robinson; in Robinson, Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence, 1:173). Their first meeting took place on 28 January 1804. Robinson, “not knowing Parisian customs,” is nonplussed when he is escorted directly to her boudoir, where she received him “most decorously” reclining in her bed. Schiller, who had followed her career during the previous ten years, described in a letter to Goethe (21 December 1803) his first meeting with her: 5. Henry Crabb Robinson, Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence, 1:69–224, and Crabb Robinson in Germany: “Every six weeks,” Edith Morley says of H.C.R.’s letters from Germany, “throughout his stay on the Continent, Robinson sent a foolscap sheet, closely written, to his brother Thomas, who replied with equal regularity and at almost equal length. The correspondence is extraordinarily detailed, especially on the part of Henry . . . . ‘It is,’ he writes, ‘the cardinal maxim of my Correspondence . . . to make it echo or shadow my Life, whether it has been passed in Travelling or Reading’ ” (p. 3). 6. René Welleck, Kant in England, pp. 139–59. 7. The notes have been edited with commentary by Behler, in his “Schelling’s Ästhetik.”

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Madame de Staël will appear to you exactly as you have constructed her a priori: she is entirely of one piece, and there is no foreign, nor false, nor pathological trait in her. In consequence, in spite of the immense distance of the nature and manner of thinking that one finds in her, one can nevertheless hear everything from her and say everything to her. The French intellect she displays in a pure and a most interesting light. In everything that we would call philosophy, hence all last and highest resorts, one is in disagreement with her, and remains so, in spite of all discussion. But her nature and feeling are better than her metaphysics, and her fashionable understanding is elevated to a genial capacity. She wants to explain, perceive, measure everything; she affirms nothing that is dark or inaccessible. Where she cannot shed light with her own torch, she will not admit that anything can exist. Therefore she harbors a horrible aversion to idealist philosophy, which in her opinion culminates only in mysticism and in superstition, and that is the suffocating air in which she perishes. For what we call Poesie she possesses no sensibility. In such works she can appropriate only the passionate, the rhetorical, the general. Although she will never value what is false, she will not always recognize what is right.8 8. Friedrich Schiller to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Jena, 26 October 1795, in Briefe, p. 369. Schiller says of de Staël’s “Essai sur les fictions” (1795) that it is “mit vielem Geiste geschrieben”; and to Körner (27 December 1796, in Briefe, p. 449) he praises “Sur l’influence des passions” (1796) for its “Energie” and “das Geistreiche ihres Inhalts.” He alters his judgment upon reading her Contes, which he assures Goethe represents her as “diese gespannte, räsonierende, und dabei völlig unpoetische Natur, oder vielmehr diese verstandesreiche Unnatur” (20 July 1798, in Briefe, p. 503). When he meets her in person, upon her arrival in Weimar in December 1803, he adjusts his opinion once more (to Goethe, 21 December 1803, in Briefe, pp. 618–19): “Frau von Staël wird Ihnen völlig so erscheinen, wie Sie sich a priori schon konstruiert haben werden; es is alles aus einem Stück und kein fremder, falscher und pathologischer Zug in ihr. Dies macht, daß man sich trotz des immensen Abstands der Naturen und Denkweisen vollkommen bei ihr befindet, daß man alles von ihr hören und ihr alles sagen mag. Die französische Geistesbildung stellt sie rein und in einem höchst interessanten Lichte dar. In allem, was wir Philosophie nennen, folglich in allen letzten und höchsten Instanzen, ist man mit ihr im Streit und bleibt es, trotz alles Redens. Aber ihr Naturell und Gefühl ist besser als ihre Metaphysik, und ihr schöner Verstand erhebt sich zu einem genialischen Vermögen. Sie will alles erklären, einsehen, ausmessen, sie statuiert nichts Dunkles, Unzugängliches, und wohin sie nicht mit ihrer Fackel leuchten kann, da ist nichts für sie vorhanden. Darum hat sie eine horrible Scheu vor der Idealphilosophie, welche nach ihrer Meinung zur Mystik und zum Aberglauben führt, und das ist die Stickluft, wo sie umkommt. Für das, was wir Poesie nennen, ist kein Sinn in ihr, sie kann sich von solchen Werken nur das Leidenschaftliche, Rednerische und Allgemeine zueignen, aber sie wird nichts Falsches schätzen, nur das Rechte nicht immer erkennen.”

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Had Schiller’s appraisal of de Staël become a matter of Weimar gossip? Or were her philosophical and poetic deficiencies readily apparent? Robinson described her in much the same terms: Mad. de Stahl is one of those persons who with a most acute understanding & elegant wit—has nothing else. She has not the least sense for poetry & is absolutely incapable of thinking a philosophical thought—her Philosophy is only a map of observations connected together by a loose logic and Poetry is for her (as it is for so many I know whose names I shall not mention now) only rhetorick in verse. She cannot perceive any thing in poetry more than fine passages!!! And what is an eternal bar to all advances she does not suspect that there is anything above her reach—Of course she can not understand, properly speaking, a syllable of the new Philosophy. (30 January 1804; Crabb Robinson in Germany, p. 134) So similar are his comments that one might think Schiller’s letter had circulated. Robinson had no illusions about de Staël’s interest in him, but he willingly acquiesces to her wishes: I was invited to her in order to be interrogated on the new Philosophy. And I saw clearly enough that I was used. I did not suffer myself to be deceived by her compliments or disconcerted by her railleries, but had the pure pleasure of seeing thro’ & understanding the comedy she was playing—It is true I could not resist her blandishments & have committed myself so far as to draw up in english (which she speaks exceedingly well) some account of the new philosophy which she will employ unquestionably against this same Philosophy in a work she is now writing. (30 January 1804; Crabb Robinson in Germany, p. 134) This means, of course, that Robinson provided de Staël with the summaries of German philosophy that she was to use in the “Troisième Partie” of De l’Allemagne (1810). From January 28 to February 19 he provided her with cogent and readily understandable summaries of Schelling’s aesthetics. He endeavored not only to demystify Schelling’s language but also to provide apt examples from contemporary poetry. He realized from the very beginning, however, that she would turn what he wrote “against this same Philosophy.” Nevertheless, as he admitted to his brother, he gave her the “4 Dissertations” (including “On the

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Philosophy of Schelling” and “On the German Aesthetics”)9 that she had “forced” him to prepare. She was pleased to compliment me by declaring I was the only person who had been able to give her any clear notion of the german philosophy—She forced me (you know how easy it is for such a Woman as M. de S. to command & that persons like me are too willing to be compelled & commanded)10 to draw up for her 4 Dissertations on the New philosophy & paid me for the trouble in loud praise, & promises or 9. Behler, “Schelling’s Ästhetik,” p. 147: “Über den Inhalt dieser bis vor kurzem verschollenen Vorlesungsnotizen sind versehiedene Spekulationen angestellt worden. Es wurde die Meinung vertreten, daß Robinson lediglich seine Kantdarstellungen aus dem Monthly Register wiederholt, oder sich vornehmlich mit Schellings Philosophie beschaftigt hatte, um deren Kenntnis es Madame de Staël damals besonders ging. Die Originale der Aufzeichnungen hat Madame de Staël mit nach Coppet genommen, wo sie nach einer privaten Mitteilung Simone Balayés mit eigenhandigen Randbemerkungen heute noch ruhen, aber von den derzeitigen Schloßbesitzern der Forschung leider nicht zugänglich gemacht werden. Doch hat Böttiger von Robinsons Vorlesungsnotizen eine genaue Abschrift anfertigen lassen, die ebenfalls Madame de Staëls Randbemerkungen enthält, und im Böttiger-Nachlaß der Dresdner Landesbibliothek aufgefunden werden konnte. Daraus geht hervor, daß Robinson zwei in sich geschlossene Vorlesungsreihen vortrug, von denen die erste in zehn Sektionen eine knappe Darstellung der Schellingschen Identitätsphilosophie mit dem Titel ‘On the Philosophy of Schelling’ ist, und die zweite unter dem Titel ‘On the German Aesthetics or Philosophy of Taste’ einen Überblick über die Entwicklung der idealistisehen Ästhetik mit besonderer Berücksichtigung von Kant, Schiller, Schelling und der Brüder Schlegel gibt. Die Abschnitte über Schelling in ‘On the German Aesthetics’ fußen eindeutig auf der hier mitgeteilten Jenaer Vorlesungsnabschrift der ‘Philosophie der Kunst’ und sind eine gedrängte Wiedergabe derselben. Beide Vorlesungsmanuskripte, die in einem anderen Zusammenhang veröffentlicht werden, zeigen aber deutlich, daß die Skepsis, die Robinson seinem philosophischen Darstellungstalent gegenüber hatte, unbegründet war und aus seiner übertrieben selbstkritischen Haltung herruhrte. Vielmehr erfaßte er mit beachtlichem Scharfblick die Prinzipien der von ihm behandelten Systeme und Asthetiken. In seinen Vorträgen ging es ihm besonders darum, den Vorwurf der Unverständlichkeit des transzendentalen Denkens zu entkräften, indem er zahlreiche Stellen aus der englischen, französischen und deutschen Dichtung anführte, die auf poetische, nicht klar bewußte Weise ausdrückten, was in den betreffenden Systemen mit der Methode der freien, selbstgewissen Spekulation entwickelt wurde.” See also Behler, Madame de Stael und Benjamin Constant in Weimar. 10. To his brother, Robinson claimed that he had not been seduced by de Staël: “Mad. de S. may have formerly turned the brains of half a score of striplings, but besides that I am not much disposed to be an inamorato, she is now somewhat too advanced in life to excite strong passion” (at age thirty-seven when they met, she was only eight years older than he). “My Acquaintance with her had been a pleasing adventure, & will never be more,” he writes after the coronation of Napoleon as emperor had made the political situation for de Staël and Constant more dangerous, and he no longer has hope of her return from Berlin to Weimar. He nevertheless fantasizes how enjoyable it would have been to “have had a constant cover at Mad de S’s Table as Ami de la Maison” (3 June 1804; Crabb Robinson in Germany, p. 145).

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threatens me (which you will) with incorporating them in her great Work on the German Nation & Literature which she is now writing. (29 March 1804; Crabb Robinson in Germany, p. 139) Although he provided her with extensive materials for this section of De l’Allemagne, it must be acknowledged that she had other sources. She would soon add August Wilhelm Schlegel to her entourage,11 and through Schlegel she would have her own conversations with Schelling.12 As is evident in Robinson’s notes, Schelling constructed his lectures on a series of propositions, beginning with those which posit the Absolute, both in essence and form (“Wesen und Form”) as the coincidence of thinking and being (“Denken und Seyn”; Behler, “Schelling’s Ästhetik,” §§1–4). The universe is God’s work of art, and the individual artist participates in that divine act of creativity. There is no opposition between essence and form: they are only two ways of observing one and the same phenomenon (§12). Nevertheless, the work of art may align itself with either the ideal or the real (§§21–27). Artistic mimesis is concerned with the means rather than the end: with the process, the mimesin, rather than with the counterfeit, the mimema. The artist does seek to replicate the product of divine creativity, but rather to provide a symbol of the process. The imagination, as the capacity “to shape into one” (Einbildungskraft 11. Benjamin Constant was Germaine de Staël’s companion from 1794 to 1811; August Wilhelm Schlegel became a part of her retinue from 1804 until her death in 1817. After providing her with the “4 Dissertations,” Robinson never publicly mentioned her debt to him: not when he read her chapters on German philosophy in De l’Allemagne (1810), nor when John Murray brought out the English translation, Germany (1814). When he met with de Staël, Constant, and Schlegel during her stay in London in 1813–14, the topic was not mentioned. Entries for 18 October 1813, and 22 January and 22 October 1814, in Henry Crabb Robinson, On Books and Their Writers, 1:148. Only on one occasion, after Henry Flaxman had invited him to meet with A. W. Schlegel, does Robinson in his diary privately recall the earlier period in Weimar: “Had I as much esteem for Schlegel’s personal character as I have admiration of his literary powers I should have been gratified by telling Flaxman that it was I who first named him to Madame de Staël and who gave Madame de Staël her first ideas of German literature” (10 November 1823; On Books and Their Writers, 1:298). 12. Schelling, Briefe und Dokumente, 1:390, 397; 3:497. A. W. Schlegel married Caroline Michaelis 1 July 1796; their marriage was dissolved 17 May 1803; she married Schelling 26 June 1803; they moved from Jena to Würzburg in October 1803; on 14 April 1804 de Staël informs her father that A. W. Schlegel will accompany her from Berlin to Coppet; in May 1804 de Staël and A. W. Schlegel visit Caroline and Schelling in Würzburg, and spend a week with them in Munich, 15–21 December 1807. Friedrich Schlegel, who had been de Staël’s guest from November 1806 to April 1807, wrote to his brother (6 January 1808) warning him that Schelling would try to steal his ideas on art: “Da Schelling jetzt einen gewaltigen Drang fühlt, über Kunst zu schwadroniren, wobei es ihm aber leider nur an eignen Gedanken darüber fehlt, daher im denn nichts erwünschter sein kann, als von den Deinigen oder meinigen . . . Besitz ergreifen zu können” ( Josef Körner, Krisenjahre, 1:493).

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 “in Eins Bildungskraft”),13 replicates not the product but the process of divine creativity in nature (§34). In emphasizing mimetic process over the mimetic object, so Robinson records, Schelling denied that illusion was the purpose of art. Trompe l’oeil is decorative, or it may serve the purpose of stage design; but art, as art, must be recognized as art. Where the eye is tricked by illusionism, there is no experience of art. The mimetic process must be witnessed so that art may reveal the inner secrets of nature (§104). Schelling distinguishes between mere “copy” (“Nachahmung”) of an object and “representation” (“Darstellung”) of the idea of Nature in its production. Because the “idea” may be represented only its manifestation of becoming, the work of art is never complete. Each of the arts requires that the artist work with the given “Potenzen”14 of its medium, thus for each the mimetic process is different. Music is a temporal medium in which the becoming of things may be represented. Painting is a spatial medium in which existing things may be shown in their identity. Music and lyric poetry are more closely aligned with the ideal, sculpture and painting with the real.15 Each of the arts, according to its own internal principles, achieves its own balance in the polarity of the ideal and the real. Pure art determines its 13. Schelling also used this definition of Einbildungskraft as “Ineinsbildungskraft” in Methode (1802) and in Darlegung des wahren Verhältnisses der Naturphilosophie zu der verbesserten Fichteschen Lehre (1806). See SW 5:348 and 7:60. Coleridge constructed an equivalent word esemplastic from the Greek “,Æ4H «< B8VJJ,4<, i.e. to shape into one,” in BL 1:168. 14. Behler, “Schellings Ästhetik,” pp. 179–83. Schelling’s three “Potenzen” provide a dialectic resolved in “Indifferenz” rather than in synthesis: the “Potenz” of the Infinite and the “Potenz” of the Finite are made to coexist in the “Indifferenz” of beauty and aesthetics (the “Potenz” of material phenomena and the “Potenz” of reason are reconciled in the “Indifferenz” of art). This relationship is summarized in the second (“Stufe der Vernunft. Potenz des Ewigen”) and third (“Systematische Eintheilung der schönen Künste”) of the five schematic tables which Robinson appends at the end of his transcription of Schelling’s lectures. 15. Among the opposing “Potenzen” reconciled in the work of art, Schelling identified those which to perception appear steadfast in space (“beharrend in Raume”): sculpture, painting, architecture. These, as Robinson shows in a schematic table titled “Systematische Eintheilung der schönen Künste,” are contrasted with works of art which celebrate the dynamism of time and space: drama, dance, music. Even the seemingly immobile matter is, Schelling insisted, a construct of dynamic energy (electrical, magnetic, and chemical processes that pervade all being). Thus Schelling could declare that “Architektur ist erstarrte Musik” (SW 5:576). During one of her meetings with Robinson, de Staël mocked the phrase as a forced metaphor: “ ‘Mais Monsr R. dites moi’ said she, what does Schelling mean when he says that Architecture is frozen Musick—And then not waiting for an answer by declaiming on the frivolity or false wit of the parallel she at last appealed to me if she was not right. Sans doute Madame sayd I. Vous nous avez demonstre que— votre Esprit n’est pas gelee (That your Wit is not frozen).” Carl August, duke of Sachsen-WeimarEisenach, “did me the honour to exclaim fort bien dit” at this “complimentary repartee” through which Robinson extricated himself from de Staël’s challenge. Crabb Robinson in Germany, pp. 135–36. De Staël repeated the phrase in her novel, Corinne (1807).

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own principles and purposes. Subservient arts (“unächte schöne Künste”) are compromised by externally imposed purposes: architecture, landscape gardening, stage scenery, rhetoric, didactic poetry. In arguing that art serves an intrinsic rather than an extrinsic purpose, Schelling addresses those aspects of “representation” which involve “recognition” (“Erkennung”). A portrait, for example, might seem to require that the viewer recognize the object as a specific person. But a portrait does not achieve its status as a work of art simply because it provides a striking likeness. The portrait must interpret nature by displaying the entire life and mind of a person in the moment of the painting. In a gallery of portraits of persons otherwise unknown, this dynamic presence is what the viewer recognizes, not the “likeness.” One year before Constant had recorded the phrase “l’art pour l’art” as the crux of Robinson’s explanation of Schelling, Robinson had transcribed the lectures in which Schelling explained how art in the medium of poetry could turn toward the real and give shape to the infinite within the finite (“die Einbildung des Unendlichen ins Endliche”), or in the medium of sculpture could emphasize the ideal by revealing the finite with the infinite (“die Einbildung des Endlichen ins Unendliche”). “Art in art” (“Kunst in der Kunst”) was Schelling’s formulation for this realization of the ideal and idealization of the real. The artist accomplishes a union of subject and object which the philosopher can only posit. Moreover, by confirming that the aesthetic experience takes place within these boundaries of art (“daß der Kunstgenuß sich ganz innerhalb der Gränze der Kunst befinde,” §104), Schelling claims that art enables the viewer to participate in the moment of reconciliation. The mimetic process aims not at a “copy” of an object, but a revelation of the union of subject and object, mind and nature. What the viewer recognizes as beauty is the adequacy (“Angemessenheit”) of the attainment. Coleridge, we know, drew from Schelling’s arguments as presented in System des transzendentalen Idealismus (1800) and Über das Verhältnis der bildenden Künste zu der Natur (1807). Had Schelling’s lectures on the philosophy of art appeared in print at the time they were delivered (Jena, 1802–3; Würzburg, 1804–5), the relevance of l’art pour l’art (or Kunst an sich, or Kunst in der Kunst) in the romantic understanding of the mimetic process would have been more immediately obvious. Böttiger kept his own copies of Robinson’s lecture notes and of the “Dissertations” that Robinson prepared for de Staël. Only as they were adapted by de Staël in De l’Allemagne did they gain currency in the aesthetics and critical theory of the ensuing decades. In her chapter on the German philosophers before and after Kant (pt. 3, chap. 7), de Staël re-creates a scene from the legend of Pygmalion and his

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statue;16 the figure awakens, “touching alternately itself and the stone on which it was placed, says by turns This is I, and This is not I. But when, taking the hand of Pygmalion, it exclaims, This, too, is I! then a question is raised of a sentiment which is much beyond the sphere of abstract ideas.”17 Having spurned real women, Pygmalion carves his ideal female. No sooner is this figure created than he succumbs to an irresistible passion. Venus answers his fervent prayers and allows his passionate embrace to bring the figure to life. Art, said Ovid of the beautiful statue, lies hidden in art (“Ars adeo latet arte sua,” Metamorphoses 10.252). Art, said Schelling, is the “indifference” between real and ideal, the “identity” of mind and nature. Thus the scene aptly exemplifies Schelling’s principle of “Identität.” The statue is the “real-ization” of Pygmalion’s ideal: the idea of feminine beauty which he carved from inert and lifeless matter. As she comes to life, she recognizes that her “identity” is in herself, but also in the artist who created her. De Staël intended this anecdote to exemplify, not the Identitäts-prinzip of Schelling’s aesthetics, but the Ich and Nicht-Ich discrimination in Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre (1794). The statue, although an apt example of Schelling’s reconciliation, is a badly chosen spokesperson for the Fichtian Ich. On touching the artist, she would have declared that he, like her stone pedestal, was Nicht-Ich. For Fichte, the Ich is simply the activity of positing the self. Consciousness works through reflection, and reflection requires a recognition of the limits of its own activity. The Nicht-Ich occupies all being not animated by the activity of conscious reflection. De Staël also intended this Pygmalion scene to expose the intellectual one-sidedness of German Idealism, which had prescinded the rational from the emotional response to the work of art. “Idealism, stripped of sentiment, has nevertheless the advantage of exciting, to the highest degree, the activity of the mind; but nature and love, by this system, lose all their charms” (Germany, 2:193).18 As applied to aesthetic judgment, de Staël’s criticism is true. Kant, in his effort to redeem aesthetics from its subordination to the “lower faculties,” the realm of feelings and sensations, endeavored to establish a ground for aesthetic 16. Jean-Baptiste Rousseau, Pygmalion (1772); Ovid, Metamorphoses 10.243–97. 17. Germaine de Staël, De l’Allemagne, p. 193: “Ce que Fichte a écrit sur le MOI métaphysique ressemble un peu au réveil de la statue de Pygmalion, qui, touchant alternativement elle-même et la pierre sur laquelle elle étatit placée, dit tour à tour:—C’est moi, et ce n’est pas moi.—Mais quand, en penant la main de Pygmalion, elle s’écrie:—C’est encore moi!—il s’agit déjà d’un sentiment qui dépasse beaucoup la sphère des idées abstraits.” 18. Ibid., pt. 3, chap. 7: “L’Idéalisme dépouillé du sentiment a néanmoins l’avantage d’exciter au plus haut degré l’activité de’l’esprit; mais la nature et l’amour perdent tout leur charme par ce système.”

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judgment within reason. De Staël, however, delights in countering Kant’s insistence upon the rational “purity of aesthetic judgment” (“Die Reinigkeit des Geschmacksurteils”) with the Sensualist philosophy of the French. Kant’s point of departure, she declares, was Leibniz’s “sublime restriction” to Locke’s axiom “that there is nothing in the intellect which has not first been in the senses.” “Nothing,” Leibniz amended, “except the intellect itself ” (2:156). In his Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1781), Kant sets forth the a priori laws resident in the intellect itself which enable it to act upon the data provided by the senses. He identifies space and time as “the first class of imperative forms” that “exist in us, and not in objects; . . . it is our understanding which gives laws to external nature, instead of receiving them from it” (Germany 2:161).19 What Kant called his “Copernican revolution” in philosophy was a revolution that insisted upon the independence of the individual mind. In his Kritik der Urtheilskraft (1791) Kant achieved a similar liberation for the arts by “separating the beautiful from the useful.” In the second part of De l’Allemagne, she observed the current tendency in German literature “to refer every thing to an interior existence” (2:90). In her chapter in part 3 on the relation of the new philosophy to literature, she explains this interiority in terms of the concern with the unfolding of inner laws. “Kant clearly proves,” de Staël affirms, “that it is not in the nature of the fine arts to give us lessons.” If dictated by ideology, “the free impression produced by masterpieces of art is necessarily destroyed.” She was fully aware that fear had been aroused in some quarters by the perceived threat of Kantian aesthetics: its insistence on maintaining itself without purpose and without interest was precisely what “the partisans of utility would call prodigal” (2:207). “It is certainly not from a want of understanding the moral value of what is useful that Kant has separated it from the beautiful: it is to ground admiration of every kind on absolute disinterestedness” (2:208).20 In upholding that independence which Kantian philosophy granted to mind over external nature, poets and artists made mind rather than nature the object of mimesis (2:208). “The literary theory of the Germans differs from all 19. Ibid., chap. 6: “Au premier rang des formes impératives de notre esprit, sont l’espace et le temps. Kant démonstre que toutes nos perceptions sont soumises à ces deux formes; il en conclut qu’elles sont en nous et non pas dans les objets, et qu’à cet égard rieure c’est notre entendement qui donne des lois à la nature extérieure, au lieu d’en recevoir d’elle.” 20. Ibid., chap. 9. On the assertion that the beautiful has no didactic purpose: “Kant, en séparant le beau de l’utile, prouve clairement qu’il n’est point du tout dans la nature des beaux-arts de donner des leçons.” On beauty without purpose: “La nature déploie ses magnificences souvent sans but, souvent avec un luxe que les partisans de l’utilité appelleraient prodigue.” On the assertion that aesthetic judgment requires disinterestedness: “Ce ne’est certainement pas pour méconnaître la valeur morale de ce qui est utile que Kant a séparé le beau; c’est pour fonder l’admiration en tout genre sur un désintéressement absolu.”

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others in not subjecting writers to customs, nor to tyrannical restrictions” (2:209). She is quick to add that great writers of the past—Homer, Dante, Shakespeare—succeeded without the help of Kant’s “metaphysical reasoning.” This does not mean, however, that the Kantian declaration of artistic freedom was unnecessary; it means only “that the fact preceded the observation of the fact.” De Staël moves the argument for the “disinterestedness” of art into a proclamation of independence that anticipates Victor Cousin’s defense of l’art pour l’art. “As we have reached the epoch of theories,” she then asks, “should we not be on our guard against those which may stifle talent?” (2:209).21 Her question is more than just a question: it is a challenge to those who impose “tyrannical restrictions.” No wonder that she was forced into exile from France, or that Napoleon thought it expedient to destroy ten thousand copies of De l’Allemagne when it first appeared in Paris in 1810.22 It scarcely needs to be said that the age of romanticism was also an age of revolution and of reactionary repression. Many writers were persecuted for their political convictions, or even charged with treason or sedition: William Blake, Thomas Holcroft, John Thelwall, and Leigh Hunt in England; Heinrich von Kleist, Friedrich Hölderlin, and Georg Büchner in Germany; there were also those like de Staël and Constant who lived in exile. From its very inception, “art for art’s sake” asserted a ground of opposition to political and moral authority. Aesthetic separatism was a resistance movement.23 In spite of her reliance on Robinson, Schlegel, and even Schelling himself, de Staël is superficial in her summaries of Fichte and Schelling. “Schelling refers everything to nature,” she writes, “while Fichte makes every thing spring from the soul” (2:196).24 The discrimination is not wrong, it is merely inadequate. If the new literature were a matter of expressing the soul, then one might think that Fichte’s philosophy would be the more relevant. In fact, as de Staël knows, it was Schelling who was more concerned with the arts. She attempts to explain why this should be so: “The ideal and the real hold, in his language, the place of intelligence and matter, of imagination and experience; and it is in the reunion of these two powers in complete harmony, that, in his opinion, the unique and absolute principle of the organized universe consists. The harmony, 21. Ibid., chap. 9: “La théorie littéraire des Allemands diffère des toutes les autres, en ce qu’elle n’assujettit point les écrivains à des usages ni à des restrictions tyranniques. . . . puisque nous sommes arrivés à l’époque des théories, ne faut-il pas au moins se garder de celles qui peuvent étouffer le talent?” 22. Simone Balayé, “Staël and Liberty.” 23. Walter Benjamin, Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik, pp. 16–22. 24. De Staël, De l’Allemagne, pt. 3, chap. 7: “Schelling rapporte tout à la nature, tardis que Fichte fait tout ressortir de l’âme.”

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of which the two poles and the centre form the image, . . . is to be found in the fine arts, as in nature” (2:196).25 Again, she provides the apt summary of a popularizer, but does not delve into the dynamics of the philosophy. She recognizes that Schelling’s system “returns into that of Spinoza” and “approaches nearly to the philosophers called Pantheists, that is, those who attribute to nature the attributes of Divinity” (2:196–97).26 Missing is Schelling’s conviction that the energy (electricity, magnetism, chemistry) that gives structure to matter is identical to the energy that informs the conscious mind. The principal difference, for Schelling, is that mind is capable of self-reflection. The artist in shaping his medium—be it marble, or language, or paint on canvas—creates a union of mind and matter, ideal and real, subject and object. It is a union that depends upon a conformance of each to the laws of the others. The work of art must grow organically in terms of self-generated, self-determined principles.27 Although she is enthusiastic about Schiller’s drama, with chapters devoted to Die Räuber, Don Carlos, Wallenstein, Maria Stuart, Die Jungfrau von Orleans, Die Braut von Messina, and Wilhelm Tell (1:270–335), she is not favorably impressed by Schiller’s aesthetics. She acknowledges him as “the first among the disciples of Kant who applied his philosophy to literature.” Über naive und sentimentale Dichtung (1795–96) possesses “great sagacity,” but Über Anmut und Wurde (1793) and Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen (1795–97) have “too much of metaphysics” (2:90–91). Had de Staël given as much attention to Schiller as she was to give to A. W. Schlegel, she would have recognized that many of Schiller’s ideas were echoed in Schlegel’s lectures. From Kant’s Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (1788), Schiller adapted the idea of a self-determined ethical ground, an “Autonomie,” as opposed to the imposed ethical ground, “Heteronomie,” of church or state. Even when the artist is capable of exercising autonomous freedom, the work itself is nevertheless heteronomous, because the will of the artist has been imposed upon its making, as well as the necessary laws of the artistic medium (in painting, for example, the laws of perspective). Art is heteronomous, but the artist 25. Ibid.: “L’idéal et le réel tiennent, dans son langage, la place de l’intelligence et de la matière, de l’imagination et de l’expérience; et c’est dans la réunion de ces deux puissances en une harmonie complète que consiste, selon lui, le principe unique et absolu de l’univers organisé. Cette harmonie, dont les deux pôles et le centre sont l’image, . . . fournit à Schelling les applications les plus ingénieuses. Il croit la retrouver dans les beaux-arts comme dans la nature.” 26. Constant had decided that Schelling was a Spinozist upon first learning of his philosophy. Journal intime, Pluviôse 7 [ 28 January] 1804: “Une conversatione que j’ai avec un disciple de Schelling me confirme que cette philosophie est bien le spinosisme et qu’ils veulent en venir là.” 27. Schiller and Schelling both make use of Kant’s arguments on organic growth in the use of language. Frederick Burwick, “Kant and Hegel.”

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can give it the illusion of freedom, so that what is mimetically represented appears to be natural and self-determined. The manipulating hand of the artist is unseen. In his theoretical exposition of this argument in the Kallias-Briefe (1793), Schiller posited a “Heautonomie,” or “Freedom in appearance” (“Freiheit in der Erscheinung”) as a way of describing an independent purposiveness without purpose (“Zweckmäßigkeit ohne Zweck”). In the response to art, we witness not just the appearance, but the freedom it communicates: “Therefore the realm of taste is a realm of freedom . . . and every beautiful being of nature beyond me is a happy warrantor, who calls to me, Be free as I am.”28 For Schelling, a free and unencumbered union of mind and matter was fully attained in art. Schiller, however, could not grant to the material medium of art the same freedom the artist might attain in imaginative conception. All that could be hoped for, is that the constraint might be disguised so that art attained “Freedom in appearance.” Not simply the sculptor’s marble but even the poet’s language inhibited freedom of ideas. All poetic representation, therefore, is no more than a “free self-action of nature in the chains of language.”29 Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen proposes that human beings acquire their sense of freedom through art, because art reveals the human potential for rising above the limitations of a life of mere thoughts or sensations. Art is free play. As a part of intellectual reflection, a person develops a “Formtrieb,” a drive to find shape, order, and the permanence of truth in the flux of impressions; this drive is accompanied by a “Stofftrieb,” which delights in the sensuous variety and change as part of the experience of objective reality (12. Brief). From these two drives a third develops, a “Spieltrieb,” which plays with the interaction of form and matter, figure and sensation (14. Brief). Out of this play, and only out of this play, emerges the “living figure” (“lebende Gestalt”) of art. Here Schiller’s play-theory fully endorses the moral and political autonomy of art. A human being, otherwise dictated to by intellectual or sensuous impulses, becomes fully human only through play. And in discovering how to play, “a person should only play with beauty, and should play only with beauty” [der Mensch soll mit der Schönheit nur spielen, und er soll nur mit der Schönheit spielen] (15. Brief). No other interests, political or moral, should interfere.30 “The writings of A. W. Schlegel,” de Staël wrote of her traveling compan28. Friedrich Schiller, Kallias-Briefe, in Sämtliche Werke, 5:409–26. “Darum ist das Reich des Geschmacks ein Reich der Freiheit . . . und jedes schöne Naturwesen außer mir ein glücklicher Bürge, der mir zuruft: Sei frei wie ich.” Ibid., 5:424–25. 29. Ibid., 5:433: “Die Schönheit der poetischen Darstellung ist ‘frei Selbsthandlung der Natur in den Fesseln der Sprache.’ ” 30. Friedrich Schiller, Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen, in Sämtliche Werke, 5:570–669.

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ion, “are less abstracted than those of Schiller.” He has found, she goes on to say, “the art of treating the finest pieces of poetry as so many wonders of nature.” Like the “wonders of nature,” poetry grows according to its own inherent rules. It is self-determining. To understand a poem, the reader must enter into the creative process of the poet. His criticism, she explains, consists of seizing the “spirit” that informs each sort of poetry “with all the imagination of a poet.” In 1801, Schlegel commenced his Berlin lectures on literature and art (Vorlesungen über schöne Literature und Kunst), the first part of which was devoted to an exposition of his doctrine of art (Kunstlehre), an application of the Kantian “purposiveness without purpose”: What purpose is served by a painting or a poem? None. Many have meant the arts well, but understood them badly, when they sought to recommend them in terms of their utility. That resulted only in degrading the arts, and turning the matter on its head. It is in the essence of art, rather, not to want to be useful. The beautiful is to a certain extent the opposite of the useful: it is that from which the useful has been exempted. Everything useful is subservient to that for which it is useful. There must therefore be some final purpose, or purpose in itself, otherwise one would be caught up with the useful in an endless sequence always to be referred to still another purpose, and the concept of usefulness would at last have no reality. . . . [W]hatever has an absolute purpose, seems in a certain sense to be again without purpose, in that what we usually call purpose, is only a limited task of the understanding a negation of absolute purpose. On the whole, one can describe art as the capability of actually executing in nature any purpose of humanity whatsoever.31 31. August Wilhelm Schlegel, Die Kunstlehre, in Kritische Schriften und Briefe, 2:13–14: “Wozu dient . . . ein Gemälde oder ein Gedicht? Zu gar nichts. Viele haben es gut mit den Künsten gemeint, aber schlecht verstanden, wenn sie sie von seiten ihrer Nützlichkeit zu empfehlen gesucht haben. Das heißt sie aufs äußerste herabwürdigen und die Sache gerade auf den Kopf stellen. Vielmehr liegt es im Wesen der schönen Künste, nicht nützlich sein zu wollen. Das Schöne ist auf gewisse Weise der Gegensatz des Nützlichen: es ist dasjenige, dem das Nützlichsein erlassen ist. Alles Nützliche ist dem untergeordnet, wozu es nützlich ist. Es muß demnach etwas geben, das letzter Zweck oder Zweck an sich ist, sonst würde man mit dem Nützlichen in einer unendlichen Reihe immer wieder an etwas anderes verwiesen, und der Begriff des Nützlichen hätte am Ende gar keine Realität. . . . [W]as einen absoluten Zweck hat, erscheint auf gewisse Weise wieder zwecklos, indem das, was wir gewöhnlich Zweck nennen, nur eine beschränkte Aufgabe des Verstandes und die Verneinung eines absoluten Zwecks ist. Kunst kann man überhaupt als die Geschichlichkeit beschreiben, irgendeinen Zweck des Menschen in die Natur wirklich auszuführen.”

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In Schlegel’s appropriation of “purposiveness without purpose” art is free of subservience to any given purpose, but may actually reveal the consequences of any purpose the mind may imagine. Art serves only its own self-determining principles. Friedrich Schlegel—“whose mind,” de Staël says, “possesses the highest originality” (2:95)—made much this same point a few years before his brother. “Shaftesbury,” wrote Friedrich Schlegel, endorsed “the more common prejudice that the highest purpose of fine art was moral refinement.” Art, in fact, is “purpose in itself ” (“Zweck an sich”).32 A. W. Schlegel dedicated his Kunstlehre to the self-sufficiency of the Beautiful, its essential difference and independence from the morally Good: his Kunstlehre would uphold the autonomy of art. Art is “autonomous,” he explained, “when the predisposition to art itself defines its own law; heteronomous, when art must derive its law from an external disposition.”33 When A. W. Schlegel delivered his “Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literatur” in Vienna in 1808, de Staël was foremost among the enthusiastic admirers in his audience. Other lecturers might devote their efforts to exposing the defects of a work; Schlegel “sought only the means of reviving a creative genius” (2:93). Art must be examined from inside its own boundaries, and in terms of its own self-generated principles. By approaching art on its own terms, Schlegel could reveal its informing genius: “the ability to discover genius and to admire it, is almost equal to the possession of genius itself ” (2:94).34 As she continued working on De l’Allemagne, de Staël came to rely increasingly on A. W. Schlegel. After leaving Weimar, her correspondence with Robinson was soon to cease. Robinson returned to England in September 1805, where he acquired deserved respect for his expertise in German literature and philosophy. He met Wordsworth in 1808 and Coleridge in 1811. Attending the “Lectures on Shakespear and Milton” (18 November 1811–27 January 1812), he 32. “Shaftesbury . . . das gemeinere Vorurteil, sittliche Veredlung sei der höchste Zweck der schönen Kunst.” “Kunst . . . ist Zweck an sich.” Lyceum 59, in Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel Ausgabe, 2:154. 33. August Wilhelm Schlegel, Die Kunstlehre, in Kritische Schriften und Briefe, 2:15: “[Die Kunstlehre] würde . . . die Selbständigkeit des Schönen, seine wesentliche Verschiedenheit und seine Unabhängigkeit vom sittlich Guten, dartun müssen: sie würde die Autonomie der Kunst behaupten. (Autonomish ist sie, wenn die Anlage dazu ihr auch selbst das Gesetz gibt; heteronomisch, wenn sie es von einer fremden Anlage entlehnen muß).” 34. De Staël, De l’Allemagne, pt. 2, chap. 31. Of A. W. Schlegel’s lectures in Vienna she reports: “Je fus confondue d’entendre un critique éloquent comme un orateur, et qui, loin de s’archarner aux défauts, éternel aliment de la médiocrité jalouse, cherchait seulement à faire revivre le génie créateur. . . . [A]prés le génie, ce qu’il y a de plus semblable à lui, c’est la puissance de le connaitre et de l’admirar.”

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recognized that Coleridge was “repeating old remarks” (16 December 1811; Books and Their Writers, 1:56). It was just at this point in his lectures that Coleridge began to adapt material from the recent publication of Schlegel’s lectures Über dramatische Kunst und Literatur (1809–11).35 A month earlier, Robinson recorded his surprise at finding Coleridge “very much of a Schellingianer,” especially in his “mode of comparing the fine arts and of antithetically considering all their elements” (24 November 1811; Books and Their Writers, 1:52). In his conversations with Robinson, Coleridge repeatedly endeavored to point the attention away from Schelling. In Proclus, he assured Robinson, he found the ideas only latterly developed by Schelling. From Fichte or Schelling he “has not gained any one great idea”; but “to Kant,” Coleridge added, “his obligations are infinite” (3 May 1812; Books and Their Writers, 1:70). “From Schelling he has gained no new ideas,” he assured Robinson; “all Schelling has said he either having thought before or found in Jacob Boehmen” (29 March 1812; Books and Their Writers, 1:88). Robinson, of course, was not misled. In noting that Coleridge’s lectures on Greek drama (Summer 1812) were “very German” and filled with “Teutonic analogies,” he adds that it was fortunate that Coleridge did not go quite so far as “to risk entirely the Schellingian triple classification.”36 Just as he made no public statement about his contributions to De l’Allemagne, Robinson said nothing about the borrowings from Schelling in the Biographia Literaria (1817), but in his diary he did ask himself: “When did he write the passages from Schelling published as his own in his Biographia Literaria?” (Selections, 83). In spite of Robinson’s discretion, the German sources were exposed in James Frederick Ferrier’s “The Plagiarisms of S. T. Coleridge,” Blackwood’s Magazine (March 1840). When Wordsworth called upon him for a defense of Coleridge’s reputation, Robinson conceded that “the charge” that Ferrier had leveled “must be deemed made out.”37 To Sara Coleridge, upon preparing her edition of Biographia Literaria (1846), complete with a thorough annotation on Coleridge’s borrowings from Schelling, Robinson expressed his reassurances that Coleridge had been “unconscious” of the many passages from Schelling amongst his notes for the work (2:659). In Chapter 3, “Mimesis of the Mind,” I further examine Coleridge’s use of Schelling’s philosophy of art. The issue in this chapter, however, is what bearing the concept of l’art pour l’art, or Kunst an sich, had on Coleridge’s own ex35. Frederick Burwick, Illusion and the Drama, pp. 191–229. 36. Henry Crabb Robinson, Blake, Coleridge,Wordsworth, Lamb, etc., being Selections from the Remains of Henry Crabb Robinson, p. 131. 37. Henry Crabb Robinson, The Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson with the Wordsworth Circle, 1808–1866, 2: 401, 404.

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planation of the mimetic process, and what he contributed to the dissemination and evolution of this foundational idea in aesthetics and critical theory. Robert Southey had introduced Coleridge to de Staël in October 1813. Coleridge mentioned her “unfavorable account” of Goethe’s Faust (1809) when he wrote to John Murray to propose a translation (31 August 1814, CL 3:525). In appraising her De l’Allemagne, he was willing to grant her a share of the characteristic French “eminence in Talent and cleverness,” but he was confident that “whatever is solid and original in Md. de Stahl was given her by Schlegel & other Germans” (to Thomas Boosey, 4 September 1816, CL 4:667). That it might not be her own work does not mean that he, of all people, would think less of the account of German philosophy in part 3 of De l’Allemagne. The recent editions of Biographia Literaria and Lectures 1808–1819 on Literature have so carefully documented Coleridge’s debt to Kant, Schelling, and A. W. Schlegel that here it is only necessary to point out the use he makes of that specific coterie of ideas which concern “art in itself,” its “purposiveness without purpose,” and its process of evolving its mimetic object from its own intrinsic laws. The most extensive borrowing from Schelling in Biographia Literaria is Coleridge’s presentation in chapter 12 of the ten theses on how perception leads to apperception.38 For Coleridge, no less than for Schelling, the problem was as urgent as Pygmalion’s desire to breathe life into the statue of his ideal. Schelling, after all, had argued that art was matter imbued with the consciousness of the artist. But Kant had created a great barrier between mind and matter. Mind knows only the phenomenon, as derived from the senses, and can never know the noumenon, the Ding an sich. But it was not merely the thingin-itself in the external world that could not be known. One could not even know the Ding an sich of one’s own consciousness. In order to discover the self through an act of inward reflection, Kant argued, the mind would have to become receptive to its own spontaneity as internal affect. This means that, in spite of the compelling illusion of immediate presence, self-consciousness is mediated, just like all other affects in the reception of sensations. “I think” (as in the familiar Cartesian cogito ergo sum) is only a phenomenon, a representation of “self ” in the mind. Kant called it the Das: Ich denke.39 Schelling endeavored to overcome this merely reflective and mediated sense of the self. He wanted to show that an immediate self-consciousness could be attained in the moment of “identity” in aesthetic experience. The work of art, as Schelling reasoned, is the realization of identity. The ten theses Coleridge borrowed from Schelling’s Sys38. Frederick Burwick, “Perception and ‘the heaven-descended KNOW THYSELF.’ ” 39. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, §§15–27, on the synthetic unity of apperception; §§24–25, on the Das: Ich denke as mediated phenomenon.

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tem des transzendentalen Idealismus enabled him to affirm that the mind may become an active agent in its own perceptions, aware of its own shaping presence in the images it beholds. If chapter 12, with the ten theses from Schelling, were Pygmalion’s prayer to Venus, then the definitions of the primary and secondary imaginations at the close of chapter 13 describe the embrace that brings the statue to life. A mediation of substance and poetic imagination must occur. In the act of mimesis the artist mentally combines the data of sense perception with the forms of the imagination and then projects both into the medium in which he creates his work. The primary imagination, which is the power of perception informing all acts of creation, is then echoed through the secondary imagination which recreates what was perceived while retaining its essential vitality (BL 1:304). Just as Schelling had posited a union of the “Endlich” and “Unendlich,” Coleridge defines the primary imagination “as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.” At the close of chapter 14, Coleridge continues to follow Schelling in declaring that the imagination “reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities” (BL 2:16). As James Engell and W. Jackson Bate point out in their notes to this passage, Coleridge also reveals a debt to Schiller’s description of the synthesis of mind and matter through imaginative play. The debt is even more evident in the subsequent discussion of poetic language (chapter 18) when Coleridge argues, as did Schiller in his Kallias-Briefe, that the poet must bring will and passion together. There must be a union, Coleridge insists, of “spontaneous impulse” and “voluntary purpose” (BL 2:65). In Coleridge’s lectures, Robinson noted on occasion the influence of A. W. Schlegel or Schelling. In addition to Coleridge’s lecture “On Poesy and Art” (1818), to be discussed in Chapter 3, traces abound of Schelling’s emphasis on art as the reconciliation on mind and matter. The understanding directs “selfconsciously a power & a wisdom deeper than Consciousness,” Coleridge states in his lecture of 1812 (LL 1:495), perhaps recollecting Schelling’s pre-Freudian insistence that the Bewußtseyn draws from the Bewußtlose (LL 2:221).40 The capacity of art to mediate between the human being and nature is a repeated theme in the lectures (LL 1:114; 2:217–18), as is the exercise of freedom and self-determination against external necessity, whether physical or cultural (LL 1:448, 457–58; 2:54, 222). As a foundational concept, it was necessary that autonomous art would avoid the external influences of morality and politics and allow the mimetic process to 40. StI, in SW 3:618.

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unfold according to an unencumbered reciprocity between mind and nature. It would be obedient only to the natural laws of perception and consciousness, and to those that governed the artistic medium, whether poetry, painting, sculpture, music, drama, or dance. The work of art was to be a reexternalization of images derived from the senses but reformed within the mind. In this triad of naturemind-art, the liberated mind locates itself beyond political and moral order. But any work that allies itself with autonomy is immediately suspected by the keepers of order as guilty of insurrection or decadence or both. The publication of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal (1857) resulted in criminal charges against the poet for mocking public morality and propriety. His lyric of autonomy was also a lyric of estrangement, in which the mind was adrift in a grotesque world, caught in antagonistic tides of spiritualité and animalité, pureté and volupté, élévation and chute, spleen and idéal. To sustain his liberation of thought and sense, Baudelaire relied on opium and hashish. Like Coleridge and De Quincey before him, he found the visionary gifts accompanied by manifold agonies. The drugs heightened his awareness of correspondences among sensations of sight, sound, and smell, but also his sensitivity to “l’horreur et l’extase de la vie.” Les Fleurs du Mal and Les Paradis artificiels, opium et haschich (1860), Baudelaire was convinced, explored a realm of art that had already been witnessed and interpreted by Thomas De Quincey and Edgar Allan Poe, whose works he studied and translated.41 From his first experimentation with drugs as a student at the Sorbonne in 1840, Baudelaire recognized opium as a “gentle seducer” which eases the way into art.42 The drug induced a detachment and, as in lucid dreaming, a more active interchange between consciousness and that which, as Coleridge phrased it, lies “deeper than Consciousness” (De Quincey in his endeavor to map this terrain was the first to use the word “subconscious”). Baudelaire became the foremost literary exponent of that opium-enhanced mode of l’art pour l’art that commenced with Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” (1797; published 1816). Coleridge introduced “Kubla Khan” with a prose preface that declared its provenance, its mediation, and its autonomy. The poet had isolated himself in “a lonely farmhouse,” where he had taken “an anodyne to relieve a slight indisposition.” The poet is isolated, and the very process of composition is insulated from the goings-on of the exterior world. He fell asleep while reading Purchas His Pilgrimage (1613); he was awakened by a “person on business from Porlock.” The entire poem arose as a dream “in which all the images rose up 41. Alethea Hayter, Opium and the Romantic Imagination, pp. 151–61. 42. Charles Baudelaire, Œuvres Complètes, 373–74, 425–28.

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before him as things,” a mode of composition that not only impresses, as Schelling would have it, the Bewußtlos upon the Befußtsein, but also in its very conjuration seems to overcome the limits of language by uniting the word and thing. The dreamer witnesses the dream compose itself: a composition not “less than from two to three hundred lines.” Because the dreamer has not exercised conscious will, he can claim no authority. He offers the lines that he has retrieved into the waking world simply as “a psychological curiosity.” Coleridge has thus pushed the autonomy of art further than Schiller had imagined. The opium dream has assumed the active role; the poem is created as a kind of automatism in which the images are self-generating. The poem itself, of course, anticipates the concerns of a society who respond to the visionary experience: And all who heard should see them there, And all should cry, Beware! Beware! His flashing eyes, his floating hair! Weave a circle round him thrice, And close your eyes in holy dread: For he on honey-dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise. Although the rationale for autonomous art was to secure the work of the artist from social censorship, Coleridge constructed a complete autonomy and then went on to close it with the intruding voice of fear and condemnation. For the reasons that Baudelaire appreciated in his Les Paradis artificiels, De Quincey became a significant advocate of art for art’s sake in his “Confessions of an English Opium-Eater.” Like Coleridge, De Quincey attributed a selfgenerating autonomy to his opium dreams. “Not the opium-eater,” he said, “but the opium is the true hero of the tale.” His dreams possessed “a power of endless growth and self-reproduction.”43 In the pieces that made up his “Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts” (1827, 1839, 1854),44 De Quincey deliberately assaults the confusion of moral and aesthetic criteria by examining the factors that arouse interest in violent crime, and by demonstrating how the cause-and-effect of aesthetic response can be pursued without recourse to moral issues. 43. Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, pp. 78, 71. 44. Two more, as yet unpublished, installments of “Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts” are among the manuscripts at the National Library of Scotland (MS 4789, ff33–36 and ff 56–62) and at Dove Cottage, Grasmere (MS 1988.193), parts of which have been transcribed by Alexander Japp in The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, 1:77–78.

