Marginalia II by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (review)

HUMANITIES 103 In these last two volumes, Mme D'Arblay is an acutely bereaved widow whose beloved only son is bewilderingly lacking in sensibility - or at least he won't write to his fretfully anxious mother. After the years when Fanny Burney was near the centre of great events, as a member of the Royal Household, courted and married by a French general in exile, living in the Paris of the First Empire, she is now in determined retirement, cut offfrom almosteveryone butfamilyand the mostintimate offriends. Sheis as conscientious as ever in her devotion to royalty and to almost any manifestation of established power, and there are occasional flashes of her old epistolary form, transforming banality with the charm of genius. When her brother James was belatedly made an admiral in 1821, she was deeply and delightedly gratified, and, after some of the first raptures had passed, she wrote to him: What is your opinion, my dear Brother, of all this Rain? Here am Iin Town, in August, & alone, & anxious to see you again - yet cannot get to you, because, forsooth, The Rain it raineth every day. Do pray tell me, upon your serious word & Conscience, what is your opinion upon this point, & if you really think such Weather as this in the midst of Summer, is shewing a proper respect for the sister of an Admiral? That's the point. You might just as well, for aught I see, have continued a Captain.... Adieu, my dearBrother- my dear Admiral, Adieu.- Iam sure you will notbe sorry to see that the first poor spirt of a little returning power of pleasantry has been given to my so long shattered - dormant spirits by the true satisfaction with which [ glow in signing myself Most affectly - an Admiral's SisterF . dAy (Pp 259, 261) It is, then, appropriate to salute here with true satisfaction this last return of the pleasure worthily completed in the final volumes of a great Canadian edition. (G.E. BENTLEY, JR) Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Marginalia II. Edited by George Whalley Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge 12 Routledge and Kegan Paul l Princeton University Press. xxxii, 1207. $<)0.00 This, the second instalment of George Whalley's major Coleridgean enterprise, is prefaced by a simple and moving note on his last labours by Kathleen Coburn; she and others in other places have paid tribute to his immense learning and industry and his acute judgment. But his monument will be primarily in this volume and its companions. The front matter in the present book, after a Contents and Professor Coburn's note, is formal compared with the lengthy Introduction of volume I; the work is longer by some two hundred pages than volume I, and includes authors and titles from Camden through Hutton. The layout is as before: text annotated (translated where not in English), printed in black; Coleridge's annotations, printed in brown; textual notes and commentary at the foot of the page. In about thirty instances, books annotated have been lost and the annotations taken from manuscript or printed copies; in another twenty-odd cases, books and annotations have been lost and only records of their existence remain. The major groups of marginalia are on J.G. Eichhorn (introductions to various parts of the Bible, about 150 pages); John Donne (poems, 30 pages; sermons, two copies, 95 pages); Claude Fleury, (Ecclesiastical History, 55 pages); Fichte (various works, 53 pages); John Hacket (sermons, and a book on Archbishop John Williams) and Herder (various works), 41 pages each. The content is largely theological, philosophical, and historical; the first two topics often obscure, along with the mysteries of Coleridgean quasi-science, like 'Light becoming Body is Oxygen: Body striving to become Light is Nitrogen: in notes on G.A. Goldfuss (p 852). Some other passages are questionable in content rather than obscure: in a note on Thomas Fuller, concerning Lot's wife: 'The sacred Historian simply says, that she became a pillar ofSalt - i.e. in that Shower offire in which she was overtaken, She dissolved as a pillar of Salt would do in an ordinary Shower' (p 836), Coleridge reports Genesis 19:26 accurately, but his gloss goes beyond the biblical text. On the authority of texts: 'The works [of Homer, Aeschylus, Pindar] give the meaning and the interest to the Names - they are in fact what we mean by the Authors.... Whoever wrote the Iliad, was Homer; but it must have been Matthew who wrote the Gospel attributed to him - The work derives its Authority from the Author' (p 893). Not, surely, until the authority of the author is established from sources outside the work; Coleridge, indeed, was not so assured (p 1078). Notes on Hartley's Observations on Man are surprisingly sparse (4 pages), but they are early ('before 1802: says Whalley), presumably before Coleridge's habit of scribbling in books grew to the addiction which it eventually became. A good deal of the historical matter is concerned with the early Stuarts and the Civil War; it is marked by contempt for Charles I and Buckingham, and by grave suspicions of the Romish tendencies of Laud and other powerful churchmen. As maybe inferred from the summaryabove, and as in volume I, literary . commentis notmuch in evidence in this volume, and some ofitis notvery profound. See, however, an excellent characterization of Robinson Crusoe as 'the Universal Representative' (p 165), and a good summary of the manner of Donne's sermons (p 338); earlier, comments on Donne's poems are more enthusiastic than illuminating. An itch to emend the texts HUMANITIES 105 of Donne's and George Herbert's poems, usually to smooth metres, offends modem editorial canons, even