“If the artist copies the mere nature, the natura naturata, what idle rivalry!—if he proceeds only from a given form which is supposed to answer to the notion of beauty—what an emptiness, what an unreality, there always is in his productions. Believe me, you must master the essence, the natura naturans, which presupposes a bond between nature in the higher sense and the soul of man[†]”.
But Coleridge held many mystical views, not always easy to reconcile with one another. In the same Essay he continues:—
“In the objects of nature are presented as in a mirror all the possible elements, steps and processes of intellect antecedent to consciousness, and therefore to the full development of the intelligential act; and man’s mind is the very focus of all the rays of intellect which are scattered throughout the images of nature. Now so to place these images, totalised and fitted to the limits of the human mind, as to elicit from and to superinduce upon the forms themselves the moral reflections to which they approximate, 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.”
Even when Coleridge is most ‘the God-intoxicated man’ his remarks to a careful reader suggest that if they could be decoded, as it were, they would provide at the least a basis for interesting speculation. Many adumbrations of this mystical view might be quoted. “There is a communication between mystery and mystery, between the unknown soul and the unknown reality; at one particular point in the texture of life the hidden truth seems to break through the veil”, writes Mr Middleton Murry in an Essay[†] which as an emotive utterance disguised to resemble an argument is of interest. How this feeling of insight arises we have seen in the foregoing chapter; the sense of immediate revelation of which he treats as “the primary stuff out of which literature is created” is certainly characteristic of the greater kinds of art. And there must be few who have not by one arrangement or another contrived from these visionary moments a philosophy which, for a time, has seemed to them unshakable because for a time emotionally satisfying. But emotional satisfaction gained at the cost of intellectual bondage is unstable. When it does not induce a partial stupor it breaks down. The freely inquiring mind has a fatal way of overthrowing all immediate and mystical intuitions which, instead of being duly subordinate, insist on giving it orders.
For the inquiring mind is simply the human being’s way of finding a place and function for all its experiences and activities, a place and function compatible with the rest of its experience. When the mystical insight is understood, and its claims fitly directed, although it may seem to those who still misunderstand it to have lost all the attributes for which they have sought to retain it, and to be no longer either mystical or an insight, it does not lose but gains in value. But this further adjustment is often very difficult to make.
These Revelation Doctrines, when we know what they are really about, come nearer, we shall see, to supplying an explanation of the value of the arts than any of the other traditional accounts. But the process of translation is no easy matter. They are not what they seem, these utterances apparently about Truth. In interpreting them we shall find ourselves forced to consider language from an angle and with a closeness which are not usual, and to do so, certain very powerful resistances and deeply ingrained habits of the mind have first to be broken down.
CHAPTER XXXIV
The Two Uses of Language
The intelligible forms of ancient poets
The fair humanities of old religion . . .
They live no longer in the faith of reason:
But still the heart doth need a language, still
Doth the old instinct bring back the old names.
Coleridge, Piccolomini.
There are two totally distinct uses of language. But because the theory of language is the most neglected of all studies they are in fact hardly ever distinguished. Yet both for the theory of poetry and for the narrower aim of understanding much which is said about poetry a clear comprehension of the differences between these uses is indispensable. For this we must look somewhat closely at the mental processes which accompany them.