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As a literary critic, he opposed the imposition of moral values as aesthetic criteria. “Didactic poetry,” he declared, is a contradicto in adjecto: “No poetry can have the function of teaching” (DQ 6:88). Never before in English literature had the autonomy of art been more forthrightly upheld, the subordination of art to religious or moral purposes more vehemently opposed: Poetry, or any one of the fine arts (all of which alike speak through the genial nature of man and his excited sensibilities), can teach only as nature teaches, as forests teach, as the sea teaches, as infancy teaches,—viz. by deep impulse, by hieroglyphic suggestion. Their teaching is not direct or explicit, but lurking, implicit, masked in deep incarnations. To teach formally and professedly is to abandon the very differential character and principle of poetry. (DQ 11:88–89) Poetry achieves its Zweckmäßigkeit without enslaving itself to the dogma or doctrine of a particular sect or party. Thus De Quincey must disassemble the locus classicus of Horatian criticism—that the purpose of literature is to teach or delight.45 There is a “literature of knowledge,” but one must not call it poetry. Horace’s advocacy of “delight” is too weak, too vague to account for the true efficacy of poetry. De Quincey chooses to call it a “literature of power”: What do you learn from Paradise Lost? Nothing at all. What do you learn from a cookery book? Something new, something that you did not know before, in every paragraph. But would you therefore put the wretched cookery book on a higher level of estimation than the divine poem? What you owe to Milton is not any knowledge, of which a million separate items are still but a million advancing steps on the same earthly level; what you owe is power—that is, exercise and expansion of your own latent capacity of sympathy with the infinite, where every pulse and each separate influx is a step upwards. (DQ 11:55–56) For De Quincey, a “literature of power” addresses the innate capacities of the mind without the burden of a didactic agenda. John Keats, like De Quincey, was powerfully swayed by current ideas on the autonomy of art. In subsequent generations more outspoken advocates of “art for art’s sake” would fondly return to such pronouncements in his poetry as “A thing of beauty is a joy forever” (Endymion, 1), or “ ‘Beauty is truth, truth 45. “Aut prodesse uolunt aut delectare poetae.” Ars Poetae, 333.

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beauty,’—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know” (“Ode on a Grecian Urn,” 49–50). He proposed a Negative Capability to sustain the poet’s exploration of “uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts,” and to counter the “irritable reaching after fact & reason.” Because he believed that art establishes its own criteria, Keats opposed the imposition of other standards: “With a great poet the sense of beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather, obliterates all other considerations” (21/27 December 1817).46 He insisted, too, on the primacy of the poem over the identity of the poet: As to the Poetical Character itself, . . . it is not itself—it has no self—it is everything and nothing—It has no character—it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated—It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the camelion Poet. It does no harm from its relish for the dark side of things any more than from its taste for the bright one; because they both end in speculation. A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity—he is continually in for—and filling some other Body. (27 October 1818) Keats does not adopt, as did Coleridge, Schelling’s philosophy of opposition and reconciliation. But he comes to much the same conclusion: the self must merge with its material, and “Identität” is realized in the work of art. Too, he adopts the conviction of all the German adherents to the concept of Kunst an sich, that art exists independent of moral judgments. An Iago and an Imogen, the dark side and the bright, have equal value in art. “We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us,” he wrote to Reynolds (3 February 1818). The mimetic process, as Keats described it, involves the translation into the artistic medium of whatever the imagination might conceive. That conception, however, must be distinct, palpable, and intense. Keats has little patience with vagueness and abstraction in art. Thus he expresses disappointment in Benjamin West’s Death on a Pale Horse: “There is nothing to be intense upon; no woman one feels mad to kiss; no face swelling into reality.” Art does not imitate reality, it competes with it. It succeeds because of its intensity: “The excellence of every Art is its intensity” (21/27 December 1817). Or to put it another way: 46. The Letters of John Keats, cited by parenthetical reference to the date; The Poems of John Keats, cited by title and line number.

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beauty is not dictated by truth, it generates its own truth: “What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth.” Thus, too, he declares that “the Imagination may be compared to Adam’s dream—he awoke and found it truth” (22 November 1817). Schelling, in asserting that art was the reconciliation between mind and nature, was not concerned that too much imagination or too much objective detail would disrupt the balance. He acknowledged various blends of the “Potenzen” in different modes of art. But the poets tended to be more wary of the hazards of losing balance. Blake, for example, feared that material nature might gain too strong a presence and destroy his art: “Natural Objects always did & now do Weaken deaden & obliterate Imagination in me.”47 Keats declared that it was the attraction to external reality that distinguished Byron from himself: “You speak of Lord Byron and me—There is this great difference between us. He describes what he sees—I describe what I imagine—Mine is the hardest task” (20 September 1819).48 The work of art, as the mediation between mind and nature, need not strike dead-center to achieve its balance. Nature remains always the nature apprehended by the mind; and the imagination, most certainly the Keatsian imagination, stores its images through the excitement of the senses. As Moneta’s condemnation of the poet as dreamer would suggest (The Fall of Hyperion, 161–70), Keats himself was aware of the solipsism of allowing his imagination to retreat into dream. The Kantian and post-Kantian doctrine of the autonomy of art and “disinterestedness” in aesthetic judgment, popularized in France through de Staël’s De l’Allemagne, was further elaborated just one year after her death by a charismatic young lecturer, Victor Cousin. His lectures at the Sorbonne in 1818 turned to the very German sources she had used. Even without a Robinson to guide him, Cousin laid bold claim to Schelling and Hegel and had no Coleridgean anxieties of influence: Hegel borrowed much from Schelling, and Cousin, who acknowledged himself much weaker than either, borrowed from both. From Schelling the autonomy of Kunst an sich is once again expressed as l’art pour l’art: “We must have religion for religion’s sake, morality for morality’s sake, as with art for art’s sake . . . the beautiful cannot be the way to what is useful, or to what 47. Annotations to Wordsworth’s Poems, in The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, p. 655. 48. Thomas McFarland, Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin, pp. 384–85, quotes both these passages—Keats on Byron, Blake on Wordsworth—to set forth a contrast between the mimetic (“the imitation of what is there”) and the meontic (“the imitation of what is not there”). This definition of the mimetic is clearly not in accord with Plato (Laws 397a–b, 400d–401a, 643c, 653a–655d, 664e–665e, 705c, 706b, 713b, 798d–e, 815a, 816a, 898a) or with Aristotle (Poetics 1449b36–1450b15). The meontic would be more appropriately contrasted with the ontic.

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is good, or to what is holy; it leads only to itself.”49 This passage reflects the ideals that Cousin announced in his title: Du Vrai, du beau, et du bien. Rather than subsume art under metaphysics, or metaphysics under art, as did Schelling in System der transzendentalen Idealismus and Philosophie der Kunst, Cousin developed three discreet systems: a spiritual idealism in which the Absolute is revealed by spontaneous intuition, a pantheistic idealism which relies on consciousness of divine presence, and an empirical idealism in which ideas are evolved from sense experience. Metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics each provide their own way of discovering the Absolute. For Cousin, l’art pour l’art was autonomous, but in contrast to Schiller or Schelling, he did not claim that its revelations commanded the entire scope of the human intellect. Not surprisingly, it was not Cousin but de Staël who continued to exert the most influence in literature and art during the years following the Bourbon restoration. Delacroix, for example, claims that he found in de Staël (De l’Allemagne, pt. 2, chap. 32) the exposition of his own idea on painting, its capacity to rise above thought, and its advantage over literature.50 Through the 1820s and 1830s in France the ideas associated with the autonomy of art continued to proliferate: in Hugo’s prefaces to Cromwell (1827) and to Hernani (1830); in Gautier’s preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835)—which became a manifesto of a l’art pour l’art; and finally to Baudelaire’s celebration of De Quincey and Poe. Twice in his essay “The Poetic Principle” (1849), Edgar Allan Poe speaks of “the poem written solely for the poem’s sake.” It is the misfortune of the American heritage, he declares, that the public has fallen under the way of “the heresy of The Didactic,” a heresy that has “accomplished more in the corruption of our Poetical Literature than all its other enemies combined.” The didactic heresy, of course, is the presumption that poetry must teach some “Truth.” This expectation led people to assume that it is wrong “to write a poem simply for the poem’s sake.” Poe urged his readers to recognize the sublime self-sufficiency of poetry: “Would we but permit ourselves to look into our own souls, we should immediately there discover that under the sun there neither exists nor can exist any work more thoroughly dignified—more supremely noble than this 49. Victor Cousin, lectures at the Sorbonne in 1818; first published as Cours de philosophie, 1836; republished as Du Vrai, du beau, et du bien (Paris, 1853), pt. 2, p. 197: “Il faut de la religion pour la religion, de la morale pour la morale, comme de l’art pour l’art . . . le beau ne peut être la voie ni de l’utile, ni du bien, ni du saint; il ne conduit qu’à lui-même.” 50. Journal d’Eugène Delacroix, 1:50: “Je retrouve justement dans Mme de Staël le développement de mon idée sur la peinture. Cet art, ainsi que la musique, sont au-dessus de la pensée; de là leur avantage su la littérature, par le vague.”

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very poem—this poem per se—this poem which is a poem and nothing more— this poem written solely for the poem’s sake.”51 When Poe divided “the world of mind into its three most immediately obvious distinctions, . . . the Pure Intellect, Taste, and the Moral Sense,” he insisted upon their respective autonomy, but he did not, like Cousin, separate them into discreet realms. Instead, following Kant and Schelling, he placed “Taste” in the middle (the “Indifferenz Punkt”). “Just as the Intellect concerns itself with Truth, so Taste informs us of the Beautiful while the Moral Sense is regardful of Duty. Of this latter, while Conscience teaches the obligation, and Reason the expediency, Taste contents herself with displaying the charms:—waging war upon Vice solely on the ground of her deformity—her disproportion—her animosity to the fitting, to the appropriate, to the harmonious—in a word, to Beauty.”52 Poe thus defended the place that he gave, in his own works, to the grotesque and arabesque, alongside the sublime, the picturesque, and the beautiful. He read Schelling and both the Schlegels in translation and appropriated where he saw fit.53 As he acknowledged, his New England readers could not be expected to accept the autonomy of art and its liberation from “unwanted” influences of religion and morality. Nevertheless, Poe endorsed the “poem for the poem’s sake” as a critical principle that permitted no compromise. In 1909, when A. C. Bradley delivered his Oxford lecture “Poetry for Poetry’s Sake,”54 it is doubtful that he had Poe in mind. He wanted to affirm that one ought to study “poetry in its essence,” that the experience of poetry is “an end in itself,” and that it does not offer a copy of the real world, but rather “a world by itself, independent, complete, autonomous.” These, of course, are ideas that were expounded by Kant and Schelling and disseminated by de Staël, Coleridge, Keats, De Quincey, Poe, Gautier, and Baudelaire. But Bradley found that they had been distorted by the Aesthetes and sullied by the Decadents. The poems he wanted read for the “Poetry’s sake” are Milton’s Paradise Lost and Tennyson’s Crossing the Bar, not Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal nor Wilde’s Salomé. “The offensive consequences often drawn from the formula ‘Art for Art,’ ” Bradley declared, “will be found to attach not to the doctrine that Art is an end in itself, but to the doctrine that Art is the whole and supreme end of human life.” He explained that his purpose was to clear the concept of Art as an end in itself from the unfortunate misapprehensions that had arisen in the final decades of the nineteenth century. 51. 52. 53. 54.

Edgar Allan Poe, “The Poetic Principle,” in Complete Works, 6:251–52. Ibid., 6:252–53. G. R. Thompson, Poe’s Fiction, pp. 19–38, 204–15. A. C. Bradley, “Poetry for Poetry’s Sake.”

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The scoffers and detractors are numerous and noisy, and not without reason. “Art for art’s sake” is, after all, a lie. No artist has ever created an “autonomous” work of art, uninfluenced by political or moral convictions. The pretense of escaping ideology is itself an ideology.55 Many of de Staël’s readers in the era of Napoleonic conquest, and even in the subsequent period of restoration, saw in the “art of autonomy” a convenient cover for the “art of anarchy”; at the other extreme, it was a way of shirking responsibilities: the escapism of a sensitive soul incapable of confronting exploitation and poverty, the brutalities and indignities of factories and cities. Even though the “New Critics” who held sway through the middle decades of the twentieth century were fond of boasting the “primacy of the text” in their interpretation of poetry, they avoided aligning themselves with “art for art’s sake,” a movement variously denounced as “yawning Philistinism” or “a philosophy of the well-fed” (of those wealthy enough to live in ivory towers).56 “L’art pour l’art,” as Robinson explained it to Constant in 1804, was an autonomous art with no other purpose than that which it developed out of its own a priori laws. The mimetic process by which it was engendered was a representation, not of external nature, but of the mind beholding external nature. It was a mimetic process that required an interplay of the object perceived, the imagination of the perceiver, and the material medium in which its form and essence were to be communicated. As Kunst an sich, or Kunst in der Kunst, it reveals its own self-determining principles. As in Eins Bildung of mind and matter, it demonstrates the persistence and reconciliation of both. In the chapters to follow, it will be related to two additional, although inextricably related, foundational principles: mimesis as identity and alterity, and mimesis as the palingenesis of mind in art.

55. Benjamin, Der Begriff der Kunstkritik, pp. 6–7. 56. V. S. Pritchett, “Books in General,” New Statesman, 16 June 1951: “The detective novel is the art-for-art’s-sake of our yawning Philistinism, the classic example of a specialized form of art removed from contact with the life it pretends to build on.” Cao Yu, The [London] Observer, 1980: “Art for art’s sake is a philosophy of the well-fed.” Darcy O’Brian, Los Angeles Times, 2 December 1975: “The academic’s freedom is confined to his ivory tower. Let him rant and wave his arms all he wants, let him spout ideas preposterous or dangerous. As long as he stays within the gates, he is fairly safe. . . . Most professors don’t realize it, but the price of what they call academic freedom is isolation.”

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M. H. Abrams begins his explanation of the shift from art as imitation to art as expression in “Romantic Analogues of Art and Mind” by citing Wordsworth’s definition of poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” Abrams was certainly right in arguing that Wordsworth’s metaphor revealed the new emphasis on creativity as the expressive “overflow” of the mind. Unfortunately, one of the consequences of Abrams’s profound and influential The Mirror and the Lamp (1953)

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has been the tendency to presume that once the lamp began to glow the mirror was shattered. Although it was not his intent to ignore the subtle interplay of imitation and expression by positing only an either/or possibility, Abrams did stress how the claims of mimetic objectivity were compromised and subordinated in romantic poetry by the insistence on the primacy of mind and emotion. When Wordsworth declared, for example, that “I have at all times endeavored to look steadily at my subject,” Abrams asserted that it was a mistake to accept this statement as the poet’s “recommendation for objective accuracy and particularity.”1 Although Wordsworth ranked observation and description first among “the powers requisite for the production of poetry,” he nevertheless relegated passive observation to subservience. Attention to the particular object of the sense should assist, not usurp the mind’s active and transforming powers. After praising faithful description, Wordsworth went on, Abrams reminds us, to limit its use: “The ability to observe with accuracy things as they are in themselves and with fidelity to describe them, unmodified by any passion or feeling existing in the mind of the describer . . . though indispensable to a Poet, is one which he employs only in submission to necessity, and never for a continuance of time: as its exercise supposes all the higher qualities of the mind to be passive, and in a state of subjection to external objects.”2 As a metaphor for the creative process, the mirror implied an unwarranted and restricting passivity. By suggesting that mental reflection is no more than a repetition in the mind of images received through the senses, the mirror metaphor seems to affirm the empiricist denial of innate capacities of the mind. Rather than simply reflect an external object, according to Wordsworth, the poetic image should reveal as well the alterations imposed by the perceiver: “Objects . . . derive their influence not from properties inherent in them, not from what they are actually in themselves, but from such as are bestowed upon them by the minds of those who are conversant with or affected by those objects.”3 “To hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature,” as Hamlet requested of the players (Act 3, scene 2, line 25), was rendered artistically suspect because it might restrict representation to mere surface reflections. What had invalidated the mirror as metaphor was not the rejection of the mimetic principle per se, but only the notion that the mirror might be deemed kindred to the Lockean metaphor of the “white paper,” upon which are inscribed the external data of the physical world without contributing any modifying peculiarities of its own. To avoid 1. M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, p. 53. 2. Preface to the Poems 1815, in Wordsworth’s Literary Criticism, p. 150; see also pp. 18, 165, 185. 3. To Francis Wrangham, 18 January 1816, in Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth:The Middle Years, vol. 3, pt. 2, p. 276.

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these passive connotations, of course, the poet might insist on the dynamic attributes of the reflecting medium. In order to animate mimetic reflection, the poet need only reveal the magic in the glass. The trick could still be performed with mirrors. For the purpose of Abrams’s investigation, art as imitation is said to be promulgated by an objective and empirical philosophy, while art as expression is seen as an effort to fulfill the expectations of a subjective and idealist philosophy. Acknowledging the radical opposition between these two philosophical positions, Coleridge also observed their essential relationship. Philosophers, he wrote in the Biographia Literaria, either begin by positing the mind and then must pursue the task of accounting for the world of things; or they begin by affirming things and then must explain how we come to have ideas about them (BL, vol. 1). Coleridge, it will be recalled, proposed a reconciliation of these Platonic and Aristotelian traditions by beginning with the moment of cognition, the coincidence of subject and object. Were such a philosophical union possible, the barrier between “imitation” and “expression” might well collapse. Historically, of course, the concept of mimesis had been advanced by both Platonic and Aristotelian philosophies. In Plato’s Republic, the concept of art as imitation fares rather poorly, for the account of the three beds—the bed as idea or “essence,” the bed made by the carpenter, and the bed represented in a painting—leaves the artistic imitation “thrice removed . . . from the truth” (bk. 10). This is the text cited by Abrams to document the “lowly status” of imitation in Plato’s realm of Ideas (Abrams, Mirror and the Lamp, pp. 8–9). Plotinus argues that the case for mimesis might be revised by granting that the artist, no less than the carpenter, is capable of conceiving the idea of the bed. The artist might then inform the real with the ideal (Ennead 5.8). Plotinus knew, of course, that Plato scorned only the imitation of external appearances. Plato was resisting an older philosophical confidence in the sensuous and emotional basis of knowledge.4 In order to establish that the philosopher, not the poet, had the advantage in defining the sources and province of knowledge,5 Plato denies that the descriptive images of art or poetry adequately represent truth. He also dismisses the Pythagorean application of the mimetic principle to a speculative mode of analogical reasoning: “As the eyes are framed for astronomy so the ears are framed for the movements of harmony” (Republic 7.530d). To advance the primacy of ideas in the Republic, he objects to mime4. Oddone Longo, “The Theater of the Polis.” 5. Göran Sörbom, Mimesis and Art, p. 146.

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sis in the arts, which under the pretense of enacting “deeds and experiences” could accomplish no more than “copying the appearance.”6 One act of imitation, however, not even Plato could avoid: language itself is mimetic. In the Cratylus, Plato discusses primitive and derived signs as the two means by which language communicates. Primitive signs, communicated by bodily gesture or vocal mimicry, seek to “imitate the nature of the thing” they represent; derived signs elaborate the scope of communication by the use of conventions accepted within the community. The mimesis of language has the potential danger that the derived can be confounded with the primitive, and that either may be misapplied (423–27). “Images,” Cratylus concedes to Socrates, “are very far from having qualities which are the exact counterpart of the realities which they represent” (432d). Because the names of things are untrustworthy as a source of knowledge, we must study the forms rather than the names. Language does not reveal forms, but to the extent that it exposes its own incapacity, it may prompt the mind to seek for enduring forms amidst the very Heraclitean flux of unreliable images (438d–440c). In the Republic, Plato cites Homer’s turn from direct narrative to dialogue as “narration through imitation.” By representing another “in speech or bodily bearing,” the poet is imitating a character. While an epic may thus intersperse narration with imitation, the drama is fully imitative. Plato then asks whether “we are to suffer our poets to narrate as imitators or in part as imitators and in part not, and what sort of things in each case, or not allow them to imitate at all.” The irony, although not intentional, is that Plato presents this inquiry not as narration but as imitation. In the home of Cephalus, Socrates discusses with Glaucon, Adimantus, and several others the conditions of an ideal state. Plato remains fictively absent from the dramatic scene. Yet it is just such a maneuver that is seen as a threat to the ideal state. If imitation is to be tolerated, it must not be allowed to represent anything that is base or shameful. From ridiculing the extravagance of a speaker willing to “imitate anything and everything,” the province of acceptable imitation is soon so curtailed that only the voice of the wise and good man is deemed a fit subject for imitation. But such should be the voice of the narrator, obviating any need for recourse to the dangerous subterfuge of imitation (3.392–98). Greek drama does not pretend to overwhelm an audience with stage illusion, nor does Greek poetry strive to copy nature. The intent is, rather, to present and enact human thought and feeling. Crucial to dramatic and epic, no less than to 6. Eva Keuls, Plato and Greek Painting, p. 24; Hermann Koller, Die Mimesis in der Antike, p. 7; Harald Feldmann, Mimesis und Wirklichkeit, pp. 11–12; Ulrike Zimbrich, Mimesis bei Platon, pp. 14–22.

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lyric poetry, is the informing harmony and rhythm of music. Indeed, music was for Plato the most important of the mimetic arts. While he may have scoffed at the imitation of appearances, Plato valued the imitation of form. Thus in the Philebus he praises the beauty of form as superior to “the beauty of a living creature or a picture” (51c). Although he wanted to banish the poets from the Republic, in the Laws he declared that mimetic arts provide a sound educational foundation for the state (653a). The mimetic arts—music, dancing, poetry, drama, painting, sculpture— are essential to education because they reveal the beauty of form (Laws 397a–b, 400d–401a). Indeed, they are mimetic arts for Plato precisely because they imitate ideal form. The formal elements of composition—order, rhythm, harmony, balance, proportion—all derive from ideal perfection. They complement the teaching of reasoned knowledge by revealing the pleasure in the good, true, and beautiful. The simple ability to perceive and delight in rhythm, melody, and order teaches those who experience the pleasure to pursue with love its informing principles (653e–655a; 664e–665e). In language, the relationship of the signifier to the signified should be sustained with the same moral commitment to the rightness of representation as is expected in the mimetic arts (Cratylus 430). Having opposed mimesis as Pythagorean metaphor for the relation of sensed things to general and characteristic forms, Plato went on to adapt it as a metaphor for the task of imitating unsensed forms. But what does an “unsensed form” look like? How does the artist, or the critic, know whether the imitation is correct? When he discusses mimesis in the Laws (643c, 655d, 705c, 706b, 713b, 798d–e, 815a, 816a, 898a), he offers two criteria for judging the rightness of the imitation: one cultural, the other intrinsic. On the one hand, he calls upon the elders of the chorus to judge, for they are “better educated” and have familiarity with the harmonic scales. On the other hand, those who are to judge must be “keenly sensitive to rhythms and melodies” (670a–e). There is a factor of self-correction in the very principle of imitating form: the success of the imitation becomes evident as the attributes of harmony are made more harmonic, as the melody becomes more melodic. What one judges, in other words, is the artist’s degree of success in striving to imitate the ideal. Upholding both criteria, Plato urges that the community should rely on the good and wise man in their midst who has the knowledge to judge how well the form of beauty has been imitated.7 That a “true imitation” might reveal nature and form in artistic representation is conceded in the 7. Edith Watson Schipper, “Mimesis in the Arts in Plato’s Laws.”

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Sophist (236). Discussing the way in which the ideal becomes real (Timaeus 29), Plato compares the physical universe to a work of art. Both involve the sensuous embodiment of the ideal in the real. In this comparison, the Neoplatonists (and with them, Coleridge) recognized the exaltation of artistic mimesis as replicating the very process of divine creation. Because Aristotle’s account of mimesis is concerned with the real rather than the ideal, one might expect him to affirm the imitation of appearances Plato had denounced. Nevertheless, when Aristotle states that the purpose of the drama is to provide an “imitation of human action,” he specifies that what is to be imitated is mental rather than physical. The crucial action is the proairesis rather than the praxis. It is not enough simply to depict the physical movement of a character upon the stage. The playwright must reveal the motives of the movement, the predication of action in thought (dianoia): a character must respond, deliberate, and choose (Poetics 1449b36–1450b15). Like Plato, Aristotle considers rhythm and harmony formative elements in the mimetic arts. Unlike Plato, he does not explain the imitative drive as aspiring toward ideal forms. He grounds it, rather, in the natural inclinations evident in the make-believe improvisations of children: “Imitation is natural to man from childhood, . . . he is the most imitative creature in the world, and learns at first by imitation” (1447a14–1448b24). Both of these principal concepts of mimesis—imitation of ideal form, imitation of the processes of thought—were current in the romantic period. Indeed, several romantic philosophers endeavored to combine them. Coleridge, as previously noted, prepared for such a reconciliation when he suggested that a philosophy might avoid the traditional opposition of mind and matter by grounding itself in the cognitive union of subject and object. If imitation is to represent objectively the phenomena of subjective experience, then it must somehow counter its own objective form. In romantic aesthetics, therefore, mimesis was understood as a transformation in which an essential sameness is retained in spite of the otherness of its material mediation. The union of form and thought in the creative process, as explained in the aesthetics of Friedrich Schleiermacher and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, is identity in difference. In the critical essays of Thomas De Quincey this mimetic principle is called idem in alio. Coleridge called it idem et alter, a formulation he derived, as he often stated, from Philo Judaeus. As a translator of Plato, Schleiermacher was fully aware of the changes that had taken place in the presentation of mimesis in the later dialogues, especially Timaeus and the Laws. Like Plato, he argued the essential identity of aesthetic and ethical judgment, and again like Plato, he recognized both cultural and in-

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trinsic grounds for judgment. In order to extend the province of judgment in the practical arena of human activity, he required a more ecumenical, less hegemonic, arbiter than Plato’s “wise and good man.” The ethical and aesthetic responses to art, he believed, were not only generally accessible within the culture, they also defined the cultural identity. The simultaneity and reciprocity of identity and difference, which Schleiermacher began to propound in his system of ethics in 1812, were further elaborated as significant constitutive elements in his aesthetics and hermeneutics.8 In its rational appeal, art does not simply invite us to compare the imitation with the object imitated; it should reveal something about the representation of images. Similarly, in its affective appeal, art should do more than reproduce an object which excites the senses; it should also examine the conditions that inform or influence the sensual relationship. Because pleasure in an object gives rise to desire for the object, Schleiermacher grants that art reciprocates through “diese Nachbildung des in der Natur Wohlgefallenden.”9 Each genre has its own means of satisfying mimetic desire. While some genres might be properly defined by locating the mimetic principle in the idea, others by centering it in the mediation of affective response, neither account adequately defines imitation in the arts. Schleiermacher therefore proposes to address mimesis in the very activity in which the work of art is produced (pp. 29–30). Only if art is a free activity can an aesthetic experience also be ethical (p. 35). Art may persuade or influence, but it does not force or dictate. To be sure, the affective response cannot always be controlled by the will, but the individual can choose whether to engage or continue the exposure to unwanted modes of sensual or emotional appeal. Even affective art exists in and through its intellectual mediation. As mental activity, it is perceived by the individual as familiar or strange. Identical activities are those which are shared and in which an entire community may participate. They are to be contrasted with those activities which are strange and different because they are peculiar to an individual or belong to a foreign experience. This dialectic of identity and difference is studied in several interrelated contexts. It has a certain kinship, for example, to the distinction between the general and the particular in Enlightenment aesthetics, but rather than laud the for8. Thomas Lehnerer, Die Kunsttheorie Friedrich Schleiermachers, pp. 169–77. 9. Friedrich Ernst Daniel Schleiermacher, “Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik,” pp. 25–26. I also consulted Schleiermacher, Ästhetik (1819/25): Über den Begriff der Kunst (1831/32). Lehnerer, Die Kunsttheorie Friedrich Schleiermachers, pp. 169–87, provides an excellent account of the dialectics of identity and difference.

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mer and condemn the latter,10 the dialectic requires both. Advancement in thinking is possible only through the contributions of difference that extend the range of identity. The primary impulse is the maintenance of “an enduring community” (“bestehende Gemeinschaft”) and the “suspension of difference” (“Aufhebung der Differenz”; pp. 51–53). Schleiermacher acknowledges, however, that the tension between identity and difference is ineluctable. The identity of an idea is altered in expression by the difference in language. No matter how malleable the medium, it will impose some change upon the artist’s conception. That very difference, however, may render the conception more like the thinking of the audience. Thus he proclaims that “the place of the work of art is always the artist’s people” (“der Ort des Kunstwerks ist immer sein Volk”; p. 54). Just as identity may subsist in difference, the inverse may also be true: “Why cannot one turn the matter around and say, thinking contains within itself a national difference even though its identity presupposes it; and why cannot one also turn it around in art and say, it is in general identical but it differentiates itself in reality? and if one can thus turn it around, then the opposition does not persist but is suspended; the difference remains, but not as an attribute useful for generically separating the activities” (p. 54).11 Because he does, indeed, want to use identity and difference to discriminate the functions of mimetic activity, he cannot annul the dialectic by allowing the terms to become interchangeable. As free activity, art does not seek to bring others into accord with its own presumptions. Difference persists because art always respects difference. The difference that sets one nation apart from others may be thoroughly imbedded in language, but “it is the effort of thinking to overcome this difference” (“es ist ein Be-streben des Denkens, diese Differenz aufzuheben”). The dialectic continues because difference abides in art, identity in the epistemic laws which govern the thinking of all humanity (“die Gesetze des Denkens für alle Menschen”; p. 55). Art may represent the activities of the inner self, whether intellectual or sensual; or it may seek to show these activities in their relation to the external world. The former begins with identity and encounters difference in the artis10. Johnson, Rasselas, chap. 10: the business of the poet is to observe general nature, not to “number the streaks of the tulip.” And from his preface to Shakespeare: “Nothing can please many and please long but just representations of general nature.” 11. Schleiermacher, “Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik,” p. 54: “Warum kann man also die Sache nicht umkehren und sagen, das Denken trägt noch die nationale Differenz in sich, wenngleich noch Identisches darüber liegt; und warum könnte man es nicht auch mit der Kunst umkehren und sagen, sie ist im allgemeinen identisch, aber sie differenziert sich in der Wirklichkeit? und wenn man es so umkehren kann, so ist der Gegensatz nicht festgehalten, sondern aufgehoben; die Differenz besteht, aber sie ist nichts, wonach man die Tätigkeit teilen kann.”

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tic medium; the latter begins with difference and seeks to reveal identity in the act of apprehension. Mimetic activity in all the arts (poetry, music, dance, painting, etc.) involves this fundamental opposition (p. 56). Just as the place of the work of art is among the people, the place of the mimetic activity is always in the mind. Because the finished work of art is the imitation of the inner image (“die Nachahmung des innern Bildes”), Schleiermacher argues the primacy of the inner image (“das innere Bild ist das eigentliche Kunstwerk”). Granting that the work of art is inevitably altered in its physical realization, he contends that the reshaping of the inner image still precedes, even as it consciously accompanies, the act of externalizing (pp. 57–59). To demonstrate this primacy of the inner image, Schleiermacher offers a variation on Diderot’s paradox of the actor: If we ask why the movements of an angry person, for example, are not as much a work of art as when an angry person is represented on the stage, it will become evident that the movements of the angry person want measure and for that reason are without beauty. For it is the primary prescription of art that its matter be measured. To be sure, there is something in human movement which we call grace, and if a person who possesses natural grace really becomes angry, that person’s movements will never be as unbeautiful as another’s. But should those movements bear the character of deliberation and measure, thereby giving the impression of art, then we would say that he is no longer the angry person, but that he has internalized the external image of the angry person, and his conscious awareness now mediates and controls the movements. The angry person himself lacks this control.12 The conscious awareness of the inner image is manifest in all aspects of the aesthetic experience. It directs the production and informs the reception of the work of art. Even in its external difference, art reveals its inherent identity. Al12. Ibid., pp. 60–61: “Fragen wir, warum sind die Bewegungen eines Zornigen z. B. nicht ebensogut ein Kunstwerk, wie wenn ein Zorniger auf der Bühne dargestellt wird, so ergibt sich, die Bewegungen des Zornigen halten kein Maß, und deswegen sind sie unschön; denn daß was gemessen sei, ist die ursprüngliche Forderung an das Kunstwerk. Allerdings gibt es etwas im Menschen, was wir durch Grazie bezeichnen, und wenn ein Mensch, der eine natürliche Grazie hat, wirklich zornig wird, so werden seine Bewegungen nie so unschön werden, als wie bei andern; aber tragen seine Bewegungen den Charakter des Vorherbewußten und Gemessenen, und machen sie so den Eindruck der Kunst, so werden wir sagen, er sei nicht mehr der Zornige, sondern das äußere Bild eines Zornigen sei in ihm erst innerlich geworden, und also eine Besinnung dazwischen getreten, die diese Bewegung hemmt, der Zornige an sich hat diese Hemmung nicht.”

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ways recognized as an immanent activity, art is never confounded with reality (p. 61). There is no solipsism in Schleiermacher’s definition of art as imitation of an inner image. He has made it clear that the inner image has its identity not in individual difference but in the artist’s participation in the community. The artist, however, is not thereby doomed to repeat what is already known. Whether drawn from internal or external being, the artist’s image is no copy. Just as no two people will perceive the same object in the same way, the inner image is different in its very conception (pp. 64–65). As already acknowledged, it is further altered in its production. Just as we may rightly anticipate certain familiar features, expressions, gestures to be realized by a sculptor in making a memorial statue of an admired fellow citizen, we may nevertheless have our expectations pleasingly fulfilled in an unanticipated way when the statue is unveiled. A composer may both meet and contradict a listener’s expectations with an innovative adaptation of a conventional musical phrase. The difference in the identity, the identity in the difference, both contribute to the compelling power of art. Thinking, in its usual modes, presumes identity; it seeks to reconcile, to bring into harmony, whatever difference it may encounter. Another mode of thinking, which deliberately presumes and maintains difference, is skepticism. Aesthetic thinking shares with skepticism a deliberate disbelief. Artistic truth is inherently different because it has no validity outside art (pp. 61–62). The work of art, Schleiermacher declares, exhibits its own fictive reality and does not causally engage in events outside itself. We may recognize a fictional character as drawn true to life, but such a character does not, like Pygmalion’s Galatea, step forth from art into life. The truth of a fictional character—the accuracy with which human thought and action are represented—is still a truth that is confined to the work of art. The apparent paradox of a fictional truth derives, in Schleiermacher’s terms, from the capacity to discover identity in art’s persistent difference (p. 63). Precisely because it provokes no such tension of identity in difference, a copy is merely a mechanical reproduction and not a work of art (p. 64). Having discriminated the essential activity of art from its end product, Schleiermacher locates each in its own ontic Ort: the place of the work of art is the nation; the place of art itself is in mental activity. The work of art, in its place among the people, is thus immanent activity. He discusses the various genres and modes of art in terms of how they engage the activity of the mind. Although the truth of art is conditional and speculative, it is a truth that may

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well be amplified and allowed to dominate our experience of the work of art. The sense of difference is suspended (aufgehoben) in order to experience the identity. Art which seeks to engender a sense of identity in difference emphasizes the receptivity. Another sort of art invites the audience to share in the artist’s productivity. To accomplish this, the artist requires a constant attention to difference, subordinating the sense of identity (pp. 65–66). The emphasis on receptivity is important to art which is concerned with representing human character or action, a Lebensmoment. The attention is to identity, the recognition of self in other. Character, no matter what change, development, or reversal of fortune it may undergo, is presumed constant. There is one “I,” one consciousness that attracts the interest of the reader or spectator. The medium of receptivity of art is thus consciousness: it is an art in which we witness Bewußtsein. The emphasis on productivity, in which the artist endeavors to represent the creative process itself, is a self-reflexive mode that requires awareness of difference. Process, after all, always involves a transmutation, a becoming other. The medium of productivity is a reenactment of the artist’s thinking. Rather than participate in the consciousness of a character, the reader or spectator enters into the creative activity of the artist (pp. 68–69). Crucial to Schleiermacher’s purpose, it will be recalled, is his effort to demonstrate that the aesthetic experience is also ethical. It is therefore necessary to show that the activity of that experience is always a free activity. At the very outset (p. 35), he admitted that in its receptive mode art may excite involuntary sensual or emotional responses that are ethically objectionable. At that moment, he argues, we may reject the work of art on ethical grounds. In his subsequent exposition, it becomes evident how the ethical and aesthetic grounds correspond: the work is deemed objectionable, after all, because it has no place in the national identity. He confesses, however, that the productive mode of art is far more problematic to his case for free activity. The problem is that artistic creativity may arise in those darker regions of mind beyond the reign of conscious, volitional control. Within the identity of consciousness there is a ferment of difference. This strangeness within the self emerges in dreams. As manifest in dreams, it is involuntary and irrational, but nonetheless creative and potentially productive. To some degree, art is always “the waking dream of the artist” (“das wachende Träumen des Künstlers”) and owes at least a part of its origin and being to a difference which resists subjection to the will. Only through waking effort may the artist tame the defiant difference of the dream. As represented in art, the dream sheds its chaotic irrationality and becomes the object of a willed and ordered activity (pp. 80–85). Dream and fantasy, in Schleiermacher’s aesthetics, are accorded a high value pre-

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cisely because they reveal in the very psychological immediacy of their subject matter the power of art to reconcile identity and difference.13 The two major thrusts of all art—to represent difference through the propagation of ideas and images, to represent identity by engendering a sense of consciousness and mental presence (pp. 85–86)—are both subject to a restraint (Hemmung) which reveals, rather than retards, its free activity. To liberate itself from the disorder and abandon of wild chaos, whether the exterior sources of anarchy and excess, or the uncontrolled interior wellings of irrationality, art must exercise the will and exemplify the freedom of an ordered and measured world. Hegel, too, responds to Plato in his presentation of identity and difference in imitation, and he shares with Schleiermacher an emphatic concern with negative powers, or as he puts it in the “Vorrede” to the Phänomenologie des Geistes: “die ungeheure Macht des Negativen” (Werke, 3:36). Mimetic desire, after all, might release rather than control irrational otherness, the alterity within our own identity. The Mandaean Gnostics told of such a terror: When the Uthras plot the creation of a world, Abathur enters into the darkness where he beholds “his face in the black water, and his likeness and son is formed unto him out of the black water.”14 The sensual and material demiurge is thus born, idem et alter, in the act of mirroring. For Plotinus, the soul participates in divine identity and the intellect is caught up in difference. Like the Mandaean Gnostics, he thus locates the demiurge in sense perception and material thought. Adapting from the Timaeus (35a), Plotinus believes all souls to be parts of the Universal Soul. In the divine division, material bodies were generated within the Universal Soul, and each body took with it a partial soul. The soul thus is attracted in two directions: toward identity and toward difference. The movement toward identity approaches true being (| }?<J@H); the movement toward difference lapses into nothingness (JÎ :0 @<). The more one enters into the self and makes images of the self, the more one strays into the indefinite and treads upon emptiness (Ennead 3.9.3). Although Hegel recognizes the formative influence of Timaeus on Plotinus, Philo, and the Alexandrine philosophers (see his Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, in Werke, 18:57, 264, and 19:24, 61), he avoids the appeal to cosmic mimesis as a model for artistic mimesis (Timaeus 29). He is no less wary of the materialist trap of empty images. The one leads to pure idea, with no content; the other to mere copies, with no meaning or “truth.” The Neoplatonic 13. Lehnerer, Die Kunsttheorie Friedrich Schleiermachers, pp. 214–29. 14. Ginza: Der Schatz oder das Grosse Buch der Mandäer, p. 173.

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fascination with the sensuous embodiment of the ideal in the real, if it is to have any abiding value as a metaphor or analogy, must confront the essential difference in artistic imitation. In divine creation, so it is assumed, material being is actually animated with a vital soul. The mere mortal artist, however, can at best create only an appearance of such animation. Drawing upon Plato’s Parmenides 146–47, Hegel asserts that each being is posited as a “something” against the “other,” while every “other” is itself a “something.” Identity and difference, therefore, coexist only in reciprocal negation (Enzyklopädie der philosophische Wissenschaft, §§42–48, in Werke, 8:116–29). Revising the argument from the Sophist 255–56, Hegel internalizes into selfreflective being what for Plato had been only a matter of a shifting frame of reference. The reciprocal negation of identity and difference takes place within consciousness.15 Identity defines itself in terms of what is different. But in each encounter with difference, identity changes. Difference becomes familiar and is absorbed by sensation and thought into identity. The drive to comprehend one’s own identity, Hegel explains in his Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, is inextricable from those desires stimulated by the external world. As the individual consciousness explores the internal and external unknown, the work of art provides a way of recording its discoveries. Mimetic desire is fulfilled in the consummation of the sensual and intellectual. The sensual aspects of the work of art are necessary to its presentation, for even the pure intellectual ideal must, as art, be represented to eye or ear through some material medium. By the same token, the mind must also be engaged through the sensual mediation of art. Because it is mediated rather than immediate, the sensual presence of art is only an illusory appearance (Schein). The work of art is thus poised, at it were, some place between the intellectual and the sensual. The very mediation of art as appearance (Schein) engages the activity of the mind as well as the senses: “Das Sinnliche in der Kunst [ist] vergeistigt, da das Geistige in ihr als versinnlicht erscheint” (Werke, 13:61).16 To what extent is the mental activity subject to rational control? In his discrimination of talent and genius, Hegel dismisses the notion that “in artistic pro15. Werner Beierwaltes, Identität und Differenz, pp. 241–68. 16. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, in Werke, 13:60: “Denn der Geist sucht im Sinnlichen des Kunstwerks weder die konkrete Materiatur, die empirische innere Vollständigkeit und Ausbreitung des Organismus, welche die Begierde verlangt, noch den allgemeinen, nur ideellen Gedanken, sondern er will sinnliche Gegenwart, die zwar sinnlich bleiben, aber ebensosehr von dem Gerüste seiner bloßen Materialität befreit werden soll. Deshalb ist das Sinnliche im Kunstwerk im Vergleich mit dem unmittelbaren Dasein der Naturdinge zum bloßen Schein erhoben, und das Kunstwerk steht in der Mitte zwischen der unmittelbaren Sinnlichkeit und dem ideelen Gedanken.”

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duction all consciousness over its own activity is not only superfluous, but even a disadvantage” (Werke, 13:46). The cult of genius, as set forth by Herder and Goethe in the 1770s, claimed that creativity arose out of inspiration or enthusiasm. Hegel insists that reflection, effort, and practice are necessary for artistic accomplishment. Reflection, he readily grants, entails a study of consciousness and its capacities of memory and fantasy. Images of experience are, of course, available through the memory, but the fantasy provides the artist a far richer source of profound and moving human imagery. Talent may be trained and disciplined, but fantasy, as a natural activity of the mind, is not the product of rational control: “Fantasy . . . has a manner at the same time of seemingly instinctual Production, in which the essential imagery and sensual appeal of the work of art must be present subjectively in the artist as natural attribute and natural drive and must also belong to the natural side of humanity at large as unconscious effect” (13:63).17 What Hegel denies to the inspiration of genius, he may thus seem to grant to the spontaneous workings of fantasy (13:363–73). He insists, however, that in the production of the work of art even the images of the fantasy, which well up instinctually from the unconscious, must be subjected to the intellectual and self-conscious control of the artist. Although the fantasy does, indeed, open a secret door through which the dark images of the unconscious enter into dreams, in the artistic consciousness the images of fantasy are wed with the images of waking experience to produce symbol (innerdirected) or allegory (outer-directed). The fascination with the dream is what Hegel finds characteristic in the art of India (12:176–77; 13:434–46). In European art, the tendency has been to valorize symbol-making (10:266–68; 13:363–64, 430–48). Imitation in art, as the mere reproduction of what is already available in nature, Hegel considers a redundant and superfluous activity. Even if the eye or ear is temporarily deceived by an illusion, delight in the mimicry seldom outlasts the moment of surprise when the deception is discovered. Unless the imitation has something more to reveal about subjective processes of perception or imagination, mere objective replication cannot please (13:65–70). The purpose of art to imitate nature should not be understood as an alternative at odds with the purpose of art to arouse the passions. Both work together, as Horace would have it, “to teach and delight.” The truth that art teaches, for Hegel, is the truth of human consciousness (13:70–82). Even when 17. Ibid., p. 63: “Die Phantasie . . . hat eine Weise zugleich instinktartiger Produktion, indem die wesentliche Bildlichkeit und Sinnlichkeit des Kunstwerks subjektiv im Künstler als Naturanlage und Naturtrieb vorhanden und als bewußtloses Wirken auch der Naturseite des Menschen angehören muß.”

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the artist turns to external nature as if determined to present in “still life” a mere accidental collection of homely and, in themselves, uninteresting items, the translation from object to appearance is what may convey significant “truth.” Neither the content nor its reality, but the reenactment in pigment on canvas of the play of light and color is what reveals the perceptual moment: “Art is mastery in the representation of all secrets of the illusions of external appearances that are submerging into their own depths” [Die Kunst ist Meisterschaft in Darstellung aller Geheimnisse des sich in sich vertiefenden Scheinens der äußeren Erscheinungen] (14:227). The polished glaze of pottery, the transparent sheen of glass, the shimmering translucence of a grape, the reflection and refraction of rippling water, the effects of moonlight, or the glaring sun, all require not only a scientific scrutiny of optical causes and physiological effects, but also a mastery of the medium in which that causality is to be re-created. Light and color do not work in and through the painter’s oils as they do in the objects to be represented on canvas. Thus when a peculiar glint of light seems to flash forth from the edge of a depicted vase, we may peer closer to behold nothing more than a strategic daub of white pigment. Or the drops of water glistening beadlike on the surface of an apple may, at closer look, lose their illusion of three-dimensional transparency and turn into mere painted streaks of red, yellow, green, and blue. To render the dynamic movement of light and color, even in a “still life,” is to grapple in a static medium with the fleeting attributes of perception. Such, too, is the complexity of a smile or a glance on a human face, the thought or feeling in a momentary expression. Its “momentary” nature, without appearing fixed or frozen, must nevertheless be captured in the static image on the canvas (14:227–28). In confronting such extensive demands to represent the truth of inner consciousness, the Schein in the Erscheinung, the artist succeeds only by fidelity to the essential subjectivity of the perceptual act. Where objective mastery fails, as it must, to replicate fully the physical phenomenon, a sensitive reenactment of the subjective attributes of the experience will enable the viewer to comprehend and, in the personal subjective response, complement the aesthetic moment. Light, he wrote in the Enzyklopädie (§317), is revealed as identity in difference: it reflects, refracts, diffracts, illuminates, and variously reveals iridescence and color. Its identity is always manifest only in its becoming other (Werke, 9:226–29). But the same is true of mind as the processes of self-reflection and sensory apprehension are exhibited to consciousness (Phänomenologie des Geistes, in Werke, 3:559–74). Identity and difference, Hegel argues in his Vorlesungen über der Philosophie der Religion, also defines the immanence of God (Werke,

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17:241–99). Or, rather, the mystery of divine immanence gave rise historically to a mode of philosophical analysis based on the dialectics of identity and difference. That historical development, which commenced at the time of Christ’s birth, was set forth principally in the works of Philo Judaeus. Philo, drawing from his studies of Pythagoras and Plato, transformed his exegesis of the divine Logos into a full-fledged philosophical system. In the midst of nothingness, JÎ :0 @<, is the presence of the divine Father, | }?<. His Identity is negative, for it is His determination to be negative, a one-sided abstraction, the potential moment of conception. That potential is expressed in the 8`(@H, the Word as rationally determined activity. In the Word, Identity becomes Difference. In the comprehension of the Word, F@n\Ó, Identity informs Difference (17:237–39). The mimetic tensions of identity and difference, elaborated by Schleiermacher in his lectures on ethics and aesthetics, and by Hegel in his lectures on aesthetics and the philosophy of religion, had also been pondered by Schelling in his lectures on the philosophy of art in 1802/3. Because I want to examine Schelling’s account of imitation in terms of Coleridge’s appropriation of certain key concepts, I shall return to these lectures in Chapter 3, “Mimesis of the Mind.” In the present chapter, I shall continue to examine the ways in which the notion of idem et alter was adapted by romantic philosophers and critics to an interpretation of the mimetic act. Pertinent historical antecedents to the romantic versions of idem et alter may be traced in logic and rhetoric as well as theology. In the Sophist, the very passage upon which Hegel constructed his account of Anderssein, Plato demonstrates that in arguing by contraries it must be observed that some oppositions are not discrete, that the JÎ JÓÛJ`< and the JÎ 2VJ,D@< may coexist or even be interchangeable.18 Indeed, the concepts of sameness and difference may shift fields of designation: If sameness refers to identity and difference to otherness, then it may be said that both refer to change. Since all things change, one of the common attributes of all things, a part of their sameness, is that they are all in the process of becoming different (Sophist 254–59). In arguing by opposites one should be alert to the ways in which the field of reference may be altered. By substituting one field of reference for another, Socrates points out to the Eleatic Stranger, one can argue that great is small or that small is great (259c–d). The seeming paradox is produced only because the terms are relative. The words remain the same but their fields of reference are different. When Aristotle discusses “the one” and “the many” in the Metaphysics (bk. 10), he also notes that “same” and “different” are relative terms. Although it is 18. G.E.R. Lloyd, Polarity and Analogy, pp. 431–34.

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possible to establish many categories of meaning, “so that everything is either the same as or other than everything else,” the terms are not contradictory. The opposition of “same and “different” remains bound within a given ontology: the meaning is predicated in reference to existing things (1054b14–23). “Otherness,” unlike “difference,” is not a term limited to definite and existing being. Thus “the other or the same,” JÎ ªJ,D@< ¼ JÓbJ| V, may open into the nonexistent, JÎ :0 @<, and indefinite speculation. To assume the coherence of being may be a simple mental act, but its logical consequences easily lead to a philosophical trap. “But being—what is being?” Heidegger asks. “It is its self,” he answers. “Subsequent thinking must learn to experience this and to say it. ‘Being’—that is not God and not a universal ground.”19 The ontological dilemma arises in the attempt to ground being in something outside itself, to derive being from nonbeing, the ontic from the meontic. Insisting on the identity of being as “its self,” Plotinus discovered, does not resolve the dilemma (Ennead 6.8–9). What is to be done with Heidegger’s “not God” and “not universal ground”? Even if the identity of being is said to exist independent of nonbeing, is the nonbeing the same or different? Philosophers, at least those determined to save the cosmos from sundering chaos, devise strategies for assimilating difference into identity: “Omne quod est, est idem sibi ipsi et alteri aliud.”20 The concept of rhetorical imitation, traditionally advanced with reference to Quintilian’s Institutionis Oratoriae (bk. 10, chap. 2), presumes that the something new will be added to form or content, manner or matter.21 “Imitation per se is not sufficient” (§4), Quintilian argues, adding that “it is even dishonorable to rest satisfied with simply equaling what we imitate” (§7). To imitate one must also be true to the power of judgment which informed the original. “Nothing improves by imitation only” (§8). Quintilian recommends, therefore, not slavish replication, but sameness with difference. It was to this concept of rhetorical imitation, then, that the poets of the Renaissance appealed when they 19. Martin Heidegger, Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit, p. 76: “Doch das Sein—was ist das Sein? Es ist Es selbst. Dies zu erfahren und zu sagen, muß das künftige Denken lernen. Das ‘Sein’—das ist nicht Gott und nicht ein Weltgrund.” Among the alterations from the fourth to the fifth edition of Was ist Metaphysik? Heidegger’s statement “daß das Sein wohl west ohne das Seiende” becomes “daß das Sein nie west ohne das Seiende.” Beierwaltes, who cites both passages, presumes that the later version did suspend the postulate of “Sein als ‘Es selbst.’ ” Identität und Differenz, p. 141. 20. Nicolaus Cusanus, De genesi 146.4; “Diversum esse sibi ipsi idem,” 146.2; “Omnis enim diversitas in ipso est identitas,” 142.6; “Omnis identificatio reperitur in assimilatione. Vocat igitur idem non-idem in idem,” 149.8–9. See also the response to Proclus in Nicolaus Cusanus, Directio speculantis seu De no aliud. 21. Marcus Fabius Quintilian, Institutionis Oratoriae: Liber Decimus, pp. 122–35.