though Coleridge's edition of Donne (1669) is corrupt in the eyes of twentieth-century editors. And his scansion of Herbert in terms of 'Epitritus primus + Dactyl + Trochee + a long word-syllable' in a line which involves only commonplace substitutions of spondee and trochee for iambus does not seem to warrant Whalley's approving 'C's subtle and accurate metrical sensibility' (pp 1039-40 ). Ofthecommentaryin this volume it needbesaidonly that itmatches the adequacy of that in volume I. I think of extended notes like that on the Countess of Pembroke (p 119) or on Lucan (p 126), or even on the Great Bed of Ware (p 888); or of Whalley the sailor emerging in a note on 'C's imprecise usage' in the phrase 'knots per hour' (p 889). Overall, there is a fine judgment of what is needed for intelligibility by the twentieth-century reader, too often lacking in languages, ancient and modem, and in English history, civil and ecclesiastical; all, or almost all, that he will require is at the foot of Whalley's page. It is always possible, of course, to add, or, less frequently, to correct. On p 102, after' WProse III 71' insert, 92'. On p 236, item4T 'that dignified Courtesy to Sexand Rank' (of a letter ofDonne's) must have been written with a half-recall of Burke's Reflections on 'that generous loyalty to rank and sex ... that dignified obedience' which he remembered from an earlier France. Page 536, 'i": the two phrases quoted from The Friend are from Wordsworth's first 'Essay upon Epitaphs: not from Coleridge. Page 537, item 8: 'how shorn of its Beams!' should be referred to Paradise Lost, I. 594-6: 'the sun new ris'n I Looks through the horizontal misty air I Shorn of his beams.' Page 847, item 3' Coleridge's last phrase, 'just and necessary: referring to the war against Napoleon, is a cliche ofofficial documents of the tiIrte:see, for instance, my reviews of The Friend and of Lectures 1795, RES, ns 22 (1971), 98,502. Page 1154, item 31: in 'a very acute & candid Reason might use the argument ...', I see no need to suggest (textual n a) that Coleridge intended IReasoner.' The following appear to be certain misprints: p 18, item 7, for 'space' read 'spice'; p 26, first line, for 'meditation' read 'mediation' (so the copy-text, a transcript in Victoria College); p 240, item 53A, Coleridge's emendation of 'nusus' to 'rursus' is not shown as a Coleridgean writing, though given in the translation of the Latin and, by implication, in the commentary; p 314, item89, for 'byglorified' read 'beglorified'; p 744, item 88, for 'that the is' read 'that he is'; p 834, read 'Matthew 17.21; p 838, note, read 'stricken'; p 894, item 24, for 'Now may we' read 'Nor may we'; P 938, note, for 'Edward IV' read 'Edward vI'. Two cases are more complex. On p 239, textualn ais repeated from p 238 (to which it primarily applies), apparently to indicate that ' Sic cine' is in Lamb's, not Coleridge's hand. If this is so, ' Sic cine' should not have been printed in brown as part of Coleridge's annotation, and should have been confined to the textual note. From the facing facsimile, however, I guess that' Sic cine' is in Coleridge's hand, in which case the textual note is in error. In either case, its repetition seems unnecessary. On P 533, Coleridge's note to p 8 is incompletely printed, at least in my copy; it should continue, after 'Das am': 'meistens sich kombinirende, seems the more appropriate epithet.' Whalley's footnote 1 refers to the missing German phrase. There is some inconsistency in the notification of Coleridge's miswritings which might be taken as misprints. Though editorial practice is that 'obvious misspellings are reproduced without comment' (p xxi), many are recorded in the textual notes in the form'A slip for ...' (they are usually common graphic errors in English, or misspellings of German, Greek, or Latin words); others of the same kind are not noted, e.g., p 227, 'Engline' for 'Engine' (quoted, with correct spelling, on p 16, commentary); p 857, 'singliar' (correctly transcribed from the source) for 'singular.' On the other hand, 'accidental repetitions are also reproduced normally with explanation in a textual note': of these I find only three (pp 636, 1036, 108,), while elsewhere we have repetitions without comment: pp 3'7, 5471582,1122, 1176: ~to to,' 'as as,' 'in in,' 'he he,' 'than than'; of these, the first two are, to my knowledge, correctly transcribed; the others have been out of reach for checking. None of these entirely minor blemishes will diminish the usefulness or the major editorial achievement of this massive and handsome volume. (W.J.B. OWEN) Charlotte Bronte. Villette. Edited by Herbert Rosengarten and Margaret Smith Clarendon Press 1984. 768. $119.95 Charlotte Bronte. The Poems ofCharlotte Bronti!. Edited by Victor A. Neufeldt Garland English Texts 9. Garland. 497. $65.00 The fourth volume of the Clarendon Edition of the Novels of the Brontes has recently been published. Like the edition of Shirley (1979), Villette has been prepared by Herbert Rosengarten and Margaret Smith, who are continuing their collaboration in an edition of Charlotte Bronte's firstwritten though last-published novel, The Professor, for this same series. Rosengarten, of the University of British Columbia, is one of two West Coast scholars who have of late been working to establish reliable texts of works byCharlotte Bronte. The other, Victor Neufeldtof the University of Victoria, has brought out an edition of Bronte's poems, hard on the heels of Tom Winnifrith's 1984 edition ofthe Poems for the Shakespeare Head. The edition of Villette and Neufeldt's edition of Charlotte Bronte's Poems have been funded in part by grants of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. ...