Coleridge and Restraint

Abstract

Is it not anomalous that Coleridge, thought of as a liberator of the imagination from the restraints of literary and aesthetic rules and models and called the father of the erstwhile "New Criticism," should still be considered in his philosophical and political-historical thinking to be mainly an advocate of established authority, of law and order, even of privilege, an oracle from the past supporting the establishment and distrustful of the new society? Is the anomaly perhaps to be found in Coleridge himself? There are many Coleridges. There are Coleridge and S.T.C., as Stephen Potter showed in a clever book, and one might turn the kaleidoscope of Coleridge's complex temperament many ways with legitimate and illuminating results. However, readers of Coleridge's more neglected poems and of the wide range of his littleknown prose works now begin to ask whether the anomaly may not come from elsewhere. Coleridge always had a sympathetic band of readers — and some among the most influential public men from Maurice and Kingsley and Mill onwards — but caricature is caviare to the general, and Coleridge has too often been the windy Coleridge of Hazlitt's savagely entertaining reviews, the mumbler of Carlyle's jealous portrait, Peacock's Mr. Flosky of Nightmare Abbey, Or Max Beerbohm's delicious but devastating Table-Talker. Satire has worked subliminally, like music in the supermarket, in this case not to cheer the customer on to buy more of Coleridge's intellectual wares than he was prepared for; rather the advertising has been drear and dull, the voice and the music pretentious and boring. But is it Coleridge's voice? Is there in fact a single unmistakable Coleridge voice? Perhaps not. Consistency would be difficult to claim for him — or evenness — or any unvarying quality; he is inconsistent, uneven, and often uncertain — commendable weaknesses, perhaps, that may help to account for the eagerness with which the young are discovering him in these days.