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sought to break away from the constraints of convention. The dominance of Petrarchan conceits in the sonnet prompted the liberating countermovement of the anti-Petrarchan. Gascoigne’s “Lullaby” is an apt example of rhetorical imitation as an experiment with new content in established forms. The idem et alter was also appropriated into theological explanations of the divine mystery of the Trinity. The divine Identity manifest in the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost is sameness in difference. It is to this tradition that Coleridge refers when he introduces the concept in the Biographia Literaria. As part of his argument on the reconciliation of the opposing traditions of idealism and materialism, Coleridge presents ten theses borrowed from Schelling.22 He observes that even in the act of self-representation, when a spirit seeks its own identity in self-consciousness, there is a necessary act of forming the subject into an object. The argument, of course, harkens back to Kant’s postulation of the “Das: Ich denke” as the phenomenal awareness of the self (the noumenal self, as Dingan-sich, remains inaccessible to consciousness). While the immediate provocation for Coleridge’s remarks is Schelling’s adumbrations on Kant in Abhandlungen zur Erläuterung des Idealismus and System des transzendentalen Idealismus, he was already familiar with the Neoplatonist arguments on positing the self. Thus in the very context of his extrapolation from Schelling he inserts the statement that “the spirit (originally the identity of object and subject) must in some sense dissolve this identity, in order to be conscious of it: fit alter et idem” (BL 1:279). In his marginalia to Jacob Böhme, Coleridge explains the Triunity of the Word that is God, the Word that is with God, and the Word become flesh (John 1:1, 14): “with God” is the copula which unifies the trinity, the Idem et Alter of God become other (M 1:690). And in a gloss on Arianism, he cites again the “Hic et Alter” in arguing “the alterity of the Son to the Father” (2:33). Because he wants to affirm the primacy and originary identity of God, the “thisness” from which is generated the Son “as self-subsistent indeed but not self-originate,” he must object to the description of Christ as “aliud et aliud” (actually “aliud ab alio”) in Tertullian’s Adversus Praxean (9). Coleridge much preferred the designation, Deus idem et alter, “named in imitation of the Jewish Philosopher.” As he acknowledges in the Opus Maximum (MSS B3, ff263–64), he found “God’s co-eternal idea of himself ” clearly expressed in the works of Philo.23 Thomas McFarland, in his account of Coleridge’s reading of Philo, cites the passage on the "| 2,@L y 8`(@H, the “world descried by the mind” (De Opificio Mundi bk. 6, §21) as representative of 22. Burwick, “Perception.” 23. I thank Thomas McFarland for sharing with me his extensive annotations and commentary to his forthcoming edition of the Opus Maximum for The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 15.

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Philo’s attempt to “to prevent pantheism by separating deity and world.” Why should Coleridge translate from Greek to Latin in referring to the “Deus alter et Idem”?24 With scholarly caution, McFarland rightly ponders “the pertinence of Coleridge’s Latin formula.”25 The explanation may simply be that Coleridge used the familiar Latin phrase from the commentaries on Philo. The divine unity of "ÛJV|H and ªJ,D@H is echoed by Nicholas of Cusa in his many names for God: “Deus idem absolutum,” “Deus oppositio oppositorum,” “Deus autem, quia non aliud est ab alio.”26 Even with the revival of the Greek texts in the sixteenth century, scholarly discussion of Philo still drew upon the Latin translations.27 Once scholars had access to texts other than the Eusebian extracts, they began to notice that Philo’s thought often seemed at odds with the Christian dogma into which it had been received. The Greek text was indispensable in pursuing Philo’s debt to Plato.28 For Coleridge, the central debate concerned the relation of the Philonic to the Johannine Logos.29 24. In addition to Philonis Iudæi Opera, ed. Thomas Mangey (1742), which gave the Greek and Latin texts in parallel columns, Coleridge may have been familiar with earlier Latin versions. Because all but fragments of the Greek text of Philo’s Quaestionum et solutionum in Genesin had been lost, it had been published only from Latin transcription. Early editions were Philonis Judaei quaestiones centum et duae, et totidem responsiones morales super Genesin, ed. August Justinian (1520); Philonis Iudaei Alexandrini, libri antiquitatum, ed. J. Sichardus (1527); and Philonis Judaei quaestionum et solutionum in Genesim liber (1538). 25. Thomas McFarland, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition, pp. 240–41; see also pp. 209, 226, 237, 360, 372–74. 26. Nicolas Cusanus, De Genesi 147, 149.2, 150.7; De Coniecturis 1.9.39.2–3, 1.11.57.11–12; Directio speculantis seu De non aliud 6, 14.13–15, 19, 47.9–10. See Beierwaltes, Identität und Differenz, pp. 118–20, and “Deus oppositio oppositorum.” 27. See Howard L. Goodhart and Erwin R. Goodenough, “A General Bibliography of Philo Judaeus,” in Goodenough, The Politics of Philo Judaeus, pp. 125–348; on editions in Greek, pp. 187–97; in Latin, pp. 198–201. 28. Thomas Billings, The Platonism of Philo Judaeus, pp. 1–12, dates the first questioning of Philo as an authority for Christian doctrine from Dionysius Petavius, Opera de theologicus dogmatibus (1644). Rather than accept him within the Christian patrologia, following the Historia ecclesiae of Eusebius, scholars of the seventeenth century emphasized his Platonism. Cudworth, True Intellectual System of the Universe; Johannes Albertus Fabricius, Exercitatio de Platonismo Philonis Judaei (1693). 29. Richard Kidder, “The Testimony of Philo the Jew concerning the Holy Trinity, and the 8Ò(@H considered,” in Demonstration of the Messias (London, 1700); Stephen Nye “An Account of the Opinions and Books of Philo Judaeus, more especially, concerning the 8Ò(@H or Word,” in Doctrine of the Holy Trinity (London, 1701), pp. 58–98; Johannes Benedictus Carpzov, De 8Ò(T Philonois, non Iohanneo adversus Thomam. Mangey (Helmstedt, 1749); Christopher Friedrich Loesner, Observationes ad Novum Testamentum e Philone Alexandrino (Leipzig, 1777); Jacob Bryant, The Sentiments of Philo Judeus concerning the 8Ò(@H, or Word of God; together with large extracts from his writings, compared with the Scriptures, on many other particular and essential doctrines of the Christian religion (Cambridge, 1797); Heinrich Christan Ballenstedt, Philo und Johannes oder forgesetzte Anwendung des Philo zur Interpretation der Johanneischen Schriften, mit besonderer Hinsicht auf die Frage: Ob Johannes der Verfasser der im zugeschriebenen Schriften seyn könne? (Göttingen, 1812).

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The divine creation is not merely an external expression of the divine identity, it is consubstantial with that identity. In a letter of April 1818, Coleridge cites Philo in explaining the doctrine of divine immanence: The only possible mode of conceiving God as at once infinite and yet personal, is that of assuming that in the former sense it is God, as JÎ 2,Ã@<, in the latter sense only {|? 1,V|H: that these are bonâ fide distinct—and the contra-distinction of God from all finite Beings consists of God’s having the ground of his existence in himself, whereas all other Beings have their ground in another. Therefore God alone is a selfcomprehending Spirit; and in this incommunicable Adequate Idea of himself (7`(@H) his Personality is contained—BDÎH JÎ< 1,`< (very ill translated by the preposition, with) 6Ó\ 1,`H. Philo has asserted the same, and anxiously guards against the misconception that the Logos is an Attribute or Personification or generic or abstract term.—Est enim, et est Deus alter et idem. Because Philo posits the Logos in distinguishing between the divine idea and the divine creation, there is an obvious similarity with the Gospel of John. Coleridge recognizes that, as in Plato’s account of the artist’s bed thrice removed from ideal bed, the doctrine of God’s Word had immediate implications for the concept of mimesis and the poet’s word. The Philonic-Johannine Logos, rather than setting the real apart from the ideal, affirmed their essential unity. The image in a mirror, Coleridge observes, may reflect the external appearance but is not informed by the creative presence: St John effects the same by interposing the account of John, a concrete, a man, and then adds—He was not the Logos. Can any thing be conceived more absurd than to affirm that John was not one of God’s Properties?—In the beginning of this Mahogony Table was redness; and this Redness was in indivisible approximity to the Table, and was the Table—There was likewise a Looking-glass in the same Parlour—But this Looking-glass was not the Redness, of which I am speaking—&c. Whether John was directly indebted to Philo, or Philo to John, or both to some other source familiar to the Hellenic Jews of the period, had stirred a debate among theologians.30 Coleridge favors the arguments giving the credit to Philo. 30. Elinor S. Shaffer, “Kubla Khan” and The Fall of Jerusalem, p. 71.

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Now Philo & John were Contemporaries—either therefore Philo learnt the doctrine from the Christians, of which there is no proof or probability—or (of which there are many proofs) he wrote long before John wrote the Gospel. In the latter case John could not have used words so familiar to all the Hellenistic Jews for whom his Gospel was written, in a sense utterly different, and without giving them the least hint of this change, without intentional delusion. Rationally or irrationally, the Logos in his time meant a personal Being. (CL 4:850; cf. 632, 803) When God molds man in His own image (Genesis 2:7), the Logos (in Philo’s exegesis, “the first principle, the archetypal idea, the pre-measurer of all things”) retains its identity even in that difference which is “a mixture of the corruptible and incorruptible” (Quaestiones et Solutiones in Genesin 4). Philo’s Logos become man is exalted in John’s Logos become Christ. For Philo, only the spirit which God breathed into the mortal flesh is incorruptible and self-sufficient. For John, the very body of Christ partakes of the divine presence. In citing Philo on the immanence of the Divine Logos, Coleridge affirms the advantage of also interpreting the Johannine Logos as “literally and mysteriously Deus alter et idem” (LS 95). The “I am” of the Johannine Christ (the Way, the Light, the Bread, the Vine) is accessible precisely because of its double nature as I-Thou. Coleridge thus extended Philo’s doctrine to other circumstances in which he wanted to acknowledge the pervasive presence of an informing will, whether in the disparate multitude of people which makes up a society, or the disparate impulses and drives which make up an individual: “Each man in a numerous society is not only coexistent with, but virtually organized into, the multitude of which he is an integral part. His idem is modified by the alter. And there arise impulses and objects from this synthesis of the alter et idem, myself and my neighbor. This, again, is strictly analogous to what takes place in the vital organization of the individual man” (“Essay on Faith,” in Shedd 5:563). The self in which the emotions are at strife with the reason is a self in which “individualization subsists in the alter” rather than “confined to the idem.” The individual, no less than the state, can be disrupted by recalcitrant alterity. Coleridge thus uses identity and difference, as does Schleiermacher, to refer to both an interior and an exterior Other. Granting that the “Body Natural” is the obvious analogue to the “Body Politic,” the inherent correspondence informing both bodies, Coleridge asserts, is “the Divine Alterity, the Deus Alter et Idem of Philo” (C&S 84–85). The Logos as informing I-Thou dialogue is not only necessary to the idea of God and the possibility of religious

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experience, it is also as crucial to the artist as it is to the statesman, and to the individual as it is to the community. Philo pursued such relationships in his exegesis of the biblical text: “The Lord God, seeing that the wickednesses of men were multiplied upon the earth and that every man intended evil in his heart diligently all his days, God had in His mind that He had made man upon the earth, and He bethought Him” (Genesis 6:5–7). Opposing “careless inquirers” who find evidence in this passage that God changed his mind about his own creation, Philo asserts that error and change are human rather than divine attributes. He therefore proposes a distinction between the ways in which God and man may be said to have something “in mind.” God, as eternal identity, conceives the universe of things. His thought is our reality. Things appear in perpetual flux as they gradually reveal to human perception the divine idea. All change is immediately present in God’s mind. The mind of man, as a part of process, is itself subject to change. It is man, not God, who changes his mind. When God speaks, His word is absolute unity, at once signifier and signified. Unfortunately, the human mind habitually comprehends only duality, always separating idea from thing (Quod Deus immutabilis sit 83–84). In spite of being caught up in constant change, human consciousness may perceive the idea of God’s immutable identity. As divine idea, its identity is present even in the alterity of the material world and the mortal mind. Through meditation and through dream, the human mind can experience the divine Idea (De Vita Contemplativa and De Somniis). Although Philo in his Legum Allegoriae supports an allegorical interpretation of the Bible, reverberations of his argument are evident even when Coleridge opposes reading the Bible allegorically. Commenting, for example, on the connection of faith with power proclaimed by Christ in the “faith as a mustard seed” (Matthew 17:20; Luke 17:6), Coleridge responds that there is “no proper allegorism in Scripture / JÓ<J@ ,< (,<,4, Ó88@ solum in gradu Ó88@ Ó(@D,4” (CN 3:4186). What Coleridge in The Statesman’s Manual calls symbol, in contradistinction to allegory (LS 30, 79), is not at odds with the sense of allegory advocated by Philo. Allegorizing Hebrew scriptures, as practiced by Hellenic Jews seeking to establish themselves among the educated Greeks, had already in Philo’s day resulted in a disregard for the sabbath and an indifference to the Mosaic laws. Philo opposed the loose humanistic allegorizing that severed the letter from the spirit; he insisted, instead, on immediate revelation, Deus idem et alter, in the scriptural word. Because the human mind dismantles all words into signifier and signified, the essential oneness of the divine word would be lost to human comprehension if God were not capable of communicating His identity even in the

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alterity of human language. What Philo calls “allegorical” exegesis is actually an attempt to retrieve the underlying meaning (ÛB`<@4Ó) from an apparent meaning (NÓ<,DV). Because “God is not as man” (Numbers 23:19), the effort to make God comprehensible gave rise to anthropomorphic narratives.31 These narratives, by telling of God in human terms, make the Scriptures generally accessible, even “for the ways of thinking of the duller folk” (Quod Deus immutabilis sit 11). However, biblical language also conveys more profound meaning to those who inquire into the inherent symbol (Hb:$@8@<). While Eden is presented as if it were a geographical place with physical qualities of sensual luxuriance, Philo urges that we read the account of Paradise “symbolically.” “Paradise should be thought a symbol of wisdom,” and the rational soul a garden in which “the Creator planted His ideas like trees” (Quaestiones et Solutiones in Genesin 1.6, 8). Philo’s allegorical reading, compatible with Coleridge’s account of symbol, proposes to interpret the divine Logos as immanent even in the fragmentation of human language. Less compatible with Coleridge’s thought, however, is the “nothingness” which for Philo is the consequence of self-knowledge. Coleridge praises the power of the will to achieve that state of philosophic insight which he calls the “heaven-descended KNOW THYSELF!” From Plato through Plotinus, (<ä24 F,ÓLJ`< involved a discipline of the mind toward self-perfection. For Philo, although it still requires meditative discipline, the end is recognition of inadequacy and imperfection: to know the nothingness of the mortal condition (De Mutatione Nominum 54) and of the self (Quis Rerum Divinarum Heres 30). To know that one knows nothing, as Socrates described the (<ä24 F,ÓLJ`<, means to Philo that one must desert the nothingness of the mortal mind and seek the Divine Mind. When Abraham most knew himself [§(
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The leap is possible, for Philo no less than for Coleridge, because of Deus idem et alter. Philo repeats this concept of the infusion of identity into difference in De Opificio Mundi and De Decalogo.32 Most relevant to Coleridge’s thought, however, is the passage in which Philo describes the reconciliation of opposites in the divine act of creation: “He called the non-existent into existence and produced order from dis-order, qualities from things devoid of quality, similarities from dissimilars [¦> " {<@:@\@< Ò:@4`J0JÓH], identities from the totally different [¦> ©J,D@4@JZJT< JÓLJ`J0JÓH], fellowship and harmony from the dissociated and discordant, equality from inequality, and light from darkness.”33 In defining the poetic imagination as “that synthetic and magical power” which “reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities: of sameness and difference; of the general, with the concrete; the idea, with the image; the individual, with the representative” (BL 2:16–17), Coleridge too lists in series the opposing elements unified in the creative act. Coleridge most probably also recollected here Schelling’s argument that the artist, in unifying subject and object in the work of art, accomplishes what the philosopher can only posit. In adapting his theses from Schelling in chapter 12 of the Biographia, as noted above, Coleridge could easily assimilate Schelling and Philo into one argument. In his account of the “reconciliation of opposites” in chapter 14,34 he clearly found Philo’s presentation more immediately pertinent than Schelling’s statement that the artist works with the “opposition of things” to achieve a “reconciliation of all powers.”35 Philo’s doctrine of the Logos as instrument of divine mediation is no less pertinent, Coleridge recognized, to aesthetics. At once signifier and signified, idea and reality, the Logos mediates God’s activity in the world. Philo complicates the relationship by describing hierarchies of intermediary powers. A 8@(4F:`H is a finite manifestation of the infinite, a fragment of the divine creative act. Were it not for this doctrine of intermediaries, even Coleridge might 32. Philonis Alexandrini Opera quae supersunt, 1:7, De Opificio Mundi, §22: JV>4< B@4ÒJ0JÓ ¦:RLP\Ó< Ò:@4ÒJ0JÓ JÓLJÒJ0JÓ, JÎ ,ßVD:@HJ@<, JÎ Fb:NT<@< BÓ y< @~F@< J−H 6D,\JJ@<@H Æ*XÓH; IV, 292, De Decalogo, §104: J¬< (@à< ¦< Ò:@4å JÓLJÒJ0JÓ. Får.@<JÓ *@84P,b,4 JÎ< ÓÂê<Ó :0*,:\Ó< ¦<*,P@:,<Ó JD@B¬< 6ÓÂ :,JÓ$@8Z<. 33. Philonis Alexandrini Opera, 5:252, De Specialibus Legibus. Liber IV (“De Iustitia”), §187. 34. BL 2:16–17: In their note to Coleridge’s statement on the “reconciliation of opposites,” James Engell and W. Jackson Bate cite Schelling’s Abhandlungen zur Erläuterung des Idealismus: “Der Begriff von Materie [geht] ursprünglich aus einer Synthesis entgegengesetzter Kräfte durch die Einbildungskraft [hervor]”; they add that “C’s concept of the aesthetic as the balance of ‘opposites’ (especially of ‘self-possession’ and ‘enthusiasm,’ and of power and play with control) is indebted to German critical thinking generally after Kant and particularly to Schiller’s AE” ( Ästhetische Erziehung). 35. KN, in SW 7:311.

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have shuddered at the pretension of replicating in the finite I AM the universal creativity of the infinite I AM. To claim as one’s own the seminal power of the divine Word (7`(@H FB,D:ÓJ46@H; Quaestiones . . . in Exodum 2.68) is a selfdeluding hubris to which Coleridge recognized his own frail susceptibility: “rationes spermaticæ—8@(@4 B@40J46@4—O Formidable Words! and O Man, Marvellous Beast-angel! Ambitious Beggar, how pompously doest thou trick out thy very Ignorance within such glorious Disguises that thou mays’t seem to hide in order to worship it!” (CN 3:4136). Through the intermediaries, God descends to human consciousness and man is elevated by divine thought.36 Coleridge thus seeks to redeem mediation from megalomania. Just as the divine mind is mediated in nature (ßBÎ J@Ly :,2@D\@L 8`(@L), the mind of the artist is mediated in the work of art. But the mind of man can create only in and through the mind of God. The reality we behold in material nature is an imitation of God’s idea. Although there is no reality outside God’s idea, as the mediating Logos it may also inspire the mortal mind (Quaestiones . . . in Genesin 4.29; Quaestiones . . . in Exodum 2.68, 94). When Coleridge declares that “Art is the imitatress of Nature” and “the Mediatress, the reconciliator of Man and Nature,” he has granted the artist the capacity not only to imitate reality, but to imitate as well the divine act of creativity. Because this passage, from Coleridge’s lecture notes “on the relations of Genius to Nature in the Fine Arts,” draws extensively from his reading of Schelling, I will discuss it further in that context in the next chapter, “Mimesis of the Mind.” But it is equally relevant here, for Coleridge elaborates the account of artistic imitation as a mediation, idem et alter: “In all Imitation two elements must exist, not only exist but must be perceived as existing—Likeness and unlikeness, or Sameness and Difference. All Imitation in the Fine Arts is the union of Disparate Things.—Wax Images—Statues—Bronze—Pictures—the Artist may take his point where he likes—provided that the effect desired is produced—namely, that there should be a Likeness in Difference & a union of the two—Tragic Dance” (CN 3:4397). Imitation as mediation is a “Tragic Dance,” for the artist experiences the limitations of the finite mind entrapped in its mortal body. Art strives against those limits and succeeds insofar as in imitating nature it imitates as well the process of divine mediation. “The Mystery of Genius in the Fine Arts,” Coleridge declares, is the “Body . . . striving to become Mind—that is mind, in its essence.” In this “Tragic Dance,” the more successful the endeavor, the more the artist knows the failure. 36. Beierwaltes, Identität und Differenz, pp. 93–95, 183–84, 230–32; Billings, The Platonism of Philo, pp. 26–46; Bréhier, Les Idées philosophiques et religieuses de Philon, pp. 112–57; Wolfson, Philo, 1:360–412.

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    

For De Quincey, too, the co-presence of identity and alterity is a crucial attribute of art. He first posits the idem in altero in a note to his translation of Lessing’s Laokoon. To the passage in which Lessing ponders the effects of the human form robed and disrobed in sculpture, De Quincey adds his own account of identity and difference. Although he is fully aware of the precedents in Athenian, Hellenic, and Roman art, he also knows that contemporary sculpture has favored draped representations of the human figure. Yet even in his own time, Canova and Thorwaldsen endeavored to make the robes appear to disappear. In spite of the moral pretense which demands drapery, “reason, conscious of an impotence to satisfy its moral need, has recourse to the parergon.”37 Mimetic desire is fulfilled only in making the drapery reveal rather than conceal. To render transparent the opacity of stone, the sculpted body is enveloped yet exposed in diaphanously light and clinging garments. De Quincey does not claim that attitudes about the body had become prudish, nor that “modesty” might be violated. But he does indulge subtle irony in suggesting that opposition to a display of the undraped body may have come about because nudity is such an unusual condition and “we are too little familiar with the undraped figure to be able so readily in that state to judge of its proportions.” In insisting that “neither the grace nor the majesty of the human figure is capable of being fully drawn out except by drapery,” he claims his aesthetic ground in the association of sameness with difference. The human form is enhanced by “the great power of drapery under the law of association,” and by the similarity and contrast between flesh and cloth. In “the original adaptation, neither accidental nor derivative, of drapery to the human figure,” there is a power manifest in “repeating the flowing outlines of the human figure in another and more fluent material.” This conjunction is the source “whence arises the pleasure, subtlest of all in nature, and the most effectively diffused, of similitude in dissimilitude.” Nevertheless, the draped figure is less appropriate to sculpture than to painting. That drapery is not essential in sculpture, and that the highest effects of sculpture are in fact produced without it, is in some measure dependent on this very law of the interfusion of the similar and the dissimilar; for, in order that any effect should be felt as the idem in altero, it is necessary that each should be distinctly perceived; whereas, in sculptural drapery, from the absence of shading and of colouring, the “alterum” is not suf37. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, §14, in Werke, 5:303–6; Derrida, La Vérité en peinture, p. 64.

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ficiently perceived as an “alterum.” There is another and transcendent reason for the ill effects of sculptural drapery, into which the former reason merges. For why does sculpture reject colouring; and why is it that just taste has always approved of the sightless eyes in statues? Manifestly, on the general and presiding law which determines the distinctions of the statuesque from the picturesque. The characteristic aim of painting is reality and life; of sculpture, ideality and duration. Painting is sensuous and concrete; sculpture abstract and imaginative. (DQ 11:195–96) In entering into Lessing’s exposition, De Quincey reiterates Lessing’s “distinctions of the statuesque from the picturesque.”38 Lessing did not use the Latin phrase idem in altero, but, in a passage which De Quincey omits from his translation, he did recognize an inevitable difference in artistic imitation: “One imitates in order to make similar; can one make similar, however, if one makes more changes than necessary? Moreover, if one does this, is the intention clear that one did not want to make similar, that one therefore has not imitated” (6:56–57).39 The Laokoon problem is complicated by the inherent differences in the verbal and visual media. Because the mimetic process is different for each, radical transformations are entailed should the poet imitate the artist, or vice versa. In spite of a polemic opposition to Lessing’s text, De Quincey is fair in his summary of Lessing’s argument. He leaves out major sections of the essay, but retains the essential points about the temporality of poetry and the spatiality of the visual arts. In his note on the idem in altero, however, he raises his own peculiar set of concerns about sameness in difference. When the note goes on to discuss problems in the representations of Christ, it becomes obvious that De Quincey—like Coleridge, not like Lessing—thinks of imitation in terms of the doctrine of the Logos. The contrasting ground of representation in sculpture and painting, De Quincey asserts, is expressed in metaphysical terms by the esse and existere respectively. Thus the crucified Christ has been a subject for sculpture, while the living Christ “has been perpetually painted and but rarely sculpted.” The reason, De Quincey asserts, derives directly from the mystery of the Logos: 38. Lessing, Laokoon, in Werke, 6:50–51; the sculpturesque and picturesque become metaphors for the differences between the classical and the modern: Jean Paul, Werke, 6:71, 83, 87, 90, 221, 289–93; A. W. Schlegel, Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literatur, pt. 2, ii 15–16, in Kritische Schriften und Briefe, vol. 6; LL 1:348–49, 368, 2:439; DQ 10:315, 350–59, 11:303, 13:118. 39. Lessing, Laokoon, in Werke, 6:56–57: “Man ahmet nach, um ähnlich zu werden; kann man aber ähnlich werden, wenn man über die Not verändert? Vielmehr, wenn man dieses tut, ist der Vorsatz klar, daß man nicht ähnlich werden wollen, daß man also nicht nachgeahmet habe.”

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    

For in this mysterious incarnation, this entrance of Deity within the shade of time and passion, we must recollect that the divine is the true nature of Christ, and the human his superinduced nature; consequently it is to his human nature, as in this case the preternatural, that our attention is called. Life, therefore, or being in time,—which is here the uppermost idea,—fits the conception of Christ to painting. But, if the case had been reversed, and a nature originally human were supposed to have projected itself into eternity, and in some unspeakable way have united itself with the Deity, the divine nature would, in this synthesis of the two natures, have been the preternatural or superinduced, and the human nature the ground. Such a conception would be adapted to sculpture; and some such conception is in fact embodied in the sublime head of Memnon in the British Museum, in which are united the expressions of ineffable benignity with infinite duration. (DQ 11:196) De Quincey goes on in his translation to present Lessing’s claim that imitation does not entail blind adherence, that the artist has “room enough left for originality of thought to be manifested in his deviations from his archetype.” Lessing’s notion of original deviation within the constraints of imitation, however, is not shared in De Quincey’s presumption of an immanence of the ideal in the real. De Quincey’s account of the ground and the superinduced also explains why he has formulated the relationship idem in altero rather than idem et alter. Insisting on co-equivalence, Coleridge relied on the separate identity of the “I AM,” as McFarland has most thoroughly demonstrated, to keep the immanence in the “it is” from spawning pantheism. In spite of his religious affirmation of the Trinity, De Quincey presents the relationship as if it were a dialectic in which mind either asserts its primacy over matter, or is subsumed in matter. In the Neoplatonic tradition it was frequently debated whether the rational principle remains a discrete ideal or somehow animates material being. Plato himself, as Billings has observed, combined “sound, consistent, logical thought with the fervor and imagination of the religious teacher and maker of myths.”40 Philo’s doctrine of intermediaries should not be interpreted as an account of mythic underpowers, the 7`(@H become 8`(@4, which are diminutions of the divine presence. Philo, whose biblical exegesis endeavors to retrieve anthropomorphic representations of God, affirms that the divine idea is often 40. Billings, The Platonism of Philo Judaeus, p. 26. Julius Elias, in Plato’s Defence of Poetry, studies Plato’s reliance on myth, his advocacy of basic myths of eschatology, cosmology, love and the soul, the origins and ideals of the state, as well as his reliance on methodological myths in his theory of forms, memory, and consciousness.

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manifest in anthropomorphic symbols. Adapting from Timaeus 36, Philo interprets the biblical description of the two Cherubim and “the sword of flame which turns every way” (Genesis 3:24) as symbols for night and day united by the moving sun, but also for the principles of sameness and difference (JÎ JÓÛJ`< and JÎ 2VJ,D@<) united by the divine Logos (De Cherubim 21). While the logoi are truly thoughts in the mind of God (De posteritate Caini 89–93), they are understood only as revealed to human mind (De Somniis 1:69–70; De Plantatione 30–31, 83–84). When De Quincey explains the idem in altero, he is concerned with what happens to an idea under the influence of the imagination and of the medium in which it is expressed. That the medium itself must be different is a part of his definition as first presented in his translation from Lessing. Twenty years had elapsed when De Quincey revived the concept in his essay on Sophocles’ Antigone. Perhaps the discussion of Sophocles in Lessing’s Laokoon came to mind and, with it, the recollection of the problem of “sameness in difference” in artistic representation. On this latter occasion, he conjures a Bosio-like sculptor who can move a viewer to tears “by exhibiting, in pure statuary marble on a sepulchral monument, two young children with their little heads on a pillow, sleeping in each other’s arm.” De Quincey’s point is that the same scene would fail to achieve its emotional effect if it were done in wax. The difference would be wanting, for wax mimics the flesh all too well.41 Madame Tussaud’s wax figures seem astonishingly lifelike. But what is their effect? They make us gasp for a moment, then we peer more closely to see how the eyebrows are attached. The representation is too direct and immediate; we are compelled to seek for difference. Because difference is readily evident in the artistic medium, the viewer is free to explore the identity. To be sure, we can focus on the medium in order to assess the skill and style of replication, but we can easily accept the manner of imitation and turn our attention to what is imitated and thus move emotionally and imaginatively into the aesthetic space of the work of art. The sculptor thus achieves the more profound effect: “He has expressed the idem, the identical thing expressed in the real children,—the sleep that masks death, the rest, the peace, the purity, the innocence,—but in alio, in a substance the most different: rigid, non-elastic, and as unlike to flesh, if tried by touch, or eye, or by experience of life, as can well be imagined” (DQ 10:369). Joseph Addison, who thought Italian opera trespassed against the principles of mimesis, allowed, ac41. In DQ 10:369, De Quincey, as did Coleridge, uses the contrasting example of waxwork figures; he may well have heard it directly from Coleridge, for he repeats it in his account of the idem in alio in “Conversation and S. T. Coleridge,” in The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, 2:96.

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cording to De Quincey, “no room or opening for any mode of imitation except such as belongs to a mechanic art.” He failed to appreciate the need for difference, the first principle of the fine arts: “The object is to reproduce in the mind some great effect through the agency of idem in alio. The idem, the same impression, is to be restored, but in alio, in a different material,—by means of some different instrument” (DQ 10:368). The union of sameness in difference, then, exhibits the transforming presence of the mind in the matter. The viewer not only requires the leverage of aesthetic difference, the efforts at mimetic representation disappoint without it. On the other hand, the viewer has a far greater capacity to appreciate difference than the insistence on verisimilitude generally recognized. Far from disrupting illusion, the artifices of difference enable the artist to infuse into the work precisely those elements which are not attributes of external appearance. What Italian opera and Greek tragedy have in common is their reliance on elaborate conventions to explore depths of thought and feeling. “The principle of the idem in alio, so widely diffused through all the higher revelations of art, it is peculiarly requisite to bear in mind when looking at Grecian Tragedy, because no form of human composition employs it in so much complexity” (DQ 10:370). The masks, the recitative, the chorus are not at odds with, but are the very means through which the mimesis of Greek tragedy is made possible. In his review of Thomas Noon Talford’s Memorials of Charles Lamb (1848), De Quincey launches into a critique on the use of quotations. While granting “that essentially it is at war with sincerity, the foundation of all good writing, to express one’s thoughts by another man’s words,” he calls upon the idem in alio to justify the apt use of borrowed words. It is a propriety maintained by the in, as opposed to et, of De Quincey’s formulation: A quotation that repeats one’s own sentiment, but in a varied form, has the grace which belongs to the idem in alio, the same radical idea expressed with a difference—similarity in dissimilarity; but to throw one’s own thoughts, matter and form, through alien organs so absolutely as to make another man one’s interpreter for evil or good, is either to confess a singular laxity of thinking that can so flexibly adapt itself to any casual form of words, or else to that sort of carelessness about the expression which draws its real origin from a sense of indifference about the things to be expressed. (DQ 5:237) The real test, and only justification, of the propriety of quotation is whether one comprehends the other’s thought and can absorb it coherently into one’s

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own prose. The practical purpose may be “simply to back one’s own view by a similar view derived from another.” But De Quincey wants something more— a meeting of the minds: not that one has been forced to “bend to another man’s expression,” but that, having engaged in a kind of dialogue, the one fully understands the other. The transforming action of mind, De Quincey states, alters all ideas which pass through consciousness. “The great catholic principle the Idem in alio” is not a principle superimposed upon the work of art, but one that is inseparable from its very birth. To describe the mimetic process whereby the author attempts to represent the images of childhood, De Quincey invites the reader to ascend with him the Brocken in North Germany. Because it serves as symbol for the operations of the mind, this narrative has much the same function as the two epic similes in Wordsworth’s Prelude, passages to be examined in Chapter 5, “Reflections in the Mirror.” De Quincey had never climbed the Brocken, but Coleridge had. The narrative tells of the famous Spectre of the Brocken, the illusion that Coleridge had hoped to see, but did not. To conjure the image of the absent phantom, De Quincey relies on the account in Sir David Brewster’s Natural Magic. This recollection of someone else’s experience, supplemented by still another person’s experience, is not inappropriate to the case that De Quincey wants to make about the otherness of one’s own experiences. To introduce “Dream-Echoes” of remote childhood, he presents this narration as “a real ascent of the Brocken” to be distinguished from the “spiritualizing haze which belongs . . . to the action of dreams, and to the transfigurings worked upon troubled remembrances by retrospects so vast as fifty years.” Coleridge’s experience is more “real,” and perhaps less “other,” than his own “troubled remembrances.” De Quincey records the date of Coleridge’s ascent, Whitsunday 1799. Coleridge might well have made some connection between the Spectre, had he but seen it, and the special observance of the Trinity on that particular day. De Quincey, for his part, did not neglect due reverence. When he makes the sign of the cross, the phantom repeats the gesture, not spontaneously but with “the air of one who acts reluctantly or evasively.” Cast by the rising sun onto the clouds on the opposite peak, the illusion is no more obedient than the images in De Quincey’s “spiritualizing haze.” As Brewster explains, its appearance and movement is also affected by atmospheric refraction. Thus De Quincey blames the reluctance of his giant alter-ego on “driving April showers” which “perplex the images.” His prayer, true to his formulation of the idem in alio, describes the phantom, not as external apparition but as engendered in his own perception: “lo! we—I thy servant, and this dark phantom, whom for one hour on this thy

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festival of Pentecost I make my servant—render thee united worship in this thy recovered temple” (DQ 1:53). The imaginary servant then plucks a blossom, kneels before the altar, and raises his right hand to God. “Dumb he is,” De Quincey concludes, “but sometimes the dumb serve God acceptably.” This “real ascent of the Brocken,” composed of borrowed details about an illusory phenomenon, is the symbol De Quincey chooses to depict how his present mind beholds “the solemn remembrances that lie hidden below.” It is a symbol both of and about sameness in difference: “The half-sportive interlusory revealings of the symbolic tend to the same effect. One part of the effect from the symbolic is dependent on the great catholic principle of the Idem in alio. The symbol restores the theme, but under new combinations of form or colouring; gives back, but changes; restores, but idealises” (DQ 1:51). The image of his former self as a child of six is no less elusive an apparition: a shadow engulfed in shadows, a self transformed by otherness. Art can do no more than retrieve, idem in alio, the phantom images of perception, memory, and imagination. For De Quincey, as for Coleridge, Schleiermacher, and Hegel, this is the only valid claim to be made for artistic imitation.

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3

   

Along with fancy and imagination, the distinction between copy and imitation is essential to Coleridge’s critical theory. Thus he repeats it, again and again, whenever he explains the creative process. The earliest formulation occurs in the Notebook entries of October–December 1804.1 In subsequent reformulations, he began to elaborate the distinction in terms of similarity and difference. The i. CN 2:2211 (October 1804), 2274 (December 1804 or 1808); see also 3:4066 (April 1811), 4397–98 (March 1818  Lecture 13, “On Poesy and Art”), and 4497 (March 1819).

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fullest exposition, and the most extensively indebted to Schelling, is “On Poesy and Art” from his 1818 lecture series.2 In this chapter, I shall endeavor to show why he found Schelling’s philosophy particularly relevant to his argument of identity and difference. Previous explorations of Coleridge’s debt to Schelling3 have helped me to track his reading and to understand how seemingly disparate philosophical traditions merged in Coleridge’s theory of imitation. Many critics before Coleridge had described mimesis as an artistic metamorphosis rather than as a reduplication, and many, too, had compared the artistic process to the divine act of creation. In order to argue that the artist’s mediation of sameness and difference is not merely analogous to the Deus idem et alter, but that it directly participates in divine creativity, Coleridge needed to find some resolution to the subjective impasse which he had encountered in Plato, Philo, Plotinus, and the Neoplatonic philosophers. Schelling not only posited, as did Kant, such a resolution in the subject-object dialectics of cognition, he also argued that a reconciliation of mind and matter is actually realized in the work of art. These are the foundational concepts examined in the preceding two chapters. The present chapter will examine a third extension of Schelling’s theory in Coleridge’s desynonimization of “copy” and “imitation,” and in the conviction that artistic imitation is “self-exposition,” the palingenesis of the mind as art. As Coleridge continued to develop and refine his analysis of imitation in the context of his lectures, essays, and the Biographia Literaria, he began to be more attentive to the changes in Schelling’s thinking. While the maturation of the concept of mimesis in Schelling’s philosophy of art took him away from his early constructions of “Naturphilosophie” and “Identitätsphilosophie,” Coleridge found it necessary to combine the later passages with earlier ones in altering Schelling to suit the development of his own critical theory.4 The most thorough account to date is that presented by Emerson Marks in 2. LL 2:217–25. 3. McFarland, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition; Gian Orsini, Coleridge and the German Idealists; Kathleen Coburn, Experience into Thought; James Engell, The Creative Imagination. See also René Wellek, “Coleridge,” in Romantic Age, pp. 151–87; Walter Greiner, “Deutsche Einflüße auf die Dichtungstheorie von Samuel Taylor Coleridge”; Norman Fruman, Coleridge; M. M. Badawi, Coleridge; Reginald A. Foakes, “Repairing the Damaged Archangel”; and Thomas McFarland, “Coleridge’s Plagiarisms Once More.” 4. Coleridge’s awareness of the changes in Schelling’s thought is also evident in his restructuring of Schelling’s various demonstrations of apperception by combining passages from Vom Ich als Prinzip der Philosophie (1795), Abhandlungen zur Erläuterung des Idealismus der Wissenschaftslehre (1797), and System des transzendentalen Idealismus (1800) into the ten theses on the “I AM,” in BL 1:264–86; cf. Burwick, “Perception.”

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his Coleridge and the Language of Verse (1981).5 Marks, however, is convinced that Schelling’s discrimination of copy and imitation has little in common with Coleridge’s. Building his case on the version of Schelling’s formulation which was published in the Philosophische Schriften (1809),6 Marks argues that the relevant passage from Schelling not only comes after Coleridge’s notebook entries, but also addresses a significantly different problem. Both reject “the repulsiveness of photographic realism,” he grants, “but there the similarity between them ends.” Schelling argues, as Marks rightly observes, “that slavish imitation is false where genuine art reveals the idea (‘Begriff ’) which alone is the truth.” In contrasting the two theories, Marks identifies Schelling’s concerns as “idealist and epistemological” and Coleridge’s, in spite of “his own idealist orientation and his faith in the cognitive value of poetry,” as “fundamentally empirical and psychological.” Marks concludes: “On this issue Schelling is Platonic, or neo-Platonic; Coleridge, essentially, Aristotelian” (45–48). In the previous chapter we reviewed several aspects of the Platonic and Aristotelian legacy relevant to the problems of aesthetic imitation. Plato distinguished between an intellectual and a sensual mode of perception: through the former, we may approach the perfect idea; through the latter, we are limited to the imperfect material manifestation. All efforts at representation, because they can be mediated only through the senses, are necessarily limited to imperfect mimicry. Plato also distinguished between simple narrative (diegesis) and fictive representation (mimesis): in the former, the narrator tells his story from his own perspective; in the latter, as in Plato’s own dialogues, he makes it seem as if some other person is speaking (Republic 3.392–94). When Aristotle in his Poetics addresses the distinction between the epic and dramatic modes of representation, he asserts that mimesis involves more than the representation of a person speaking—that person must be seen in action. Furthermore, mimesis, as “the representation of human action,” must reveal mental action as well as physical. Aristotle’s concept of imitation, then, involves an act of deliberating and choosing, a psychological process in which a character responds to a situation and considers alternatives. His physical action must be seen as the outcome of his mental action.7 5. Emerson Marks, Coleridge and the Language of Verse, pp. 42–95. See also the commentary and notes on copy vs. imitation in LL 1:lxx, 307n, and 2:218n and 266n; and in BL 1:xci, cv–cvi, cxi, 76, 137, 293, and 305n, and 2:27n, 43, 54, 72, 83n, 84n, 144, and 212. 6. KN, in SW 7:289–329; Marks quotes Schelling’s “Concerning the Relation of the Plastic Arts to Nature.” 7. Thomas Middleton Raysor, in his note to Coleridge’s distinction between copy and imitation, identifies the terms respectively as Platonic and Aristotelian. Sh C, p. 177n; Plato, The Collected Dialogues, 637–39; Aristotle, Works, 2:2318–21.

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Although the discussion of artistic imitation has for centuries grappled with the definitions formulated by Plato and Aristotle, labeling the differences between Schelling and Coleridge as Platonic vs. Aristotelian is misleading. Schelling, as we shall see, was particularly concerned with including the “empirical and psychological” in his own exposition of mimesis, and as Marks admits, Coleridge, too, had an “idealist orientation.” But there are other defects in Marks’s presentation. For one thing, the matter of priority or possible source cannot be dismissed by insisting on the 1809 edition of Schelling’s Philosophische Schriften as the only text in question. To be sure, Schelling’s “Über das Verhältnis der bildende Künste zu der Natur” appeared in that edition, but it had also been printed as a separate monograph two years earlier. Equally important as sources for Coleridge were Schelling’s System des transzendentalen Idealismus (1800), in which he first set forth his arguments on copy and imitation in terms of mechanical and organic processes, and the lecture on art in his Vorlesung über die Methode des akademischen Studiums (1803), with its account of imagination and the co-relevance of sensual and intellectual experience of art. Crucial to the development of Schelling’s aesthetic was the lecture series collected under the title Philosophie der Kunst (delivered in 1802–3 and 1804–5). Coleridge, as I suggested in Chapter 1, may have known something of their purport through Henry Crabb Robinson.8 Excluding Schelling as a pertinent source, and apparently oblivious to the fact that his words also aptly express Schelling’s definition of imitation, Marks declares that for Coleridge, “imitation is precisely a manifestation of the poet’s creative manipulation of the life-stuff that constitutes the material of his poem” (Coleridge and the Language of Verse, 57). For Schelling as for Coleridge this “creative manipulation” is what renders the work of art superior to mere mechanical replication. The notion that artistic representation requires perfect mimicry had considerable support during the eighteenth century. The success of the bourgeois drama is demonstrated, so argued such critics as Schink and Weiße,9 when the spectator experiences the artifice as reality. Other critics, however, insisted that an aesthetic pleasure could only result from a recognition of artifice and awareness of art. The work of art, therefore, must not duplicate but transform the reality it exhibits. Art must reveal its difference. Du Bos, for example, claimed that 8. KN, in SW 7:289–329; StI, in SW 3:607–29; PdK, in SW 5:353–736; Methode, in SW 5:207–352. See also Henri Nidecker, “Notes marginales de S. T. Coleridge en marge de Schelling,” and Behler, “Schellings Ästhetik,” with Robinson’s transcription of the lectures as delivered in Jena, 1802–3. 9. Johann Friedrich Schink, Dramaturgische Fragmente, p. 458; Christian Felix Weiße, Vorrede, in Das Fanatismus, oder Jean Calas, pp. 2–3.

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aesthetic pleasure derived not from a trompe-l’oeil, which actually makes us think we see the object imitated, but from a stunning resemblance which lets us appreciate the imitation of the object. A degree of difference in the artistic imitation, Du Bos asserted, allows for an interaction between the sensual response to the object and the rational appraisal of the artistic accomplishment.10 Bodmer’s position seems more in line with those critics who judge the success of a work by its power to delude the spectator. But if the mimicry is perfect, the spectator never knows that he has been tricked. Bodmer thus wants sufficient difference in a work of art to tease the senses and arouse doubts whether we behold the original or only its image. Aesthetic pleasure for Bodmer derives from the trickery of art: “We like to let ourselves be deceived in such a pleasing way.”11 Bodmer’s notion of an aesthetic liminality between similarity and difference is also supported by Johann Elias Schlegel, who maintains that the response to art is but “half illusion . . . an illusion and at the same time not an illusion.” Artistic imitation, for J. E. Schegel, involves not a perfect replication but a paradox of dissimilarity in similarity.12 The debate over the revelation of difference in artistic representation had already made the distinction between copy and imitation a commonplace. Nor was the idea of similarity and difference in the work of art unfamiliar to Coleridge’s contemporaries in England. Joseph Harpur, in his Essay on the Principles of Philosophical Criticism (1810), proceeds from his argument “that all poetry whatsoever is of necessity mimetic,” to an exposition of how mimetic images “excite in the mind” ideas and sensations analogous to the experiences represented. The aesthetic response is never identical to the actual experience, but only analogous. Citing Ammonius’s commentary to Aristotle, Harpur grounds the sameness and difference of poetry in the necessary opposition of matter (‹m80) and form (+É*@H). Poetic imagery, the medium of imitation, communicates difference even in its representation of sameness. Poetry creates intellectual beauty through the harmony of these universal principles of diversity and unity, difference and sameness.13 The nature of artistic imitation, as is evident in the criticism of Du Bos and Bodmer, is defined affectively and is inseparable from the problem of aesthetic i0. Jean Baptiste Du Bos, Rèflexions critiques sur la Poësie, la Peinture et la Musique, 1:27. i1. Johann Jacob Bodmer and Johann Jacob Breitinger, Von dem Einfluß und Gebrauche der Einbildungs-Krafft zur Ausbesserung des Geschmackes, p. 31; Bodmer, Critische Betrachtungen über die Poetischen Gemählde der Dichter, pp. 23–24. i2. Johann Elias Schlegel, “Schreiben an Herrn N.N. über die Comödie in Versen” (1740) and “Abhandlung von der Nachahmung” (1745), in Ästhetische und dramaturgische Schriften, pp. 14–16, 98–102, 132–33. i3. Joseph Harpur, Essay on the Principles of Philosophical Criticism, pp. 18–20, 25–26, 59–60.

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illusion. When Coleridge takes up the problem in his lectures of 1808, he, too, relates imitation and illusion. He endeavors, however, to deal with imitation in terms of creative process as well as affective response. This is the dimension of Coleridge’s theory which sets his definition of imitation apart from definitions developed during the eighteenth century. But it is also his interest in the creative process which attracted him to Schelling’s philosophy of art. Schelling introduced his analysis of artistic mimesis in his System des transzendentalen Idealismus (1800) in order to demonstrate the reconciliation of subject and object. Art accomplishes, he said, what philosophy can only deliberate. In his System, Schelling extends his earlier responses to Kant’s “The: I think” (Das: ich denke) and Fichte’s division of the “I” and “Not I.” For the first time, Schelling’s argument for the self-construction of the “I” is postulated as the identity of self and nature (the ground for the “Identitäts-philosophie” of his middle phase). Hume, it will be recalled, denied the possibility of selfconsciousness.14 Kant, too, left the noumenal self beyond the horizon of awareness, while Fichte’s doctrine endeavored to posit the apperception of self as the essential link between subject and object.15 In his earlier Vom Ich als Prinzip der Philosophie (1795), Schelling followed Fichte in affirming that through the reflexion of self within consciousness the mind had access to one noumenal object. He continued to use Fichte’s sense of the subject and object as “contradictions” (“Widersprüche”). In his System, however, Schelling attempted a transcendental construction of the “I.” Mind, which is free and reflexive activity, coexists with nature, which is activity without reflexive consciousness and thus determined by other external forces. The “I” is realized through spontaneity and productivity. The activity of mind exercises its freedom only through its productivity. Freedom is deliberate and purposive activity. As soon as productivity appears as product, it is no longer free. What begins in consciousness ends in unconsciousness. The history of consciousness, then, is a perpetual division of subject and object. But consciousness itself is unity and harmony. In the fifth section of the System (StI 3:607–11), which Coleridge appropriates in chapter 8 of the Biographia (BL 1:130–38), Schelling dismisses hylozoism and materialism as philosophically i4. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, p. 252: “For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble upon some particular perception or other. . . . I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and can never observe anything but the perception.” i5. Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1781, 1787), §§15–27, esp. §§16–18 and 24, in Werke, 2:135ff.; Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre, in Werke, vol. 1, pt. 2, pp. 301, 352–53.

