Personality in Literature | Page 9

order in the seemingly chaotic, in other words the discovering of beauty, that the creative artist is concerned. It is his business to inform matter with idea; and matter symbolically used becomes the expression of the artist's thought just as for the theologian the world of nature is an expression of the thought of God. "To make the external internal, the internal external, to make nature thought, and thought nature--this is the mystery of genius in the Fine Arts." And he goes on significantly: "Dare I add that the genius must act on the feeling, that body is but a striving to become mind--that it is mind in its essence?" And in all the Biographia Literaria there is perhaps no more striking suggestion than: "Remark the seeming identity of body and mind in infants, and thence the loveliness of the former."
It should be observed that Coleridge's philosophy presupposes "a bond between nature in the higher sense and the soul of a man," presupposes, that is, that the spirit of the artist "has the same ground with nature," whose unspoken language he must learn "in its main radicals." It is only by reason of this bond that external nature, the manifestation of Natura naturans, lends itself to the artist so that he too may manifest himself. To attain this end the artist will imitate nature but not copy her. ("What idle rivalry!" he exclaims. Is not a copy of nature like a wax-work figure, which shocks because it lacks "the motion and the life which we expected?") The artist imitates what he perceives to be essential in nature; he takes the images which life affords him and so disposes of them as to bring to light the unities which the spirit loves; it is he who brings order out of disorder, imposing upon matter a form which the imagination has conceived.
For the purposes of the general critic of art, Coleridge has given us too much and too little. He gives us too much: for the acceptance of his theory in its completeness is only possible for those who can also accept his metaphysic (his artist stands in a special relationship to that Natura naturans which is a name for God). It is indeed clear to me that no complete conception of the operations of art can be formed without a complete metaphysical theory; but both are difficult to attain. Both lead to speculation, controversy, and a thousand opportunities of error. And any systematically complete theory of art, seeking as it must to account for infinity, must, like all metaphysical systems, fall short of the truth by precisely the difference between infinite thought and the thought of one man--by the difference between the Universe and You or Me. Those who are anxious to learn what can be learnt about the creative process, and to explain it to themselves, not in terms of abstract thought, but in terms of the humanly intelligible and appreciable, may be satisfied with a lower degree of truth, with something more certain though not fully explained. We may be content if we can hit upon some least common denominator free from the controversies of metaphysics.
If that is our object, Coleridge has given us too much. But he has also given us too little. So generalised is his treatment that we are led to the conclusion that his perfect artist (who cannot exist) ought to express nothing less than the whole of himself in one single comprehensive work of art, as the divine Creator is conceived to have produced one harmonious expression of Himself in the Universe. What he does not sufficiently discuss is the imperfect artist--the only artist that has yet been given to the world. It is true the great genius in letters, or any other kind of art, can never rest content until he has bodied forth in a multitude of works all of that complex which is his conception of life. But he works under the conditions of time and space. His conception of life has been modified before he has had time to vanquish time. In practice, at any given moment, he is at work upon a single aspect of life, upon one part only of his general conception, so that the most immediate task before him is not that of unifying nature, but of separating, of selecting; and only when he has thus separated and selected can he proceed to make a unity within that restricted sphere of nature--his particular subject. On this practical question, this problem, not of perfection but of imperfection, Coleridge is characteristically silent.
But at least we must follow him in his view that the great artist is engaged in the attempt to body forth, through the symbols which external nature provides him, his fundamental conceptions about life. Were this