INTRODUCTORY NOTE SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE (1772-1834) was the tenth child of a Devonshire clergyman, and the most distinguished member of one of the most intellectual stocks in modern England. His life was devoted to literary and philosophical pursuits, but an inherent weakness of will and lack of practical sense made him depend upon friends and benefactors for a large part of the support of himself and his family. In poetry he achieved his greatest distinction, and the best of his work stands at the head of its class. But he was constantly planning great schemes which he usually abandoned before they were carried out, and in spite of the extraordinary nature of his endowments he never fulfilled his promise. In prose his chief work was in philosophy and esthetics. He was one of the first to introduce into England the philosophy of Kant, and in literary criticism he stands in the front rank. Probably no interpreter of Shakespeare has said so many memorable and penetrating things in illumination of the characters of the great dramas; and in the present essay he shows his power of dealing with profound philosophic insight with the fundamental principles of art. M ON POESY OR ART AN communicates by articulation of sounds, and paramountly by the memory in the ear; nature by the impression of bounds and surfaces on the eye, and through the eye it gives significance and appropriation, and thus the conditions of memory, or the capability of being remembered, to sounds, smells, etc. Now Art, used collectively for painting, sculpture, architecture, and music, is the mediatress between, and reconciler of nature and man. It is, therefore, the power of humanizing nature, of infusing the thoughts and passions of man into everything which is the object of his contemplation; color, form, motion, and sound, are the elements which it combines, and it stamps them into unity in the mould of a moral idea. The primary art is writing;-primary, if we regard the purpose abstracted from the different modes of realizing it, those steps of progression of which the instances are still visible in the lower degrees of civilization. First, there is mere gesticulation; then rosaries or wampum; then picturelanguage; then hieroglyphics, and finally alphabetic letters. These all consist of a translation of man into nature, of a substitution of the visible for the audible. The so-called music of savage tribes as little deserves the name of art for the understanding as the ear warrants it for music. Its lowest state is a mere expression of passion by sounds which the passion itself necessitates; the highest amounts to no more than a voluntary reproduction of these sounds in the absence of the occasioning causes, so as to give the pleasure of contrast-for example, by the various outcries of battle in the song of security and triumph. Poetry also is purely human; for all its materials are from the mind, 1 Delivered as a lecture in 1818. and all its products are for the mind. But it is the apotheosis of the former state, in which by excitement of the associative power passion itself imitates order, and the order resulting produces a pleasurable passion, and thus it elevates the mind by making its feelings the object of its reflection. So likewise, while it recalls the sights and sounds that had accompanied the occasions of the original passions, poetry impregnates them with an interest not their own by means of the passions, and yet tempers the passion by the calming power which all distinct images exert on the human soul. In this way poetry is the preparation for art, inasmuch as it avails itself of the forms of nature to recall, to express, and to modify the thoughts and feelings of the mind. Still, however, poetry can only act through the intervention of articulate speech, which is so peculiarly human that in all languages it constitutes the ordinary phrase by which man and nature are contradistinguished. It is the original force of the word "brute," and even mute " and "dumb" do not convey the absence of sound, but the absence of articulated sounds. As soon as the human mind is intelligibly addressed by an outward image exclusively of articulate speech, so soon does art commence. But please to observe that I have laid particular stress on the words "human mind "-meaning to exclude thereby all results common to man and all other sentient creatures, and consequently confining myself to the effect produced by the congruity of the animal impression with the reflective powers of the mind; so that not the thing presented, but that which is re-presented by the thing, shall be the source of the pleasure. In this sense nature itself is to a religious observer the art of God; and for the same cause art itself might be defined as of a middle quality between a thought and a thing, or as I said before, the union and reconciliation of that which is nature with that which is exclusively human. It is the figured language of thought, and is distinguished from nature by the unity of all the parts in one thought or idea. Hence nature itself would give us the impression of a work of art, if we could see the thought which is present at once in the whole and in every part; and a work of art will be just in proportion as it adequately conveys the |