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untenable resolutions to the inevitable division. Hylozoism extends reflexive intelligence to matter; materialism embraces mind as well as matter in blind mechanism. In the moment of perception, Schelling argues, the union of subject and object reaffirm the primal identity of free consciousness and mechanical determinism. The ground for this union lies in the “I myself.” The effort to express this unity gives rise to art. While all other productivity ends in the loss of harmony, art brings the conscious and unconscious activity into one objective moment of perception. The unity of conscious and unconscious, which can be experienced only as division and separation in our experience of nature, is manifest in the art object because the activity of the artist is reanimated in our perception of his work. In the sixth section of the System, relevant to Coleridge’s definition of poetry as a “reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities,” Schelling develops his account of art as synthesis of “infinite opposition in a finite product.” Whereas philosophy proceeds from “the infinite dichotomizing of opposing activities,” in artistic representation the opposition is fully suspended. The tension of opposites—subject and object, conscious and unconscious, reflexion and perception, freedom and necessity, organic and mechanic, ideal and real, infinite and finite—is resolved in the consummation of the “I myself ” in art. Schelling then uses this principle of unified opposition in art to define the imagination. The imagination is the sole facility through which we are able to comprehend and combine the oppositions. The unifying power of imagination distinguishes genius from talent and imitation from copy (StI 3:612–29). The contrast between genius and talent had been made by other critics, and Coleridge himself varies the implications to suit his purpose.16 Although many of his references to genius vs. talent are irrelevant here, he does use the distinction in accord with Schelling to privilege “the creative Life-power of inspired Genius” in contrast with “the Shaping skill of mechanical Talent” (LL 2:362; cf. StI 3:623–24). Coleridge’s reference to poetry and art in the “Principles of Genial Criticism” (1814) echoes Schelling’s account of poesie and art as genus and species; in his lecture “On Poesy and Art” he further elaborates in Schelling’s terms the infinite power of poesie and its finite immanence in art as i6. Thomas De Quincey, in DQ 3:35, defines genius vs. talent with the boast, “I am in the more proud of this distinction since I have seen the utter failure of Mr. Coleridge, judging from his attempt in his ‘Table Talk.’ ” The definition which De Quincey repeats in 1834, 1838, 1846, and 1853 (DQ 1:194, 3:34–35, 11:382–83, and 1:195) is derived from Jean Paul Richter’s Vorschule der Ästhetik, in Werke, 6:56, also 50–51, 60–67. For Coleridge’s various references to genius vs. talent, see CL 3:21; CN 3:3453; The Friend, 2:73–74; LS, p. 178; LL 1:85n, 193–94, 287, 295, 304, and 326n, and 2:362, 478, and 488; and BL 1:31, 80–81, 300.

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organic process.17 When Coleridge formulated his definition of the imagination as “esemplastic power,” he noted “How excellent the German Einbildungskraft expresses this prime & loftiest Faculty, the power of co-adunation, the faculty that forms the many into one, in eins Bildung.” This is the pseudo-etymology which Schelling found apt in explaining the capacity of the imagination, as “the living In-Eins-Bildung,” to unify unconscious nature and conscious mind.18 Poesie, according to Schelling, derives from unconscious nature: its presence in mind is instinctive; it cannot be learned or acquired through practice. Poesie thus distinguishes genius from mere talent. The manifestation of poesie in nature is perceived as beautiful, but in natural beauty there is no sense of harmony between conscious idea and unconscious object. The manifestation of poesie in the artistic work of genius, however, resolves the paradoxical division of mind and matter. Art, for this reason, serves as the “document of philosophy and, at the same time, its sole true and eternal organon.” What philosophy can only posit, art can objectively represent: the primal identity of the conscious and the unconscious (StI 3:618–19, 624, 627–28). The purpose of Lecture 14, from the series Vorlesung über die Methode des akademischen Studiums (delivered at Jena, 1802, and repeated as the opening lecture in the series Philosophie der Kunst delivered at Jena, 1802–3, and Würzburg, 1804–5), is to establish a foundation for a scientific and philosophical approach to art. While most aesthetic theory is limited to the sensual, empirical, and psychological response, in order to address art in its totality, Schelling proposes a method of study that will account for the creative as well as the affective elements. Art, as the “perfect Ineinsbildung of the real and ideal,” is approached in terms of the inherent paradox of unity and opposition. The paradox is complicated, Schelling admits, by the very difference between the artist and the philosopher: the one begins with the subjective and expresses it objectively; the other begins with the objective and deals with it subjectively. Both are concerned with the relationship of subject and object: the philosopher can nevertheless posit it only as abstract idea; the artist alone succeeds in representing the essential identity of mind and matter as real (Methode 5:344–52). Schelling’s lectures in Philosophie der Kunst elaborate his thesis that art restores unity to the divided consciousness. The perpetual sense of division arouses a desire to reunite all things in the Absolute. Not by proliferating mere images of reality, but only by rendering a primal image (Urbild) of the Absolute, can this i7. StI, in SW 3:618–19; Coleridge, “Principles of Genial Criticism” and “On Poesy and Art,” in BL 1907 2:220–21 and 255; see also notes to “On Poesy or Art,” in CN 3:4397–98 and LL 2:217–25. i8. CN 3:4176; cf. BL 1:168, 172–74; StI, in SW 3:626–27; Methode, in SW 5:348; PdK, in SW 5:390; Schelling, Darlegung des wahren Verhältnisses der Naturphilosophie, in SW 7:60.

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longing be satisfied. The mimesis of art is not similitude, then, but difference. Yet this difference is achieved only in indifference, that is, in the negation of difference through the synthesis of real and ideal. Indifference is the unity of opposites. The indifference of art imitates God, for as infinite affirmation—both the affirmed and the affirming, the natura naturata and the natura naturans—God is absolute indifference.19 After dealing with the affirmation of absolute identity in the opening sections of the Philosophie der Kunst (§§1–15), Schelling turns to the imagination and the Ineinsbildung of the general and particular (§28). In distinguishing between fantasy and imagination, Schelling declares that the former functions through reason and the latter through intuition: fantasy sees things only from the outside; imagination, by contrast, is that power through which the production of art is conceived and developed (§31). Art is more than a replication of finite forms. All artistic imitation and representation is mythological: all art, that is, has its inception in the mythic quest for reunion; it makes the absolute visible in the real (§§33–38).20 “Symbol” he defines as the resolution of the infinite in the finite, and “allegory” as the finite in the infinite (§§39, 46). Claiming to correct the errors of Schiller’s aesthetics, he amends Schiller’s distinction between “naive” and “sentimental” in terms of the opposition of unconscious instinct and conscious intent, and he redefines Schiller’s “beautiful” and “sublime” in terms of the finite and infinite.21 i9. PdK, in SW 5:357–86. Spinoza, Ethics, pt. 1, §29, describes the immanence of the natura naturans in the natura naturata; Schelling uses Spinoza’s terms in his Fichtean analysis of the “Nicht Ich” as a postulate of the “Ich” (in Vom Ich als Prinzip der Philosophie, in SW, vol. 3); he then converts the terms to posit the self-construction of nature through Absolute Affirmation (in Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur, in SW 2:67, and Einleitung zu seinem Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie, in SW 2:269–326); he again shifts the meaning to refer to the opposites reconciled in Absolute Indifference (in PdK, in SW 5:378; Philosophie und Religion, in SW 6:44; and System der gesamten Philosophie und der Naturphilosophie inbesondere, in SW 6:199). Artistic unity is only relatively indifferent, for the aesthetic experience involves some awareness of other; absolute unity is absolutely indifferent, for no other exists outside of it. See Beierwaltes, Identität und Differenz, pp. 204–7. 20. The mythic quest for reunion, which Schelling considers the inception of all art (PdK, §38), is further investigated in his late works, Philosophie der Mythologie (lectures at Erlangen, 1821; at Berlin, 1841; published 1854; in SW, vol. 12) and Philosophie der Offenbarung (lectures at Berlin, 1841; published 1854; in SW, vol. 13). 21. Friedrich Schiller, “Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung” and “Über das Erhabene,” in Sämtliche Werke, Säkularausgabe, 12:161, 187, 192, and 229, and 12:269, 274, 293, and 296. In her notes on the passages from Schelling in Coleridge’s “On Poesy and Art,” in CN 3:4397, Kathleen Coburn asserts, “The seminal thinker in the whole range of problems here broached—nature as the object the artists ‘imitates,’ nature as the universe of which man is part, nature and its imitation in art distinguished and discussed in both anthropological and psychological terms—was Schiller. . . . Schelling’s debt was marked; he added the dimension of neo-Platonic metaphysics, to which Coleridge, up to a point, responded.” Engell, The Creative Imagination, p. 234, provides a convenient chart relating the dialectic terminology of Schiller, Tetens, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Coleridge.

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“Symbol” and “allegory,” “the beautiful” and “the sublime,” “the naive” and “the sentimental,” “style” and “mannerism,” “art” and “poesie,” are all terms derived from the polarity and identity of subject and object (PdK, §§64–69, in SW 5:388–487). Schelling had first defined artistic imitation, not as a replication of the real object, but as a reunion of the ideal in the real (in his System); he then emphasized that the mere image is restricted to physical, sensual presentation of external nature, whereas true imitation reveals the co-presence of opposition sustained yet suspended through the unifying imagination (in his Methode); the artist, discontent with the inadequacy of the image (Bild), intuits a primal image (Urbild) which is not merely revealed but realized (Gegenbild) in the creative identity of mind and matter (see his Philosophie der Kunst). His final and most extensive deliberation of the problem of mimesis Schelling presented in his address to the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, “Über das Verhältnis der bildende Künste zu der Natur” (1807). Here artistic imitation is defined as the “active link” and the “living middle” between the soul and nature. Although modern theories of art have all proceeded from the premise that art imitates nature, Schelling observes, the terms “imitate” and “nature” remain problematic. Those bound to “servile imitations” of physical existence naturally turn more often to the ugly and imitate it with more passion than the beautiful. He credits Winckelmann with elevating the concept of imitation to “the realm of intellectual freedom,” with the qualification that although he rightly identified the ideal of beauty in Greek art, he nevertheless erred in substituting the effect for the cause. By claiming the external forms as his models, he missed the active principle and true spiritual bond.22 What the artist must observe in nature is not the object but the informing power, the “power of things” which “flows together with the power of our minds”: “this can only be determined through a positive . . . power, which subordinates the multiplicity of the parts to the unity of a concept, starting with the power with which a crystal grows, up to the power which, like a gentle magnetic current in man’s development, gives the material parts a certain position and reciprocal relation through which the concept, the essential unity and beauty, can be made visible.” As he had argued in his Identitätsphilosophie, the concept of “essential unity and beauty” resides in the pervasive powers operative in nature as well as in man. Man, however, can bring the concept into reflexive consciousness. By lending his reflexive consciousness to the uncon22. KN, in SW 7:295–96. J. J. Winckelmann, Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke and Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums.

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scious activity he perceives in his material, the artist attains creative unity. He works with the “opposition of things” to achieve a “reconciliation of all powers.”23 A work of art never aims at deluding the spectator into thinking that he has the real object before him. A painting “in no way offers its images for the objects themselves, but intends them to be seen expressly as images.”24 As Gombrich has phrased this necessary attribute of difference, when we look at the painting of a mountain, we derive aesthetic illusion from seeing a mountain in a painting, never from thinking that we actually see a mountain and not a painting. Even the most perfect mimicry, such as deceived the birds into pecking at the grapes in the painting by Zeuxis,25 misdirects the purposes of art into mechanical redundancy. Worse, “to everyone whose taste is to some degree educated,” the attempts at “mere superficial animation” produce only lifeless “spectres” which are seen as fraudulent and repugnant. Bereft of the informing consciousness which would give them “full power of truth,” these “imitations of the real which are pushed to the point of delusion appear in the highest degree unreal.”26 Sensory perception, Schelling argued, gives us only a copy of the original (Abhandlungen, in SW 1:362, 378–79; cf. BL 1:137). To escape the sensual bondage of the copy, the artist must disengage himself from the immediate impact of nature: “Art, in order to be art, must remove itself from nature and return to it only in the final achievement.” “Slavish fidelity” to physical reality can 23. KN, in SW 7:292, 296: “ein tätiges Band,” “die lebendige Mitte”; 299–300: “Diese kann nur durch eine positive . . . Kraft bestimmt sein, welche die Mannichfaltigkeit der Teile der Einheit eines Begriffs unterwirft, von der Kraft an, die im Kristal wirkt, bis zu der, welche wie ein sanfter magnetischer Strom in menschlichen Bildungen den Teilen der Materie eine solche Stellung und Lage untereinander gibt, durch welche der Begriff, die wesentliche Einheit und Schönheit sichtbar werden kann”; 311: “der Gegensatz der Dinge,” “die Versöhnung aller Kräfte.” 24. KN, in SW 7:302: “Auch gibt sie ihre Bilder keineswegs für die Gegenstände selbst, sondern will sie ausdrücklich als Bilder angesehen wissen.” 25. E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion, pp. 4–10, 361, 395, 206; Pliny, Naturalis Historia 10.35.36. Zeuxis of Heraclea challenged Parrhasius of Ephesus to a contest in painting. When birds came to peck at the grapes in Zeuxis’ painting, he was ready to claim victory; then, attempting to pull back the curtains which concealed Parrhasius’s painting, he discovered that the curtains were Parrhasius’s painting. Zeuxis had deceived the birds, but Parrhasius had deceived Zeuxis. 26. KN, in SW 7:302: “Wie kommt es, daß jedem einigermaßen gebildeten Sinn die bis zur Täuschung getriebenen Nachahmungen des sogenannt Wirklichen als im höchsten Grade unwahr erscheinen, ja den Eindruck von Gespenstern machen, indes ein Werk, in dem der Begriff herrschend ist, ihn mit der vollen Kraft der Wahrheit ergreift, ja ihn erst in die echt wirkliche Welt versetzt?” [Why is it that, to everyone whose taste is to some degree educated, imitations of the real which are pushed to the point of delusion appear in the highest degree unreal, giving the impression of spectres, whereas a work in which the concept is dominant seizes him with the full power of truth and transports him for the first time into authentically real world?]

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“only bring forth masks, but no works of art.” True imitation is not baffled by the exterior form but seeks the essence, “the indwelling spirit of nature.” The emphasis on discovering and revealing the inner power does not mean that one artist cannot borrow from another. As long as the similarity is not a deliberate copy but the result of “the same striving toward the same means,” the imitation will involve the revelation of vital essence.27 Once the artist goes beyond the limits of sensory consciousness, he is able to penetrate form and reveal essence. Although the shift from copy to imitation is thus attained, the artist has not yet reached the ultimate goal of art. To be sure, art may be content to tarry at this stage, for it has achieved harmony and beauty. Essence is revealed within form, soul within body, the conscious within the unconscious. But form prevails and opposition has been suspended. Again countering Schiller’s aesthetic terminology, Schelling calls this essentially passive imitation “grace.” Schiller had contrasted “grace” with “dignity.” As transfiguration of the Naturgeist, grace is also the synthesizing medium of the ethically good as well as the sensual manifestation of the soul within the body. In order to show that the union of soul and body is not a capitulation of the restless, resistive, and all-pervasive spirit of nature within the soul of the individual, art must strive against grace as its controlling center. For Schelling the contrast with the graceful reconciliation of content and form is the annihilation of form.28 If artistic imitation truly succeeds in representing the vitality of form, the form itself, as limitation and confinement, will be annihilated. Schelling denies the pretenses of characteristic art as well as ideal art. Ideal 27. KN, in SW 7:301: “Wollte er sich aber mit Bewußtsein dem Wirklichen ganz unterordnen, und das Vorhandensein mit knechtischer Treue wiedergeben, so würde er wohl Larven hervorbringen, aber keine Kunstwerke. . . . Jenem im Innern der Dinge wirksamen durch Form und Gestalt nur wie durch Sinnbilder redenden Naturgeist soll der Künstler allerdings nacheifern, und nur insofern er diesen lebendig nachahmend ergreift, hat er selbst etwas Wahrhaftes erschaffen. Denn Werke, die aus einer Zusammensetzung auch übrigens schöner Formen entstünden, wären doch ohne alle Schönheit, indem das, wodurch nun eigentlich das Werk oder das Ganze schön ist, nicht mehr Form sein kann. Es ist über die Form, ist Wesen, Allgemeines, ist Blick und Ausdruck des inwohnenden Naturgeistes” [Should he want consciously to surrender himself altogether to reality, and reproduce what is immediately at hand with slavish fidelity, then he would only bring forth masks, but no works of art. . . . The artist should certainly strive to emulate that spirit of nature operative in the interior of things and speaking through form and shape as through symbols, and only insofar as he seizes this spirit through vitally imitating it, has he himself created something of truth. For even works which originate in a combination of otherwise beautiful forms would nevertheless be without any beauty because that, whereby a work or the whole is actually beautiful, can no longer reside in form. It is beyond form: it is essence, the universal; it is the vision and expression of the indwelling spirit of nature]. KN, in SW 7:321: “eine bloß willkürliche Nachahmung” as opposed to “ein gleiches Streben auf gleiche Mittel.” 28. KN, in SW 7:311, 305, 315–16. Friedrich Schiller, “Über Anmut und Würde,” in Sämtliche Werke, 12:115.

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art, which imitates classical models, “will leave you cold,” Schelling warns, “unless you bring the spiritual eye to penetrate the covering and feel the active power within.” Characteristic art, which claims to reveal individual beauty, too readily lapses into “a pampered characterless art, which indeed gives itself a higher name, but thereby only seeks to disguise its inability to fulfill the primary requisites of art.” Rather than annihilating absolute form by revealing the perfection of individual form, characteristic art is apt to be preoccupied with the flesh and ignore the spirit. Not simply a reconciliation in tranquil grace, artistic imitation must also reveal the dynamic interaction of form and essence, body and spirit, as in “the living whole,” each determining and being determined by the other.29 Since Coleridge’s discussion of imitation is most extensively indebted to Schelling in the notes he prepared for his lecture “On Poesy and Art” (1818), that exposition of the mimetic process in art is useful in establishing what Coleridge accepted, modified, or rejected. The principal sources, documented by Sara Coleridge,30 are Schelling’s lecture Über das Verhältnis der bildende Künste zu der Natur and the sixth section of his System. A major premise of Schelling’s philosophy of art, however, is conspicuously absent in the arguments which Coleridge has appropriated. By equating art, as a longing to restore primal unity, with mythology, Schelling may have served well the interests of Hölderlin, 29. KN, in SW 7:305: “Nur durch die Vollendung der Form kann die Form vernichtet werden, und dieses ist allerdings im Charakteristischen das letzte Ziel der Kunst. Wie aber die scheinbare Übereinstimmung, zu der gehaltlose Seelen leichter als andere gelangen, innerlich dennoch nichtig ist, so verhält es sich in der Kunst mit der schnell erlangten Harmonie ohne die Fülle des Inhaltes, und hat Lehre und Unterricht der geistlosen Nachahmung schöner Formen entgegenzuwirken, so vernehmlich auch der Neigung zu einer verzärtelten charakterlosen Kunst, die sich zwar höhere Namen gibt, aber damit nur ihr Unvermögen, die Grundbedingungen zu erfüllen, bedeckt” [Only through the perfection of form can form be annihilated, and this is certainly in characteristic art the ultimate goal. Just as the apparent correspondence, which empty souls reach more easily than others, is nevertheless inwardly null, so also art conducts itself with readily attained outer harmony which is lacking the inner abundance of content and has to work against the theory and practice of mindless imitation of beautiful forms, and especially against the inclination to a pampered characterless art, which to be sure gives itself a higher name, but thereby only seeks to disguise its inability to fulfill the primary requisites of art]. KN, in SW 7:308: in defining “das lebendige Ganze” as “Bestimmendes und Bestimmtes” Schelling once again has recourse to the natura naturans and natura naturata; see note 25 above. 30. “On Poesy and Art” was first published in The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 4 vols., ed. Henry Nelson Coleridge (London: William Pickering, 1836–39). James Ferrier, “The Plagiarisms of S. T. Coleridge,” Blackwood’s Magazine, March 1840, pp. 287–99, cites the debt to Schelling. In Notes and Lectures on Shakespeare and Some Other Old Poets and Dramatists with Other Literary Remains, 2 vols., ed. Sara Coleridge (London: William Pickering, 1849), the parallel passages are documented. Kathleen Coburn, in her notes to CN 3:4397, has given the fullest account of sources.

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Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel, and the Jena romantics,31 but the equation was illsuited to Coleridge’s thinking. With Schelling he may turn often to Plotinus, to Boehme, and to Bruno,32 but he does not elaborate the quasi-mystical moment of inspiration as a mythological ground for all art. Furthermore, Coleridge actually explores the imaginative process which Schelling merely posits. As Schelling himself often reminds us, the philosopher may reason upon the unifying imagination as an abstract idea, but the artist alone can realize it. Schelling states that the artist must blend the conscious with the unconscious; Coleridge, citing examples from Shakespeare, demonstrates the mediating processes of the creative imagination. Schelling recommends that the artist grasp “inner workings,” but he still observes art as a philosopher. Coleridge’s critical theory, however, is artist centered: he describes the imagination from within. As announced in the syllabus for his lecture series in 1818, the topic for Lecture 13 was “Colour, Sound, Form, in Nature, as connected with Poesy.” It is further explained that “Poesy” and “Art” are defined as genus and species. This point of departure, as we have seen, harkens back to Schelling’s System. Indeed, when Coleridge proceeds in his notes to affirm that “art itself might be defined as of a middle quality between a thought and a thing,” we recognize Schelling’s “active link” and “living middle.” So close does he adhere to his German source 31. Friedriech Schlegel, Gespräch über die Poesie, in Kritische Friedriech-Schlegel Ausgabe, 2:311–22: in this dialogue, the “Rede über die Mythologie” proposes to redeem modern literature and to resuscitate “das unendliche Gedicht” by mining a new mythology “aus der tiefsten Tiefe des Geistes”; a ground for the new mythology has already been prepared, Schlegel asserts, in Schelling’s Naturphilosophie. Friedrich Hölderlin, Hyperion, in Sämtliche Werke, 3:81: “Wie Minerva aus Jupiters Haupt entspringt sie aus der Dichtung eines unendlichen göttlichen Seins. Und so läuft am End’ auch wieder in ihr das Unvereinbare in der geheimnisvollen Quelle der Dichtung zusammen.” Novalis, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, in Schriften, 1:304, 3:672. See also J. Hennigfeld, Mythos und Poesie, and W. Kahle, “Zur Kunstauffassung Schellings im Spannungsfeld der Entwicklung des ästhetischen Denkens seiner Zeit.” 32. On Schelling’s debt to Plotinus, Boehme, and Bruno, see Werner Beierwaltes, Platonismus und Idealismus and Marsilio Ficinos Theorie des Schönen im Kontext des Platonismus. Schelling, Bruno oder über das göttliche und natürliche Prinzip der Dinge: Ein Gespräch in SW 4:214–332, draws from the passages on nature and imitation in Plotinus, Ennead 3.8 and 5.8.1; Schelling’s “Gegenbild” and his argument on divine Self-Affirmation follow Ennead V, 8, 4, 4–10; 5.9, 5, 16; 6.3. Cf. StI and PdK, in SW 6:574 (§§321–22) and 5:384–86, 405. McFarland, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition, pp. 245–51 and 325–32, discusses the place of Bruno and Boehme in Schelling and Coleridge. To Coleridge’s discussion of Boehme, Bruno, and Schelling in BL 1:144–51, 160–63, the editors footnote Coleridge’s marginal gloss to Schelling’s Über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit: “How can I explain the strange Silence respecting Jacob Böhmen? . . . the coincidence in the expressions, illustrations, & even in the mystical obscurities, is too glaring to be solved by mere independent coincidence in Thought and intuition. Probably, prudential motives restrain Schelling for a while: for I will not think, that Pride or a dishonest lurking Desire to appear not only an original, but the Original, can have influenced a man of Genius, like Schelling.”

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that he retains Schelling’s feminine personification: “Art is the imitatress of Nature,” and only slightly turns Schelling’s phrasing of the problem: “The Truths, I hope to convey, would be barren Truisms, if all men meant the same by the words, imitate and nature” (LL 2:219  CN, 3:4397; cf. StI 3:618–19, and KN 7:293). At this juncture, Coleridge introduces a distinction between copy and imitation which he did not simply translate or paraphrase from Schelling’s text: The impression on the wax is not an imitation but a Copy of the Seal—the Seal itself is an Imitation. But farther—in order to form a philosophic conception, we must seek for the kind—as the heat in ice— invisible Light—&c—but for practical purposes, we must have reference to the degree. It is sufficient that philosophically we understand that in all Imitation two elements must exist, and not only exist but must be perceived as existing—Likeness and unlikeness, or Sameness and Difference. All Imitation in the Fine Arts is the union of Disparate Things. (LL 2:220) In the latter part of this passage, Coleridge is indebted to earlier sources. He had given this same definition in Lecture 3 of the 1811–12 series on Shakespeare and Milton, which in turn merely abbreviated the version in Lecture 3 of the 1808 Lectures on the Principles of Poetry (LL 1:83–84 and 223–25). In this formulation he returns to the principle of idem et alter rather than simply affirming Schelling’s doctrine of universal polarity of conscious and unconscious, form and essence, revealed in art as the “reconciliation of all powers.” The first part of the definition, however, has several pertinent modifications of Schelling. Coleridge had previously referred to a waxwork human figure or a marble peach as a deceptive copy. But the example of the seal and its wax impression poses a different sort of problem. The impression in wax, after all, does not trick the senses as does the waxwork figure. It is a copy, indeed a very exact copy, but not a copy directly mimicking nature. The wax impression is an example of mechanical replication. Then Coleridge tells us that “the Seal itself is an Imitation.” But what, we might reasonably ask, does the seal imitate? Another seal? No, but rather the very “reconciliation of that which is Nature with that which is exclusively Human.” The seal itself possesses “a middle nature between a Thought and a Thing” and imitates the human process of transforming nature. Another attribute of Schelling’s Identitätsphilosophie is that the power in nature is the same as the power in mind, but the one is unconscious while the

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other is conscious and can reflect upon its own activity. As we have seen, this “Sameness and Difference” could be represented both actively and passively in art. Coleridge’s reference to “invisible Light” and “the heat in ice” draws from the same data in contemporary physics with which Schelling documented and reinforced his philosophical arguments.33 It is not enough to establish “the kind,” Coleridge adds, “we must have reference to the degree.” Light and darkness, heat and cold, may seem to represent differences in kind, but in the physics which Schelling appropriated in his philosophy, the apparent difference in kind is merely difference in the manifestation of the dynamic energy in nature. Ice possesses heat relative to an absolute scale of temperature; infrared and ultraviolet may be invisible to the human eye but they are nevertheless degrees of light.34 So, too, that energy which we experience as consciousness is altered by degrees in its transmutation through the media of material nature. When Coleridge translates Schelling’s basic premise—“in every work of Art the Consciousness is so impressed on the Unconscious, as to appear in it,” he adds another concrete example: “Letters on a Tomb compared with Figures constituting a Tomb.” He then affirms Schelling’s Identitätsphilosophie by declaring that the “Wisdom” (Wissenschaft) in nature and man are distinguished only by the “coinstantaneity” of “the Thought and the Production—In Nature there is no reflex act.” Schelling, too, states that unconscious wisdom anticipates or “prophecies” the reflexive activity of consciousness: “Every step antecedent to full consciousness found in Nature.” Even with reflexive consciousness, the mind is limited by the finite experience of the body, Schelling insisted, unless the mind also possessed the capacity to intuit its own participation in the unconscious energy of nature. Repeating Schelling’s definition, Coleridge writes: “There is in Genius itself an unconscious activity,” indeed, the unconscious power “is the Genius in the man of Genius” (LL 2:221–22; cf. StI 3:624). The lecture “On Poesy and Art” may resort to Coleridge’s earlier distinction between copy and imitation, but it has become absorbed within Schelling’s distinction between the “masks” wrought by “slavish fidelity” and the reconciliation of form and essence as “the vision and expression of the indwelling spirit of nature.” It might be argued that these are merely notes from Schelling which Coleridge intended in his lecture to set apart from his own thinking. In spite of his page references to Schelling, there are indications of Coleridge’s au33. Schelling, “Allgemeine Deduction des dynamischen Processes,” in Zeitschrift für spekulative Physik, for example, cites examples of the propagation and diffusion of electrical, magnetic, and chemical energy to document the basis in nature, as postulated in StI, of the “Zeit-Raum Bedingungen” of the Kantian Categories of mind. 34. Frederick Burwick, The Damnation of Newton, pp. 45–47, 126–35, 163–67.

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thorial appropriation. For example, when he offers Schelling’s distinction between Poesy and Art, he announces that he has personally “cherished the wish” to desynonymize the words as genus and species (LL 2:219).35 And again when he translates Schelling’s account of the neoclassical doctrine of mimesis set forth by Winckelmann, Coleridge lays claim to it as his own by substituting the name of Sir Joshua Reynolds. Are we to conclude, then, that by 1818 Coleridge had fully acquiesced to Schelling’s philosophy of art? As the evidence in “On Poesy and Art” clearly demonstrates, Coleridge has repeated Schelling’s major premises of artistic production as the opposition and reconciliation of the conscious and unconscious. It should also be acknowledged, however, that he has left these excerpts from Schelling bereft of their function as premises. He has avoided, that is, Schelling’s critical application of these principles. Coleridge refers neither to the critique of physical grace, nor to the objections against “characteristic” genre painting. He omits Schelling’s discussion of mimesis in sculpture and painting as determined by specific oppositions between the artist’s material and the allpervading energy: in the plastic arts, the struggle with gravity; in the graphic arts, the tensions of light and color. He also ignores the brief history of art in which Schelling narrates the cultural modulations of mythology. Apparently, then, Schelling’s premises had for Coleridge a very different set of implications. These may be best judged by tracing their advent and development in Coleridge’s thought. While it remains uncertain just when Coleridge first turned to Schelling’s philosophy, it is not until 1811 that Schelling’s terminology is reflected in Coleridge’s discussion of copy vs. imitation. Let us review what Coleridge had accomplished in his earlier commentary. In a Notebook entry of October 1804, he observed that objections against the opera were “equally applicable to Tragedy & Comedy without music, & all proceed on the false principle, that Theatrical representations are Copies of nature whereas they are imitations” (CN 2:2211; cf. entry of December 1804, in CN 2:2382). Another entry of November 1804 (or possibly 1808, as Kathleen Coburn has suggested, when Coleridge was preparing his lectures), not only contrasts likeness and difference, but also describes the transforming power of the imagination: Hard to express that sense of the analogy of likeness of a Thing which enables a Symbol to represent it, so that we think of the Thing itself— & yet knowing that the Thing is not present to us.—Surely, on this uni35. Schelling’s account of the dissemination of “Poesie” and “Kunst” as genus and species (StI and PdK, §64, in SW 3:618, and 5:473–74) is also evident in Coleridge’s “Principles of Genial Criticism” and in Lecture 1, 1811–12.

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versal fact of words & images depends by more or less mediations the imitation instead of copy which is illustrated in very nature shakespearianized—that Proteus Essence that could assume the very form, but yet known & felt not to be the Thing by that difference of the Substance which made every atom of the Form another thing—that likeness not identity—an exact web, every line of direction miraculously the same, but the one worsted, the other silk. (CN 2:2274) The identity and difference which exists in the relation between signifier and signified, a problem deliberated by Plato in the Cratylus dialogue, prompts Coleridge’s speculations into the simultaneous sense of absence and presence provoked by images and words. Artistic imitation is here defined as an elaboration or extension of this mediating capacity of the image. The phrase “nature shakespearianized” refers to that manner of representing nature which at the same time reveals the presence and power of the authorial imagination. Coleridge repeats the reference to the Protean transformation in Lecture 3 of his Lectures on the Principles of Poetry (1808). The criterion of true poetry is not its eloquence or passion, but the poet’s capacity to imbue the thing described with his own presence: “To become by power of Imagination another Thing— Proteus, a river, a lion, yet still the God to be felt there” (LL 1:69–70).36 In the “Desultory Remarks on the Stage,” which were probably intended for the 1808 lectures, he explains art as “imitating Reality (Objects, Actions, or Passions) under a Semblance of Reality.” Imitation is not deception; artistic illusion is not delusion. What is involved is, rather, “a sort of temporary Half-faith, which the Spectator encourages in himself & supports by a voluntary contribution on his own part, because he knows that it is at all times in his power to see the thing as it really is.” Here, anticipating his later definition of “Poetic Faith” as the “willing suspension of disbelief,” Coleridge accounts for the mediating process in terms of aesthetic response. But he also applies the mediating principle to the creative imagination. To understand why Shakespeare’s characters are “characteristic” in relation to humanity, yet “characterless” in relation to the poet, one must recognize “the living Balance” he sustains between meditation and observation (LL 1:126, 133–34).37 36. Reginald Foakes cites a similar reference to the Protean metamorphosis in William Richardson, A Philosophical Analysis and Illustration of Some of Shakespeare’s Characters, “He is the Proteus of the drama; he changes himself into every character, and enters easily into every condition of human nature.” Foakes also notes that Coleridge’s “subtlety lies in his insistence that Shakespeare is nonetheless still felt to be there.” 37. Foakes relates the Egerton MSS, including “Desultory Remarks,” to the 1808 lectures. The argument that in artistic imitation “it is a condition of all geniune delight, that we should not be de-

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In the fourth lecture of the 1808 series, Coleridge reiterates the distinction that drama “is not a Copy of Nature; but it is an Imitation.” A copy merely mirrors and reproduces, an imitation reveals the conscious artistry involved. Although “the consciousness of the Poet’s Mind must be diffused over that of the Reader or Spectator,” it must be “always in keeping.” To the extent that this “consciousness” pervades the work of art as an inherent and integral attribute, it successfully “prevents us from perceiving any strangeness.” Because we recognize a creative consciousness at work, the strange becomes familiar. The beautiful in nature is that which seems to reveal an artist’s creative touch: “Whenever in Mountains, or Cataracts, we discover a likeness to anything artificial which we yet know was not artificial, what pleasure!” So, too, in art the pleasure derives from perceiving a co-presence of the natural with the artificial, from feeling a “balance and antithesis of feelings and thoughts.” “This,” Coleridge asserts, “is the universal Principle of the Fine Arts.” Indeed, it is “probably . . . the condition of all consciousness, without which we should feel & imagine only by discontinuous Moments, & be plants or animals instead of men.” I mean that ever-varying Balance—or Balancing—of Images, Notions, or Feelings (for I avoid the vague word, Idea) conceived as in opposition to each other—in short, the perception of Identity & Contrariety—the least degree of which constitutes Likeness—the greatest, absolute Difference—but the infinite gradations between these two from all the Play & all the Interest of our Intellectual & Moral Being, till it leads us to a Feeling & an Object more aweful, than it seems to me compatible with even the present Subject to utter aloud, tho’ most desirous to suggest it—for there alone are all things at once different and the same—there alone, as the principle of all things, does distinction exist unaided by division / Will, and Reason, Succession of Time & unmoving Eternity, infinite Change and ineffable Rest. (LL 1:83–84)38 luded,” Coleridge documents with a reference to Adam Smith’s Posthumous Essays. Foakes quotes the relevant passage from Adam Smith, “Of the Nature of That Imitation Which Takes Place in What Are Called the Imitative Arts,” in Essays on Philosophical Subjects, pp. 131–79, “The works of the great masters in Statuary and Painting . . . never produce their effect by deception. They never are, and it never is intended that they should be mistaken for the real objects which they represent.” Foakes claims that Coleridge was indebted to Smith for his ideas on stage-illusion as well as his distinction between imitation and copy. 38. Foakes refers to this passage as “an interesting anticipation of ideas C expressed later in the essay ‘On Poesy and Art,’ which was developed from Lect 13 of the 1818 series and much influenced by his reading of Schelling’s System des transzendentalen Idealismus (1800).” The “general consonance here with Schelling’s discussion of objective and subjective” is more probably derived from Kant. See also Crabb Robinson, On Books and Their Writers, 1:52.

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The very act of self-awareness, then, results from the activity of mind which sorts out the self and other, idea and thing, subject and object. Obviously there is a Kantian, perhaps even a Fichtean thesis involved here. Only the reference to “infinite gradations,” were it not such a staple of Neoplatonism and gnosticism, might suggest the influence of Schelling.39 Schelling’s terminology, however, becomes evident in Coleridge’s notes and lectures of 1811. Schelling, as we have observed, introduced his distinction between the fantasy and the imagination in the context of his argument that all artistic imitation and representation is mythological. The imagination is the receptive organ of Ineinsbildung; the fantasy deals in external images. In his account of the origins of art in mythology, Schelling describes a polarity between the imagination, which attempts to comprehend the ideal, and the fantasy, which turns to constraining forms of physical matter. All representations of the gods involve both, the absolute within the finite, the spirit within the body, the idea within the symbol. But a Minerva or a Juno is conceived through the unrestrained receptivity of the imagination, while the monsters of the underworld, of chaos and darkness, take shape primarily through the fantasy. Proteus represents for Schelling the unity of nature, which in spite of “its manifold changing shapes,” is “always a whole like unto itself.” Proteus is therefore the apotheosis of the imagination which can behold the primal essence and grasp the truth even while the sensual and intellectual appeal of ever-varying images preoccupy the fantasy.40 Although he does not endorse Schelling’s mythological dogma, Coleridge responds to the distinction between fantasy and imagination: The image-forming or rather re-forming power, the imagination in its passive sense, which I would rather call Fancy  Phantasy, a NÓ40 ,40, this, the Fetisch & Talisman of all modern Philosophers (the Germans excepted) may not inaptly be compared to the Gorgon Head, which looked death into every thing—and this is not by accident, but from the nature of the faculty itself, the province of which is to give conscious39. Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, §§45–47, discusses nature, mind, and the subject-object reconciliation in imitation. Fichte, Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre, in Werke, vol. 1, pt. 2, pp. 300–302. PdK, in SW 5:378–83; see esp. §§10, 15–16, on revelation or immanence of God in nature in terms of “Potenzen.” 40. PdK, §§ 28–39, in SW 5:390–414; 404: “Die Ansicht der Natur als eines unter vielfach wechselnden Gestalten doch immer sich selbst gleichen Ganzen ist in der Gestalt des Proteus fixiert, der nur denen, die unter jeder Verwandlung ihn mit starken Armen festhielten, zuletzt in der Urgestalt erschien und ihnen das Wahre entdeckte” [The view of nature as one, even among manifold changing shapes, which is always a whole like unto itself, is fixed in the figure of Proteus; only to those, who with strong arms held him in every metamorphosis, did he appear in his primal shape and reveal to them the truth].

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ness to the Subject by presenting to it its conceptions objectively but the Soul differences itself from any other Soul for the purposes of symbolical knowledge by form or body only—but all form as body, i.e. as shape, & not a forma efformans, is dead—Life may be inferred, even as intelligence is from black marks on white paper—but the black marks themselves are truly “the dead letter.” Here then is the error—not in the faculty itself, without which there would be no fixation, consequently no distinct perception or conception, but in the gross idolatry of those who abuse it, & make that the goal & end which should be only a means of arriving at it. Is it any excuse to him who treats a living being as inanimate Body, that we cannot arrive at the knowledge of the living Being, but thro’ the Body which is its Symbol & outward visible Sign? (April 1811; CN 3:4066) Just as Schelling turned his construct of the myth-making polarity of imagination and fantasy into an account of the artistic process and the engendering of symbol and allegory, Coleridge proposes to use the distinction of fancy and imagination to “deduce the worth & dignity of poetic Imagination, of the fusing power, that fixing unfixes & while it melts & bedims the Image, still leaves in the Soul its living meaning.” Coleridge returns to this argument in his second lecture (21 November 1811) of the 1811–12 series. Granting Shakespeare’s many other “extraordinary powers,” Coleridge claims that “his judgment was the most wonderful.” Here, too, he elaborates his crucial distinction between the copy as a replica of the real, and the imitation as an imaginative transformation. Theatrical representations, in counterdistinction to the real, become “fit & true” only because they were perceived by the imagination as ideal. The effects of reality are tied to the moment: “If mere pain for the moment were wanted, could we not go to our hospitals: if we required mere pleasure could we not be present at our public fêtes?” As Du Bos and Bodmer had argued a century earlier, Coleridge attributes the aesthetic experience to an awareness of difference: “This was not what was required from dramatic exhibition: we wanted a continual representation of it before our eyes.” Without calling for adherence to the unities, as his eighteenthcentury predecessors had done, Coleridge repeats their claim that this difference involves our sense of space and time. In Coleridge’s reformulation, drama provides that experience of illusion which gives us pleasure in the power of our own imagination: “The real pleasure derived from knowing that the scene represented was unreal and merely an imitation” (LL 1:211). Lecture 3 (25 November 1811) goes on to clarify why only an imitation, not

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a copy, can produce “the great total effect.” A copy reflects only the accidents of the moment. An imitation reveals the informing presence of the mind. The word imitation, Coleridge once again explains, “means always a combination of a certain degree of dissimilitude with a certain degree of similitude.” It is our recognition of the difference which delights us. Even if the poet or artist has selected the “purest parts” of his material, they must still be blended with the mind. When Schelling describes the union of mind and matter in the work of art, there is simply a merging of the conscious with the unconscious. There is no immanence of the artist’s identity. Schelling’s concept of genius depends on the artist’s intuition of unconscious power, not on his capacity for self-projection. For Coleridge, the artist retains his identity as the divine center of his creation. When he speaks of a “higher” difference, it is not merely reflective consciousness which exalts the artist’s material. It is the artist’s own presence. Poetry results from “blending the nobler mind with the meaner object,” Coleridge says, but he does not describe the “nobler mind” as dissolving and diffusing itself in its creation. His earlier reference to Proteus, whether in 1804 or 1808, serves him perfectly in explaining his concept of the immanent self in the act of “blending”: “Proteus who now flowed, a river; now raged, a fire; now roared, a lion— . . . assumed all changes, but still in the stream, in the fire, in the beast, it was not only the resemblance, but it was the Divinity that appeared in it, & assumed the character” (LL 1:223–24). Coleridge insists on the controlling presence of the artist’s imagination. The distinction between copy and imitation thus has a non-Schellingian emphasis. It is “not the mere copy of things, but the contemplation of mind upon things.” In Lectures 6 (5 December) and 9 (16 December 1811), he further develops the ramifications of copy vs. imitation: a copy is the result of strict observation; an imitation requires the interest of meditation; the modern stage of mechanical contrivance attempts to copy, making everything appear reality; the Shakespearean stage relied on imitation, “and the Actor as well as the author were obliged to appeal to the imagination & not to the senses” (LL 1:289, 349–50). In Lecture 9, of course, passages from August Wilhelm Schlegel suddenly abound: mechanical and organic form, the sculpturesque Greek drama and the picturesque Shakespearean drama. Even previously formulated ideas take on fresh nuance under the stimulation of Schlegel’s analogical thinking. In appropriating Schlegel’s idea of the “painterly” (malerisch), for example, Coleridge describes an illusion that is no longer simply the “difference” projected by the mind, but a momentary realization of what even art cannot achieve. Shakespeare’s characters, however, are not confined by the painterly moment: “They have the union of

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reason perceiving, & the judgment recording actual facts and the imagination diffusing over all a magic glory” (LL 1:349).41 Here, too, his earlier assertion in 1808, of illusion as “half-faith” gains new and richer dimension. The thinking which prompted him to convert “half-faith” into a fully active “Poetic Faith” had been tentatively explored in his essay “On Certainty” (August–September 1809). Certainty cannot be attained through “the logical completeness of my Intuitions, Notions, Judgments, and Elementary Positions in themselves and in relation to my particular conviction.” An act of faith is required. In presuming “the universal and necessary truth of the principles of Logic,” the mind acts according to a “Confidence” rather than according to its achieved state of knowledge. Even the skeptic must believe in some absolute criterion to be reached through negative reduction. Coleridge may have the Cartesian “cogito” in mind. Without some pou sto, some “fixed Scale,” understanding and comparison are impossible. Thus the intellectual faculties are driven in an “Instinctive Pursuit of a sufficient ground.” Although the ground is unattained, “the sense of Power supplies the conviction, that there is a certain ground.” This faith is evident in our response to art. This is so true, that even in the Imitative Arts, that are supposed to have their being in fiction, a well-disciplined mind is offended by actual Delusion. To exclaim, that we had actually mistaken the picture for reality, is an hyperbole of a clumsy flatterer—and to have been gratified by an actual Cheat, the pleasure of a bad and vulgar Taste . . . the meanest Taste finds its pleasure in a painted marble Apple or Peach exhausted after it has been once or twice seen and handled—while the Fruit-piece of some eminent Dutch painter which had never appeared to him other than a picture will give him increased pleasure in proportion as he can be induced to look at and think of it. (CN 3:3592). In contrast to delusion, which is self-contained as counterfeit, illusion presumes a relation of object to subject—the very certainty missing from our experience. The Bible, with its “strong and very frequent eulogies on Truth” (CN 3:3592n), intends to teach the intuitive act of beholding an all-pervading intimacy between object and subject. Philosophers, too (Coleridge cites Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Malebranche, and Berkeley), are compelled by the same instinct to 41. Schlegel, Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literatur, in Kritische Schriften und Briefe, 6:228.

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derive from mere “representations & notions of Things” a universal and necessary ground. The compelling instinct is not prompted by “the desire of attaching Outness, an externality to our representations”; rather, the desire to externalize our representations is prompted by the instinct (“This very attachment of Outness originates in this Instinct”). In his letter to Charles Mathews (30 May 1814), Coleridge praises the actor for almost achieving illusion as Sir Archy Mac Sarcasm, in Charles Macklin’s Love à la Mode: A great Actor, comic or tragic, is not to be a mere Copy, a fac simile, but an imitation, of Nature. Now an Imitation differs from a Copy in this, that it of necessity implies and demands difference—whereas a Copy aims at identity. What a marble peach on a mantlepiece, that you take up deluded, & put down with pettish disgust, is compared with a fruit-piece of Vanhusyen’s [ Jan Van Huysum], even such is a mere Copy of nature compared with a true histrionic Imitation. A good actor is Pygmalion’s Statue, a work of exquisite art, animated & gifted with motion; but still art, still a species of Poetry. (CL 3:501) Whereas he had previously applied it to the drama and to stage illusion, he here extends his formulation of copy vs. imitation to include acting. Nevertheless, he has added nothing that could not have been written in 1804. Still it is a useful document to demonstrate both the tenacity with which Coleridge holds to his ideas and the flexibility with which he applies them. Just a few months later, in his essay “On the Principles of Genial Criticism” (August–September 1814), Coleridge once more set forth his ideas on copy and imitation. On this occasion, however, he borrows from Schelling’s “Über das Verhältnis der bildende Künste zu der Natur” several of the same ideas which he was later to use again in his lecture “On Poesy and Art.” Coleridge also employs in the opening paragraphs the same rhetorical topoi Schelling had used in his speech to the Bavarian Academy of Science: the praise of peace and tranquillity which allows the Fine Arts to flourish (“On the Principles of Genial Criticism,” in BL 1907, 2:220; cf. KN 7:291). Coleridge then defines poetry as the genus informing each species of art: “All the fine arts are different species of poetry.” As in Schelling, this genus is a Naturgeist, a spirit manifest in mind and in matter: “The same spirit speaks to the mind through different senses by manifestations of itself, appropriate to each.” Proposing to address the main principles of “the plastic and graphic arts,” he quotes from Remorse a tribute to the magic of mimesis,

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Which, like a second and more lovely nature, Turns the blank canvas to a magic mirror; That makes the absent present, and to shadows Gives light, depth, substance, bloom, yea, thought and motion.42 With Schelling, he acknowledges that much has already been written on the subject, but that he is confident that he can contribute something new. Again repeating Schelling’s definition of “Poesie” as “der werktätige Begriff ” informing all “Kunst,” Coleridge begins the second of the three essays with the statement that poetry is “the regulative idea of all the Fine Arts.” Schelling referred to the “operative wisdom in nature and art,” which, as “the link between idea and form, between body and soul,” enables us to conceive pure “unsensual beauty . . . represented to the senses”; art thereby provides “an active link between the soul and nature, and can only be conceived in the living middle between the two.” Coleridge’s contribution is that “taste is the intermediate faculty which connects the active with the passive powers of our nature, the intellect with the senses; and its appointed function is to elevate the images of the latter, while it realizes the ideas of the former” (“Genial Criticism,” in BL 1907, 2:227; cf. KN 7:292, 296). In the third essay of “On the Principles of Genial Criticism,” Coleridge uses the same distinction between “degrees” and “kind,” with the examples of “heat in ice” and “latent or fixed light,” which he repeats in “On Poesy and Art.” He then sets forth his definition of beauty as “multeity in unity.”43 His argument that “beauty is harmony,” and more specifically that “which is naturally consonant with our sense by the re-established harmony between nature and the human mind,” adheres to Schelling’s definition. In appropriating Schelling’s account of the reconciliation of the conscious and the unconscious, however, Coleridge alters the notion that the freedom and vitality in art is simply an expression of spontaneity and productivity prompted by the confrontation between the ideal and the real. He reasserts Schelling’s sense of the union of the “two conflicting principles of the Free Life, and of the confining form, but his emphasis is on freedom not as liberation from physical and material constraint, but freedom as an act of will. 42. Remorse, Act 2, scene 2, lines 42ff. (in Shedd). These lines, praising “the famous Titian,” were omitted from the first edition and restored in Coleridge’s note in subsequent editions. 43. The definition of the beautiful as “the many united into one” is commonplace; see esp. Moses Mendelssohn, Rhapsodie, pp. 134–35; parallel to Coleridge’s examples of the “painted tiger” and “fangless snake,” Mendelssohn describes the response to a “painted snake.” Harpur, Essay on the Principles of Philosophical Criticism, pp. 59–60.

