The Aristotle-Coleridge Axis

THE ARISTOTLE-COLERIDGE AXIS GEORGE WHALLEY George Saintsbury wound up one of the final sections of his History of Literary Criticism (1917) with the sub-biblical declaration: 'So then, there abide these three, Aristotle, Longinus, Coleridge: We are not concerned just now with all the figures in this arresting triad: the supposititious Longinus is printed in all the anthologies of literary-critical texts and has long received the subdued respect that we extend to documents of archaeological or genetic interest. The other two figures have a more pervasive ambience - Aristotle often as a menacing undertone, Coleridge as a mercurial presence that with luck one might be able to ignore. If we consider the succession of translations of Aristotle's Poetics achieved in this century alone, the interminable discussions of the nature of tragedy in schools of English (and elsewhere), the post-war wave of necrAristotelianism at the University of Chicago, and the intrusion into critical terminology of a number of Aristotelian terms (often mispronounced, and not seldom introduced with less scrupulous regard for propriety than in search of an honorific effect), we could hardly say that Aristotle had not put in an impressive appearance in twentieth-century literary criticism. Coleridge's writing has attracted no such diligent attention: it is said that he wrote in English, and he is alleged to be 'a romantic: It is true that four or five important studies of Coleridge's criticism have been published in recent years, and that a few cautious suggestions have already been made en passant that there is some connection between Aristotle and Coleridge, but this has not (as far as I know) been pursued in circumstantial detail, partly perhaps because both are difficult to explicate, partly because Aristotle and Coleridge are commonly thought to represent opposite poles in criticism. I am aware therefore that my title is mildly scandalous , and that it is all the more scandalous for the unrepentant use of the definite article - The Aristotle-Coleridge Axis. To establish a clear identity of critical purpose between Aristotle and Coleridge would I think be possible, but this is not the time to attempt it; the question is in any case complicated by the fact that Coleridge considered that 'There are but two possible philosophies - [two] possible seekings after wisdom' - the Platonic and the Aristotelian, and he was sure that his Own position was Platonic. What I find interesting in the 'axis' is UTQ. Volume XLII, Number 2, Winter 1973 94 GEORGE WHALLEY the possibility that there may be a way of coming at a critic's or a plrilosopher's way of thinking and worlting in much the same way we find out how a particular poem actually functions. From that functioning we can discover and release the self-declarative drama of a poem- no rnatter what kind of poem it is, for I hold (with Croce and others) that Art is one, not many. I should like to consider the critical thinking of Aristotle and of Coleridge in its dynamic mode, and the way language becomes a dramatic (rather than a merely semantic) representation of thinking; in short, to look for similarities between Aristotle and Coleridge - identity even - not On the grounds of some coincidence in the terms they use or the nature and weight of the conclusions they reach, but by their way of looking at things, the way of sustaining attention, the way of dealing with evidence and of using - and imparting - a guiding inSight. The test of a critic, in my view, is not that he says things that we can repeat with approval and that we can without uneasiness induce others to repeat, but that he uses and encourages us to use liberating and fertile ways of perceiving and thinking; that he purifies our perception and tones the muscles of our minds. In our knowing and in our getting-toknow we navigate by recognitions, by (what Yeats calls) hound-voices, rather than by impregnable propositions or imperious gnomae. To work out something for ourselves, by whatever means, because we must, and then to lind it already noticed - and usually more trenchantly - by an Aristotle or a Coleridge is reassuring; such felonious anticipations are...