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But we are conscious of faculties far superior to the highest impression of sense; we have life and free-will.—What then will be the result, when the Beautiful, arising from regular form, is so modified by the perception of live and spontaneous action, as that the latter only shall be the objects of our conscious perception, while the former merely acts, and yet does effectively act, on our feelings? (“Genial Criticism,” in BL 1907, 2:234–35; cf. KN 7:303–4, and StI 3:624–28) Schelling’s affirmation of freedom in his System des transzendentalen Idealismus and his Philosophie der Kunst has little to do with the individual and his personal or social predicament. Such concerns were developed later in his Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit (1809), but Schelling himself never modified his writings on art in terms of his subsequent concept of freedom. The Naturgeist, as the “appearance of freedom” in nature, also manifests itself in artistic genius, but this requires no determination of will: it is intuitive and arises from the unconscious (StI 3:608, 623). The natura naturans, or as Coleridge identifies it here, the forma informans, may exert essential freedom as it permeates the mechanically determined physical world, but the power which gives shape to the crystal or inspiration to the mind, in Schelling’s philosophy, depends on no act of will to call it forth. Coleridge, of course, gives particular emphasis to the will in the Biographia Literaria (1817): he readily grants that “the medium, by which spirits understand each other is . . . the freedom which they possess in common,” but that freedom must be brought into consciousness by discipline: “The inner sense has its direction determined for the greater part only by an act of freedom” (chap. 12: BL 1:243–44, 251; cf. Schelling, Abhandlungen, in SW 1:442–43); the secondary imagination may echo of the primary imagination but it functions only through “co-existing with the conscious will” (chap. 13: BL 1:304; cf. Methode 5:282, 324, and StI 3:626); not just the act of creation but the aesthetic experience itself requires a “willing suspension of disbelief ” (chap. 14: BL 2:6.). The act of the individual will also distinguishes the copy as mechanical replication or mirrored image from the transforming imagination which produces the imitation. In the context of discussing perception (chap. 8), Coleridge appropriates from Schelling to establish an immediate as well as a sensually mediated response (BL 1:137; cf. Schelling, Abhandlungen, in SW 1:362, 377–79). The dependency on the senses can give us only a copy. And at the close of his presentation of the ten theses, again from Schelling, demonstrating how perception leads to apperception, he repeats from the Omniana his account of “the imitative power, voluntary and automatic; the imagination, or shaping and modifying power; the

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fancy, or the aggregative and associative power” as well as the dominant control of reason and will (chap. 12: BL 1:293). Coleridge once more refers to “the Proteus of the fire and the flood” which “passes into all the forms of human character and passion” (chap. 15: BL 2:27). Even though Wordsworth intends “to imitate, as far as possible, to adopt the very language of men,” such an endeavor mistakes copy for imitation (chap. 17: BL 2:43, 54). Motivated by “the high spiritual instinct” which impells us “to seek unity by harmonious adjustment,” the poet creates an organic whole through imitation, distinguished from copy, as “the interfusion of the same throughout the radically different, or of the different throughout a base radically the same.” The imitation is the result of meditation, copy requires only observation (chap. 18: BL 2:72, 82–83; chap. 22: BL 2:144). Copy and imitation, real and ideal, observation and mediation, remain, as before, the essential attributes of that art which elicits our voluntary engagement of illusion. He rehearses these points, for example, in Lecture 4 of 1818. When we exclaim, “How natural Shakespeare is,” we surely cannot mean he copies nature, for “a mere copy never delights us.” In fact, we cannot “read but a few detached lines,” without recognizing the author. His characters become “true to nature” because they are mediated through his own experience. The term “nature,” we should notice, appears in a context where we might have expected “imitation.” Coleridge has not dropped “copy and imitation” from the set of oppositions; rather, he is rethinking his argument on the representative and the probable. In 1811, Coleridge had opposed the notion of Shakespeare’s natural genius as implying some kind of wild “Monster.” As becomes apparent in the final lecture series of 1818–19, he seeks to naturalize genius as the revelation of judgment. Here, however, he simply tells his audience that they must enter a kind of contract with the author. To appreciate the “exquisite judgement” of Shakespeare, they must “conceive a stage without scenery,” and they must be prepared to attend to the playwright who promises illusion to those who “will listen to me with your minds—& not with your eyes to scene & assist me with your imagination” (LL 2:115, 120, 122). The argument, developed in the lectures of 1808 and in subsequent lecture series, is brought forth for the last time in Lecture 1 of 1818–19. A proper understanding of the words “probable” and “natural,” he declares, is “the indispensable Condition not only of just and genial criticism, but of all consistency in our opinions.” These words, in their “ordinary meaning,” cannot be applied to the drama. Before he begins to unfurl the ambiguities in these words to locate the meanings he wants, he once again rehearses his familiar distinction of copy and imitation. Imitation is “contra-distinguished” from copy because of “a

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certain quantum of Difference.” “Difference” becomes the ground into which he transplants “natural” and “probable.” Once we have willingly set aside comparison and contrast, “our sense of Probability” is no longer compelled to refer to the causal conditions of the external world. By the criteria of comparison and contrast, we may be confronted with any number of incongruities and improbabilities which do not “disturb or disentrance us from all illusion.” Because they are accepted as a part of the fictive “groundwork of the story,” or because they are internally consistent with other elements of the drama, “they do not contravene or interrupt the Illusion”; they are improbable only when related to conditions outside the play. The choice to be deceived requires an attentive commitment to the mental state “in which the Images have a negative reality.” We are brought to this state gradually through the arousal of interest and excitement afforded “by the Art of the Poet and the Actors.” Then, “with the consent and positive Aidance of our own Will,” we take the essential step: “We chuse to be deceived.” The one abiding rule in this game of illusion is that the improbable must appear probable. We are neither lost in delusion nor committed to a mere “copy” of reality. Art offers us “a certain quantum of Difference,” and in this “Difference” we find the “indispensable condition and cause of the pleasure, we derive from it” (LL 2:263–67, 277). In Lecture 10 of his Philosophical Lectures of 1819, Coleridge discusses copy and imitation in terms of the philosophy and art of the Middle Ages. The debate between the Nominalists and the Realists, he observes, brings “into clear view what in all ages, clearly or obscurely conceived, works in the mind, the true engine of all speculation.” What “works in the mind” is the identity and difference of word and perception. The Nominalists “valued terms only as words, and . . . thought of such connexions as not applicable to nature at all but mere parts of logic.” The Realists “contended that those words appertain to certain forms of the mind and that those forms were truly correspondent to connexions in nature, so that the mind was to be conceived of as one pole of a line, the other pole of which was in nature—the contemplative and the contemplated being, as it were, the positive and negative points of the magnetic line.” He does not resolve this opposition, he merely offers it as symptomatic “of the Gothic mind—the inward, the striking, the romantic character.” The problem here echoes that of the Notebook entry of November 1804 (or 1808), when Coleridge confessed that it was “hard to express that sense of the analogy of likeness of a Thing which enables a Symbol to represent, so that we think of the Thing itself—& yet knowing that the Thing is not present to us.” The Nominalists and the Realists were engaged in the great battle over

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identity and difference: metaphor conjuring the presence of its referent and seeming to merge with it; metonymy ever moving away from the referent and exposing its absence. Unlike the Greeks who structured their ideal in external forms, the Gothic mind turned inward and its internal revelation “sullenly refuse[d] to disclose itself otherwise than in terrors.” They looked with awe upon Greek and Roman models, but their own dark inwardness and the paradoxical regard for the mystery of the word kept them from becoming mere copyists: “They professed to follow the ancients as guides. They sometimes copied; but nature maintained her rights, and instead of the copyists of Homer or Virgil, we have imitators indeed, in Dante and Ariosto; but imitators only as nature imitates herself, when the same energies are excited under other circumstances, and on different materials through which she is to diffuse her creative and shaping mind.”44 That “creative and shaping mind” diffusing itself through nature may betray traces of Schelling. Here, too, Coleridge comes closest to endorsing Schelling’s sense of the cultural modulations of the mythic quest to posit everything in the Absolute. But his lectures on philosophy, like his lectures on literature, focus on the capacities of the individual mind, not on a universal mythology of nature and human history. Having already observed the particular set of ideas which Coleridge took from Schelling, we should now find it easy to see how he has shaped them to mesh with the dialectic pattern of opposition. The copy replicates only the physical or material; it counterfeits the real; it addresses the senses and deliberately confuses the perception; it is created by a mechanical manipulation of images; the talent which it requires is in observation as well as in the facility of fancy (fantasy) to organize and arrange; it is appraised on positive and empirical grounds. Imitation reconciles mind with matter, real with ideal; it is created by reenacting the organic process; it engages the senses and the reason and reveals the paradox and harmony of its own representation; it requires the unifying power of the imagination and the genius to intuit the vital power with nature; it is accepted only on negative grounds, that is, with a poetic faith or conditional certainty of its probability. In the 1818 lecture “On Poesy and Art,” Coleridge has assembled from Schelling most of the elements which are relevant to the idea of imitation as the infusion of difference into sameness. Although presented within an attractive philosophical exposition of the dynamic interaction and primal identity of mind and nature, Schelling’s ideas provided Coleridge with nothing to corre44. Philosophical Lectures of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lecture 10 (March 1, 1819), pp. 291–92, 442n. CN 2:2274. PdK, in SW 5:435–51, compares medieval Christianity and classical antiquity.

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spond to his own concern with the act of will. Art has its “divine freedom,” for Schelling, through the “all-governing” powers of nature, which are impressed in its own insubduable power. When Schelling writes about the organic process, the freedom he affirms belongs only to the irresistible dynamism of the informing Naturgeist. In translating what he borrows, Coleridge tries to shift the emphasis over to a willing participation of the individual. For example, when Schelling writes, “Every creature of nature has but one moment of the true perfection of beauty” [Ein jedes Gewächs der Natur nur Einen Augenblick der wahren vollendeten Schönheit], Coleridge alters the significance so that it refers to the individual: “Every thing, that lives, has its moment of selfexposition.” The italics are Coleridge’s. Again, when Schelling writes about the determination of form in contrast to the organic growth of shape, Coleridge predicates the action in terms of “self-witnessing” and “self-effected” (LL 2:223–24; cf. KN 7:302, 306). Schelling, to be sure, also relies on “self-“ compounds; they refer, however, not to the individual but to the Absolute—which is “Selbst-konstruierend” and “Selbst-affirmirend.” Coleridge’s appropriation of the Naturphilosophie and Identätsphilosophie profoundly altered his exposition of artistic imitation. Unlike Schelling, Coleridge is concerned with the process of imagination as exercised by the individual, be it Shakespeare or Milton, himself or Wordsworth. On this personal level, the act of judgment is crucial, for the artist creates his art not by a dissolution of self, but by a reaffirmation and rebirth of self. The conscious will creates and controls its own fictive world. Coleridge, as we have seen, affirms an intuitive ground for the imagination which enables it to anticipate succession actively, as opposed to historic faith (which accepts the unfolding of events as inevitable). Schelling’s thought no doubt influenced Coleridge’s sense of an instinctive pursuit of that sufficient ground which he called a transcendental dos pou sto (CN 3:3592; Friend 1:104–5, 2:70–71). What Coleridge stressed, and what Schelling neglected, was the individual standing on this pou sto and manipulating the lever. From the theoretical ground of art as triadic union of mind-mattermedium, art as identity and alterity, art as the self-construct of the mind, we turn in the next three chapters to those poetic tropes or themes recurrent in romantic literature through which the writer made the mimetic process itself the subject of the work. A mirror is held up, not to reality, but to the work of art. Such self-reflexivity exists in the description of a painting or statue, the description of mirror reflections, and in the structural mirroring that takes place when a story is retold (yet no longer quite the same).

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       ,         ,      

The verbal description of a visual work of art bears the name given it in Greek antiquity: ekphrasis. The poet, by representing the work of the painter or sculptor, is offering us a mimesis of a mimesis which pretends to be externally directed, even when it is not: Homer never saw the shield of Achilles; Keats’s Grecian Urn existed only in his own imagination. But even when the poet looks upon an actual artifact, the verbal translation forces a self-reflexive scrutiny. Ekphrasis requires atten-

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    

tion to the presumptions and pitfalls of the artistic endeavor. In looking into another work of art, the writer may witness or even personally experience the entrapment of art. In his poem on Francesco Parmigianino’s Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror (1524), John Ashbery sees the artist as caught in a fishbowl and trying to break out.1 The figure seeking to escape the work of art is a frequent conceit in the ekphrastic poetry of the nineteenth century (used by Goethe, Gautier, Nerval, among others). Most recent criticism of ekphrasis has recognized a rivalry between language and artifact, a rivalry of sign-systems, or a rivalry that is gendered.2 The argument in behalf of gendered rivalry seems convincingly demonstrated in Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” in which a masculine narrator presumes authority over a feminine artifact, an “unravished bride.” Although gendered rivalry is not everywhere evident in romantic poetry, virtually ubiquitous are the alternations of fascination and fear, domination and submission. Rich and evocative examples abound in the poetry of Keats.3 Wordsworth, poet of nature, poet of the mind, was also poet of the painting. Nor was painting to him no more than what a yellow primrose was to Peter Bell. The experience of art often functioned just as did Wordsworthian memory, welling up with images of pleasure and pain from earlier years.4 No poet in the romantic period turned more extensively to ekphrasis than did Felicia Hemans.5 Among her many ekphrastic poems, several are at odds i. James A. W. Heffernan, Museum of Words, pp. 16–189. 2. Jean Hagstrum, The Sister Arts; Ian Jack, Keats and the Mirror of Art; Rennsselaer Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis; Murray Krieger, “Ekphrasis and the Still Movement of Poetry”; Mario Praz, Mnemosyne; Karl Kroeber, Romantic Landscape Vision; W.J.T. Mitchell, Iconology; Derrida, The Truth in Painting; James A. W. Heffernan, “Ekphrasis and Representation”; W.J.T. Mitchell, “Ekphrasis and the Other”; Krieger, Ekphrasis; Heffernan, Museum of Words; Grant F. Scott, The Sculpted Word; Peter Wagner, Reading Iconotexts. 3. Scott, The Sculpted Word, devotes chapters to “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles,” “Fragment of Castle-builder,” “Epistle to John Hamilton Reynolds,” “Eve of St. Agnes,” “Ode on Indolence,” “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “To Autumn,” Hyperion, and The Fall of Hyperion. See also Jack, Keats and the Mirror of Art. 4. Heffernan, Museum of Words, pp. 94–97, examines Wordsworth’s extensive and complex use of ekphrasis: “Elegiac Stanzas suggested by a picture of Peele Castle, in a Storm, painted by Sir George Beaumont”; “Upon the Sight of a Beautiful Picture, painted by Sir G. H. Beaumont”; “To B. R. Haydon”; “To B. R. Haydon, on Seeing His Picture of Napoleon”; “On a Portrait of the Duke of Wellington, by Haydon”; “Recollection of the Portrait of Henry VIII”; “To the Author’s Portrait [by W. Pickersgill]”; three sonnets suggested by William Westall’s Views of the Caves near Ingleton, Goredale Scar, and Malham Cove in Yorkshire (1818), published in Blackwood’s (January 1819); two sonnets “To a Painter” (“All praise the Likeness by thy skill portrayed” and “Though I beheld at first with blank surprise”); the description of Roubiliac’s Statue of Newton and in the passage on the monumental sculpture of London (The Prelude [1850], 3:58–63, 7:130–45). 5. The Poems of Felicia Hemans.

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, , 



with the assumption that the poet assumes gendered authority over the artifact. In “Properzia Rossi” she gives voice to the “celebrated female sculptor of Bologna” in the act of creating her statue of Ariadne: The bright work grows Beneath my hand, unfolded as a rose, Leaf after leaf, to beauty; line by line, I fix my thought, heart, soul, to burn, to shine, Through the pale marble’s veins. It grows!—and now I give my own life’s history to thy brow, Forsaken Ariadne!— (“Properzia Rossi,” 32–38) Hemans displays an astonishing range and virtuosity in her ekphrastic poetry. Some are expressed in a forthright feminine voice, as in “Properzia Rossi” or “The Queen of Prussia’s Tomb.” She also assumes a masculine voice, as in the dramatic monologue she gives to Pietro Mulier, the artist known as “Il Tempesto,” after his imprisonment in the dungeon of Genoa. She explores, too, the interaction of the verbal and the visual, as when she addresses her poetic text to the ekphrastic task of deciphering the text inscribed within Poussin’s painting Et in Arcadia ego. She responds to the work of contemporary artists in her poems on the paintings of Sir Charles Eastlake and the sculpture of Sir Francis Chantrey. In Modern Greece (1816) she praises the arrival of the Elgin marbles in England; in The Restoration of the Works of Art to Italy (also 1816), she describes famous works that had been transported to the Louvre and were returned to Italy after the defeat of Napoleon. Art is property. Domination and submission may be themes for gender rivalry, but Hemans develops them in terms of political power and the rise and fall of culture. Mimesis, ekphrasis, and aesthetic illusion, as Girard has argued (see Introduction), perpetuate destructive power. Nor is it easy, even with a writer aware of the entrapment, to resist the compelling authority. As instruments of the dominant ideology, the mimetic strategies of aesthetic illusion often bear the marks of authorial resistance or submission. Nevertheless, ekphrasis, as the mimesis of a mimesis, allows for a second sight, a second consideration. The work of art within the literary work is a mise en abyme that not only reinterprets, but also reshapes and redirects the writer’s earlier perception. In most literary genre such countercurrents may be revealed only through careful attention to the semiotics of the occluded and subverted reference. In the genre of “confession,” however, explicit admission of violating the ortho-

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    

doxy receives a degree of orthodox sanction. The themes of trespass and reconciliation in the confessional genre provided the apology of having put aside former errors as a justification for elaborating both defiance and capitulation. Thomas De Quincey, who established his reputation in the “Confessions of an English Opium-Eater” (1821) and spent many subsequent years of his career writing for the politically conservative Blackwood’s Magazine, continued to infuse virtually all of his writings with disrupting confessions of trespass. This chapter will focus on De Quincey’s use of ekphrasis, with special attention to how its mimetic replication served his vision of national politics, and to how its temporal-spatial presumptions were made to replicate the ups and downs of his opium addiction. That a dire price was to be paid for the magnificent visions he describes in “The Pleasures of Opium,” De Quincey candidly acknowledges in “The Pains of Opium.” How his personal crisis also reflected a national state of affairs is evident in his account of “The English Mail-Coach” (1849) as mighty organ of the nation: in its “Glory of Motion” the mail coach could “trample upon humanity” and become the instrument of “Sudden Death.” Ekphrasis for De Quincey was not simply an occasion to display a certain mastery of rhetorical enargia in attempting to conjure a visual work of art; he used ekphrasis, rather, for a particular confessional purpose. He readily admitted both deceit and personal agony in his very pretense of bringing language to challenge the representations of art. In the ekphrasis of the culminating “Dream Fugue,” the statue of the Dying Trumpeter winds a stony trumpet. It is the statue who acts, while the helpless opium-eater remains in the bondage of his dream; it is the statue whose dreadful blast proclaims from the field of battle the human sacrifice to the gods of war and empire. The poetic exposé of the conflict, aesthetic and ideological, is neither a skeptical breakdown of the poetic endeavor nor an ironic breaking-out-of the reflexivity of art imitating art imitating art; it is, rather, the painful confession of its deadly entrapment. The poet’s confrontation with artistic entrapment, W.J.T. Mitchell has described as “ekphrastic fear.” Poetic ekphrasis commences in “indifference,” the simple recognition that a painting or sculpture cannot possibly be represented in language. Yet as the poet undertakes that impossible task, there follows an “ekphrastic hope” that the power of metaphor to stimulate the visual imagination might actually succeed in overcoming the differences between verbal and visual modes of representation. This hope, Mitchell argues, quickly gives way to an “ekphrastic fear” born of anticipating the consequences of conjuring visual stasis.6 Should language succeed in generating the 6. Mitchell, “Ekphrasis and the Other.”

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

“frozen moment” of art, it would lose the power and dynamism of temporal movement. The fear no less than the hope of the ekphrastic endeavor attributes to art a permanence. The “frozen moment” endures. That it may thus transcend the transitory condition of mortality makes art much like death. The notion that one can “die into art” soothes the stark opposition in Horace’s phrase, “ars longa, vita brevis.” The mortal doom that casts its shadow even upon the joyous celebration of his marriage, Spencer can claim to transcend in his “Epithalamion” by offering “To short time an endless monument.” While the “endless monument” of art may thus preserve its subject, it is also evident that preservation is achieved only through embalmment. The artifact is forever petrified. Not the embalmment of the artifact but the embalmment of its author is what seemed so terrifying to those romantic writers who perceived their work as somehow identical with the activity of mind. In the works of Coleridge and De Quincey, who experienced something akin to self-embalmment in the thrall of opium, passages recur in which they record the peculiar alterations in their own temporal perception. In its initial effects, the drug accelerates mental activity even while the body succumbs in torpor; then, in its subsequent phase, consciousness lapses into lethargy, while the muscles begin to suffer nervous agitation. Precisely such alternating acceleration and retardation are among the themes which Alethea Hayter described as characteristic of the effects of opium on the romantic imagination. Opium, De Quincey declares in his “Confessions of an English OpiumEater,” wrought upon his mind and body “mighty antagonisms; infinite activities, infinite repose” (DQ 3:395). This statement is directly followed by a grand apostrophe to opium, a swelling crescendo that commences with the words, “O just, subtle, and all-conquering opium!” The irony of this passage is immediately accessible to readers who recognize that De Quincey has echoed the finale to Sir Walter Raleigh’s History of the World, who addressed these words to “O just, subtle, and all-conquering death.” Opium, as De Quincey went on to recount in the section of the confessions devoted to its “Pains,” gradually assumed a more debilitating hold on his body so that the drug became a Medusa, and he the hapless witness whom she turns to stone. It is not surprising that in De Quincey’s prose the verbal appropriation of the visual artifact is aligned with the same “mighty antagonisms” that he attributes to opium. The Medusa-moment is the paralysis engendered at its negative pole; at the positive pole is the animating power of the Pygmalion-moment. Although De Quincey, as he reveals in his “Confessions,” had recognized by 1821 how this polarity operated in his opium-induced dreams, it is not until 1827, when he left the London Magazine and returned to Edinburgh to work on Black-

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    

wood’s Magazine, that he came explicitly to terms with the problem of temporality in art. Among his first contributions were the essay on Lessing and the annotated translation from the Laokoon. Like many a critic who has since explored the temporal and spatial presumptions of the verbal and visual arts, De Quincey was not convinced by Lessing’s discrimination. One of his lengthier notes to Lessing’s text concerns the argument about the sort of temporal movement that might be effectively halted in the “frozen moment” of art. This was intimately relevant to the difficulty, with which he had already grappled in the “Confessions,” of representing how time seemed to accelerate or decelerate as opium rang its changes upon his body and his mind. Lessing, as De Quincey describes him in the essay introductory to his translation of the Laokoon, was not only an accomplished playwright and critic, he had personally brought about that Pygmalion-moment of giving vitality not only to German letters but also to the German people. To him goes the credit for “awakening the frozen activities of the German mind” (DQ 11:157). De Quincey’s annotations to the Laokoon reveal his effort to relate Lessing’s critical thought to his own. In his well-known distinction between the Literature of Knowledge and the Literature of Power, De Quincey revises Horace’s “aut prodesse, aut delectare.” While the purpose of the Literature of Knowledge is to teach, the function of the Literature of Power is not to delight but, as in Quintilian’s definition of rhetoric, to move. De Quincey means “to move” in the manifold sense of arousing the reason as well as the passions. While Lessing commanded such power in “awakening the frozen activities of the German mind,” his declaration that “the object of the fine arts is pleasure” prompted De Quincey to insist that “not pleasure, but the sense of power and the illimitable incarnated as it were in pleasure, is the true object of the Fine Arts” (DQ 11:172–73). When Lessing goes on to confirm the other half of the Horatian formula, that the function of art is to teach, De Quincey is prompted to append a “Postscript on Didactic Poetry” (DQ 11:215–21) elaborating his contention that the essential attribute of poetry was the power to move the mind. The power to move, which De Quincey insists is the object of art, depends in turn on the capacity of art to reveal that power in process. If art is to move, it must appear dynamic rather than static. As Lessing seeks to establish the regulative principles which govern the artistic endeavor to express “the acme or transcendent point of action,” De Quincey inserts no contrary notes. Lessing, of course, is also concerned with how mimesis in visual art is to overcome the bondage of its physical condition, “its punctual restriction to a single instant of time” (DQ 11:177). To resolve this problem of temporal restriction, the artist

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must show the “arrested movement”; the artist must create, that is, the illusion of a continuity of movement in the single instant which the work of art depicts. Once that continuity is perceived, it can be reanimated in the active mind of the beholder: If it be granted of the artist generally that of all this moving series he can arrest as it were but so much as fills one instant of time, and, with regard to the painter in particular, that even this insulated moment he can exhibit only under one single aspect or phasis, it then becomes evident that, in the selection of this single aspect, too much care cannot be taken that each shall be in the highest possible degree pregnant in its meaning,—that is, shall yield the utmost range to the activities of the imagination. (DQ 11:177) The “pregnant” moment is not the ultimate moment of crisis, Lessing argues, but in the movement leading toward that crisis. Thus the artist should represent the moment before the action rises to its extremity of passion: “To present the last extremity to the eye is in effect to put fetters on the fancy, and, by denying it all possibility of rising above the sensible impression of the picture or statue, to throw its activities forcibly upon the weaker images which lie below that impression” (DQ 11:178). De Quincey is in complete accord with Lessing’s contention that the temporal moment of art must appear continuous, and that the imagination of the beholder must be stimulated to reanimate the action. Crucial to this argument is Lessing’s discrimination of two modes of temporal movement. At this point, De Quincey finds it necessary to insert another lengthy note, not to disagree with Lessing but to elucidate further the two modes of temporal movement. One mode involves a homogeneous movement, which reveals a continuous, self-repeating, enduring action; the other a heterogeneous movement, which, as he translates Lessing’s phrase, is “essentially evanescent.” The artist must represent the former, not the latter. Although De Quincey agrees with Lessing, he explains the problem in terms which are more particularly relevant to his own grappling with temporal perception: “It is in the very antagonism between the transitory reality and the non-transitory image of it reproduced by Painting or Sculpture that one main attraction of those arts is concealed. The shows of Nature, which we feel and know to be moving, unstable, and transitory, are by these arts arrested in a single moment of their passage, and frozen as it were into a motionless immortality” (DQ 11:178). Lessing’s principle of representing events that progress through self-repeating rather

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    

than self-effacing action, De Quincey declares, “has been admirably drawn into light, and finely illustrated, by Mr. Wordsworth in a sonnet on the Art of Landscape-Painting.” The sonnet, “Upon the Sight of a Beautiful Picture,” in which Wordsworth describes a painting by Sir George Beaumont, provides De Quincey with a specific example of ekphrasis to elucidate the efficacy of enduring rather than evanescent movement in the work of art. The poet in the final couplet identifies “the great secret power” of the painting as its capacity to bestow upon One brief moment caught from fleeting time The appropriate calm of blest Eternity. Has the sonnet justified the claim of these closing lines? Has the poet actually shown how the artist has caught the moment from “fleeting time”? De Quincey acknowledges that the very notion of “fleeting time” might seem at odds with Lessing’s insistence upon durational time; “but all the illustrations of the sonnet,” De Quincey argues, show that Wordsworth has fully grasped the principle of continuous motion. In the succession of parts which make up any appearance in nature, either these parts simply repeat each other (as in the case of a man walking, a river flowing, &c.), or they unfold themselves through a cycle, in which each step effaces the preceding (as in the case of a gun exploding, where the flash is swallowed up by the smoke, the smoke effaced by its own dispersion, &c.). Now, the illustrations in Mr. Wordsworth’s poem are all of the former class: as the party of travellers just entering the wood, but not permitted, by the good, considerate painter, absolutely to enter the wood, where they must be eternally hidden from us; so again with regard to the little boat,—if allowed to unmoor and go out a-fishing, it might be lying hid for hours under the restless glory of the sun, but now we all see it “For ever anchored in its rocky bed”; and so on; where the continuous self-repeating nature of the impression, together with the indefinite duration, predisposes the mind to contemplate it under a form of unity, one mode of which exists in the eternal Now of the painter and the sculptor. (DQ 11:178–79) Because Wordsworth explicitly addresses the phenomenon of the “frozen moment,” his sonnet on Beaumont’s landscape provides, for De Quincey’s purpose,

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, , 



a better example of durational time than the description in “Elegiac Stanzas” of Beaumont’s painting of Peele Castle. By contrasting an imagined painting of Peele Castle in a setting of perfect tranquillity with Beaumont’s painting of the castle lashed by a violent storm, Wordsworth draws attention to the means by which temporal movement is represented. In his own imagined painting, where nothing is allowed to disrupt the tranquillity, there is also nothing to mark the passing of time: all action, all movement have been suspended in utter passivity. His unpainted painting would show the castle with its reflection “sleeping on a glassy sea”; the sunlight that might suggest passing time would be replaced by “the light that never was, on sea or land, / The consecration, and the Poet’s dream.” His vision of “steadfast peace that might not be betrayed,” Wordsworth admits, was mere selfdelusion. The death of his brother John, drowned at sea, has forced him to recognize human mortality and the ravages of time even in scenes of nature. “A deep distress,” he thus declares, “has humanised my Soul.” To depict such a “humanised” drama, Beaumont has painted the impact of “sea in anger” on the mortal struggle of ship and castle: That Hulk which labours in the deadly swell, The rueful sky, this pageantry of fear! And this huge Castle, standing here sublime, I love to see the look with which it braves, Cased in the unfeeling armour of old time, The lightning, the fierce wind, and trampling waves. (“Elegiac Stanzas,” 47–52) Although De Quincey does not elaborate on other instances of ekphrasis in Wordsworth’s poetry (for example, the statue “Of Newton with his prism and silent face, / The marble index of a mind for ever / Voyaging through strange seas of Thought alone.” Prelude 3.61–64), he does in his commentary on Wordsworth’s poetry emphasize the poet’s acute attention to visual detail. On such a passage from the “Kilchern Castle” (36–43), De Quincey comments: Who does not acknowledge instantaneously the magical strength of truth in his saying of a cataract seen from a station two miles off that it was “frozen by distance”? In all nature there is not an object so essentially at war with the stiffening of frost as the headlong and desperate life of a cataract; and yet notoriously the effect of distance is to lock up this frenzy of motion into the most petrific column of stillness. This effect

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    

is perceived at once when it is pointed out; but how few are they that ever would have perceived it for themselves! (DQ 11:315–16) “Arrested movement” is not simply an artificial convention of painting: it is a commonplace phenomenon of perception. Movement too rapid or too distant for the eye to perceive is blurred into a seemingly stationary object. Wordsworth, as a poet preoccupied with optical illusions, transformed an experience of the “frozen moment” into a moment of poetic awareness. Fascinated though he was with how optical illusion revealed the workings of the mind, he had no interest in the altered perception of rapidity and distance which opium might wreak upon the mind. In Wordsworth’s judgment, as De Quincey well knew, he and Coleridge had revealed only a moral turpitude in their addiction. Lessing explains the “essentially evanescent” as “All appearances in nature which bear the character to our understanding of sudden birth and sudden extinction, and which by their essence are fluxionary.” The “frozen moment” of art must be durational rather than evanescent. This sort of movement is unsuitable for representation in painting and sculpture, because it will inevitably appear “unnatural when fixed and petrified, as it were, into the unchanging forms of art.” If evanescent forms are “frozen,” Lessing asserts, they immediately appear unnatural and, even if “otherwise agreeable or terrific, inevitably become weaker and weaker in the impression the oftener they are contemplated” (DQ 11:178–80). De Quincey, however, is not willing to consider “arrested movement” a mere peculiarity of the work of art. It may, indeed, be odd, but not for that reason unnatural. He has himself witnessed such alterations in passing time, experienced the frightening sensation that time has stopped altogether. Depending upon the state of his drug-altered perception, a succession of events could register themselves in De Quincey’s mind at varying rates. The illusions of time rapidly fleeting or slowly creeping make Lessing’s objection to apparent suddenness less significant and merely subsidiary to his discrimination of the opposing modes of movement. De Quincey repeats Lessing’s objection to abrupt events, but he goes on to elaborate the importance of revealing sequential continuity in the “frozen moment.” Inappropriate to the visual arts is that sort of movement, “where the parts are not fluent, as in a line, but angular, as it were, to each other, not homogeneous, but heterogeneous, not continuous but abrupt.” As evident in his example of the flash and smoke of a gun, De Quincey argues against representing the evanescent event less because of its abruptness than because of the difficulty in revealing a continuity of process: “Both because each part really has, in general, but a momentary existence, and

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, , 

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still more because, all parts being unlike, each is imperfect as a representative of the whole process; whereas in trains which repeat each other the whole exists virtually in each part, and therefore reciprocally each part will be a perfect representation of the whole” (DQ 11:179). Parallel to the problem of representing durational rather than evanescent time in the visual arts, De Quincey notes that a similar problem exists in language when it is used not for the circumstantially ephemeral occasion of discourse but for the purpose of permanent inscription. The language inscribed upon a monument is subject to the same conditions of temporal continuity as govern visual representation of the “frozen moment,” for it too becomes visually fixed and permanent. De Quincey again turns to Wordsworth in whose “Essay on Epitaphs” he finds the most thorough exposition of the principles of representation applied to language: First, that all fanciful thoughts, and secondly all thoughts of unsubdued, gloomy, and unhopeful grief, are not less severely excluded from the Epitaph by just taste than by Christian feeling. For the very nature of the material in which such inscriptions are recorded, stone or marble, and the laborious process by which they are chiselled out, both point to a character of duration with which everything slight, frail, or evanescent, is out of harmony. Now, a fanciful thought, however tender, has, by its very definition, this defect. For, being of necessity taken from a partial and oblique station (since, if it coincided with the central or absolute station of the reason, it would cease to be fanciful), such a thought can, at most, include but a side-glimpse of the truth: the mind submits to it for a moment, but immediately hurries on to some other thought, under the feeling that the flash and sudden gleam of colourable truth, being as frail as the resemblances in clouds, would, like them, unmould and “dislimn” itself (to use a Shakespearian word) under too steady and continued attention. (DQ 11:179) Although he cites Wordsworth’s “Essay on Epitaphs” as resting on the same general principles which Lessing develops in the essay on the Laocoön, De Quincey in fact provides counterevidence to the major distinction which Lessing attempts to draw between the spatiality of art and the temporal flux of language. How language communicates alters radically when its use is shifted from one medium to another, not just from spoken to written, but from spoken in parliament to spoken in pulpit, from written in a chronicle to written on a monument. When painting appropriates language, a similar shift takes place.

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    

The words must bear the burden of duration, even as they interact within the illusion of transitory time. Thus, in Nicholas Poussin’s painting, the words “ET IN ARCADIA EGO,” which are aptly depicted as inscribed upon a monument, are also being pointed to, read, and interpreted by the figures within the painting who thus challenge the viewer of the painting to participate in the temporal action.7 “In an Epitaph, from its monumental character,” De Quincey asserts, “we look for a feeling which is fitted to be acquiesced in as final.” Therefore extremity of pain or grief are as ill-suited to the language of epitaphs as to the expression chiseled upon the face of the statue of Laocoön: “Upon the general principles of human nature, we know that the turbulence of rebellious grief cannot be a final, or other than a transitory, state of mind; and, if it were otherwise in any particular case, we should be too much shocked to survey it with a pleasurable sympathy” (DQ 11:180). De Quincey readily grants, however, Lessing’s point that the language of the evanescent moment can be of great use to the dramatic poet, for in the drama such passages “make parts, or steps, in a natural process the whole of which is given, and are effaced either by more tranquil sentiments, or by the catastrophe, so that attempt is there made to give permanence to the evanescent” (DQ 11:180). In comparing the representation of Medea in painting and in drama, Lessing reasserts the need for the visual arts to select “that point of the action which rather suggested than represented its crisis of extremity.” Thus the praise accorded to Timomachus for his representation of the intense passion of Medea is due to his having captured “that particular form of expression for the situation with which the sense of evanescence was not too powerfully connected to make us revolt from the prolongation of it by art.” Lessing, of course, is relying on verbal accounts of a painting that had long since perished. Timomachus’s rendition may well have been based on a scene from dramatic performance. Whether or not Lessing assumed that the work of art drew specifically upon Sophocles’ play, it is evident that his verbal description of that visual moment presumes a dramatic enactment. In giving us his account of the visual imitation of the verbal, he involves us in a verbal imitation of the visual. Indeed, the aesthetic response to the “frozen moment” of the painting is made dependent upon an imaginative reenactment of the tragedy. His purpose is to reiterate his criteria for the limits of evanescence: “The Medea was exhibited, not in 7. Nicholas Poussin, “ET IN ARCADIA EGO” (ca. 1630–35), Louvre; this version was often engraved; the earlier version by Poussin (1626–28) is in Chatsworth, Devonshire. Poussin adapted the theme from the painting by Guercino (1591–1666) which hangs in the Galleria Corsino. See Erwin Panofsky and Gerda Panofsky, “The ‘Tomb in Arcady’ at the ‘fin de siècle.’ ”

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, , 

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the very act of murdering her children, but a few moments before, whilst the struggle was yet fervent between maternal love and jealousy. The issue is foreseen; already, by anticipation, we shudder at the image of the mother mastered by her murderous fury; and our imagination transports us far beyond any effect that could have been derived from the actual exhibition of this awful moment” (DQ 11:181). Once again citing as his evidence a work of visual art which survives only in verbal tradition, Lessing tells of the failure of a contemporary of Timomachus who committed the grievous error, in attempting “to exhibit Medea in the very transports of her murderous frenzy; and thus upon a thing as fugitive as a delirious dream had conferred a monumental duration,—which is shocking and revolting to nature.” Proof of the failure is the scorn expressed by the poet who lays ekphrastic claim to the apparently unabating madness captured in the painting: “ ‘Ha! Medea, is then thy thirst after thy children’s blood unquenchable? Doth there rise up for ever another Jason and another Creusa, to sting thee into madness? If so,’ he adds in indignation, ‘cursed be thou, even in the painter’s mimicry!’ ” The aesthetic judgment, endorsed and upheld by Lessing, is more obedient to tradition and cultural conventions than to any deficiency in temporal dynamism which he seeks to grant to language and deny to art. The artists themselves, fortunately, paid little heed to the limits which Lessing argued were insurmountable. Sir Joshua Reynolds’s well-known painting Sarah Siddons Contemplating the Tragic Muse, for example, depicts the actress seated between two ghostly images of herself acting out the tragic scenes of rage and remorse. With her left hand raised, she summons to the murderous deed an image of herself bearing a poisonous beaker, her face contorted with precisely the impassioned fury to which Lessing strenuously objects; parallel with the angle of the contemplative Sarah’s right hand, which declines from the armrest of her chair, is the bloody knife held by the other image of herself as the murderess who has just recognized the horror of her atrocity. Nor should Reynolds reap undue praise for his originality in overcoming the temporal obstacles of his medium. To introduce into the painting of the contemplative Sarah Siddons the very object of her contemplation—herself as tragic heroine before and after she has committed the deadly crime—Reynolds simply adapted the temporal structure of the triptych, much as Bosch used it in The Garden of Early Delights, flanked to the left with a scene from Paradise, to the right with a scene from Hell. Historically, the visual arts have adapted a wide variety of conventions to express the passing of narrative time. Hogarth, we remember, used a series of plates to narrate stories in A Rake’s Progress, The Harlot’s Progress, and Marriage à la Mode. A narrative sequence of visual scenes, of

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    

course, is as commonplace in traditional Christian iconography as the Stations of the Cross. Few artists of the Late Middle Ages felt that they were obliged to represent but one temporal moment in a painting. As the eye moves about the painting to interpret the visible signs, it becomes involved in the passage of time no less than it does in reading a printed text. Such stories as “Susannah and the Elders” or “David and Bathsheba” were represented in a series of scenes in a single painting. Because the eye is not captive, but free to move from one scene to the next, Lessing’s argument against the repugnance generated by rendering a moment of extreme passion is mitigated by the very sort of narrative movement which he grants to the verbal arts. In another lengthy note to his translation, De Quincey sets forth his oftreiterated principle of idem in alio. This passage, of course, was among those we examined in Chapter 2, but it is worthwhile considering why in his translation of the Laokoon, De Quincey felt compelled to elaborate on “similitude in dissimilitude” as a crucial attribute of the mimetic arts. The immediate occasion for the note is to augment Lessing’s explanation of why Laocoön is depicted nude rather than in his priestly robes. Drapery, although also possessing an appropriate beauty, Lessing explained, detracts from the artistic representation of the human form. De Quincey, here and elsewhere, finds Lessing too preoccupied with the sensuous image. Better suited to the representation of the sensuous image is painting, in which shading and coloring render flesh and drapery more excitingly “alive.” Sculpture, even that of “the most perfect master,” reveals not flesh but the human form in stone. While the painter can meet the challenge of idem in alio in representing the scene of Pygmalion with the statue coming to life, the same scene remains problematic for the sculptor. “The characteristic aim of painting is reality and life; of sculpture, ideality and duration. Painting is sensuous and concrete; sculpture is abstract and imaginative” (DQ 11:194–96).8 De Quincey, to be sure, fully sanctioned Lessing’s distinction between evanescent and durational time. Yet in acknowledging that halting the evanescent moment could produce effects that were revoltingly grotesque, he also knew how to use effectively the horror of freezing a moment of crisis, of stopping the forward thrust of the narrative to rivet the reader’s attention to the moment of violent passion or destruction. Consider, for example, that scene in “Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts,” in which he conjures the return of the servant girl, Mary, to the household in which the fiendish Williams has 8. This particular formulation of the difference between the sculpturesque and the picturesque owes more to A. W. Schlegel’s reading of Lessing than to Lessing’s own account, and De Quincey no doubt knew it, as well, from Coleridge’s lectures on Shakespeare.

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just finished slitting the throats of Mr. and Mrs. Marr, the apprentice boy, and even the infant in its cradle. Mary, in the scene which De Quincey elaborates with the excruciating detail of slowly passing seconds, enters the darkened house where the murderer awaits. When she pauses at the door of the bedroom corridor, De Quincey stops the action for a full page to ponder the dire predicament: “He, the solitary murderer, is on one side of the door; Mary is on the other side” (DQ 11:88). Will she open the door? Will he? The extended moment of suspense, a narrative trick often practiced in the tale of terror, may well have its origin, as De Quincey repeatedly testified, in the nightmare experience of being caught in some perilous horror with no power to flee nor even to fend off the danger. To be paralyzed with fear became for De Quincey a recurrent correlative of being physically enervated by opium. Knowing that he would be unable to rouse himself to action, he could not suppress the paranoiac fear which arose as demonic companion to his enfeebled condition. Once the opium began to take command of his biochemistry, numbing every muscle, even as it liberated in reverie his rich store of imagery, each sensation of delight brought with it an associated image of menacing evil. Thus in that moment in which desire has animated the statue and Pygmalion seeks to embrace her, she is transformed into the Medusa who turns him to stone. The ephemeral “roses and Fannies” of the Pygmalion-moment, to use the example in “The Glory of Motion,” are inseparable from the unchanging “crocodiles” of the Medusa-moment. If, therefore, the crocodile does not change, all things else undeniably do: even the shadow of the pyramids grows less. And often the restoration in vision of Fanny and the Bath road makes me too pathetically sensible of that truth. Out of the darkness, if I happen to call back the image of Fanny, up rises suddenly from a gulf of forty years a rose in June; or, if I think for an instant of the rose in June, up rises the heavenly face of Fanny. One after the other, like the antiphonies in the choral service, rise Fanny and the rose in June, then back again the rose in June and Fanny. Then come both together, as in a chorus—roses and Fannies, Fannies and roses, without end, thick as blossoms in paradise. (DQ 11:289) This bliss of paradisiacal images is disrupted by the inevitable demoniacal intrusion: “Then comes a venerable crocodile, in a royal livery of scarlet and gold, with sixteen capes; and the crocodile is driving four-in-hand from the box of the Bath mail.” De Quincey’s account of the associational game thus played out

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    

repetitively and relentlessly in his dreams involves a contrariety even more disturbing than the fearsome crocodile juxtaposed with the beautiful roses and Fannies. It is the contrariety of the “frozen moment.” The galloping coach is halted, De Quincey declares, “And suddenly we upon the mail are pulled up by a mighty dial, sculptured with the hours.” The irreality of time in the nightmare void Coleridge had also, in the poem “Limbo,” described as “Mark’d but by Flit of Shades—unmeaning they / As Moonlight on the Dial of Day.” What had seemed dynamic are but captive images, caught upon a dial where only shadows move, returning again and again to haunt the dreamer: Once again the roses call up the sweet countenance of Fanny; and she, being the granddaughter of a crocodile, awakens a dreadful host of semi-legendary animals—griffins, dragons, basilisks, sphinxes—till at length the whole vision of fighting images crowds into one towering armorial shield, a vast emblazonry of human charities and human loveliness that have perished, but quartered heraldically with unutterable and demoniac natures, whilst over all rises, as a surmounting crest, one fair female hand, with the forefinger pointing, in sweet, sorrowful admonition, upwards to heaven, where is sculptured the eternal writing which proclaims the frailty of earth and her children. This is the ekphrastic moment which provides the paradoxical climax to De Quincey’s celebration of movement in “The Glory of Motion.” The galloping mail coach is but a sculptured device to point the passing hours upon a sundial, and the fleeting moments, animating and petrifying, are emblazoned as heraldic emblems upon a shield. In “The English Mail-Coach,” not only is the paralysis he describes in “The Vision of Sudden Death” a direct consequence of the troubled exhilaration he experiences in “The Glory of Motion,” both alternate in the imagery of shipwreck and marble tombs in the “Dream Fugue.” The sense of exhilarating motion and the helpless paralysis are relocated in the figure of the woman doomed to an inescapable cycle of “infinite activities, infinite repose.” As a case study in ekphrastic paralysis, “The English Mail-Coach” reveals how De Quincey’s experience of heightened perception accompanied by bodily torpor gave rise to images of action and stasis. He describes himself in a helpless stupor, unable to move or act, seated beside the sleeping driver as the speeding mail coach thunders down upon the young lovers who fail to see in time their impending peril. The frantic gestures of the woman continue to haunt his dreams, which he subsequently narrates in dream-fugue variations on the moment of death. Not only is the experience of thrilling motion overwhelmed by the narrator’s paralysis

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and thus gradually turned into a tale of terror, he concludes by describing himself turned to stone as he witnesses the marble figures upon the graveyard monuments arise and move. Although Coleridge in “Kubla Khan” and Keats in “The Fall of Hyperion” depict struggles with lifeless paralysis that are thematically similar to De Quincey’s visions of petrifaction, they do not share his peculiar reversal of the ekphrastic polarity. The paradoxical tension of art vs. life has been frequently scrutinized in that prime example of ekphrasis in English romanticism, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” As other critics have observed, there is something perverse in the poet’s apparent delight over the predicament of the urn as an “unravished bride,” the stasis of the “wild ecstasy” of the figures with which the urn is decorated. The unconsummated bliss of the lovers may well seem a mixed blessing, in spite of the poet’s argument that they are thus liberated from “all breathing human passion . . . / That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d, / A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.” The perversity has been located in the peculiar ekphrastic domination which the male poet exercises over the female work of art and the scenes that define its identity as purely ornamental eroticism. The static condition enables the poet to mediate and control the ecstatic energy of his subject. Although he deliberately insists upon its stasis as necessary condition to its permanence as art, the poet nevertheless posits the very temporal movement that he pretends to deny. The evocations of movement must be conjured in order to describe the “mad pursuit” of men and “maidens loth,” the melodist “For ever piping,” the lovers ever about to kiss. Yet in declaring the power of the beautiful “Sylvan historian” to “express / A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme,” he promptly exposes its limitations. For all its power to “tease us out of thought / As doth eternity,” its Attic beauty remains a “Cold pastoral!” An exclamation point marks this judgmental declaration of the deathlike coldness which is neither warmed nor vitalized by the reassurance that the urn is a “friend to man” to whom it communicates the sole essential knowledge that “ ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty.’ ” When the narrator in the “Eve of St. Agnes” chides the Beadsman for ignoring the figures of “The sculptur’d dead” which “seem to freeze, Emprison’d in black purgatorial rails: / Knights, ladies, praying in dumb orat’ries,” he advocates an aesthetic empathy capable of restoring human feeling to the cold inanimate work of art. By accusing the Beadsman of a “weak spirit” for failing “To think how they may ache in icy hoods and mails,” he implicitly invokes the reader to exercise a more sensitive response. An aesthetic of animating empathy rather than willful control is also pronounced in “The Fall of Hyperion.” The poet who declared himself “half in love with easeful death” in “Ode to a

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    

Nightingale,” who feared that “I may cease to be / Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,” commenced “The Fall of Hyperion” with the morbid prophecy that “When this warm scribe my hand is in the grave,” posterity will decide whether his visions were those of a poet or a fanatic. This same movement of “dying into art” is rendered thematic as the poet manipulates his narrative through the labyrinthine recesses of dream within dream within dream. Yet with each recapitulation of the basic opposition between action and stasis, the dreamer is increasingly threatened with the paralysis of vision. The dreamer, who awakens belatedly at the site of the edenic banquet of Milton’s Paradise Lost, eats of the abandoned fruit, drinks of the “transparent juice,” and falls into another slumber. In this dream within a dream, he finds himself enclosed within a huge cathedral-like vault. Traversing the vast architectural space, he approaches a lofty altar; standing at the foot of the stairs that ascend its heights, he hears the words of doom: “If thou canst not ascend / These steps, die on that marble where thou art.” As he approaches the altar his entire being is inflicted with cold and numbing pain; he is at the brink of death when his “iced foot touch’d / The lowest stair”; then with each step his vital impulses are restored. Atop the altar he is challenged by Moneta, high priestess of memory and the mythic past, and their dialogue elaborates once more what it means “to die and live again.” Guided by Moneta, the dreamer suddenly emerges in the realm of a third dream, “Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,” where Saturn, great Titan of Time, had fallen “When he had lost his realms.” The frozen immobility of Saturn expresses precisely the conditions of the ekphrastic fear: to enter into the “endless monument” of art is to bear the risk of permanent entombment. While Coleridge, too, inveighs against the paralysis of vision, he blames the mind itself rather than the artistic endeavor for the enervation of the “genial spirits.” Thus in “Dejection: An Ode,” he seeks to dispel the “viper thoughts that coil around the mind.” In “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Coleridge named his demon “Life-in-Death.” When the curse of the slaying of the albatross falls upon the mariner, he and the crew are stranded, “As idle as a painted ship / Upon a painted ocean.” In the game of dice Death wins the crew, but Life-in-Death, as the apotheosis of his guilt and the agent of his apostasy, claims the Ancient Mariner. His blessing of the water-snakes may restore his ability to pray, but he is still under her awful shadow as he commences, like the Wandering Jew, his long trial of penance. Although she first pronounced her chilling spell over the Mariner years before Coleridge suffered the debilitating enthrallment of opium, when she is later invoked, in “The Pains of Sleep” and “Epitaph for S.T.C.,” she is more intimately identified with his addiction. The opium dream of “Kubla Khan” also describes the antagonism of life and

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art, torpor and vitality, edenic fertility and lifeless lassitude. The pleasure dome and the River Alph seem to arise twin-born within the “walls and towers” of Xanadu. The River Alph, as the dreamer reveals in opening lines of his vision, is doomed to descend “Through caverns measureless to man, / Down to a sunless sea.” The dreamer, virtually caught up in its current, is compelled along the same plummeting course. Alph surged through the “deep romantic cavern,” spent its last tumultuous energies as a “mighty fountain” erupting in “halfintermittent burst” from its underground channel before it finally “sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean.” It is only at this juncture that the paradox of the lifeless entrapment is revealed. There amidst the “caves of ice” hovers the image of the pleasure dome. Kubla himself seems to be one with the dreamer as he witnesses this “miracle of rare device,” for it is Kubla, standing amidst the tumult as it subsides into helpless passivity, who “heard from far / Ancestral voices prophesying war.” Not the pleasure dome in the creative moment of the decree, not the surging River Alph in its tumultuous descent, but the paradox of “that sunny dome!” within “those caves of ice!” produces the haunting image of artistic entrapment which the dreamer desires to re-create in song. Yet even if he should succeed, the vision would be met with fear and dread as the conjuration of one who “on honey dew hath fed / And drunk the milk of paradise.” No writer of the romantic period dealt more extensively with artistic entrapment than De Quincey. As in Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” he often described processes of powerful energy in opposition to paralyzed immobility; the historical sweep of eons may seem to pass as he struggles to rise from his couch, or mere seconds to swell ponderously and extend into infinity. Among the dream-visions, where the excruciating attenuation of time is a dominant motif, one may cite that glimpse of infinitude in the bravura piece, adapted from Jean Paul, which he appends to the essay on Lord Rosse’s telescope. Weary of the “persecutions of the Infinite,” and seeing no end to the journey, the traveler begs his angelic guide to let him lie down in his grave. “ ‘End there is none?’ the Angel solemnly demanded. ‘And is this the sorrow that kills you?’ But no voice answered, that he might answer himself. Then the Angel threw up his glorious hands to the heaven of heavens, saying, ‘End there is none to the Universe of God? Lo! also THERE IS NO BEGINNING’ ” (DQ 8:34). Time and space are too vast to be endured by mortal perception. “The spirit of man,” the dreamer cries out, “aches under this infinity.” Associated with the agony of limitless time and space is the agony of absolute confinement in the “frozen moment.” The one evokes the other as inexorably as the image of Fanny of the Bath road calls forth crocodiles and basilisks, as ineluctably as the galloping mail coach is transfixed upon a sculptured sundial or among prophetic emblems upon a shield.

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    

With his description of the shield, De Quincey submits his own entry alongside those examples of ekphrasis, the shield of Achilles as described by Homer (Iliad 18.478–607) and the shield of Aeneas as described by Virgil (Aeneid 8.626–728) to which Lessing devoted special attention in his Laokoon. Lessing’s argument is that the ekphrasis in Homer succeeds, because the description does not interrupt the progression of narrative time with an exposition of ornamental details that are confined in the fixed space of the unmoving, unchanging artifact. Homer liberates the “frozen moment,” by describing “the shield not as a thing finished and complete, but in the stages of its growth.” Homer converts spatial nebeneinander into temporal nacheinander, by showing Vulcan “in the act and process of making it.” Virgil’s description of the shield of Aeneas fails, according to Lessing, because, rather than recounting how the prophetic embellishments were wrought, “prophecy as prophecy,” he has required the action of the poem to stand still while he interprets those emblems upon the shield (DQ 11:211–12). In his note to this passage in the Laokoon, De Quincey does not attempt to defend Virgil’s ekphrasis. He simply calls attention to the inherent temporal succession of prophecy: when it is delivered, when it is deciphered, when it is fulfilled. “By ‘prophecy as prophecy,’ ” De Quincey observes, “Lessing means prophecy in the station of the prophet, not as retrospectively contemplated by the interpreter” (DQ 11:212). Like the shield in Homer’s Iliad, De Quincey’s shield is wrought before our eyes; like the shield in Virgil’s Aeneid, it is emblazoned with prophetic emblems. But De Quincey’s shield is no palpable artifact, it is an image from a dream; not hammered into being by a divine artisan, but embalmed into memory from out of waking experience; and while it is prophetic, its meaning is manifest in its very appearance. De Quincey need not pause in his narrative to interpret its paradox as self-fulfilling prophecy. Zeno created his paradoxes by confounding the measurement of time with the measurement of space: the arrow in flight does not move, the swift Achilles can never catch the tortoise. De Quincey, too, as may be seen in the exquisite scrutiny he brings to the passing moment as measured by the water drops of a Roman clepsydra, enjoyed the logical subtleties of the temporalspatial paradox. Although he plays out the elements of seeming infinitesimal division in “The Vision of Sudden Death,” the narrator knows full well that a Zenoan paradox cannot forestall the collision of the mail coach with the little gig. In an early draft of this section of “The English Mail-Coach,” De Quincey inserted a parenthetical reminder to himself that he should “notice to the r[eader] the imposs[ibility] of fixing an absol[ute] point in things so varying as a

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, , 

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succession of time.”9 This recognition of the impossibility of the task documents what Mitchell called ekphrastic indifference, yet in subsequent drafts De Quincey soon succumbed to the antagonism of ekphrastic hope and fear. In the manuscript for the version first published in Blackwood’s (December 1849), De Quincey altered his strategy: he now sought to overcome that impossibility. More remarkable, his own paralysis in the onrushing succession of time is duplicated, relocated. One young man sits enthralled in an opium trance, awed by his dangerous predicament as the coachman sleeps and the coach races wildly down the wrong side of the dark road. Another young man sits beside a young woman, his head bent close to hers, oblivious to the imminent disaster. In the earlier manuscript draft, De Quincey wrote of that other young man, after he had struggled to wheel the gig out of harm’s way: “that which could be done, [he] had /been done.” In the subsequent version, describing how he forced himself to shout a warning in spite of his inability to move, he takes that phrase for himself: “Now then [I had] /all had been done [all] that /by me could be done: more on my part was not possible.” And in the gig, after it has been struck a splintering blow by the passing coach: “The young man sate like a rock. He stirred not at all. But his was the steadiness of [frozen] agitation frozen into rest by horror.”10 9. National Library of Scotland: MS 21239, f62: “Suff[er] me, reader to recal [int] bef[ore] your memory Suffer me to converge the elements of the case. /They were these (or These they were). From a [deep] breakless [hush] /hush [and /from the peace] of this saintly sum[mer] night,—from the pathetic blending of this sweet moonlight dawn-light, dreamlight—(notice to the r[eader] the imposs[ibility] of fixing an absol[ute] point in things so varying as a succession of time.)—from the tenderness of this manly fluttering—whispering—murmuring love—suddenly as fm the—f[iel]ds and the w[oo]ds sud[den]ly as from the chambers of the air,—sud[denly] as fm the gd opening at sunset—leaped upon her with the flashing of cataracts—Death the crowned phantom, with all the eq[uipage] of his ter[rors], and with the [an] tiger roar of his voice. The young man sat like a rock: that which could be done, [he] had /been done.” i0. National Library of Scotland: MS 4789, f19, ff22–23: “But the Lady—! Oh heavens will that spectacle ever depart from my dreams, as she rose and [rav] sank upon her seat, /sank and rose, [tossed] /threw up her arms wildly to heaven, clutched at some visionary object in the air, fainting, praying, raving, despairing?—Figure to yourself, reader, the [unpar] elements of the case: suffer me to [recal] recal before your mind the circumstances of the unparalleled situation. From the [peac] /silence and deep peace of this saintly summer night, from the pathetic blending of this sweet moonlight, dawnlight, dreamlight,—from the manly tenderness of this flattering, whispering, murmuring love,—suddenly as from the woods and fields,—suddenly as from the chambers of the air opening in revelations,—suddenly as from the ground yawning at her feet, leaped upon her with the flashing of cataracts, Death the crownéd* phantom, with all the equipage of his terrors, and the tiger roar of his voice. “The moments were numbered. In the twinkling of an eye our flying horses had carried us to the termination of the umbrageous aisle; at right angles we wheeled into our former direction: the turn of the road carried the scene out of my eyes in an instant, and swept it into my dreams for ever.” *It is important to my rhythmus that this /word crowned should be read, and therefore should be printed, as a disyllable—crownéd.”

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    

The temporal movement in De Quincey’s narrative is carefully counted out in Zenoan measures. As in that scene in “Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts,” where Mary pauses on one side of the door and the murderer waits on the other, time is not halted, but simply attenuated and minutely articulated. According to Lessing’s crucial distinction in Laokoon: “The language of painting consists in lines and colour, which exist in space; the language of poetry in articulate sounds, which exist in time.” For this reason, Lessing asserts, “Art is obliged to abstain from all images of which the different parts are in the successional connexion of time” (DQ 11:207). De Quincey objects that “Lessing is too palpably infected by the error which he combats.” Although Lessing intends to make a case for poetic experience, the poetic becomes “too frequently in his meaning nothing more than that which is clothed in a form of sensuous apprehensibility.” Even the purely descriptive, whether represented by painter or poet, becomes picturesque or poetic only “in and through the passion which presides” (DQ 11:206). A scene, De Quincey argues, must be transferred from its visual or verbal medium to the subjective experience of the perceiver. Temporal experience is subjective experience. Lessing’s case for the temporality of the verbal arts, it should be noted, rests upon the “articulated sounds” of spoken language. What sort of temporality, by this criterion, can be claimed for words printed upon the page? Certainly not that sort of temporality usually referred to as “narrative time.” A narrator can make time run forward or backward, quickly or slowly. Whatever the illusions of temporality in narrative, they are seldom, even in dialogue, regulated by the passing time of “articulated sounds.” Indeed, a narrator may find it easier to recount in a paragraph the passing of a month than the passing of a minute. Yet precisely the slow-motion illusion of witnessing each second as a dramatic event is what De Quincey endeavors to create from the first instant that he explicitly anticipates the impending collision. Explicitly, I say, because implicitly the collision had been anticipated all along. The entire narrative of “The Glory of Motion” prepares for the moment of crisis in “The Vision of Sudden Death.” It is anticipated in the semiallegorical description of the mail coach as a mighty instrument of the state, a vehicle of national authority and power. Charged as it is not only with distributing the mails but also with reporting political and military events, “the heartshaking news as of Trafalgar, of Salamanca, of Vittoria, of Waterloo,” the mail coach seems to operate “through the conscious presence of a central intellect.” Although De Quincey celebrates “the mail-coach, as the national organ for publishing these mighty events” (DQ 13:279), he makes it clear that its power could be recklessly dangerous. It was privileged with virtual diplomatic immu-

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

nity, pausing not to assay the damage or make amends when it forced other traffic off the road or crashed and shattered its way through a crowded marketplace: In its difficult wheelings amongst the intricacies of early markets, it would upset an apple-cart, a cart loaded with eggs, &c. Huge was the affliction and dismay, awful was the smash. I, as far as possible, endeavoured in such a case to represent the conscience and moral sensibilities of the mail; and, when wildernesses of eggs were lying poached under our horses’ hoofs, then would I stretch forth my hands in sorrow, saying (in words too celebrated at that time from the false echoes of Marengo), “Ah! wherefore have we not time to weep over you?”. . . If even it seemed to trample on humanity, it did so, I felt, in its discharge of its own more peremptory duties. (DQ 13.280–81) De Quincey confesses, here, his role as apologist for the mails, yet even in admitting a degree of hypocrisy (the mock sorrow in repeating “the false echoes of Marengo”), he staunchly upholds the right of the state “to trample on humanity.” Whether De Quincey was ever fully capable of appraising the extent to which he had been exploited in his career as impoverished journalist, surviving on a meager £10 for each essay he could produce in support of the Tory politics of Blackwood’s, he was most certainly capable of tingeing his defense of the establishment with sarcasm or undermining its self-righteous confidence with alarmist prophecies of doom. Although he seems to argue that the mail coach is above the law and that anyone who dares challenge its authority is guilty of treason, the actual course of his narrative describes the horror that the unguided juggernaut leaves in its wake. Nevertheless, De Quincey makes no effort to extricate himself from the charges that might be leveled against the mail coach. It may be a mighty instrument of state, but De Quincey is its obedient agent. He excuses the havoc and destruction it causes, and when it brings the news of bloodshed and slaughter at war, he tells the lies of patriotism and valor to postpone a mother’s grief (DQ 13:297–300). Although De Quincey’s frank revelation of ideological entrapment seems to be an inadvertent subtext, it is inseparably implicated in the spellbinding tale of his opium paralysis as he sits atop the mail coach, at the side of the sleeping coachman, watching aghast and helpless as the unguided horses veer to the wrong side of the road and race through the nighttime darkness. He hears a sound and is struck “by one flash of horrid simultaneous intuition”: what if another coach should be approaching from the opposite direction?

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    

Under this steady though rapid anticipation of the evil which might be gathering ahead, ah! what a sullen mystery of fear, what a sigh of woe, was that which stole upon the air, as again the far-off sound of a wheel was heard! A whisper it was—a whisper from, perhaps, four miles off— secretly announcing a ruin that, being foreseen, was not the less inevitable; that, being known, was not therefore healed. What could be done—who was it that could do it—to check the storm flight of these maniacal horses? Could I not seize the reins from the grasp of the slumbering coachman? You, reader, think that it would have been in your power to do so. And I quarrel not with your estimate of yourself. (DQ 13:312–13) What is at stake, here, is not the reader’s power but the narrator’s paralysis. This antagonism of action and stasis is precisely the tension of ekphrasis, and De Quincey aptly conjures it as an ekphrastic image: “Easy was it? See, then, that bronze equestrian statue. The cruel rider has kept the bit in his horse’s mouth for two centuries. Unbridle him for a minute, if you please, and wash his mouth with water. Easy was it? Unhorse me, then, that imperial rider; knock me those marble feet from those marble stirrups of Charlemagne” (DQ 13:313). Powerless to interfere with the headlong rush, De Quincey measures out the units of time and space between the galloping coach and the point of inevitable collision. At his first calculation, the moment of disaster is four miles, or eighteen minutes, away. Unchecked by the coachman, the horses are racing at thirteen miles an hour. The distance narrows. The coach rounds a bend and there, six hundred yards down “an avenue straight as an arrow,” sheltered by arching trees on either side that “gave to it the character of a cathedral aisle,” idly rolled “a frail reedy gig.” By elaborating in swelling sentences the events of the passing seconds, De Quincey’s prose achieves an effect not unlike that of slow-motion photography. He continues to mark the time. “Between them and eternity, to all human calculation, there is but a minute and a-half.” After another one hundred words, the wildly racing thoughts of the immobile narrator in search of some heroic escape from his entrapment, happens to find it in the Iliad. “Strange it is, and to a mere auditor of the tale might seem laughable, that I should need a suggestion from the Iliad to prompt the sole resource that remained. Yet so it was.” And that resource? The shout of Achilles. Life must imitate art. “But could I pretend to shout like the son of Peleus, aided by Pallas? No: but then I needed not the shout that should alarm all Asia militant; such a shout would suf-

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fice as might carry terror into the hearts of two thoughtless young people and one gig horse” (DQ 13:314). His shout is unheard, yet he manages to shout again. Another two hundred words have passed before the driver of the gig at last responds. He has seventy seconds left to save the young lady and himself, or “stand before the judgement seat of God.” For seven of those seventy seconds he stares upon the onrushing coach, another five he spends “with eyes upraised, like one who prayed in sorrow.” The entrapped and immobile narrator cannot utter his silent plea for the gig to move, to turn from the road, to wheel away from danger. Another four hundred words delineate the desperate actions of the remaining fifty-five seconds. The horse has reached the crest of the road, but the rear wheels of the gig have yet to be cleared from the “inexorable flight” of the mail coach: “In that moment the thunder of collision spoke aloud.” The young man sits, as does the narrator himself, frozen like a rock. “But the lady—! Oh, heavens! will that spectacle ever depart from my dreams.” The frantic gestures of her horrible fright are described before “the turn of the road carried the scene out of my eyes in an instant, and swept it into my dreams for ever” (DQ 13:318). In the “Dream Fugue,” De Quincey recapitulates in the imagery of dream the circumstances of the collision, of the “agitation frozen into rest by horror.” In the first parts of the fugue, the coach and gig have been transformed into ships at sea. In the final movement, the dreamer is again upon a galloping coach, bringing tidings “of a grandeur that measured itself against centuries.” The dark forest road that had seemed, in his earlier description, like a Gothic aisle, now opens before him as the interior of a vast cathedral. Keats’s dreamer too, we may recall, traveled through a vast cathedral and struggled against numbing paralysis as he approached the altar steps (Fall of Hyperion, 122–33). The “eternal domed monument” of Keats’s The Fall of Hyperion, however, is deliberately contrasted with “The like upon the earth . . . / Of grey cathedrals, buttress’d walls, rent towers” (66–67). Poetry is the religion that is worshiped in Keats’s cathedral. The cathedral of De Quincey’s “Dream Fugue” is insistently Christian in its imagery of death and resurrection. Grand sculptured tombs sweep by on either side as the coach gallops league after league down the aisle towards “the aerial galleries of organ and choir.” He recognizes the cathedral graves as that venerable necropolis, the Campo Santo, “a city of sepulchres, built within the saintly cathedral for the warrior dead that rested from their feuds on earth.” De Quincey may well have absorbed these images of the Campo Santo from conversations with Coleridge. He recorded, we know, that occasion when he and Coleridge were looking through the folio of Piranesi’s engravings, The An-

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    

tiquities of Rome, and Coleridge described for him the vast architecture of Piranesi’s Il Carceri, which he could immediately visualize, De Quincey said, as the architecture of his own opium dreams (DQ 3:438). Twice during his stay in Italy in 1805–6, Coleridge had visited the Campo Santo of Pisa. The fresco The Triumph of Death impressed him with its stark and powerful images. Describing the fresco in one of his lectures, Coleridge emphasized how it visually dramatized “the effect of the appearance of Death on all men—different groups of men— men of business—men of pleasure—huntsmen—all flying in different directions while the dreadful Goddess descending with a kind of air-chilling white with her wings expanded and the extremities of the wings compressed into talons and the only group in which there appeared anything like welcoming her was a group of beggars.”11 Although the power he attributes to the fresco may well reside in its invitation to the beholder to stand among the “different groups of men” who witness the descent of “the dreadful Goddess,” Coleridge here avoids the implication of ekphrastic entrapment and maintains a position safely out of the reach of the deadly talons. But he has clearly recognized the threat of entrapment, if we trust De Quincey’s “memory of Coleridge’s account,” in his description of Piranesi imprisoned in his own nightmare dungeons: Creeping along the sides of the walls, you perceived a staircase; and upon this, groping his way upwards, was Piranesi himself. Follow the stairs a little farther, and you perceive them reaching an abrupt termination, without any balustrade, and allowing no step onwards to him who should reach the extremity, except into the depths below. Whatever is to become of poor Piranesi, at least you suppose that his labours must now in some way terminate. But raise your eyes, and behold a second flight of stairs still higher, on which again Piranesi is perceived, by this time standing on the very brink of the abyss. Once again elevate your eye, and a still more aerial flight of stairs is descried; and there, again, is the delirious Piranesi, busy on his aspiring labours: and so on, until the unfinished stairs and the hopeless Piranesi are both lost in the upper gloom of the hall. (DQ 3:439) Not only the same vast architecture, De Quincey says, but the same “endless growth and self-reproduction” were experienced in his own opium dreams. Unlike Coleridge’s aloof description of the fresco at Campo Santo, De Quincey reproduces its imagery with himself caught in the very midst. Indeed, 11. Coleridge, Philosophical Lectures, pp. 167–68.

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entrapment is the explicit and characteristic feature of his ekphrasis: like Piranesi clambering the dungeon walls, De Quincey has entombed himself upon the sculptured sundial, among the heraldic emblems of the shield, and in the final confrontation with the statue of the Dying Trumpeter. In De Quincey’s dream visions, the images of the death and resurrection interact in much the same way as the Pygmalion-moment and Medusa-moment of ekphrastic representation. The Dying Trumpeter rising up from the battlefield is not less ghastly than the talon-winged goddess. The entrance into the necropolis is measured out, just as in the preceding narrative of “Sudden Death,” in passing minutes. Then, as the dream coach thunders down “the arrow-like flight of the illimitable central aisle,” he beholds “a female child, that rode in a carriage as frail as flowers.” She is to be “the ransom for Waterloo.” The tidings of great victory must be paid by her death. At this thought, he declares, he rose in horror, and in that very moment, mirroring his movement and echoing his thought, “rose one that was sculptured on a bas-relief—a Dying Trumpeter”: Solemnly from the field of battle he rose to his feet; and, unslinging his stony trumpet, carried it, in his dying anguish, to his stony lips— sounding once, and yet once again; proclamation that, in thy ears, oh baby! spoke from the battlements of death. Immediately deep shadows fell between us, and aboriginal silence. The choir had ceased to sing. The hoofs of our horses, the dreadful rattle of our harness, the groaning of our wheels, alarmed the graves no more. By horror the basrelief had been unlocked unto life. By horror we, that were so full of life, we men and our horses, with their fiery fore-legs rising in mid air to their everlasting gallop, were frozen to a bas-relief. (DQ 13:324–25) This is the moment of crisis, not an evanescent but an enduring crisis. The Pygmalion-moment of the Dying Trumpeter is at once the Medusa-moment of the dreamer. The bearer of the tidings of empire, the rider of mail coaches become a writer of Tory journalism, is held petrified in bondage. For the readers of Blackwood’s De Quincey has provided a “happy ending.” With one more blast on his horn the Dying Trumpeter calls forth the Last Judgment. The dead arise “from the burials of centuries” and within that mighty cathedral they join in singing to God their jubilation. It is an ending much like the ending which Goethe gave to Faust, Part Two. Goethe, like many other poets of that age of rapid and radical change, had thematized the dangerous seduction of stasis and the status quo. The condition of Faust’s damnation was to

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    

say to the moment, “Verweile doch, du bist so schön!” [Stay, thou art so beautiful]. To halt the dynamic process of flux and change is to surrender to the damnation of entrapment. When Faust utters the fatal words, “Verweile doch, du bist so schön!” he addresses not stasis but the reclamation he has begun in returning the salt-swamped flatlands to fertility. Following the declaration, “Er ist gerettet!” [He is saved], Goethe concludes with a jubilant chorus. De Quincey’s concluding jubilation, however, does not grant unconditional salvation. The concluding words are that God’s angel “might snatch thee back from ruin, and might emblazon in thy deliverance the endless resurrections of His love!” (DQ 13:327). In the meantime, the dreamer is not released from the recurrent nightmares of “dreadful revelations.” In De Quincey’s appropriation of the two modes of time defined in the Laokoon, when the mail coach galloped past the wreckage of collision, it “carried the scene out of my eyes in an instant, and swept it into my dreams for ever” (DQ 13:318). The evanescent moment has been captured in the enduring time of memory, and there in dreams the Medusa-moment prevails.

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5

                    

One reason that critics have dated the decline or even the demise of mimesis from the end of the eighteenth century is that the poets of the romantic period displayed little confidence in the rationalist strategies of representation.1 Indeed, their poetry is often about the instability of representation. Even if it explores subjectivity, an arena of experii. See, for example, Boyd, The Function of Mimesis and Its Decline, pp. 302–7; and Christopher Prendergast, The Order of Mimesis, pp. 1–23. Wellek, Romantic Age, p. 2, links “the rise of an emotional concept of poetry” to “the implied rejection of the imitation theory.” Terryl Givens, “Blind Men and Hieroglyphs.”

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    

ence for which most languages offer only a meager vocabulary, poetry requires objective referentiality. That the subject matter might be as limited as the vocabulary prompted Goethe’s observation that “a subjective nature has soon talked out his little internal material.”2 In Biographia Literaria and “On Poesy and Art,” as we noted in Chapter 3, Coleridge sought to reassert the leverage of mimetic objectivity in romantic subjectivity and to reinstate imitation within the activity of imagination. Once the reliability of representation had been called into doubt, many poets began to scrutinize the fallibility of perception and the fragility of subjective experience. Far from being neglected, the tropes of “imitation” and the “mirror” were brought forth as key witnesses in interrogating the claims of mimesis. One characteristic of romantic poetry, then, is the tentative nature of representation and the instability of images. Yet there is a remarkable persistence in their instability. When Coleridge, for example, thematizes the mimetic act in “The Picture, or the Lover’s Resolution,” the very act of denying images seems to render them more tenable and certainly not less vivid. The lovelorn narrator seeks refuge from his self-torment in the wild depths of the woods: here will I couch my limbs, Close by this river, in this silent shade, As safe and sacred from the step of man As an invisible world—unheard, unseen (“The Picture, or the Lover’s Resolution,” 51–54) Even in this “invisible world” he is pursued by the very images that he strives to negate. The breeze, that visits me Was never Love’s accomplice, never raised The tendril ringlets from the maiden’s brow, And the blue, delicate veins above her cheek; Ne’er played the wanton—never half disclosed The maiden’s snowy bosom, scattering thence Eye-poisons for some love-distempered youth. (58–64) 2. Johann Peter Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe (29 January 1826), 1:161: “Wogegen aber eine subjektive Natur ihr bißchen Inneres bald ausgesprochen hat.” Translation in Criticism:The Major Texts, ed. W. J. Bate, p. 403.

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Coleridge’s strategy is to reaffirm mimetic presence while insisting upon its absence. To abjure is to conjure, a dilemma also experienced by the lover in “Lewti, or The Circassian Love-Chant.”3 The “eye-poisons” of wanton images arise in spite of disclaiming their truth. The stream, too, is said not to reflect the teasing images which torment the fictional lover, who, of course, is not the narrator. The absent images are nevertheless described in attentive detail: no pool of thine, Though clear as lake in latest summer-eve, Did e’er reflect the stately virgin’s robe, The face, the form divine, the downcast look Contemplative! Behold! her open palm Presses her cheek and brow! her elbow rests On the bare branch of half-uprooted tree, That leans towards its mirror! (72–79) So insistent is the mind’s mimetic projection that the lover cries out, “Behold!” As if it were not enough to delineate the very look and gesture of the image that is not there, he has the phantom image return his gaze and then teasingly cast flowers into the water, dispelling the nonexistent reflection of her nonexistent presence: he now With steadfast gaze and unoffending eye, Worships the watery idol, dreaming hopes Delicious to the soul, but fleeting, vain, E’en as that phantom-world on which he gazed, But not unheeded gazed: for see, ah! see, The sportive tyrant with her left hand plucks The heads of tall flowers that behind her grow, Lychnis, and willow-herb, and fox-glove bells: And suddenly, as one that toys with time, Scatters them on the pool! Then all the charm Is broken—all that phantom-world so fair 3. CPW 1:254. “Lewti,” as Kathleen Coburn has suggested, may be Coleridge’s revision of some earlier lines by Wordsworth. CN 3:3708 and 3:3708n; also see 1:315n and 1:218n.

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    

Vanishes, and a thousand circlets spread, And each mis-shape the other. (81–94) The lovelorn poet, like a mime who manipulates imaginary objects, has played with images that he has mentally projected onto the surface of the pool. The image of the maiden, too, becomes a mime whose gesture, plucking “the heads of tall flowers that behind her grow,” acts out the beholder’s desire for her touch. Since she exists here only as an image of his unrequited love, she naturally reenacts the lover’s recollected experience of a “sportive tyrant” who even as a merely mental phenomenon disrupts his image of her. The poet advises his alter ego, the “poor youth” who has witnessed his dream dashed, to wait and watch. The stream will soon renew its smoothness, soon The visions will return! And lo! he stays: And soon the fragments dim of lovely forms Come trembling back, unite, and now once more The pool becomes a mirror (96–100) The “half-uprooted tree” and “each wild-flower” reappear as inverted images, but the image of the maiden is no longer there. Although neither she nor her image were present in the first place, only now does the lover confront the visual evidence of her absence: “He turns, and she is gone!” As if she had just at that moment fled through the “woodland maze,” he runs off to seek her vanished form in vain. His fictional counterpart, the poet declares, may well devote his “mad love-yearning” to the vacant pool, which will no doubt requite his “sickly thoughts” with a bewitching image of his beloved, “her shadow still abiding there, / The Naiad of the mirror!” (110–11). At the close of this digression, the narrator repeats his denial of its truth: “Not to thee, / O wild and desert stream! belongs this tale” (111–12). The stream, as reflector of images, thus becomes a personified poet. Since the wild stream has had “no loves,” it could scarcely be guilty of generating false images. This denial not only continues the imaginary projection, it also strangely implicates the narrator’s own lovelorn lot. At this point in his poem, Coleridge has by no means played all his verbal games with the paradoxes of reference and negation. Before examining what final twists he has in store, let us define the dimensions of paradoxicality thus far

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implicated. A simple example is Hughes Mearns’s well-known “Anti-gone.” The play with negation makes fun of the very illusion, or delusion, it pretends to describe. As I was going up the stair I met a man who wasn’t there. He wasn’t there again today. I wish, I wish he’d go away.4 Apparently written in response to one of his pupils having mispronounced “Antigone,” Mearns exploits in “Anti-gone” the same paradox that enables Georg Christoph Lichtenberg to refer to a “handleless knife without a blade.”5 Coleridge, in his annotations to Boehme, called attention to the ambiguous functions of negation and the difference between vere non ens and non vere ens (“really not-being” and “not really being”).6 Negations are purely conceptual: they do not refer to occurrences in reality. Yet they are necessary in language because language trades in references to things that are not there. If Coleridge had written a more conventional poem, he might simply have described the maiden casting her flowers into the pond then leaving her lover alone in the woods. To narrate the same events as seen reflected in the water might well call attention to the mimetic description. The latter strategy, even as metaphor for poetic representation, could nevertheless reinforce, rather than undermine, the claims of visual presence. The phenomena of reflected images, after all, could effectively enhance descriptive verisimilitude. The poet might thus have it both ways. And Coleridge certainly does retain this double advantage even when he proceeds to negate the entire scene and all of its participants: there is no lover, no mistress, no reflection, no river. A positive narration presents absences as if they were present. Coleridge presents absences and insists upon their absence. The net result, as Coleridge well knows, is much the same: we “believe” the latter neither more nor less than the former. The negation, however, deftly calls attention to that process of indulging illusion which Coleridge referred to as “the willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith.” As he distinguished it from delusion, illusion involves 4. Hughes Mearns, “Antigonish” (27 March 1922), in Franklin Pierce Adams, ed., Innocent Merriment, p. 239. 5. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, “Verzeichnis einer Sammlung von Gerätschaften welche in dem Hause des Sir. H. S. künftige Woche öffentlich verauktioniert werden soll,” in Schriften und Briefe 3:452: “Ein Messer ohne Klinge, an welchem der Stiel fehlt.” 6. M 1:565, 574; CN 3:3861.

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self-awareness. By allowing his fictional lover to lapse into “sickly thoughts,” he thematizes both illusion and delusion. Having unfolded and refolded the redoublings of the absent image, Coleridge goes on in this poem to reaffirm the illusions of presence. “This be my chosen haunt,” he declares, “emancipate / From passion’s dreams” (118–19). The river inside his text is now said to be real, and inside his text he commences to “trace its devious course” as if the traces were the thing itself. Not surprisingly, his tracing leads him through a terrain in which the supposedly objective representation is transformed by subjective response. The reflection of a “soft water-sun” is said to be “throbbing” as if it were “heart at once and eye” of the imagined river. Overshadowed by clouds, the reflected images become “the stains and shadings of forgotten tears, / Dimness o’erswum with lustre.” The river is then described as running through a “circular vale,” with a cottage “close by the waterfall.” Here the poet claims to discover at his feet a picture of the very scene he has just described. But what is this? That cottage, with its slanting chimney-smoke, And close beside its porch a sleeping child, His dear head pillowed on a sleeping dog— One arm between its fore-legs, and the hand Holds loosely its small handful of wild-flowers, Unfilletted, and of unequal lengths. A curious picture, with a master’s haste Sketched on a strip of pinky-silver skin, Peeled from the birched bark! (152–61) The ekphrastic description of the “curious picture” is more minutely detailed than the poet’s description of the “original” scene in the lines immediately preceding. Coleridge thus makes the painted image seem more real than reality, in marked contrast to the emphatic unreality of the phantom reflections in the imaginary river. The depicted image is no will o’ the wisp, and the painting itself is a palpable object. Yon bark her canvass, and those purple berries Her pencil! See, the juice is scarcely dried On the fine skin! She has been newly here;

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And lo! yon patch of heath has been her couch— The pressure still remains! (162–67) Reversing his rhetorical tactic, Coleridge affirms the picture as strongly as he previously had denied the reflection. Yet even this latter image is revealed amidst absences and traces. Only the signs remain behind. The poem ends with the poet, now with picture in hand as well as image in mind, in quest of a maiden who still is no longer there.7 Coleridge’s flexiloquent play with its multiple meanings reminds us that “reflection” is a word caught up in redoubling: it refers to the internal processes of perception, memory, and meditation as well as to the external physics of light and energy; and were this doubling not in itself a potential source of confusion, either mode of reflection also repeat some prior act of flexion. Something is bent or changed, then altered or modified once more.8 Coleridge was by no means the only poet of the period to be fascinated with the metaphorical redoubling of mental and optical reflection. Wordsworth, too, often reflects upon reflections. A recurrent motif in Wordsworth’s Guide through the Lakes, indeed in all his writings, is how scenes of nature work their “influence upon the mind of the spectator.” The Guide was intended, Wordsworth wrote, as a “Companion for the Minds of Persons of taste, and feeling for Landscape, who might be inclined to explore the District of the Lakes with that degree of attention to which its beauty may fairly lay claim.”9 His reader may be a stranger to the Lakes, but not to the beauties of nature. A stranger to the Lakes, as it turns out, has certain advantages. Wordsworth calls attention to these advantages when he introduces into his description unusual optical phenomena. Reflections often prompt us to ponder both the internal and external aspects of visual experience. Often, too, they reveal possible connections between mimetic description and poetic invention. “Walking by the side of Ulswater,” Wordsworth recollects, he once saw “deep within the bosom of the lake, a magnificent Castle, with towers and battlements.” Perhaps more telling than the perceptual phenomenon are the contradictory elements of his response. His “delight” is disrupted by “regret.” The “regret” is the consequence of knowledge intruding upon illusion and exposing its apparent magic. 7. CPW 1:369–74; CN 3:3708, 3995, 4227. 8. The OED cites from Chaucer both the reflexion of mind and the reflexion of light: Hous of Fame, bk. 1, line 22; Squire’s Tale, line 230; cf. “flexion” (grammar, calculus). 9. William Wordsworth, The Prose Works, 2:155.

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After gazing with delight upon it for some time, as upon a work of enchantment, I could not but regret that my previous knowledge of the place enabled me to account for the appearance. It was in fact a pleasure-house called Lyulph’s Tower—the towers and battlements magnified and so much changed in shape as not to be immediately recognized. In the meanwhile, the pleasure-house itself was altogether hidden from my view by a body of vapour stretching over it along the hill-side on which it stands, but not so as to have intercepted its communication with the lake; and hence this novel and most impressive object, which, if I had been a stranger to the spot, would, from its being inexplicable, have long detained the mind in a state of pleasing astonishment. (Prose Works 2:237) Wordsworth’s own familiarity with the place prevents him from sustaining the mysterious illusion of a castle in the depths of Ulswater. One not intimate with the terrain could not possibly have been able to determine that the castle in the lake had been reflected beneath the cloud cover from the unseen tower on the opposite shore. In the Kantian sublime, the uplifted sense of joy (Ergießung) passes into the dejected sense of one’s incapacity to comprehend what one beholds (Hemmung).10 Wordsworth’s response is essentially the opposite, for it is the very comprehension that inhibits the delight in the mysterious grandeur of the vision. For the stranger, the causes of the illusion would remain inexplicable and thus continue to intrigue and delight. Such appearances, Wordsworth states, might easily have stimulated the poets of a more credulous age to invent their “stories of subaqueous palaces, gardens, and pleasure-grounds—the brilliant ornaments of Romance.” Optical illusions may thus provide the mimetic source for what might otherwise seem the fanciful invention of romantic imagination. More astonishing than the illusion of a castle submerged in Ulswater was the second island that he once witnessed alongside what he had previously known as the solitary island in the Lake of Grasmere. Again he claims the optical illusion as a potential source for poetic imitation. Because art may reflect the peculiarities of nature reflecting itself, this “extraordinary phenomenon . . . will shew how other elegant fancies may have had their origin, less in invention than in the actual processes of nature” (Prose Works 2:238). What is astonishing about this particular reflection is that its image does not appear inverted. Thus he introduces it in contrast to the “inverted scene” he has 10. Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, §23, in Werke 5:329.

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just described in Ulswater. “About eleven o’clock on the forenoon of a winter’s day, coming suddenly, in company of a friend, into view of the Lake of Grasmere, we were alarmed by the sight of a newly-created Island; the transitory thought of the moment was, that it had been produced by an earthquake or some other convulsion of nature.” New though it seemed to be, its rocky surface was already “speckled with snow, and sprinkled over with birch trees.” Wordsworth describes in detail its appearance, dimensions, and position relative to the old, familiar island. The new island, which he knows cannot be real, nevertheless appears optically “more distinct” than its neighbor. Marvellous was the illusion! Comparing the new with the old Island, the surface of which is soft, green, and unvaried, I do not scruple to say that, as an object of sight, it was much the more distinct. “How little faith,” we exclaimed, “is due to one sense, unless its evidence be confirmed by some of its fellows! What Stranger could possibly be persuaded that this, which we know to be an unsubstantial mockery, is really so; and that there exists only a single Island on this beautiful Lake?” At length the appearance underwent a gradual transmutation; it lost its prominence and passed into a glimmering and dim inversion, and then totally disapppeared;—leaving behind it a clear open area of ice of the same dimensions. We now perceived that this bed of ice, which was thinly suffused with water, had produced the illusion, by reflecting and refracting (as persons skilled in optics would no doubt easily explain) a rocky and woody section of the opposite mountain named Silver-how. (Prose Works 2:238) The knowledge which informs his own response is once again contrasted with the response which he attributes to a stranger. Although he confesses that he was momentarily baffled, he quickly perceives that it was a phantom image. So natural was its appearance, however, that a stranger, not knowing that the lake had but one island, could not have detected that it was an illusion. While Wordsworth was perplexed only at its appearance, the stranger would have been utterly amazed at its disappearance. The trick of its appearance and disappearance, Wordsworth reveals, was simply a matter of a sheet of ice, drifting at a tilt and mirroring a second image of Silver-how below the image already inverted in the water. The trees reflected in the water seemed to rise upright above the rocky ground mirrored in the ice. As the ice floated once more level with the surface, the upright illusion “lost its prominence and passed into a glimmering and dim inversion, and then totally disappeared.”

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Far from adhering to the philosophical argument that knowledge is a repetition in the mind of images received through the senses, Wordsworth cites the complexity of optical reflection to demonstrate how mental reflection rises to the challenge to interpret the external world. When he and his companion declare that the evidence of “one sense” must “be confirmed by some of its fellows,” they are in this instance calling upon the corroboration not of touch or hearing, but of the internal capacities of memory and reason to resolve the bafflement of the eye. In deferring to “persons skilled in optics” to explain the angles of reflection and refraction, he would no doubt have recollected his own studies of optics at St. John’s, Cambridge, and the work of James Wood, his college tutor.11 Wordsworth’s argument on behalf of imitating “the actual processes of nature” is not a belated deliberation on the possibilities of representing optical phenomena in poetry. When he states that such phenomena may provide a rich source for “elegant fancies,” he has the confident assurance of one who has made abundant use of optical illusion in his own poetic practice.12 As I mentioned in a passing reference in Chapter 2, the two epic similes of the Prelude both evoke optical illusions as a means of accounting for the capacities of the mind. In book 8, his own unsettling adjustment to the “vast metropolis” is compared to a traveler whose eyes gradually accommodate to the darkness of a cave (8.711–41). In book 4, as a simile for the elusive processes of memory he describes the visual experience of “one who hangs down-bending from the side / Of a slow-moving boat.” To elaborate his comparison between reflections in the mind and reflections in the water, Wordsworth describes a viewer who, gazing into a still water, solacing himself With such discoveries as his eye can make Beneath him in the bottom of the deeps, Sees many beauteous sights—weeds, fishes, flowers, Grots, pebbles, roots of trees—and fancies more, Yet is often perplexed and cannot part The shadow from the substance, rocks and sky, Mountains and clouds, from that which is indeed The region, and the things which their abide In their true dwelling; now is crossed by gleam 11. Frederick Burwick, “Wordsworth: An Auxiliar Light,” in The Damnation of Newton, pp. 176–209; on James Wood, pp. 183–84. 12. Robin Grove, “Reflection on Water.”

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Of his own image, by a sunbeam now, And wavering motions sent he knows not whence (Prelude 4.249–60) To review the images of memory, the poet has similarly pursued his office “Incumbent o’er the surface of past time / With like success.” Just as the eye may confuse surface reflections with images seen in the depths, present perceptions may be confounded with past recollections. Even one’s own image may get in the way. In narrating Peter Bell’s discovery of the corpse in the river, Wordsworth projects this same inability to distinguish “the shadow from the substance” into a mind more credulous and less discriminating than his own. Just as he conjectured how a stranger to the Lakes might respond to the optical illusions wrought upon their mirroring surfaces, he here lends the confusion of surface and depth to the selfish and superstitious mind of Peter, whose confounding of reflected and refracted images engenders a grotesque mélange that frightens him out of his wits, even out of his wicked ways. For in the pool a startling sight Meets him, among the inverted trees. Is it the moon’s distorted face? The ghost-like image of a cloud? Is it a gallows there portrayed? Is Peter of himself afraid? (Peter Bell.A Tale, 499–504)13 The face of the drowned man beneath the surface seems to peer through “the moon’s distorted face” and through the reflection of Peter’s own face when he bends down for a closer look. How Peter might have interpreted the shimmering composite of blindly staring faces, Wordsworth suggests with a rapid catalog of horrid images: fiend, imp, grisly idol. Equating the mesmerizing hold of visual and verbal images, much like Coleridge telling of the Mariner’s “glittering eye” and the Wedding-Guest who “cannot choose but hear,” Wordsworth tells us that Peter “cannot choose but look; / Like some one reading in a book— / A book that is enchanted” (518–20). It is not enough to acknowledge that the metaphors of mirroring and re13. In Wordsworth, Poetical Works 2:331–82.

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flecting contribute to a poetry that is mimetic. They result, in fact, in a poetry that is about the mimetic process. The self-reflective gestures by which the poet may thematize mimesis can be deceptively simple, subtle, spontaneous. That they appear natural, of course, is perfectly in keeping with Aristotle’s claim that “imitation is natural to man from childhood” (Poetics 1448b.6). For Wordsworth, too, the mimetic instinct of the child has profound ramifications for the mature poet. In “The Boy of Winander” (Poetical Works 2:206), Wordsworth traces a progression of mimetic thought without departing from the natural setting. The mimetic action, which commences with the boy blowing his “mimic hootings to the silent owls,” is anticipated with an economy of details. The poet introduces the “cliffs / And islands of Winander” in the opening lines, a dozen lines before they are called upon in the mimic game. The poet who ranked observation and description first among “the powers requisite for the production of poetry” has not neglected to watch the sky. He defines the time of day as that twilight moment “when the earliest stars began / To move along the edge of the hills, / Rising or setting.” Nor could a stranger to such games want a better depiction of how to play than the poet provides: “with fingers interwoven, both hands / Pressed closely palm to palm and to his mouth / Uplifted.” The boy imitates the owls “That they might answer him.” His skillful mimicry provokes a manic redoubling: And they would shout Across the watery vale, and shout again, Responsive to his call,—with quivering peals, And long halloos, and screams, and echoes loud Redoubled and redoubled; concourse wild Of jocund din! There follows, however, a silence “such as baffled his best skill.” The owls no longer respond, but the mimetic action does not cease. Rather, the boy becomes witness to a redoubling more vast and profound: Then sometimes in that silence, while he hung Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprize Has carried far into his heart the voice Of mountain-torrents; or the visible scene Would enter unawares into his mind With all its solemn imagery, its rocks,

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Its woods, and that uncertain heaven, received Into the bosom of the steady lake. Absorbing the mere externality of optical reflection, “the steady lake,” as if it were a responsive human body, receives the “solemn imagery” of the vale and sky into its bosom, in precisely the same way the boy receives the same imagery “into his mind,” or the reechoing of distant torrents “into his heart.” His mimic dialogue with the owls disrupted, the boy participates in the silent dialogue between the lake and the “uncertain heaven.” Having thus internalized reflections on reflections, Wordsworth concludes his tale at the boy’s grave. The boy—a former self, an image of his own childhood—is dead.14 As the boy once on summer evenings “hung / Listening” for the redoublings from across the lake, the man confesses that he has “stood / Mute—looking at the grave in which he lies.” In the sonnet, “Composed by the Side of Grasmere Lake” (Poetical Works 3:127), Wordsworth again calls attention to mimetic replication in “waters steeled / By breezeless airs to smoothest polish.” The “vivid repetition of the stars” conjures an illusion of water transformed into a threshold through which we may behold “the nether Sphere / Opening to view the abyss in which she feeds / Her own calm fires.” It is a multistable illusion in which the water is hardened, “steeled,” into an impermeable surface, which immediately becomes invisible, so that there seems to be no surface at all, but only a vast opening into an interior cosmos. The confounding of above and below, exterior and interior, is also invoked with tragic implication in the River Duddon sonnet (Poetical Works 3:255) which recounts the fate of a “love-lorn maid” who met her “hapless doom” grasping for an unattainable blossom: The starry treasures from the blue profound She longs to ravish;—shall she plunge or climb The humid precipice and seize the guest Of April, smiling high in upper air? Desperate alternative! what fiend could dare To prompt the thought? The multistability here involves not just the external reflection and the confounding of the two blossoms. The blossom also reflects the maid’s internal 14. The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill, p. 492, gives from MS JJ the original, first-person version of “There was a boy” (lines 389–413).

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plight. Her only choice seems to be the suicidal “alternative”: whether she seeks to grasp the reality or the illusion, the enticing promise of the blossom is deceptive, its ravishing fatal. Reflected images, as a special and peculiar province of mimesis in romantic literature, involve a meticulous verbal account of visual details and typically implicate, as well, details of the perceptual and psychological response. This latter movement, rather than retreating into the purely subjective consciousness of the beholder, takes advantage of the dedoublement of reflection to represent both the objective and the subjective. Optical reflection, as we have seen in the poetry of Coleridge and Wordsworth, is a model for visual perception as well as an analogue for mental reflection. In drawing upon the multiple connotations of reflection, Shelley, too, allows the vagaries of light and shadow, the confounding of surface and depth, the distortion or disruption of a mirrored image, to serve as an index for the mind of the beholder. In The Revolt of Islam, mirror reflections superimpose the internal reflections upon the external features. As the perceiver, so the perception. When Laon is chained atop the tower, “the bright and glassy bay” below becomes the mirror in which he beholds the images of his madness. Rescued by the Hermit, he is nourished back to health by the side of a “reposing lake,” in which he can see his own “countenance reflected,” now pale and haggard. He recalls when his face was once like Cythna’s, when each could be the other’s mirror. The image of his lost Cythna haunts his own reflected image: ’twas her lover’s face— It might resemble her—it had once been The mirror of her thoughts, and still the grace Which her mind’s shadow cast, left there a lingering trace. (Canto 4, lines 1680–83) His face mirrors her thoughts; her mind casts the shadow which leaves its traces in his appearance. When Shelley goes on to tell of Cythna’s madness, so thoroughly do the mental and the visual interact that it becomes impossible to distinguish the subjective from the objective. Indeed, their confounding seems to be not just the metaphor but the very symptom of her madness. Within the cave the fountain and the pool reflect the turmoil of her frantic mind: “A fountain round and vast, in which the wave / Imprisoned, boiled and leaped perpetually” (Canto 7, lines 2931–32). Reechoing the credo—“the mind is its own place”—uttered by Byron’s Manfred and before him by Milton’s Satan, Cythna declares that “we live in our

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own world” (Canto 7, lines 3091). As her mind grows calm, so too does the image-shattering turbulence of the waters within the cave: My mind became the book through which I grew Wise in all human wisdom, and its cave, Which like a mine I rifled through and through, To me the keeping of its secrets gave— One mind, the type of all, the moveless wave Whose calm reflects all moving things that are. (Canto 7, lines 3100–3105) Shelley has obviously appropriated for Cythna the cave of Plato (Republic 7.514–18, 532) and has allowed her to move freely in her restored lucidity between the interior and exterior, the real and ideal cave. Sustaining the Platonic reference, Cythna goes on to tell how she would trace her thoughts within the cave of the mind: And on the sand would I make signs to range These woofs, as they were woven, of my thought; Clear, elemental shapes, whose smallest change A subtler language within language wrought. (Canto 7, lines 3109–12) Within her mind, Cythna reconstructs the outside world, and her “prophetic dreams” reflect images of the future. Shelley relies on temporal and spatial metonymy (effect for cause, adjunct for subject) to shift the conditions of mimetic representation forward and backward, inside and outside. Shelley’s contribution to the romantic discussion on the autonomy of art and its freedom from external dictates would have added an interesting twist to the discussion of “art for art’s sake” in Chapter 1. Shelley worked out his own explanation of “purposiveness.” In the Defence of Poetry, he insists on the utility, purpose, and causal engagement of poetry.15 A. W. Schlegel, as was noted, had argued an “absolute purpose” not limited by the constraints of “what we usually call purpose.”16 For Shelley, “absolute purpose” belongs to the causality of ideas and is not subject to the laws of physical nature, which govern the cause15. Frederick Burwick, “The Language of Metonymy in Prometheus Unbound.” 16. A. W. Schlegel, Die Kunstlehre, in Kritische Schriften, 2:14: “Was einen absoluten Zweck hat, erscheint auf gewisse Weise wieder zwecklos, indem das, was wir gewöhnlich Zweck nennen, nur eine beschränkte Aufgabe des Verstandes und die Verneinung eines absoluten Zwecks ist.”

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and-effect of material circumstances. The utility of poetry lies in its capacity to work through “mental causation”: “The great instrument of the moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting on the cause.”17 Shelley, too, cautions against the imposition of moral or political values. The dictates of cultural institutions are tied to immediate material conditions. “A Poet therefore would do ill to embody his own conceptions of right and wrong, which are usually those of his place and time, in his poetical creations.”18 The poet, as prophet and seer of the causality of mind, transcends the limitations of place and time. Accordingly, Shelley often uses metaphors of mirroring and reflecting to catch the images of the future as well as the past. Thus he defines poets as “the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present.”19 In contrast to the salubrious and restorative purpose with which Wordsworth broods “o’er the surface of past time,” something pathological occurs when Shelley’s characters lose sight of the causal flux and fret over the shapes caught in memory’s mirror. In The Revolt of Islam, to be sure, the waters reflect both the sickness and recovery of the mind. In Hellas, Mahmud grows anxious about his troubled dreams; he considers it a symptom of some wrong that, when he awakens, the images vanish not only from perception but even from recollection. Because dreams are prophetic the wrong may be external rather than internal. “The times do cast strange shadows,” Mahmud says, but though the shadows are reflected within the “gloomy vision” of sleep, he awakens to find that they leave “no figure upon memory’s glass” (124–31). Like Pharaoh calling upon David, Mahmud calls upon Ahasuerus to trace the elusive shadows and interpret their meaning. The images of thought, much like the Wandering Jew himself, “cannot die.” What has thought To do with time, or place, or circumstance? Wouldst thou behold the Future?—ask and have! Knock and it shall be opened—look, and lo! The coming age is shadowed on the Past As on a glass. (801–6) 17. Defence of Poetry (1821), in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, p. 488. 18. Ibid.; see also Shelley’s definition of “Utility” on pp. 500–501. 19. Ibid., pp. 480–508.

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Forth from the glass of the “forgotten dream” steps the phantom of Mahomet, “A dream itself,” declares Ahasuerus, “yet less, perhaps, than that / Thou call’st reality.” The competing claims of reality do not impose upon Shelley’s confident assertion of the mimesis of the mind. The conjuring of the Phantom of Mahomet parallels the conjuring of the Phantasm of Jupiter in Prometheus Unbound. Shelley maneuvers his verbal mirrors to reflect images through the surface of the present moment: Mahomet wants to foresee the future, Prometheus to recall the past. Mahomet asks, “When, how, by whom, Destruction must accomplish / Her consummation” (Hellas, 901–2). The Phantasm of Jupiter is called upon to repeat the curse Prometheus once uttered. Mahomet sees an image of the self; Prometheus hears his own words. Mahomet addresses his ghostly reflection as “Imperial shadow of the thing I am” (900). The Phantasm who appears to Prometheus is the image of Jupiter, for it is Jupiter who keeps the curse which Prometheus has forgotten. To annul the curse, Prometheus must recall it. The phantom image is thus seized by a “spirit within” and made to echo the ancient words. When Shelley asserts that the prophetic poet is a mirror capable of reflecting images of the future, he does not presume an oracular magic. Prophecy is that capacity to deduce the consequences of present circumstances. Referring to the repercussions of Jupiter’s tyranny, Prometheus says, “I close my tearless eyes, but see more clear / Thy works within my woe-illumèd mind.” Earth blesses Prometheus that he may be comforted by those spirits of human thought who “behold / Beyond that twilight realm, as in a glass, / The future.” And when, after the fall of Jupiter, the chariot of the new earth arrives, its coming is “Distinctly seen through that dusk aery veil / . . . like shapes in an enchanter’s glass” (Prometheus Unbound, Act 4, lines 212–13). Prophecy, for Shelley, surrenders nothing to perceptual immediacy. The problem of memory, including that cultural memory known as history, is that it may seduce the mind into neglecting the immediate present or into nurturing a nostalgia for a falsified past. As Shelley says in the errant fragments of Epipsychidion, “Remembrance borrows Fancy’s glass, to show / These forms more sincere / Than now they are, than then, perhaps, they were” (159–61). The deceptive images of history are also seen as reflections in a distorting mirror. In the Triumph of Life, as the tumultuous throng passes by, the withered root “Of what was once Rousseau” identifies to the poet history’s glorious conquerors now “chained to the car.” “Let them pass,” the poet cries out, the world and its mysterious doom Is not so much more glorious than it was,

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    

That I desire to worship those who drew New figures on its false and fragile glass As the old faded. (Triumph of Life, 244–48) To this skepticism, the wizened Rousseau adds the grim moral that not only do the shadows of “mighty phantoms” pass away, they suffer in their passing. He points to “All that is mortal of great Plato,” who now among the sufferers “Expiates the joy and woe his master knew not.” The curse upon these reflections from the past is not simply what they have made of themselves, as might be the case if Shelley were adhering to the conventional de casibus tale, but rather what history has made of them. Their “mortal” images are reflected in the “false and fragile glass” of history. Theirs is the curse of historical reception which leaves them chained to the careening chariot. In probing the ways in which art may be said to imitate nature, the romantic poets not only confirmed Aristotle’s notion that human beings are born with a mimetic instinct, they also observed nature itself stimulating an awareness of the mimetic activity. While the child may spontaneously engage in games of mimicry, nature itself does so as well, revealing the possibilities of mimicry, guiding its attainments. The adult artist may imitate nature, but only after nature has taught the child how to imitate. The theme of tutorial nature dominates much of Wordsworth’s poetry, but Coleridge too, and even Shelley acknowledge the influence of nature on the child’s creative sensibility. For Shelley, as he tells it in “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” the child’s intuition of an invisible power informing nature inspires the child to seek beauty. Once he has perceived the immanence of beauty in “thought or form,” he is overcome with a longing to pursue its elusive presence. His childhood imagination, Shelley records, equated the spiritual manifestation of beauty with the Gothic lore of the supernatural. His morbid conjurings failed. When he stood amidst the animate vitality of springtime, he recollects, “thy shadow fell upon me.” This was the moment of ecstasy that inspired him to “dedicate my powers / To thee and thine.” Shelley’s Platonic conception of artistic mimesis as an imitation of idea or ideal form rather than as a mere redundancy of physical objects also contributes to his argument that material bondage makes a mockery of imitation. Shelley, inclined as he was to see mockery in all monuments to material power, exposes the delusion of their grandeur with succinct irony in the sonnet, “Ozymandias.” The ravages of time have all but obliterated the grand pretensions of a once mighty “king of kings.” The sonnet heightens the sense of geographical re-

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moteness and historical obscurity by casting the narrative as the report of “a traveller from an antique land” who describes the monument now toppled into ruin in a distant land of desert and desolation. Redoubling the mimetic redoubling, the traveler’s description of the monument ekphrastically recapitulates the sculptor’s representation of the ignominious tyrant. Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things. As he here presents the dilemma of manner and matter in artistic mimesis, the sculptor’s truth, “stamped on these lifeless things,” outlasts the vanity and ambition of his mortal subject. Shelley nevertheless encourages no naive faith that the artist’s truth will survive and prosper. Because artistic representation exists under the aegis of prevailing materiality, its truth is more readily perverted than propagated. Thus when the Furies mock Prometheus with the vision of Christ, they interpret the Crucifixion as an “emblem” of futility (Act 1, lines 594–96). Similarly, Prometheus’s gift to humanity, the fire of “harmonious mind” and “all-prophetic song,” becomes enmeshed in the paradoxicality of Platonic mimesis: human hands first mimicked then mocked, With moulded limbs more lovely than its own The human form, till marble grew divine; And mothers, gazing, drank the love men see Reflected in their race, behold, and perish. (Act 2, scene 4, lines 80–84) Even in idealizing the human form, art remains in bondage to the materiality of representation. Evil, the immedicable plague, which, while Man looks on his creation like a God And sees that it is glorious, drives him on, The wreck of his own will (Act 2, scene 4, lines 101–4)

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    

As Demogorgon explains the dilemma, “All spirits are enslaved which serve things evil.” The material impulse is to confine and possess the truth in some palpable representation, yet in its very materiality it is corrupt and no longer true. It is futile to “gaze / On the revolving world,” for “the deep truth is imageless” (110, 116–18). Although he did not share Shelley’s hostility toward the monuments of materiality and icons of power, Wordsworth nevertheless registers an awareness of incongruity as he ambles through the streets of London beholding statues of maniacs and monarchs: the tombs Of Westminster; the Giants of Guildhall; Bedlam and the two figures at its gates, Streets without end and churches numberless, Statues with flowery gardens in vast squares, The Monument, and Armoury of the Tower. These fond imaginations of themselves, Had long before given way in season due, Leaving a throng of others in their stead; And now I looked upon the real scene. (Prelude 7.130–39) Not these carved memorials in themselves but their place amidst “the real scene” produce the sense of incongruity. In contrast to his boyhood visions “of sights and shows, / Processions, equipages, lords and dukes, / The King, and the King’s Palace,” and “not last, / Or least,” Dick Whittington magically elevated from friendless poverty to Lord Mayor (110–15), London now whirls dizzily in “the quick dance / Of colours, lights and forms, the Babel din, / The endless stream of men and moving things” (156–58). Shelley, as a poet who celebrates themes of political freedom, is quick to assume that misrepresentation is the product of hypocrisy and deceit, an ideological ploy of ruling authority. That he may himself be entrapped in misrepresentation is not a possibility that he is apt to accept. In “Alastor” and “Julian and Madallo,” he creates characters who are victims of error and delusion. In The Revolt of Islam, canto 1, the narrator himself misinterprets the battle of the eagle and the serpent. Nevertheless, delusion and error are evils to be overcome by the vatic poet who possesses truth. Wordsworth, however, assumes that misrepresentation cannot be avoided, that it will intrude even upon the most conscientious effort at mimetic repre-

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sentation. Misrepresentation is unavoidable, not necessarily evil, perhaps even informative and beneficial. If properly pondered, rather than simply ignored or futilely opposed, the inevitable misrepresentations in art may help expose, rather than insidiously propagate, the misrepresentations in life. Wordsworth thus maintains a bemused recollection of his Cambridge education as a mock-show, “played / By wooden images”: here in dwarf proportions were expressed The limbs of the great world—its goings-on Collaterally portrayed, as in a mock fight, A tournament of blows, some hardly dealt Though short of mortal combat—and whate’er Might in this pageant be supposed to hit An artless rustic’s notice, this way less, More that way, was not wasted upon me. And yet the spectacle may well demand A more substantial name, no mimic show, Itself a living part of a live whole (Prelude [1805] 3.616–25) While the misrepresentation which he here represents may not be his own, but that of the university, he also acknowledges that he participated in its illusions. He likens himself to one who “rather makes / Than finds what he beholds” (548–49). But Cambridge was “a privileged world / Within a world, a midway residence / With all its intervenient imagery” (553–55). The inclinations of his own “visionary mind” are thus encouraged by the “artificial life” of the place. Tolerance of misrepresentation, however, does not mean acquiescence to error. Confessing his own visionary habits at the time and the uncertainty of his memory after many years have elapsed, Wordsworth enhances his own ethical credibility as one who is striving for accuracy in his reflections as well as in his representations. In the Prelude, no less than in the Guide through the Lakes, Wordsworth rejects that reversal of the mimetic order which, in the name of the picturesque, assumes that nature must imitate art. But even here, Wordsworth confesses his own culpability as one who has been seduced by “superficial things, / Pampering myself with meagre novelties / Of colour and proportion” (Prelude 12.116–18). The cult of the picturesque encouraged superficiality: “disliking here, and there / Liking; by rules of mimic art transferred / To things above all art” (110–12). The fault here is neither nature nor art, but a false set of “rules

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    

prescribed by passive taste” (154). The optical reflection of surface details must be complemented by active mental reflection on “the depth of things” (184). By retracing the ways in which external reflections stimulate internal reflections, Wordsworth claims to reveal a truth that may well reside in illusion but is nevertheless the truth of reciprocity between mind and nature. Optical illusions provide dramatic moments for such revelations, as when the “huge cliff, / As with voluntary power instinct” seemed to pursue the boy in a borrowed boat (Prelude 1.406–10); or when, stopping suddenly in his ice-skating, the “solitary cliffs” seemed still to wheel by, “as if the earth had rolled / With visible motion her diurnal round” (1.484–86); or when, ascending “up the lonely brooks,” he sees suddenly before him a shepherd, “In size a giant, stalking through the fog, / His sheep like Greenland bears” (8.400–402). He admits, of course, to his own willful intervention in sustaining the truth of such fragile revelations. In book 8, for example, he recounts his imaginative response in reflecting upon the light which reflected upon a rock some distance from his cottage door. There was a copse, An upright bank of wood and woody rock That opposite our rural dwelling stood, In which a sparkling patch of diamond light Was in bright weather duly to be seen On summer afternoons, within the wood At the same place. ’Twas doubtless nothing more Than a black rock, which, wet with constant springs, Glistered far seen from out its lurking-place As soon as ever the declining sun Has smitten it. Beside our cottage hearth Sitting with open door, a hundred times Upon this lustre have I gazed, that seemed To have some meaning which I could not find— And now it was a burnished shield, I fancied, Suspended over a knight’s tomb, who lay Inglorious, buried in the dusky wood; An entrance now into some magic cave, Or palace for a fairy of the rock. Nor would I, though not certain whence the cause Of the effulgence, thither have repaired Without a precious bribe, and day by day And month by month I saw the spectacle,

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Nor ever once have visited the spot Unto this hour. Thus sometimes were the shapes Of wilful fancy grafted upon feelings Of the imagination, and they rose In worth accordingly. (Prelude 8.559–86) After arguing Wordsworth’s concern with revealing truth, I do not intend now to undermine my argument by calling the disclaimer in this passage disingenuous. But how are we to interpret his denial that he neither knew “the cause / Of the effulgence, . . . / Nor ever once . . . visited the spot / Unto this hour”? He might seem to resort here to that mode of reasoning in “Yarrow Unvisited”: “We have a vision of our own; / Ah! why should we undo it.” But clearly the sequence of this passage would indicate something closer to the situation in “Yarrow Visited”: “I see—but not by sight alone, / . . . / A ray of fancy still survives—Her sunshine plays upon thee!” In “Yarrow Unvisited” the internal vision is described in competition with the external sight. In “Yarrow Visited,” the “ray” of internal “sunshine” is not obscured but reflected upon the “genuine image.” This complementation, in spite of his assertion that he would not visit the spot “Without a precious bribe,” already informs his awareness of “the shapes / Of wilful fancy grafted upon feelings / Of the imagination.” Even if he has not visited this glistering rock hidden in the dark copse, he has observed others like it and thus already knows the source of its “diamond light.” Indeed, he knows “the cause / Of the effulgence” well enough to describe with scientific detail the complex conditions necessary to produce its singular effect: the black rock, wet by constant springs, provides the proper mirroring surface; only during the summer months do the late afternoon rays of the sun strike the rock at the correct angle to reflect the light toward the cottage door; the rock itself is otherwise concealed in the dark copse. Before the reflective imagination is called into play, the poet has fully explained the causes of the optical reflection. The tension between the two modes of perception, it is worth recalling, is precisely the same that he sets up in the Guide to distinguish his own intimate knowledge of the lakes from the stranger’s awe at the apparent magic at the optical illusions reflected upon their surfaces. Yet in “Yarrow Visited” and in this retrospective passage from the Prelude, Wordsworth allows himself to be the stranger, to sustain, that is, a naive perception and to encourage the fancy and imagination. As a poet capable of gazing often and long upon the mysterious lustre until

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    

his fancy becomes as restless as what he beholds, Wordsworth shares with Coleridge a capacity for self-mesmerizing contemplation that is perhaps more often indulged by the latter. The movement, of course, is the same as the one Coleridge describes in “Frost at Midnight,”20 when he gazes at the fluttering ash upon the hearth and allows it to make a toy of thought. Both poets evoke an interchange of optical and mental reflections in poetic description. In describing artistic imitation, Coleridge praises the “magic mirror” precisely because it reflects the internal as well as external: Which, like a second and more lovely nature, Turns the blank canvas to a magic mirror; That makes the absent present, and to shadows Gives light, depth, substance, bloom, yea, thought and motion.21 For Coleridge, as we have seen, the mimetic illusion that makes the absent seem present is always only an illusion. This praise of Titian’s art as “a second and more lovely nature,” in its orginal context in Remorse, contributes to Coleridge’s thematization of illusion. Because she cherishes the illusion that Alvar, her absent lover, still lives, Theresa is thought to be deranged or mad. Her mental illusion, however, is true. The painting, to be revealed by a flash of gunpowder in a stunning coup de theatre, falsely depicts Alvar’s death. Just before the play enjoyed its successful run at Drury Lane, Coleridge had commenced his lectures on Shakespeare at the Surry Institute. His auditors were informed that the true nature of dramatic illusion, in contradistinction to optical effects of stage illusion, resides in the mental reflection.22 Those who then joined the audience at Drury Lane were able to witness a bit of Coleridgean irony when he has Alvar, disguised as the moorish sorcerer in the magic scene, tell Theresa that she is right to walk out on such false theatrical display. The two principal concepts of mimesis—Plato’s imitation of ideal form, Aristotle’s imitation of the processes of thought—persist in the romantic period. Both accounts of artistic “imitation” are metonymic: they refer only to the means. The same is no less true of “expression.” As soon as we begin to ask how, or what, to “imitate” or “express,” we become aware that these terms do not explain artistic production. They are mere tropes for something that is presumed to 20. CPW 1:240–42. 21. CPW 2:842. Remorse, Act 2, scene 2, lines 42ff. These lines, praising “the famous Titian,” were omitted from the first edition, and restored in Coleridge’s note in subsequent editions. 22. Coleridge, lectures 7 and 8 (15 December and 22 or 29 December 1812), in LL 1:491–92,

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happen in the creative process. Perhaps it was in their effort to overcome the spare abstraction of mimetic theory that prompted the romantic poets to thematize reflection. Whatever their motives, the evidence is abundantly clear: the descriptive attention to mirror surfaces provides apt occasion in their poetry to implicate their own imagery in the moment of redoubling and reflecting. Verbal images of reflection cannot function in the same way as actual mirrors, nor even in the same way as painted mirrors, as in Velázquez’s Las Meniñas or Quentin Metsys’s The Money Changer and His Wife. Actual mirrors move with the beholder, to whom they offer not only an alternate perspective, but an alternate that adjusts itself up, down, and sideways. Painted mirrors are not cooperative. The alternate perspective is fixed and immobile. But it is nevertheless a useful alternative. Metsys’s mirror-in-the-painting reveals a person situated exactly where the spectator stands and where the artist ought to have been, but the figure seems to be a client rather than the painter. Velázquez has inverted the relationship, for his artist is in the middle of the painting, looking out from behind his canvas toward the spectator. The mirror in the back of the room reflects, of course, not the spectator, but the subject that the artist is painting. The actual painting reveals only the back of the canvas; what is presumably being painted on the canvas are the images of the royal couple seen in the mirror. The painted mirror provides an alternate perspective, and in so doing opposes the stasis of the fixed images with a revealed and potentially dynamic oscillation. The eye is provided with the visual evidence of what is outside as well as inside the frame. Verbal reflections are bereft of the simultaneity of visual imagery. Their alternate perspective may be imagistically detailed, but the images cannot be juxtaposed by the eye. The reflected images in Coleridge’s “The Picture,” in Wordsworth’s “Composed by the Side of Grasmere Lake,” or in Shelley’s The Revolt of Islam, are alternate mind-sets, alternate states of subjectivity. As Blake put it, “The eye altering alters all.” The reality reflected in the mirroring surface is not a mise en abyme that reveals in little the scene at large; it is a mise en abyme, rather, that reflects the mimetic process at large. As such, the “reflections” in romantic poetry function much the same way as the ekphrastic conjuration in Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” Heman’s “Properzia Rossi,” or the Campo Santo finale to De Quincey’s “Dream Fugue.” Reflections and ekphrasis both involve a mimesis of mimesis, a self-reflexive opportunity to explore, or to challenge, the presumptions of representation. The twice-told tale, the topic of Chapter 6, is another such self-reflexive strategy. But it is structurally more ambitious: the narrative is split in half and made to mirror itself, thus exposing, perhaps even undermining, its own fictions.

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6

                  -      

“All the world’s a stage” (As You Like It, Act 2, scene 7, line 47), declares the melancholy Jacques, whose lines are often cited as testimony to that reverse mimesis whereby life is said to imitate art. Another such pronouncement on life as redundant imitation is spoken by Lewis (“a beardless boy, a cocker’d silken wanton”): “Life is as tedious as a twicetold tale / Vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man” (King John, Act 3, scene 4, lines 108–9).1 In his i. Alexander Pope, in his translation of the Odyssey (12.558), echoes Shakespeare: “What so tedious as a twice-told tale?”

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    

1851 preface to Twice-Told Tales (1837), Nathaniel Hawthorne endorses rather than dispels the notion of tedium: his tales “have the pale tint of flowers that blossomed in too retired a shade,—the coolness of a meditative habit, which diffuses itself through the feeling and observation of every sketch. Instead of passion there is sentiment; and, even in what purport to be pictures of actual life, we have allegory, not always so warmly dressed in its habiliments of flesh and blood as to be taken into the reader’s mind without a shiver” (Complete Writings, 1:liv). As did the venerable Dr. Dryasdust, Sir Walter Scott’s antiquarian alter ego, Hawthorne poses a recluse who rummages through old books and papers, conjuring characters from obscurity and retelling their tales. As many of the romantic writers discovered, the twice-told tale was far from tedious. A second telling, never quite the same as the first, exposes the biases, prejudices, and idiosyncracies of the narrator. But it also challenges the reader to watch for the discrepancies. Indeed, the author may implicate auditors as well as storytellers in the strategy of retelling. The narrator in Wordsworth’s “Resolution and Independence” fails to listen to the leechgather tell his story and requires him to tell it three times over. Not the fallible narrator but the fallible auditor also requires the child to repeat her insistent “we are seven.” In “Hartleap Well” the first telling, a tale of a hunter who builds a memorial where he may celebrate his victory in “merriment,” is told from the perspective of Sir Walter, calling for another horse, and yet another as he pursues relentlessly his quarry to that point where the beast finally drops after a thirteen-hour chase. The second telling commences when the poet arrives on a scene of moldered ruin, and a shepherd reveals that Sir Walter’s victorious hunt was an act of cruelty. Friedrich Schlegel’s various pronouncements in the Lyceum and Athenäum fragments have tended to dominate critical discussion on romantic irony. The problem in citing Schlegel occurs when the critic ignores the irony in which Schlegel has couched his account of irony. Lyceum §42, we should recollect, begins with the assertion that “die Philosophie ist die eigentliche Heimat der Ironie.”2 His fragments, true to the genre, are fragmentary. As fragments, their function is provocation rather than definition. Lilian Furst rightly insists that we 2. Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel Ausgabe, vol. 2, Lyceum, §42: “Es gibt alte und moderne Gedichte, die durchgängig im Ganzen und überall den göttlichen Hauch der Ironie atmen. Es lebt in ihnen eine wirklich transzendentale Buffonerie. Im Innern, die Stimmung, welche alles übersieht, und sich über alles Bedingte unendlich erhebt, auch über eigne Kunst, Tugend, und Genialität; im Äußern, in der Ausführung die mimische Manier eines gewöhnlichen guten italiänischen Buffo.”

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must “get away from Schlegel’s cryptic terminology.”3 Before we put that terminology behind us, however, I would like to consider the challenge of the relationships Schlegel has proposed. Philosophic and poetic expression are intimately related because both become vehicles of transcendental irony. Rhetorical irony, Schlegel also explains in Lyceum, §42, is incidental and governs only a particular turn of phrase or juxtaposition of ideas. Transcendental irony, by contrast, pervades the entire exposition. When Schlegel declares that irony is the operative mode of philosophic dialogue, he means that dialogue sustains opposing versions of the truth. The dialogical tensions in poetic expression are bolstered by the external appearance of an earnest mimesis accompanied by an internal awareness of the art and artifice of the whole endeavor. The self-reflexive awareness is not in itself ironic; rather, it becomes ironic by putting on a well-acted show of external conditions. The irony, that is, exists in and through a conscious artistic manipulation of mimetic representation. To the extent that art disguises itself as what it is not and pretends to make the absent present, the mimetic act has an inherent potential for irony. This potential is realized, as Schlegel observed, by various strategies of self-reflection. Ekphrasis, for example, may thematize the mimetic act by describing the presence of a visual artifact within the verbal medium and at the same time attempting to conjure its making, or trying to involve us in beholding the details of its palpable form. The ekphrastic endeavor, as in Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” forces language to expose the limits of its own mimetic pretenses. A storyteller might also posit within the descriptive landscape a mirroring surface in which narrative events are reflected. Most readers, as Sir Walter Scott knew in telling “My Aunt Margaret’s Mirror” (1828), are quite capable of noticing when “literary” mirrors have been enlisted as both fictive instruments and selfdefining symbols of the narrative. A primary mode of thematizing mimesis occurs in a literary work that portrays the production of a literary work. And still another twist occasionally encountered in the doubling of the narrative is the doubling of a character: the doppelgänger who appears as wraith-like shadow of the self or a flesh-and-blood alter ego in several of the twice-told tales to be discussed in this chapter. The twice-told tale creates tensions and oppositions that are a devil’s playground for romantic irony. 3. Lilian Furst, Fictions of Romantic Irony, p. 227: “The greatest challenge in grappling with romantic irony is to try to get away from Schlegel’s cryptic terminology so as to evolve not so much a portable definition as a robust understanding of the phenomenon in its bewildering ramifications.”

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August Wilhelm Schlegel expressed his critical enthusiasm for this sort of self-reflexivity when he praised Goethe’s Torquato Tasso (1790) for making an actual poet the object of poetic representation, and Tieck’s Der gestiefelte Kater (1797) as a play about a play.4 The “play within a play,” whether to parody the lovers in Midsummer-Night’s Dream (1600) or to expose the murderers in Hamlet (1603), functions as well, A. W. Schlegel observed, to enhance the dimensions of dramatic illusion.5 Shakespeare’s notion that “all the world’s a stage” was shared by other playwrights who gradually elaborated the “play within a play” into the “play about a play.” Seventeenth-century drama frequently problematizes the “play-acting” of social mannerism and the ways in which art imitates life or life imitates art. Shakespeare introduces his Taming of the Shrew (1594) as an entertainment performed to distract the befuddled Tinker Sly. As such, it may be seen as a grand extension of a “play within a play.” In L’Illusion comique (1636), however, Corneille attempts something very different when he has the magician Alcandre appear to Piedamant and promise to conjure an illusion that will reveal what has happened to Clindor, his long-lost son. Unknown to the father, the son has become an actor. In the ensuing “illusion” (acts 2 through 4), the son performs a fictional version of his own life story which ends in disgrace and death. In the fifth act the son steps forth to reveal himself as a successful actor. In Charles Beys’s Les Illustres Fous (1634; rev. 1653), the aristocrats who come to observe the inmates of an insane asylum are entertained by a theatrical performance in which each of the unfortunate inmates acts out the circumstances that drove him mad. The insane asylum, as an arena in which all members of society may see themselves mirrored, functions very much like a theater. Although the play might have lapsed into a series of vignettes, little “plays within a play,” the very device of putting on a performance to entertain the nobility turns it into a metadramatic “play about a play,” in which the characters discuss the rules of drama, the methods of acting, the expectations of the audience. The “play about a play” can thus function as a critique on the drama, actors, or playwrights or it can function as a satire on contemporary manners. In a play in which he introduces himself rehearsing a comedy to be performed at court, 4. A. W. Schlegel, review of Goethe’s Schriften, vols. 6–8, Göttingische Anzeigen von gelerhten Sachen, no. 154 (1790); in Kritische Schriften, ed. Eduard Böcking (1846), 10:4–5: “Der Gedanke den Charakter eines wirklichen Dichters zum Gegenstand einer dichterischen Darstellung zu machen, hat etwas so Natürliches und auffallend Anlockendes, daß man sich wundern muß, ihn nicht häufiger benutzt zu finden.” Review of Tieck’s Ritter Blaubart and Der gestiefelte Kater, in Jenaische Allgemeine Litteraturzeitung, reprinted in Kritische Schriften (1828), 1:311–18. 5. Schlegel, Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literatur, in Kritische Schriften und Briefe, 6:160, 171.

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L’Impromptu de Versailles (1663), Molière ridicules the plays of Edme Boursault, rival acting troops, and various pedants and critics. Similarly, in The Rehearsal (1672), George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, mocks the pretensions of heroic tragedy by having the playwright, Mr. Laurel Bayes, instruct the actors in preparing a performance of his new play (with burlesqued echoes of John Dryden’s Conquest of Granada, 1672). Such metadramatic ploys have a history virtually as old as drama itself. The mimetic pretenses of the drama have apparently always invited efforts to pop the illusionist bubble. Long before Luigi Pirandello sent his six characters in search of an author (Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore, 1921), Aristophanes in The Acharnians (425 b.c.) sent his comic hero Dicaepolis in search of Euripides to borrow a speech from one of his plays so that he might escape the horrible dilemma he is in for having exploited his private peace-treaty with the Lacedaemonians. The playwright has his character beg another playwright to loan him a speech from a character in another play. In the parabasis of Aristophanic comedy the actor steps out of his role, denouncing the lines which the playwright has given him or the predicament into which his character has been placed. Irony, in another of Friedrich Schlegel’s fragments, is defined as “permanent parabasis” (Philosophische Fragmente, Erste Epoche, 2.668). Perpetuating the condition of being both “inside” and “outside” the role, a “permanent parabasis” might well intensify other paradoxical oppositions—artifice and nature, intention and instinct, urbanity and naïveté, concealment and revelation, deliberation and spontaneity, jest and seriousness, self-propagation and self-annihilation— essential to Schlegel’s concept of irony (Lyceum, §§37, 42, 48, 108; Athenäum, §§51, 116, 121, 238, 305). How these oppositions are to be reconciled in a “clear consciousness of the eternal agility, of the infinitely full chaos” [klares Bewußtsein der ewigen Agilität, des unendlich vollen Chaos] (Ideen, §69), Schlegel does not tell us. In Fictions of Romantic Irony, Furst delineates various ways in which appearance and reality, illusion and truth, are brought into a special mode of ironic conjunction. When characters in Jean Paul Richter’s Flegeljahre (1804–5) call upon a writer named J.P.F. Richter, for example, she insists that such references are “by no means gratuitous exercises in self-reflexivity,” and she goes on to argue that the author is both “in” his narrative and “external” to it (pp. 124–29). Although Friedrich Schlegel suggested something similar in comparing irony to the “inner” awareness and “outer” mannerism of the Italian buffo, Furst goes far beyond the cryptic metaphor by exploring the levels of metafictional referentiality. Following her analysis of the essential cross-referencing and functional self-reflexivity, I would like to call attention to an ironic structure of transcen-

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dental buffoonery which is achieved through doubled narratives or twice-told tales. Just as a play can be doubled by containing “a play about a play,” a novel can be made to fold back upon itself, reflect itself, thematize and ironize its own mimetic presumption. Although I am concerned less with the generic attributes of “a novel about a novel” than with competing perspectives and contrary versions of the truth, I do want to track self-reflexivity and the fictions about what may be “inside” or “outside” a narrative. In her commentary on Jean Paul’s irony, Furst points out the ironic dimensions of Flegeljahre as a “box-within-abox-within-a-box.” Flegeljahre introduces a character named J.P.F. Richter, who writes a report to his employers on Walt’s efforts in fulfilling the terms of the will. While pausing at the inn “Zum Wirtshaus” (which has a signboard depicting an inn with a signboard depicting an inn), Walt and his twin brother Vult agree to write a joint novel, “Doppelpoppel, oder das Herz.” Material for the “outside” novel is created by the tasks the character must perform to meet the conditions of Van der Kabel’s will, and for the “inside” novel by the escapades in which the naive enthusiast Walt is involved not only by the will but also by the pranks of his brother Vult. The tension between the external and internal dimensions creates the illusion of two discreet but interacting realities. Flegeljahre, however, is not bifurcated in the same sense as, say, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847). Heathcliff ’s tempestuous and blighted passion for Catherine Earnshaw in the first half of the novel (chaps. 1–15) is perversely replicated in the second half (chaps. 16–33) when Heathcliff forces Catherine’s daughter, Cathy Linton to marry her sickly cousin, Linton Heathcliff, son of his marriage to Isabelle Linton. The social and economic manipulation of the lives of Catherine and Heathcliff is reenacted with a vengeance on their children. The bifurcated structure is further complicated by the narrative shift from Lockwood’s naive report to Ellen Dean’s revelation of her own meddling. When two or more witnesses give their accounts of an event, the story never comes out the same. The differences, as Browning fully realized in The Ring and the Book (1868–69), provide for powerful ironic tensions. Over and over again the story is told of what happened on the fatal night when Count Guido Franceschini went in search of his seventeen-year-old bride Pompilia, who in the company of the handsome young priest Giuseppi Caponsacchi had run away from his ancient villa and returned home to her parents in Rome. And in every telling there is another version of the motives and the consequences. Although Browning allows the Pope to serve as arbiter, he also effectively under-

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mines confidence in testimony. Even Guido’s final confession leaves the reader with uneasy qualms about the claims of truth and justice. What is expected of a reader who observes that one truth-claim modifies or compromises another? Is the task, then, to decide which version is more deserving of credence? And how is the reader to respond to an account that is advanced with full expectation that it will be disbelieved? As Clayton Koelb has shown in The Incredulous Reader, dialogical opposition can fold untruth within truth, disbelief within belief, in a virtually endless regress. When Pirandello, in It is so! (If you think so) (Così è [si vi pare], 1917), takes up the problem of competing claims to truth, he gradually pushes the claims into such extreme contradiction that if one version is true the proponent of the other is not simply mistaken or lying, but mentally unbalanced. The claims of Signora Frola and Signor Ponza baffle the efforts of the gossips in a small Italian town, and with them Pirandello’s theater audience, to determine whether Ponza is deranged and has cruelly concealed his wife (according to the tale his mother-in-law tells), or Signora Frola suffers from the delusion that her daughter is still alive, refusing to believe that Ponza has remarried (as Ponza tells the story). Signora Ponza fully understands the bond of affection and mutual dependence that has grown up between Signora Frola and Signor Ponza as each attempts to humor the supposed delusion of the other. When she at last appears in the final scene, everyone, gossiping neighbors and audience alike, expect the truth to be revealed. Instead, they find that she humors them both, declaring herself to be both the daughter of Signora Frola and the second wife of Ponza. When the local prefect demands that she must be “either the one or the other,” she answers that she is “whom you believe me to be.” The two versions of the story are incompatible; yet as the stage manager declares when the curtain falls, both are true. “Are you satisfied?” he asks, and bursts out laughing. The bifurcated novel and the twice-told tale not only allow for variations, contradictions, and paradoxical tensions, they also thematize the very act of storytelling. Whereas other modes of narrative necessarily rely on a presumed reality outside the novel that is mimetically reflected in the telling, the twicetold tale reflects itself. One version of the tale inevitably stands in some kind of mirror-relation to the other. The reader readily observes the differences, but may well be baffled in trying to determine which of the mirrored images is distorted. Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn (1799), E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Kater Murr (1820/21), and James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) are three novels of the romantic period which develop their irony through structural bifurcation.

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Because it is more difficult to track the “transcendental buffoonery” of Brown’s Arthur Mervyn, I shall give it the most thorough attention and then briefly describe the ironic effects of narrative doubling in the other two novels. In documenting the epidemic of yellow fever in Philadelphia, Brown describes actual historical circumstances in far more explicit detail than either Hoffmann does in Kater Murr or Hogg does in Confessions of a Justified Sinner. In the latter two, the mimesis of external reality is less earnest and the narrative moves more radically into demonic and fantastic delusions. In Arthur Mervyn, the title character tells his stories because his moral integrity has been challenged—by Wortley in part 1 and by Mrs. Althorpe in part 2. In Kater Murr, the “Life and Opinions” of a tomcat are interspersed with pages from a manuscript describing the plight of the bewildered composer, Johannes Kreisler. In the Confessions, the editor presents a biographical account of the events leading up to Robert Wringhim’s succession to the estate of Laird Dalcastle, then these events are retold in Wringhim’s own record of how he fell under the delusionary sway of a demonic companion. Sir Walter Scott succinctly appraised Brown’s narrative strategy: “The suggestive manner of treating every subject aims at keeping the mind constantly on the rack of uncertainty.” In Brown’s “Philadelphia novel,” Arthur Mervyn wanders city streets and country by-ways that would be immediately familiar to his American readers, but he also stumbles through an interior mindscape of naive self-righteousness and guilty self-doubt and recrimination that most readers would rather disown. Brown’s “suggestive manner” of “keeping the mind constantly on the rack of uncertainty” made it difficult, however, for the reader to avoid the demands of moral judgment. The irony that results from Brown’s compilation of contradictory evidence is that the accusations of Wortley and Mrs. Althorpe are never dispelled. Mrs. Wentworth may change her mind about Arthur, but Mrs. Maurice never will. Welbeck is convinced that Arthur is a younger version of himself who has turned his own villainous tactics against him. Brown’s Arthur Mervyn may foreground the American experience in its account of the pestilential outbreak of yellow fever in Philadelphia 1793, but it repeatedly reminds us that 1793 is also the year of the Bloody Reign of Terror in France. The many intrigues of the novel are propelled by the complicated interaction with such European characters as the evil Englishman Welbeck, the unfortunate Clemenza Lodi, the opportunistic and conniving Lucy Villars. France, as depicted in Achsa Fielding’s tale, is a place of blighted hopes. Just as William Wordsworth had created an allegory of the French Revolution and his own love for Annette Vallon in the “Vaudracour and Julia” episode of The Pre-

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lude (1805), the tale which Brown gives to Mrs. Fielding readily implies how self-serving desires had perverted the populist struggle for freedom and happiness. Mrs. Fielding tells how her aristocratic English husband had abandoned her and their child and run off to France with another woman. After his mistress died twelve months later, he became embroiled in the political turmoil and was executed under Robespierre’s tribunal. Brown’s narrative involves persistent cross-references, social and political, between the Old World and the New. Thus it is significant that his hero, at the novel’s close, looks forward to happiness in his marriage to a Jewish heiress from England with whom he is planning a twoyear excursion in Europe. Brown’s historical matter is even more immediate than the date of plague year, 1793, might imply, for the outbreak again reached epidemic proportions at the very time the first nine chapters were serialized in 1798. Yellow fever, carried by mosquitoes which bred in the surrounding marshlands, persisted summer after summer. The horror of the pestilence is narrated with all the morbid details of an eyewitness report. Brown may be given to overstatement in his emotional sentimentalism, but his description of the panic, the mass evacuation of the city, the desolate streets, and the feeble and dying who were left behind has the stark realism of newspaper reportage. None of Brown’s contemporaries found his account exaggerated. The plague, which spread through Philadelphia in August, September, and October 1793, killed 2,500 of a population of 30,000. The most horrific details of the novel—the helpless sick left unattended among the dead and dying, or nailed still alive into their coffins—were not mere fictions. The hearse-men making their rounds may well, as contemporary rumor suggested, have nailed up more than one prostrate victim of the disease who was still alive. The temporary infirmary set up on the circus grounds at the edge of the city was soon overcrowded. Conditions at the Bush-Hill mansion, which had been converted into an emergency hospital with 140 beds, were inadequate and inhumane. The staff, which had been enlisted to attend to the sick, according to Brown’s account, caroused in rooms well separated from the plague victims, whom they feared and shunned as carriers of death. In contrast to the sick who were neglected and abandoned, Brown tells of the survival of Arthur Mervyn who had exposed himself to the disease in his effort to save Wallace. Too weak to walk, Arthur collapses in the street where Dr. Stevens finds him. Stevens takes him home, cares for him, and restores him to health. Brown draws upon personal experience, for he too fell victim to yellow fever during the epidemic of 1798 and was nursed back to health in the home of William Dunlap (who later wrote the first biography of Brown). In Arthur’s search for Wallace he witnesses the death struggles of Maravegli, who,

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he is told by Estwick, was betrothed to Fanny, the eldest of Mary Walpole’s seven daughters, and had returned to help them escape from the blight but arrived too late and was himself seized by the disease. Here, again, Brown wove fact into fiction, for the tale of Maravegli parallels the real case of Joseph Scandella, an Italian physician who was stricken with the disease and was treated by Brown’s close friend, Elihu Hubbard Smith. Both Scandella and Smith died. In the very midst of the serialization of the opening chapters in the Weekly Magazine, the publisher James Watters also succumbed to the disease. The plague becomes a metaphor for social contagion and corruption. It is not only coincident with the Bloody Reign of Terror, it is aided and abetted by individual greed. The younger Walter Thetford, for example, is so eager to reap the profits from having swindled Welbeck that he refuses to leave even though the epidemic is devastating the population. When his maid shows symptoms of the disease, she is sent against her will to Bush-Hill, soon to be followed by his clerk, Wallace. One after another, every member of the household perishes: his wife, his bastard infant, whom, as Arthur had witnessed while hidden in the closet, Thetford had presented to his wife after they had lost their own child. Finally, Thetford himself dies in a mad frenzy of fear and fever. Arthur, stricken by the disease, hides in Welbeck’s vacant house to avoid being carried off to Bush-Hill. There he encounters Welbeck, who returned to search for the money concealed in Vicentio Lodi’s book. Arthur had already found it and intended to return it to Clemenza. Knowing that he is close to death, Arthur is about to write out instructions for the disposal of her money, when he is surprised by Welbeck. The scene in which Welbeck threatens, bargains with, and attempts to con the feverish and ailing Arthur, neatly amplifies the operative metaphor of contagion and corruption. Welbeck outsmarts himself, however, when he convinces Arthur that the money is counterfeit. To Welbeck’s dismay, Arthur promptly burns the bills in a candle flame. Welbeck’s angry shouts attract passersby. Welbeck runs off, certain that Arthur will be either incarcerated for looting or taken off to Bush-Hill. Arthur, however, escapes and weakly limps to the street corner where Dr. Stevens finds him. For all his emphasis on contagion and corruption, Brown is no pessimist. Scenes of healing intrude upon those of disease and death, of sacrifice upon those of greed. In the midst of the pestilence, Arthur meets individuals who risk their own lives to assist friends, neighbors, even strangers. Although part 1 might suggest that Brown endorses a commonplace distinction between the evils of the city and the virtues of rural life, part 2 assembles contrary evidence. The country may not have the likes of Welbeck or Thetford, but the ruthlessness and greed of Philip Hadwin are bad enough. Besides, it is in the city that

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Arthur experiences the benevolence of Estwick, Medlicote, and Stevens. No more than he can proclaim a good America and a bad Europe, or vice versa, can he accept the simplistic discrimination of city vs. country. The good and evil of humankind exist in peculiar mixtures in every individual, no matter where he or she is bred or housed. Brown shows us, instead, how easily innocence is corrupted, how easily the contagion of greed is spread. Welbeck’s tale of his own corruption is such a moral exemplum, first told to Arthur when he finds Welbeck in his study with the murdered Amos Watson, and then rehearsed in the debtor’s prison when Arthur reveals to Welbeck that he has broken his pledge of silence and recounted the entire tale to Dr. Stevens. Brown sustains reader interest and anticipation with the persistent hints that Arthur, the innocent exposed to the wiles of a corrupt society, may succumb eventually to similar temptations. Such temptations abound. When Arthur first sees Clemenza Lodi, whom he assumes is Welbeck’s daughter, he begins to fancy a familiarity that “might foster love and terminate in—marriage!” The fancy is promptly dissolved, for Clemenza is not Welbeck’s daughter, but his ward. Worse, as Arthur discovers when he encounters his benefactor departing one night from her bedroom, Welbeck has made her his mistress. Temptation is also upon him when he resides with Hadwin and his two daughters, Susan and Eliza. Susan is betrothed to Wallace, and Arthur soon recognizes his own growing passion for Eliza. He seeks to distract himself by translating Vicentio Lodi’s book. The book within the book, in Brown’s self-reflexive joke, serves to divert rather than stimulate the passions. When both Hadwin and Susan are dead, and Arthur is left as Eliza’s sole protector, the desire again seems irresistible. Arthur steadfastly declares himself her brother, not her lover, and delivers her to the Clavering family for safe-keeping, from himself no less than from Philip Hadwin, her ruthless uncle and legal guardian. Arthur also finds himself the protector of Clemenza, whom Welbeck sent to Mrs. Villars’s whorehouse when she became noticeably pregnant. Many adventures intervene—the burial of Watson in the cellar, the stay with the Hadwin family, the search for Wallace, the long recovery from yellow fever, the return to the devastated household of the Hadwins. When Arthur finally marches into Mrs. Villars’s house of ill-repute to rescue the ill-fated Clemenza, he arrives just in time to see her embrace her dying infant. It is here that he meets Mrs. Fielding, who might well have taken his brash words as an insult, as well as Mrs. Villars, who certainly did consider herself insulted and chose to answer him by putting a pistol to his head. The bullet only grazes his skull, and Arthur manages to escape with his life. Throughout these scenes, Arthur’s sup-

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posed innocence is sorely tested by desire, and his moral righteousness is made to sound a bit too urgent and disingenuous. Why have readers continued to find Brown’s novels psychologically unsettling? The answer, I think, is that he dared to explore, yet could not easily come to terms with, the hidden passions that his own Quaker upbringing and the puritanical rectitude of the nation had deliberately repressed. A generation before Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe were to take up these very themes, Brown introduced into American letters those sexual idiosyncrasies which America’s pious religious founders had determined to eradicate through pillories and witch-burnings. In less than a century, the city of “brotherly love,” settled by Quakers, Mennonites, Moravians, Presbyterians, and other Protestant sects, had expanded into a major center of maritime commerce peopled by prostitutes and sailors, merchants and speculators. Religious piety coexisted with lewd and greedy passions in Brown’s Philadelphia, and his novels explore the hypocrisy and tensions of opposing value systems. His characters are caught up in intrigues of murder, seduction, and rape, and they are victims of their own Oedipal and incestuous desires. Because of his ingenuity in manipulating multiple narrators, Brown obviates the need to exercise an explicit authorial judgment. Constantly pondering moral values, his characters manage to justify the moral right of acts which might otherwise seem wrong, and vice versa. While several of the characters in his novels, like Arthur Mervyn, seem to function as a surrogate self, an autobiographical projection in fictional disguise, Brown’s narratives disturb readers not because of the sexual urges which he reveals beneath the exterior of self-righteousness, but rather because Brown himself never acknowledges the hypocrisy. Although Arthur Mervyn implicates the same irony of concealed sin which Poe would bring to the perilous incest in “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) or Hawthorne to the adultery in The Scarlet Letter (1850), Brown’s characters seem also to conceal their sins from themselves. While the villain Welbeck has his moments of remorse and confession, he is adept at justifying his trespasses. Arthur Mervyn, the nominal hero, is all the more facile at claiming to be acting from the highest moral principles even in the most incriminating situations. Because Brown never allows the reader to penetrate the ambiguity of conflicting versions of “truth” as presented by his several narrators, the reader has no way of knowing how to interpret the ironies of hypocrisy and self-righteous turpitude. The irony and ambiguity is rendered all the more acute through the contradictory narrative in part 2 of the novel. Mrs. Althorpe’s report that the true reason for Arthur’s animosity toward Betty Lawrence, the servant girl whom his father had taken as a second wife, was jealousy, for “a criminal intimacy had

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subsisted between her . . . and the son” (II, i). When confronted with the accusation, Arthur admits that he had been discovered in apparently illicit circumstances with Betty, who had contrived entrance into his room while he was undressed. Considering it pointless to defend his innocence to those who would have acted differently in such a situation, Arthur nevertheless insists that he had not acquiesced to her wiles, and that his very refusal had aroused her anger. She was thus bent upon revenge once she had married his father. The ambiguity results from the contradictory claims of the two-part structure. Brown’s earlier comments on the novel indicate that he had originally conceived a much simpler ending. Arthur was to return to Eliza, now in possession of the family homestead, and settle down to a domestic bliss that would replicate the harmonic order disrupted at the beginning of the novel when Arthur’s mother died and his father married Betty Lawrence. The only trouble with this idyllic fate is that Arthur had already avowed himself constitutionally ill-suited to the life of a farmer. Brown rescues his hero from this happy ending by burdening him with calumny. In part 1, Dr. Stevens requests Arthur to redeem himself from Wortley’s charge that he is Welbeck’s co-conspirator. In the opening chapters of part 2, Dr. Stevens receives more damaging reports against Arthur’s character. In spite of Stevens’s efforts to restore Arthur’s claims of innocence and integrity, a residue of guilt nevertheless remains. His honesty, in part 2, is considerably more tarnished than in part 1. He was, indeed, telling the truth about Clavering’s death, although the mystery of Clavering’s doppelgänger in Charleston is never explained. In part 1, Brown describes Arthur’s attachment to his mother, how the mother’s role was usurped by the sluttish Betty, and how Arthur’s sexual fancies were aroused by his association with Clemenza and Eliza. In part 2, these relationships are reexamined as a part of a psychological pattern. Arthur has not learned to perceive a woman as wife. He sees woman, instead, as mother, or sister, or whore. Whenever his sexual urges are aroused, they must be repressed, for he must sustain the purity of the mother or sister from the taint of incestuous desire. For this reason, he finds the presence of Betty in the mother’s role unbearable. When he first enters Welbeck’s household, he imagines that he will be adopted as a son, but then his attraction to Clemenza threatens to turn the relationship incestuous. The same pattern is repeated in the household of the Hadwins when he begins to realize his desire for Eliza. He guards against his sexual urges by insisting upon his role as brother-protector. And he is unconscious of the pain that he inflicts upon Eliza, who cannot comprehend why he

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has rejected her. Playing son to Achsa is even more cruel and trying than playing brother to Eliza. His first encounter with Achsa Fielding is in the house of Lucy Villars. The latter he quickly identifies as a whore, the former “by no means inspired the same disgust . . . her modesty seemed unaffected.” If he thinks she is not a prostitute in Mrs. Villars’s service, the question he puts to her is all the more insulting: “Under this veil, perhaps, lurk a tainted heart and depraved appetites. Is it so?” (p. 320). What Arthur wants in a wife, he realizes, is a woman just like Mrs. Fielding, who happens also to be just like his “lost mamma.” When Arthur delivers to Mrs. Fielding his conclusion that he can only marry a woman just like herself, she can only avert her eyes and cry. Because of Arthur’s inability to get beyond the perception of mother or sister, the courtship is clearly doomed. Arthur is shocked out of his delusion by Dr. Stevens, who bluntly declares that the woman whom Arthur seeks as wife, the woman most like Mrs. Fielding, is Mrs. Fielding herself. Arthur must pass through one more trial before he can win Mrs. Fielding as his wife. It is a trial that can surprise no reader who has followed Brown’s account of the vicissitudes of love. The plague of seduction, according to Brown, is as dangerous as the plague of yellow fever. Lovers must be cautious of seductive infections. The evil of seduction is reported many times throughout the novel. The “wages” of seduction are frequently madness and suicide: such is the fate of Arthur’s sister after she has been seduced by the schoolmaster, Colvill; such, too, is the fate of Watson’s sister after she has been seduced by Welbeck. Susan Hadwin goes mad and dies when she realizes that Wallace has betrayed and abandoned her. The lovelorn Clavering also lapses into madness and suicidal despair. Watson’s brother-in-law kills himself upon learning of his wife’s infidelity, and Watson’s father, too, goes mad. Mrs. Fielding’s mother falls into madness when her daughter is abandoned. Madness and suicide, then, follow as natural consequences of seduction, abandonment, and betrayal. It is the madness of jealousy and doubt that Arthur must confront before he can realize the love of Achsa Fielding. After Stevens tells him that Achsa Fielding loves him, Arthur grows distraught. He calls Stevens a madman for indulging “so fatal a chimera! So rash a dream!” And he declares that he will no longer be able to look upon her “lest my mad and unhallowed ambition should betray itself ” (p. 435). Seriously in love with his substitute “mamma,” he must confront the father-rival. In his dream, Arthur goes to the house of Achsa Fielding. The door is answered by Eliza, “robed in a careless and hasty manner,” who tells him that “mamma has wanted you these two hours.” She leads him into the parlor where he is confronted by—Mr. Fielding, who has returned to reclaim his wife. Stricken with

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guilt, Arthur expiates his sin by reversing the Oedipal murder. Rather than having to kill his father, the wayward son is slain. Fielding, his face is distorted with rage and fury, draws his sword and stabs the young man through the heart. Arthur sinks into dark oblivion. When he awakens, Arthur is surprised to find the wound miraculously healed. At least on the level of dream, he has begun to confront his guilt. Nor is he altogether surprised to learn that, in his feverish and troubled sleep, he actually arose as a somnambulist, went to the house of Mrs. Fielding, and rang for admission. Now awake, he is eager to visit her and declare his feelings. But the visit is thwarted, for she has left for the home of Miss Stedman and her brother. It is this image of the brother that overwhelms Arthur with fear. The husband who returned in his dream was only a phantom. But Miss Stedman’s brother was a real flesh-and-blood rival. “A youth, forward, gallant and gay! Flushed with prosperity, and just returned from Europe, with all the confidence of age, and all the ornaments of education! She has gone with him, though preengaged to me! Poor Arthur, how art thou despised!” (pp. 439–40). In his delirium he hastens to the Stedman Villa, trespasses into the garden, prowls about the house, startles Achsa at the window, and arranges a tryst at five o’clock the following morning. That night he lies down at the river’s edge, pressing his “bared and throbbing breast” against the cold, hard stone and sheds his tears into the flowing waters. When Achsa arrives at dawn the next morning, he tells her that he has summoned her to hear his confession of infamy and guilt. His crime, he reveals after much hesitation, is that he “has dared—to love you; nay, to think of you, as of his wife!” She recognizes and accepts the urgent necessity of his ritual of expiation, his guilty transformation from son to lover. “ ‘Arthur! I do forgive thee.’—With what accents was this uttered! With what looks! The cheek that was before pale with terror, was now crimsoned over by a different emotion, and delight swam in her eye” (p. 443). Brown has had a difficult time constructing a narrative that would enable Arthur Mervyn to confront and overcome his own covert sexual conflicts. The reader is probably as relieved as Achsa Fielding that he has managed, at last, to come to terms with himself. Brown’s plots, some critics have complained, rely too much on coincidence and concealment, but it may be justly replied that it was precisely these narrative conventions that enabled him to thematize the psychology of repressed desire. Secrecy and impersonation, in fact, are crucial elements in Brown’s development of character. People are never quite what they seem. Carwin, in Wieland (1798), is so adept in mimicking the voices of others that he can drive the poor, troubled Wieland to commit murder. The title character in Ormond (1799) is a master of disguise who uses his acting skills to

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manipulate and influence his mistress, Helena Cleves, and the woman whom he seeks to seduce, Constantia Dudley. And in Edgar Huntly (1799), the narrator is threatened with mental lapses in which the irrational dreamer usurps the place of the rational observer, and, like one of the characters Clithero Edny, assumes a nocturnal identity as somnambulist. Before the advent of a Freudian psychology of the subconscious, Brown endeavored to chart that terra incognita of the mind by making new use of the old romance motifs of secrecy, impersonation, and disguise. Like Carwin in Wieland, Welbeck uses ventriloquism, and manages for the moment to make Arthur Mervyn hear the voice of the man who destroyed his sister. Like Edgar and Clithero in Edgar Huntly, Arthur, too, steps forth as an actor in the nocturnal drama of somnambulism. And like the evil seducer in Ormond, Arthur Mervyn thrills at the secret power of disguise. He puts on the clothes of Vicentio Lodi and feels himself transformed into a new identity, a new personality. Troubled especially by his resemblance to Clavering and Vicentio Lodi, Arthur thinks that his own identity is somehow redefined because he has mirrored the appearance of others. Unlike Ormond, Arthur never seems to be fully in command of his ability to act. He simply assumes the role into which others cast him. Thus he is all too responsive to the schemes of Welbeck. But his ready ability to adopt a role has its advantages. He accepts the part of surrogate son and protégé when Dr. Stevens offers to assist his study of medicine. More importantly, he readily enters into whatever part Mrs. Fielding may want him to play. “I was wax in her hand,” he declares. “Without design and without effort, I was always of that form she wished me to assume.” His immature struggle to define his self is thus externalized and thematized in the romance motifs of disguise and impersonation. Similarly, his inability to make his own choices in directing his course in life is represented through the apparent intervention of fate, again as in romance, which guides his steps as if by coincidence. On his very first night in Philadelphia, he is led by a prankster into a strange room where he is forced to conceal himself in a closet. The prankster turns out to be Wallace, Susan Hadwin’s fiancé; and the room belongs to Thetford, whom Arthur overhears plotting to swindle the “Nabob,” Welbeck. Through this chance encounter, Arthur is brought into contact with a web of circumstances that will only gain meaning to him in the course of his subsequent adventures. Coincidence, for Brown, is an efficient narrative shorthand for setting forth the complexity of interwoven events that are garnered and interpreted through an intricate web of individual experiences far beyond any narrator’s art to portray. Because Brown never releases his reader from “the rack of uncertainty” the

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irony remains unresolved. If we are disappointed that Arthur marries the wealthy Achsa Fielding rather than the charming and simple Eliza Hadwin, we are apt to agree with those many characters in the novel who consider him a cunning opportunist. He might be more aptly called a naive opportunist, one, that is, who instinctively discovers an altruistic purpose in every selfish desire. Arthur, like most people, does not dwell long upon his faults and failings. Faulted he may be, but he is made of better stuff than Welbeck, or Thetford, or Wallace. Dr. Stevens and his wife admire and trust him, even when well apprised of his shortcomings. And Achsa Fielding, whom he insulted on their first meeting and subsequently subjected to his immature fawnings, learns to love him. Now and again in the novel we may judge him a huckster or a prig, but ultimately the judgmental epithets are dissolved in a larger appreciation of human values. Arthur, in the tradition of the picaro, learns and grows with his experiences. Because Edgar Huntly, who, like Arthur Mervyn, readily convinces himself that all his prying and meddling is benevolent, slips from mere self-delusion into irrational obsession and gradually finds his way back, Brown is able to reveal a more conscious and deliberate irony in that later novel. The momentary madness of the somnambulist episode in Arthur Mervyn might have provided a similar occasion for revelation and self-awareness. Arthur, however, simply readjusts the rationale for his behavior. Even at the end of Brown’s bifurcated novel, the reader may still be unable to judge whether Arthur is “simple and ingenuous” or an ingeniously subtle charlatan. An Italian buffo, according to Schlegel, joins external mimesis with internal awareness. Is Arthur a buffo? On the one hand, he is so easily swayed by external appearances that, with a change of clothes, he feels his identity altered. On the other, he readily adapts to whatever role Achsa Fielding wishes him to play. Brown’s “transcendental Buffoonery” is not easily ascertained in the character, but it certainly resides in the bifurcated narrative. Hoffmann’s Kater Murr may make the art and artifice more obvious, but Hoffmann, too, delights in forestalling and dislocating self-reflexive awareness. In need of blotting paper and an underpad while writing his memoirs, Murr, a literary descendent of Hinze in Tieck’s Der gestiefelte Kater, ripped pages from a manuscript belonging to his master, Johannes Kreisler. Only after the page proofs were returned from the publisher, did Hoffmann, who had volunteered his services as editor, discover that scattered pages from Kreisler’s biography had remained interleaved with Murr’s memoirs. Because the two had been typeset together, the editor decided that an efficient expediency to indicate the shift in text would be a parenthetical note, Mak. Bl. (Maklatur-Blatt) and M. f. f. (Murr fährt fort). Although only happenstance has caused the two biographies to be published

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together, the reader soon discovers strange cross-connections. For one thing, Murr’s love for Miesmies leads to a series of intrigues and conflicts that seems to be echoed in the randomly inserted scraps describing Kreisler’s love for Julia and his rivalry with the mysterious Prince Hektor. For another, Master Abraham, “der ironische Schwarzkünstler,” is mentor to both Murr and Kreisler. Hoffmann may have defined only a modest part for himself as the editor of these entangled biographies, but in Master Abraham he has created a surrogate self who plays a more powerful role as manipulator of the dark fate that works upon the lives of cat and composer. It is from Master Abraham’s lyric manuscript that Kater Murr and the Poodle Ponto acquire their uncanny wisdom. And it is Master Abraham who takes Kreisler into the court of Fürst Irenäus, where he is soon caught up in Prince Hector’s evil machinations. After Miesmies jilts Murr and has an affair with an attractive black-yellow cat, Murr abandons his bourgeois philistine society and falls into rollicking company with a fraternity. When Ponto snubs him, however, he vows to change his ways. He feels a growing passion for the beautiful kitten Mina, but Miesmies appears just in time to reveal that Mina is their daughter. All his attempts to find love are doomed to disappointment, Murr realizes, when he finally gives up his unhappy attraction to Minona, the niece of Badina, the whippet of the wife of the head steward at the court of the Baron Alzibades von Wipp. It is at this point in his life that Murr comes under the care of Kreisler. Kreisler, too, is disappointed in love; wounded in a duel, he flees society not to carouse in a fraternity but to compose music in a Benedictine abbey. Here he is assaulted by Cyprian, Hektor’s younger brother, who had been married to Julia’s half-sister, Angela. Although Cyprian survived when his jealous brother slit his throat, Hektor succeeded in poisoning Angela. Fully apprised of Hektor’s evil past, Kreisler received a letter from Master Abraham. He is urged to fly at once from the abbey. Hektor is to marry Princess Hedwiga, and her demented brother, Prince Ignaz, is to marry the beautiful Julia. Master Abraham promises to appear at court himself and to conjure something grand. Kreisler, he insists, must join him. Murr’s memoirs, the editor informs us, are incomplete because “bitter death has carried him off in the midst of his beautiful career.” Although the “life and opinions” of Kater Murr must remain a fragment, the editor observes that many valuable reflections and comments survive among the posthumous papers. Indeed, they might be combined with the untorn pages of Kreisler’s biography to form another volume. Hoffmann’s guise as editor, like J.P.F. Richter’s role as chronicler in Flegeljahre, provides a useful device for laying claim to the text as

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an actual document. In James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner, the editor assumes a more problematic role. The editor begins his account by acknowledging that he must rely less on history than on tradition. The former supplies a factual account drawn from records; the latter a more conjectural version based upon gossip and supposition. What is known, however, always seems to be inundated by what is said. Rather than merely rival historical fact, popular tradition shapes and gradually absorbs history. Although he is “only relating to the greater part of the inhabitants of at least four centuries of Scotland, matters of which they were perfectly well informed,” he nevertheless calls attention to vagaries of the gossip about the former laird of Dalcastle: “This George was a rich man, or supposed to be so, and was married, when considerably advanced in life, to the sole heiress and reputed daughter of a Baillie Orde, of Glasgow” (my italics). The hints are thus planted that George Colwan’s estate is less grand than the Orde family might have hoped, and that Rabina Orde is the product of her mother’s extramarital liaison. Further, we discover that the laird “had a very limited proportion of the fear of God in his heart,” while his bride “was the most severe and gloomy of all bigots to the principles of the Reformation.” Their marital union, as the laird discovers on his wedding night, is doomed to discord. He refuses to say prayers with her, she to sleep with him. She occupies an upstairs apartment, where she is comforted by her attending pastor, Mr. Wringhim; and to cheer his dwelling downstairs, the laird takes a housekeeper, Miss Arabelle Logan. Lady Dalcastle presents the laird with two sons, the first named after the father, the second, whom the laird refuses to recognize as his own, after the pastor who agrees to rear him. The rivalry between the younger George Colwan and his brother, or half-brother, Robert Wringhim, provides the major conflict in the editor’s ensuing narrative. The two sons first meet years later in Edinburgh. George Colwan is playing tennis with friends, when Robert Wringhim deliberately strides onto the court to disrupt the game. George knocks him down and scorns him as a bastard. Robert seeks revenge by dogging his brother day after day. During a climb up Arthur’s Seat, George is astonished by the apparition of a giant image of his brother’s head, which appears in the mist like the Brocken Spectre. He turns in fright only to stumble over his brother who is crouching behind him. After George is acquitted of charges of assault against his brother, he and his friends celebrate in the Black Bull Inn. Later that evening he is called out to the street, and the following morning he is found slain. At the inquest it is determined that he was killed in a duel. The old Laird Dalcastle dies, and Robert Wringhim

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inherits the estate. Bell Logan, suspecting that Robert killed George, meets with Bell Calvert, a prostitute who witnessed the murder from her chamber above the street. She reports having seen Robert stab George Colwan from behind after a mysterious companion had engaged him in a duel. The two Bells give their evidence to the Lord Craigie, the justice clerk, and officers are sent to arrest Robert at Dalcastle. When they arrive, however, he has vanished. The first half of this bifurcated novel is replete with doublings. There are generational doublings: Rabina Orde, child born of adultery, is very much her mother’s daughter; the younger George Colwan shares his father’s love for fun and carousing; and the younger Wringhim has learned well his father’s selfrighteous, sham-pious hypocrisy. There is also the doubling of the two Bells: Mrs. Logan may have the advantage of social prestige as “housekeeper” of the laird, but her position is not very different from that of the less fortunate Mrs. Calvert. The motif of doubling is also conjured in the phantom of Robert atop Arthur’s Seat. All these doublings but vaguely foreshadow the haunting presence of the doppelgänger who dominates Robert’s own autobiographical text in the second half of the novel. The younger Wringhim is tutored in Antinomian doctrines espoused by the reformist pastor. Since he has received divine election among the saved, the senior Wringhim tells him, he is free of all punishment for sin. No sooner does he begin to relish the joy of this secure salvation than Gil-Martin appears at his side to explain that he now has carte blanche to commit with impunity whatever sins may tempt him. With the power to change his appearance, Gil-Martin is a doppelgänger with multiple disguises. He prompts Robert from one crime to another. Robert kills a preacher who has presumed to chastise him, and by assuming the appearance of another young preacher, Gil-Martin brings the charge of murder on an innocent man. Gil-Martin also assumes the shape of George Colwan’s friend Drummond, who is initially charged with killing him in a duel. Once he has assumed the estate as the new Laird Dalcastle, Robert falls into dissolute drinking. He seems to lose all sense of time. He finds himself engaged in a suit to dispossess a neighbor who has accused him of seducing, then murdering her daughter. Even his own mother has disappeared, and he is suspected of killing her as well. Her body is found, and officers are sent to arrest him. He flees into hiding and disguises himself as a weaver and as a printer’s devil. But Gil-Martin continues to follow him. Thrown out of an inn and left to wander in despair, he decides to kill himself together with GilMartin. His final entry describes the approach of his tormentor and his plan to conceal the book in which he has told the story of his ruin. The editor resumes the tale. He quotes from a letter submitted by James

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Hogg to Blackwood’s Magazine, claiming to have found the shallow grave of a suicide atop “a wild height called Cowan’s Croft.” Blackwood’s Magazine had indeed published this letter from Hogg a year before his novel appeared. The editor claims that he, too, visited the spot to confirm the account, and it was here in the partially exhumed grave that he found the manuscript entitled “The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.” The editor presents the manuscript as a case study in aberration, which reveals either that its author was “not only the greatest fool, but the greatest wretch, on whom was ever stamped the form of humanity; or, that he was a religious maniac and wrote about a deluded creature, till he arrived at that height of madness that he believed himself the very object whom he had all along been describing.” This last possibility internalizes the “transcendental buffoonery” of Wringhim’s authorship. He has “authored” in his own delusions the being who persecutes him. This is not merely a belated hint dropped in the editor’s Afterword. Wringhim earlier confessed, “I feel as if I were the same person.” Gil-Martin is not merely a doppelgänger but an alter ego, a convenient externalization of Wringhim’s own repressed desires. As in other twice-told tales, the bifurcated structure enables Hogg to contrast his “editor” and his “author” and to tell a story about telling a story. Wringhim, in his “memoirs,” enters the ranks of those romantic “mad rhapsodists” who confound reality and delusion. Storytelling builds upon repetitions. The child, who responds with anticipation to the structured redundancies in “The Three Little Pigs” or “The Three Bears,” may well grow up looking for such patterns in real events, nurturing illusions of déjà vu and half-believing the old proverb that “history repeats itself.” Whether or not such repetitions station the circumstances of real life, they certainly have a venerable tradition in narrative. As in the successive reflections of an image caught up between two mirrors facing each other, a tale retold imposes reversals and counterreversals on the reader’s perception of character and events. When telling a story is presented as the action in a story, the author, even if the internal storyteller does not bear the author’s own name, has nevertheless implicated his or her own authorship. Hawthorne’s “Alice Doane’s Appeal” (1833) well demonstrates the selfreflexivity of telling a story about telling a story about telling a story. In the narrative frame, Hawthorne, as first-person narrator, tells of walking to Gallows Hill with two women and reading to them on that desolate spot a tale about the witchcraft which had prevailed two centuries earlier. The tale describes how Leonard Doane, who lived alone with his sister Alice, in a jealous rage killed an interloper who had made love to her. Because their parents had been killed by Indians, Leonard and Alice grew up caring for the homestead and each other.

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The incestuous bond that Leonard had formed with his sister is violated by the stranger, Walter Brome. Leonard visited a wizard to tell his story. This tale within a tale within a tale has two striking peculiarities: first, the wizard already knows the story; second, Walter Brome is revealed to be a doppelgänger of Leonard Doane. The one peculiarity might seem to confirm the power of the wizard, as if he had by witchcraft caused Alice Doane to be seduced by the stranger and her brother to be aroused to murderous revenge. The other peculiarity suggests, instead, a stark psychological confrontation in which Leonard is made to recognize his own “fierce and deep passions” as they are acted out by his “accursed” double. Hawthorne puts still another twist on his narrative doubling: Alice and Leonard walk to the graveyard, much as Hawthorne and his companions walk to Gallows Hill, witnessing there the ghosts of the past arise from their graves to reenact the deeds they performed while living. When Leonard stands over his bloodied victim, he has a vision of himself as a “weeping infant” looking down upon his bloodied father and hearing the “childish wail of Alice.” Hawthorne also describes Salem caught in an ice storm, where one might imagine the inhabitants frozen in time, “glittering in icy garments, with motionless features, cold, sparkling eyes, and just sensation enough in their frozen hearts to shiver at each other’s presence.” Ice-bound Salem provides an appropriate metaphor for the Puritan constraint but also for a historical past awaiting reanimation in the present. The custom house where the author finds the gold-embroidered scarlet letter is, like the graveyard and Gallows Hill in “Alice Doane’s Appeal,” a repository of human stories. The multiple recesses of enclosed narratives serve to emphasize the haunting of the present by the personal and historical past. In Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915), the narrator, John Dowell, while telling the sad story of Edward and Leonora Ashburnham, exposes the self-delusion that he fosters in the name of love for his ailing wife Florence. The story is bifurcated not only in Dowell’s relating the story of his own marriage along with telling the story of the Ashburnhams, but also in his temporal enfolding of the past into the present. Edward, we soon realize, serves as a vehicle for Dowell’s unacknowledged desire and guilt. With strange pride in his own “chastity,” Dowell seeks illusions and avoids unpleasant reality. While registering his moral detachment, he admits an “innocent” titillation in recounting Edward’s affair with the Spanish dancer and his flirtations with Maisie Maidan and Nancy Rufford, a double response evident even in his discovery that Edward has made Florence one of his mistresses, and that his wife has had other lovers. Ford uses the bifurcated narrative to expose the self-vindications of his narrator, but also to skewer the moral hypocrisy of a mannered world of pretense. Ford’s “transcendental buffoonery” makes us struggle uncomfortably with

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whatever we might have in common with Dowell, who can tell only how people appear or seem, and who does not know even those with whom he is most intimate. Ford has made his naive narrator wonderfully capable of rationalizing away every event that threatens to disrupt his cherished sense of pure, unconsummated love. In revealing the entrapment of self-delusions, Ford effectively challenges the reader to transcend Dowell’s impotent perspective. By linking romantic irony to the structural irony of the bifurcated novel and the twice-told tale, I do not mean to imply that the latter mode absorbs the former. Rather, I observe among the many authors who have appropriated structural doubling a variety of self-reflexive strategies. In trying to fathom the character of Pechorin in Mikhail Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time (1839/40), we have to weigh the testimony of Bela and Maxim against Perchorin’s own selfdeceptions. After striving to interpret the contradictory versions of the story Julio Cortázar gives us in Hopscotch (Rayuela, 1962), we still must ponder the significance of the supposedly rejected, but carefully preserved, alternate chapters. Emphasizing the sameness in difference, Philip Roth in My Life as a Man (1974) reveals the illusions of choice and change in the alternative possibilities of the life he narrates. The traditional ironist, who maintains the authority of authorship, may expose the disparity between appearance and reality, but he or she does not implicate the reader in the baffling opposition. The irony of the bifurcated novel, however, offers conflicting versions of reality, each of which remains ensnared in illusion. The storyteller’s incapacity to tell the truth, and the reader’s to interpret it, provide the binding challenge of the “transcendental buffoonery” of the bifurcated novel and its self-reflective mode of telling a story about telling a story. In the Introduction I cited Jacques Derrida’s argument that mimesis in literature has its basis in the redoubling of language itself, a redoubling, as Derrida asserted again and again, that bears with it a potential for deception. It is a deception that lurks in every metaphor, and looms large in every pretense of mimetic replication. There would be no thrill in literature, not even Hawthorne’s subdued antiquarian thrill, if language did not become a temporary substitute for being. Derridean deconstruction provides a pinch to awaken the reader from that dream. The effect of self-reflexivity and its mimetic redoublings, however, is that the very conjuration of an external world is exposed as illusory and the author’s language implodes. The literary fabrication of urns or statues, of reflections in the mirror, of retold stories, recognizes its own redoubling.6 Romantic self-reflexivity achieved the plurality of mimemes that 6. Derrida, “La double séance,” in La Dissémination.

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Derrida recognized in Mallarmé’s Mimique. Nevertheless, in spite of its selfawareness, the romantic text could be no more successful than the mime’s performative act in overcoming the absence of the referent, the differentiality of the mimesis. Even without the aid of Derrida’s deconstruction, the author is repeatedly reminded of the fragility of the mimetic presumption and the illusory structure of signs and symbols.7 When the vision vanishes in “Ode to a Nightingale,” Keats acknowledges that “the fancy cannot cheat / As well as she is fam’d to do.” The autonomy of “art for art’s sake,” the palingenesis of mind as art, the identity in alterity, were the grand ideals of romantic aesthetics, and also their grand deceptions. Rather than reveal the truth of Being, Derrida suggests, the mimetic act only redoubles the figurations of self. The romantics made, not a virtue, but an aesthetic of that necessity.

7. On the “economy of physis as mimesis,” see Derrida, The Truth in Painting, p. 76; on mimesis and “Economimesis,” see pp. 47–48, 76, 110, 377. Also see his Mimesis des articulations, pp. 57–93, and Dissemination, pp. 206–8.

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Richter, Jean Paul. Werke. 6 vols. Ed. Walter Höllerer, Gustav Lohmann, and Norbert Miller. Munich: Carl Hanser, 1959–63. Robinson, Henry Crabb. Blake, Coleridge,Wordsworth, Lamb, etc., being Selections from the Remains of Henry Crabb Robinson. Edited by Edith J. Morley. Manchester: University of Manchester Press; London: Longmans, Green, 1922. Reprint. New York, AMS Press, 1967. ———. The Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson with the Wordsworth Circle, 1808–1866. 2 vols. Ed. Edith J. Morley. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927. ———. Crabb Robinson in Germany, 1800–1805. Ed. Edith J. Morley. London: Oxford University Press, 1929. ———. Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence. 3 vols. Ed. Thomas Sadler. London: Macmillan, 1869. ———. Dr.Williams’s Library. Index to the Henry Crabb Robinson letters in Dr.Williams’s Library, being a supplement to the index in Edith Morley’s Henry Crabb Robinson on books and their writers. Compiled by Inez Elliott. Series title: Dr. Williams’s Library Occasional Paper, no. 10. London, Dr. Williams’s Trust, 1960. ———. On Books and Their Writers. 3 vols. Ed. Edith J. Morley. London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1938. Rorty, Richard. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979. Rosenblatt, Louise. L’Idée de l’art pour l’art dans la littérature anglaise pendant la période victorienne. Bibliothèque de la Revue de Littérature Comparée, 70. Paris, Librairie Ancienne Honoré Champion, 1931. Roth, Philip. My Life as a Man. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1974. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von. Abhandlungen zur Erläuterung des Idealismus der Wissenschaftslehre. 1796–97. In SW 1:345–452. ———. “Allgemeine Deduction des dynamischen Processes.” Zeitschrift für spekulative Physik, vol. 1, binder 1, pp. 100–36. Jena and Leipzig: Christian Ernst Gabler, 1800. Reprint. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1969. ———. Briefe und Dokumente. 3 vols. Ed. Horst Fuhrman. Bonn: Bouvier Verlag, 1962, 1973, 1975. ———. “Concerning the Relation of the Plastic Arts to Nature.” Trans. Michael Bullock. In The True Voice of Feeling, ed. Herbert Read. New York: Pantheon, 1953. ———. Philosophie der Kunst. Lectures given in Jena 1802–3, Würzburg 1804–5. In SW 5:353–736. Transcription of Jena lectures by Henry Crabb Robinson, in Behler, “Schellings Ästhetik.” ———. The Philosophy of Art. Ed. and trans. Douglas W. Stott. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. ———. Sämtliche Werke ( SW). 14 vols. Ed. Karl Friedrich August Schelling. Stuttgart: Cotta, 1856–61. ———. “Über das Verhältnis der bildende Künste zu der Natur. Eine Rede zur Feier des 12ten Oktobers als des Allerhöchsten Namensfesters Seiner Königlichen Majestät von Baiern, gehalten in der Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu München.” In Philosophische Schriften. Landshut: Universitätsbuchhandler Philipp Krull, 1807. In SW 7:289–329. ———. Vorlesung über die Methode des akademischen Studiums. Lecture delivered in Jena in 1802. Tübingen: Cotta, 1803. In SW 5:207–352.

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Schiller, Friedrich. Briefe. Ed. Gerhard Fricke. Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1955. ———. Sämtliche Werke. Säkularausgabe. 16 vols. Ed. E. von der Hellen et al. Stuttgart, 1904–5. ———. Sämtliche Werke. 5 vols. Ed. Gerhard Fricke and Herbert Göpfert. Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1960. Schink, Johann Friedrich. Dramaturgische Fragmente. 4 vols., continuous pagination. Graz, 1781–82. Schipper, Edith Watson. “Mimesis in the Arts in Plato’s Laws.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 22, no. 2 (Winter 1963): 199–202. Schlegel, August Wilhelm. Kritische Schriften. 2 vols. Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1828. ———. Kritische Schriften. 12 vols. Ed. Eduard Böcking. Leipzig: 1846–47. Reprinted in 16 vols. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1971–72. ———. Kritische Schriften und Briefe. 7 vols. Ed. Edgar Lohner. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1967–74. Schlegel, Friedrich. Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel Ausgabe. 35 vols. Ed. Ernst Behler, Jean-Jacques Anstett, and Hans Eichner. Munich: Schöningh; Zürich: Thomas Verlag, 1957–. Schlegel, Friedrich, and August Wilhelm Schlegel. Krisenjahre der Frühromantik: Briefe aus dem Schlegelkreis. 3 vols. Ed. Josef Körner. Brünn: Rudolf Rohrer, 1936–37; Bern: Francke, 1958 [final volume]. Schlegel, Johann Elias. Ästhetische und dramaturgische Schriften. Ed. J. von Antoniewicz. Stuttgart, 1887. Reprint. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1970. Schleiermacher, Friedrich Ernst Daniel. Ästhetik (1819/25): Über den Begriff der Kunst (1831/32). Ed. Thomas Lehnerer. Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1984. ———. “Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik. Aus Schleiermacher’s handschriftliche Nachlasse und aus nachgeschriebenen Heften.” Ed. C. Lommatzsch. In Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Sämtliche Werke, 31 vols., ed. L. Jonas, H. Schweizer, et al., 3d division, Zur Philosophie, 7:25–86. Berlin, 1834–64. Schweiker, William. Mimetic Reflection:A Study in Hermeneutics,Theology, and Ethics. New York: Fordham University Press, 1990. Scott, Grant F. The Sculpted Word: Keats, Ekphrasis, and the Visual Arts. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1994. Scott, Sir Walter. “My Aunt Margaret’s Mirror” (1828). Vol. 48 of Chronicles of Canongate, The Waverly Novels, 48 vols. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1900. Shaffer, Elinor S. “Kubla Khan” and The Fall of Jerusalem:The Mythological School of Biblical Criticism and Secular Literature, 1770–1880. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975. Shakespeare, William. The Complete Works. Ed. Hardin Craig. Chicago: Scott, Foresman, 1951. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. Shelley’s Poetry and Prose. Ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers. New York: W. W. Norton, 1977. Singer, Irving. “The Aesthetics of ‘Art for Art’s Sake.’ ” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 12, no. 3 (1954): 343–59. Smith, Adam. Essays on Philosophical Subjects. Ed. Dugald Stewart. London: Cadell and Davies, 1795. Sörbom, Göran. Mimesis and Art: Studies in the Origin and Early Development of an Aesthetic Vocabulary. Stockholm: Svenska Bokförlaget Bonniers, 1966. Spinoza, Benedict (Bruch) de. Opera. Werke. 2 vols. Ed. Günter Gawlick and Friedrich Niewöhner. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Burggsellschaft, 1979.

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Spitzer, Leo. “The ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn,’ or Content vs. Metagrammar.” In Essays on English and American Literature, ed. Anna Hatcher, 67–97. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962. Staël, Germaine de. De l’Allemagne. 5 vols. Ed. Jean de Pange and Simone Balayé. Paris: Hachette, 1958–60. ———. Germany. 2 vols. Translated for John Murray (1814). Revised by O. W. Wight. New York: Hurd & Houghton, 1871. Thompson, G. R. Poe’s Fiction: Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1973. Tieck, Ludwig. Der gestiefelte Kater (1797). Ed. Helmut Kreuzer. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1984. Villiers, George, second duke of Buckingham. The Rehearsal (1672). Ed. D.E.L. Crane. Durham: University of Durham Publications, 1976. Wagner, Peter. Reading Iconotexts: From Swift to the French Revolution. London: Reaktion Books, 1995. Weiße, Christian Felix. Das Fanatismus, oder Jean Calas: Ein historisches Schauspiel in fünf Aufzügen, Samt einer kurzen Geschichte von seinem Tode. Frankfurt and Leipzig: Dykische Buchandlung, 1780. Wellek, René. Kant in England. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1931. ———. The Romantic Age. Vol. 2 of A History of Modern Criticism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955. Wilcox, John. “The Beginnings of L’art pour l’art.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 11 (1953): 360–77. Winckelmann, J. J. Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke. Friedrichstadt, 1755. ———. Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums. Dresden, 1764. Wolfson, Henry Austryn. Philo. Foundations of Religious Philosophy in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. 2 vols. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1947. Wordsworth, William. Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth:The Middle Years. Ed. Ernest de Selincourt. 1937. Reprint. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970. ———. Poetical Works. Edited by Thomas Hutchinson. Revised by Ernest de Selincourt. London: Oxford University Press, 1969. ———. The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850. Ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill. New York: W. W. Norton, 1979. ———. The Prose Works. 3 vols. Ed. W.J.B. Owen and Jane Smyser. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974. ———. Wordsworth’s Literary Criticism. Ed. W.J.B. Owen. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974. Zimbrich, Ulrike. Mimesis bei Platon. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1984.

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Abrams, M. H., 8, 9, 45, 47 Addison, Joseph, 73 Aesthetes, 43 Aestheticism, 12, 17 Ammonius, commentary to Aristotle, 81 anthropocentrism, 2 Ariosto, Ludovico, 105 Aristophanes, The Acharnians, 165 Aristotle, 3, 7–9, 47, 61, 79, 80, 99, 158 imitation of thought processes, 50 Metaphysics, 60 Poetics, 2, 11, 50, 146, 152 Arnim, Achim von, 10 art as illusory appearance, 57 as imitation of inner image, 54 as imitation; as expression, 45 as the indifference between real and ideal, 27 as palingenesis of mind, 44 “purpose in itself ” (“Zweck an sich”), 33 as reconciliation of subject and object, 26 self-determined purposiveness, 19 as waking dream, 55 art for art’s sake, 12, 15, 17–44, 149, 184 art in art. See Schelling, art in itself (Kunst in der Kunst) Ashbery, John, 108 associationism, 70, 121–22 Auerbach, Erich, 1, 2, 6, 8, 10 Balzac, Honoré de, 1 Bate, W. Jackson, 36 Baudelaire, Charles, 12, 17, 37–38, 42–43 on De Quincey and Poe, 42 Les Fleurs du Mal, 37, 43 Les Paradis artificiels, 37, 38 Beaumont, Sir George, 114, 115

Behler, Ernst, 24 Berkeley, George, 99 Beys, Charles, Les Illustres Fous, 164 Bible, 99 allegorical interpretation of, 66 Genesis, 65, 66 John, 62, 64, 65 Luke, 66 Matthew, 66 Numbers, 67 symbolic language, 67 bifurcated narrative, 14, 15, 167–84 Billings, Thomas Henry, 72 Blake, William, 29, 41 Bodmer, Johann Jacob, 81, 97 Boehme, Jacob, 34, 62, 90, 139 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 10, 29, 44 Boosey, Thomas, 35 Bosch, Hieronymus, The Garden of Earthly Delights, 119 Bosio, 73 Böttiger, Karl August, 20, 26 Boyd, John, S.J., 8 Bradley, A. C., 43 Brewster, Sir David, 75 Brocken Spectre, 75, 76, 179 Brontë, Emily, Wuthering Heights, 166 Brown, Charles Brockden Arthur Mervyn,14, 167–177 Edgar Huntly, 176, 177 Ormond, 175, 176 Wieland, 175, 176 Browning, Robert, The Ring and the Book, 166 Bruno, Giordano, 90 Büchner, Georg, 10, 29 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 10, 41 Childe Harold, 10 Manfred, 148

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Cambridge Platonists, 7 Canova, Antonio, 70 Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de, Don Quixote, 5 Chantrey, Sir Francis, 109 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 8, 9, 13, 26, 34, 35, 40, 43, 50, 60, 62–69, 75, 80, 82, 92, 111, 116, 131, 132, 136–41, 148, 152 Ancient Mariner, 124, 145 Biographia Literaria, 13, 34, 35, 36, 47, 62, 68, 78, 102, 103, 136; ten theses from Schelling, 36, 62 “Colour, Sound, Form, in Nature, as connected with Poesy,” 90 copy and imitation, 13, 77, 79, 91–95, 100, 103–4 “Dejection: an Ode,” 12, 13, 124 esemplastic power, 84 finite I AM, infinite I AM, 67, 69, 72 “Frost at Midnight,” 158 “Kubla Khan,” 37, 38, 123, 125 “Lewti,” 137 Lectures 1808–1819: On Literature, 33, 35, 158 “Limbo,” 122 “living Balance,” 94 “multeity in unity,” 101 “nature shakespearianized,” 94 “On Certainty,” 99 “On Faith,” 65 “On Poesy and Art,” 11, 13, 36, 78, 83, 89, 92, 93, 100, 101, 105, 136 “On the Principles of Genial Criticism,” 13, 83, 100–102 Opus Maximum, 62 primary and secondary imagination, 36 “Principles of Poetry,” 91, 94 “The Picture, 14, 136–41, 159 “reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities,” 36, 68, 82, 83, 91 Remorse, 100, 101, 158 self-exposition, 106 on Shakespeare, 97 on stage illusion, 100 The Statesman’s Manual, 66 “willing suspension of disbelief,” 12, 99, 102, 139 Coleridge, Sara, 34 notes to Biographia Literaria, 89 conjuration and abjuration, 137 consciousness, evident in art, 95, 97 Constant, Benjamin, 12, 13, 18, 19, 26, 29, 44

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copy and imitation, 8, 83, 87, 98, 103. See also entries under Schelling and Coleridge Corneille, Pierre, L’Illusion comique, 164 Cortázar, Julio, Rayuela, 183 coup de theatre, 158 Cousin, Victor, 19, 29, 41–42 Dante Alighieri, 29, 105 De Quincey, Thomas, 9, 13, 37, 43, 50, 70–76, 120–31 Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, 38, 110 The English Mail-Coach, 13, 110, 120–22, 126–31, 134, 159 on Lessing’s Laokoon, 112–20, 126 literature of knowledge, literature of power, 39, 112 Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts, 38, 120, 128 subconsciousness, 37 Decadence, 12, 17, 43 Decartes, René, cogito ergo sum, 35, 99 deconstruction, 2, 5, 183, 184 dedoublement, 148. See also redoubling Delacroix, Eugène, 42 Derrida, Jacques, 2, 3, 5, 6, 183–84 Diderot, Denis, paradox of the actor, 53 différance, 3, 4 disinterestedness, 13, 18, 28, 29, 41 doppelgänger, 163, 173, 180–82 double bind, 5 Dryden, John, Conquest of Granada, 165 Du Bos, Jean-Baptiste, 80, 81, 97 Eastlake, Sir Charles, 109 Eichendorff, Joseph von, 12 eidolon, 3 eikastic representation, 3 eikon, 3 ekphrasis, 13, 14, 107–34, 140, 159, 163 Elgin marbles, 109 Engell, James, 36 entrapment, 13, 15, 110, 125, 129, 131 ontological and ideological, 6 rhetoric and semiotics of, 11 of self-reflexivity, 12 Epicurus, 99 expressive, in contrast to mimetic, 9 fantastic representation, 3 fantasy and imagination, 96

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Ferrier, James Frederick, 34 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 29, 34, 82, 96 Ich and Nicht-Ich, 27 Ford, Ford Madox, The Good Soldier, 182–83 fragmentation, 1 in contrast to organic whole, 9 French Revolution, 10 Freud, Sigmund, 5, 176 frozen moment of art, 111, 112, 114–17, 125, 126 Furst, Lilian, 162, 165 Gascoigne, George, “Lullaby,” 62 Gautier, Théophile, 10, 12, 17, 42–43, 108 preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835), 42 genius and talent, 57–58, 83 Girard, René, 4–6, 109 mimetic nature of desire, 5 victimization and violence, 4 gnosticism, 96 Mandaean, 56 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 1, 18, 20, 58, 108, 136 Faust, 35, 133, 134 Torquato Tasso, 164 Gombrich, Ernst, 87 Grabbe, Christian Dietrich, 12 Harpur, Joseph, 81 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 172, 183 “Alice Doane’s Appeal,” 181–82 The Scarlet Letter, 172 Twice-Told Tales, 162 Hayter, Alethea, 111 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 9, 41, 57, 58, 60, 76 Anderssein, 60 identity in difference, 50 on light and visual perception, 59 Phenomenology of the Mind, 56 Heidegger, Martin, 1, 6, 8 Being and Nonbeing, 61 Hemans, Felicia, 108–9 “Properzia Rossi,” 109, 159, 169 “The Queen of Prussia’s Tomb,” 109 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 18, 58 Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor Amadeus, 14 Kater Murr, 167, 168, 177–78 Hogarth, William, 119 Hogg, James, 14 Confessions of a Justified Sinner, 167, 168, 179–81 Holcroft, Thomas, 29

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Hölderlin, Friedrich, 29, 89 Homer, 29, 48, 105 shield of Achilles, 107, 126 shout of Achilles, 130 Horace, 39, 58, 111, 112 Hugo, Victor, 10 prefaces to Cromwell and Hernani, 42 Hume, David, 82 Hunt, Leigh, 29 Huysum, Jan Van, 100 Hylozoism, 82, 83 idem et alter, 13, 45–76 identity and difference (alterity), 44, 50, 52, 60 reciprocal negation of, 57 illusion, 104 aesthetic, 9 and delusion, 99, 139, 140 dramatic or stage, 158, 164 optical, 116, 142, 143, 147, 156 illusionism, 12, 25 images instability of, 14, 136 of memory and of fantasy, 58 not the counterpart of reality, 48 Imitatio Christi, 7 Imitatio Dei, 7 imitation as exposition of mental process, 8 of human action, 9 of human actions, 11 of nature, of human action, of ideal form, 7 indifference as absence of concern, regard, or interest, 66, 74, 110, 127 as difference reconciled, suspended, or neutralized, 27, 85 inner image, 53 irony, 162, 163, 165, 166, 168 as “transcendental buffoonery,” 168, 177, 181–83 Jean Paul (Richter), 125 Flegeljahre, 165–66, 178 Jena Romantics, 90 Jesus Christ, 65, 66, 71, 72 in the Trinity, 62 Johnson, Samuel, Rasselas, 5 Kant, Immanuel, 18, 19, 26, 27, 28, 34, 35, 43, 62, 78, 96

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a priori aesthetics, 19 on artistic freedom, 29 Das: Ich denke, 35, 62, 82 Ding an sich, 18, 35 disinterestedness, 13, 41 Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, 30 Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 28 Kritik der Urtheilskraft, 28 purposiveness without a purpose, 32, 35 on the sublime, 142 Keats, John, 40–43 Eve of St.Agnes, 123 Endymion, 39 The Fall of Hyperion, 41, 123–24, 131 imagination compared to Adam’s dream, 41 Negative Capability, 39 “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” 14, 39, 107, 123, 159, 163 “Ode to a Nightingale,” 124, 184 a poet has no Identity, 40 Kleist, Heinrich von, 10, 29 Koelb, Clayton, 167 Kunst an sich, 44 Lamb, Charles, 74 language constitutive structures of, 2 identity and difference, 52 as mimetic, 48 L’art pour l’art. See Art for art’s sake Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 28 Lermontov, Mikhail Yurevich, A Hero of Our Time, 183 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 71, 72, 73, 114, 119, 120 Laokoon, 70, 73, 112–20, 126, 128, 134 Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph, 139 Locke, John, “white paper,” 46 Logos, 64, 65, 68, 71, 73 as informing I-Thou dialogue, 65 in John’s gospel and in Philo, 63 Macklin, Charles, Love a la Mode, 100 Mahoney, John, 9 Malebranche, Nicolas, 99 Mallarmé, Stéphane, Mimique, 4, 184 Marengo, Battle of (14 June 1800), 129 Marks, Emerson, 78, 80 materialism, 82, 83 Mathews, Charles, 100

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McFarland, Thomas, 62–63, 72 Mearns, Hughes, “Anti-gone,” 139 Medusa-moment, 111, 121, 133, 134 Memnon, 72 metaphor and metonymy, 8, 105 metaphors, Calderonian and Homeric, 12 Metsys, Quintin, The Money-Changer and his Wife, 159 Milton, John, 91, 106 Paradise Lost, 39, 43, 124, 148 mime, performative act, 4 mimetic desire, 57, 70 mimicry, 4 mirror. See also Reflections dark side of, 6 as metaphor for creative process, 46 of reality, 6 mise en abyme, 109, 159 Mitchell, W. J. T., 110, 127 Molière ( Jean-Baptiste Poquelin), L’Impromptu de Versailles, 165 Morris, William, 7 Mulier, Pietro, 109 Murray, John, 35 National Socialism, 2 natura naturata and natura naturans, 85, 102 Neoplatonism, 72, 78, 96 Nerval, Gérard de, 108 Newton, Sir Isaac, 115 Nicholas of Cusa, 63 Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), 90 optics, physical and physiological, 9 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 27 palingenesis, of mind as art, 13, 78–106 pantheism, 30, 72 parabasis, 165 parergon, 70 Parmigianino, Francesco, 108 parthenogenesis, of the imagination, 6 Pater, Walter, 17 perception, 11 drug-altered, 116 fallibility of, 9 two modes of, 157 performative, 1, 4, 184 Petrarchan, and anti-Petrarchan, 62 phantasma, 3

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phenomenal appearances, 2 phenomenological, 9 philo, 13, 50, 56, 62–69, 72, 73, 78 allegorical exegesis, 67 Logos, 60, 69 physis, 2–3 redoubled in mimesis, 2 picturesque, 43, 71, 98, 128, 155 Pirandello, Luigi Così è [si vi pare], 167 Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore, 165 Piranesi, Giovanni Battista, 131, 132 Plato, 3, 6, 7, 60, 63, 64, 67, 72, 78, 79, 80, 99, 152, 158 Cratylus, 4, 48, 49, 94 imitation of ideal form, 49 Ion, 3 Laws, 3, 11, 49, 50 Parmenides, 57 Phaedrus, 4 Philebus, 49 Republic, 3, 47, 48, 49, 149 Sophist, 50, 60 Timaeus, 3, 50, 56, 73 “play about a play,” 164, 166 “play within a play,” 164 Plotinus, Ennead, 47, 56, 61, 67, 78, 90 Poe, Edgar Allan, 37, 172 “The Fall of the House of Usher,” 172 grotesque, arabesque, picturesque, and sublime, 43 “The Poetic Principle,” 42 Pope, Alexander, Essay on Criticism, 7 Poussin, Nicholas, Et in Arcadia ego, 109, 118 presence and absence, 137 probability, 104 Proclus, 34 purposiveness without purpose, 19, 31, 33, 39, 149 Pygmalion, 26, 27, 35, 36, 100 Pygmalion-moment, 111, 112, 121, 133 Pythagoras, 60 Quintilian, 61, 112 quotations, use of, 74 Raleigh, Sir Walter, 111 reconciliation, 89, 91, 101 of mind and nature, 41, 44 of opposites, 87



redoubling, 2–5, 140, 141, 146, 147, 153, 159, 183, 184 reflections, 13, 14, 135–59 reflexivity, 110. See also self-reflexivity of consciousness, 92 replication mechanical, 8, 61, 80, 91, 102, 105 mimetic, 110, 147, 183 of process, 24–25, 50, 81, 85, 86 subject-object, 2, 58 representation instability of, 135 of reality, 1 Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 11, 93 Sarah Siddons Contemplating the Tragic Muse, 119 Robinson, Henry Crabb, 12, 18–24, 26, 29, 33, 34, 36, 41, 44, 80 notes on Kant, 20 notes on Schelling, 20 “On the German Aesthetics,” 23 Roth, Philip, My Life as a Man, 183 Roubiliac, Louis-Francois, statue of Sir Isaac Newton, 115 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 1, 151, 152 Ruskin, John, 7 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhem Joseph von, 8, 9, 11–13, 18, 20, 24–26, 29, 30, 34, 35, 38, 40–43, 60, 68, 69, 78, 80, 82, 83, 86, 88, 90–93, 96, 98, 100, 101, 105 art in itself (Kunst an sich, Kunst in der Kunst), 26, 35 copy and imitation (Nachahmung und Darstellung), 25, 79 Einbildungskraft = in Eins Bildungskraft, 24, 84, 96 freedom of art, 102, 106 Identität, 27 Identitätsphilosophie, 78, 82, 86, 91, 92, 106 Kunst an sich, 18, 41 “living middle”; cf. Coleridge “living Balance,” 86, 90, 101 Naturphilosophie, 78, 106 organic process, 106 Schiller, Friedrich, 1, 18, 20, 22, 42 Autonomie, Heteronomie, and Heautonomie (Freedom in appearance), 30, 31, 38 beautiful and sublime, 85–86 Die Braut von Messina, 30 Die Jungfrau von Orleans, 30

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Die Räuber, 30 Don Carlos, 30 illusion of freedom, 31 Kallias-Briefe, 31, 36 Maria Stuart, 30 play theory of art, 31, 36 Über Anmut und Wurde (On Grace and Dignity), 30, 88 Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen, 30, 31 Über naive und sentimentale Dichtung, 30, 85, 86 Wallenstein, 30 Wilhelm Tell, 30 Schink, Johann Friedrich, 80 Schlegel, August Wilhelm, 24, 29, 30, 31–33, 35, 36, 149, 164 mechanical and organic; scupturesque and picturesque, 98 Über dramatische Kunst und Literatur, 34 Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literatur, 33 Vorlesungen über schöne Literature und Kunst, 32 Schlegel, Friedrich, 12, 33, 90, 163, 165, 177 Athenäum, 162 Lyceum, 162 Schlegel, Johann Elias, 81 Schleiermacher, Friedrich Ernst Daniel, 9, 52–55, 60, 65, 76 identity and difference, 50, 51 Schweiker, William, 7, 8 Scott, Sir Walter, 162, 168 My Aunt Margaret’s Mirror, 14, 163 self-reflexivity,12, 13, 14, 15, 30, 35, 55, 59, 106, 107, 146, 159, 163–66, 171, 177, 181, 183 in aesthetics, 11 phenomenal awareness of self, 62, 92 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3d Earl of, 33 Shakespeare, William, 29, 91, 94, 97, 103, 106 As You Like It, 161 Hamlet, 46, 164 King John, 161 Midsummer-Night’s Dream, 164 Taming of the Shrew, 164 Shelley, Percy Bysshe Alastor, 154 Defence of Poetry, 149, 150 Epipsychidion, 151 Hellas, 150, 151 “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” 152



“Julian and Madallo,” 154 “Ozymandias,” 152, 153 Prometheus Unbound, 151, 153, 154 Revolt of Islam, 148–50, 154, 159 Triumph of Life, 151, 152 signs and symbols, illusory structure of, 2, 184 Socrates, 48, 60 Sophocles Antigone, 73 Medea, 118 Southey, Robert, 35 Spencer, Edmund, 111 Spinoza, Baruch, 30 Staël, Germaine de, 12, 18, 20–22, 27–31, 33, 35, 41–44 De l’Allemagne, 19, 24, 26, 34 Napoleon orders burning of De l’Allemagne, 29 statuesque and picturesque, 71 Stendhal (Henri Beyle), 1 The Red and the Black, 6 subject-object dialectics, 78 subjectivism, subjectivity, 1, 9, 13 meager vocabulary of, 135 symbol and allegory, 85, 86, 97 Talford, Thomas Noon, 74 temporal movement in art, 113, 116, 120, 126 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, “Crossing the Bar,” 43 Tertullian, 62 Thelwall, John, 29 Thorwaldsen, Bertel, 70 “The Three Bears,” 181 “The Three Little Pigs,” 181 Tieck, Ludwig, 12 Der gestiefelte Kater (Puss-in-Boots), 164 Timomachus, Medea, 118, 119 transcendental, 9, 36, 80, 106, 163 Triumph of Death, fresco in Pisa, 132 trompe l’oeil, 25, 81, 87 Tussaud, Marie, wax figures, 73 twice-told tale, 7, 14, 159, 161, 166 Velázquez, Diego Rodriguez, Las Meninas, 159 verisimilitude, 74 Villiers, George, Duke of Buckingham, The Rehearsal, 165 Virgil, 105 shield of Aeneas, 126

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voluntary aesthetic response, 36, 94, 102, 103 in contrast to realism, 8–9 in contrast to involuntary response, 55 Weiße, Christian Felix, 80 Wellek, René, 8, 9 West, Benjamin, Death on a Pale Horse, 40 Wilde, Oscar, Salomé, 43 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 11, 86, 93 Wood, James, 144 Wordsworth, William, 10, 13, 14, 33, 34, 46, 106, 108, 114–16, 148, 150, 152 “Boy of Winander,” 146, 147 “Composed by the Side of Grasemere Lake,” 147, 159 “Elegiac Stanzas,” 115 “Essay on Epitaphs,” 117 Guide through the Lakes, 141, 142, 143, 155, 157

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“Hartleap Well,” 162 “Kilchern Castle,” 115 “Peter Bell,” 145 Prelude, 10, 75, 115, 144, 154–57 “Resolution and Independence,” 162 River Duddon Sonnets, 147 real language of men, 103 spontaneous overflow, 45 “Vaudracour and Julia,” 168 “We Are Seven,” 162 “Yarrow Unvisited,” 157 “Yarrow Visited,” 157 Wordsworth, John, 115 Young, Edward, Conjectures on Original Composition, 7 Zeno, paradoxes, 126, 128 Zeuxis, 87