City of Health, Fields of Disease: Revolutions in the Poetry, Medicine, and Philosophy of Romanticism [1 ed.] 0754635422, 9780754635420

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CITY OF HEALTH, FIELDS OF DISEASE

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City of Health, Fields of Disease Revolutions in the Poetry, Medicine, and Philosophy of Romanticism

MARTIN WALLEN Oklahoma State University, USA

|1 Routledge

Taylor & Francis Group

First published 2004 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © Martin Wallen 2004 The author has asserted his moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Wallen Martin City of health, fields of disease : revolutions in the poetry, medicine, and philosophy of romanticism. - (The nineteenth century series) 1. English poetry - 18th century - History and criticism 2. Romanticism - Great Britain 3. Health in literature 4. Diseases in literature 5. Medicine in literature I. Title 821.7*09356 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wallen, Martin. City of health, fields of disease : revolutions in the poetry, medicine, and philosophy of Romanticism / Martin J. Wallen. p. cm. - (The nineteenth century series) Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index. 1. English literature-19th century-History and criticism. 2. Diseases in literature. 3. Literature and medicine-Great Britain-History-19th century. 4. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhem Joseph von, 1775-1854-Knowledge-Medicine. 5. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1772-1834-Knowledge-Medicine. 6. Wordsworth, William, 1770-1850-KnowledgeMedicine. 7. Medicine-Great Britian-History-19th century. 8. Brown, John, 17351788. Elementamedicinae. 9. Beddoes, Thomas, 1760-1808.10. Romanticism-England. II. Medicine in literature. 12. Health in literature. I. Title. II. Nineteenth century (Aldershot, England) PR468.D57W35 2004 820.9'3561-dc22 2003062879 ISBN 13: 978-0-7546-3542-0 (hbk)

Contents The Nineteenth Century Series Editors' Preface Acknowledgements Abbreviations and Symbols Introduction

vi vii viii 1

1

Lyrical Health in Wordsworth and Coleridge

14

2

Coleridge's Scrofulous Dejection

50

3

The Medical Frame of Character and the Enforcement of Normative Health in Thomas Beddoes' 'Observations on the Character and Writings of John Brown, M.D.'

73

4

A Secret Excitement: Coleridge, John Brown, and the Chance for a Physical Imagination

102

5

Schelling' s Medical Singing School in the Yearbooks of Medicine as Science

120

6

The Electromagnetic Orgasm and History Outside the City

149

Notes

173

Works Cited

189

Index

197

The Nineteenth Century Series General Editors' Preface The aim of the series is to reflect, develop and extend the great burgeoning of interest in the nineteenth century that has been an inevitable feature of recent years, as that former epoch has come more sharply into focus as a locus for our understanding not only of the past but of the contours of our modernity. It centres primarily upon major authors and subjects within Romantic and Victorian literature. It also includes studies of other British writers and issues, where these are matters of current debate: for example, biography and autobiography, journalism, periodical literature, travel writing, book production, gender and non-canonical writing. We are dedicated principally to publishing original monographs and symposia; our policy is to embrace a broad scope in chronology, approach and range of concern, and both to recognize and cut innovatively across such parameters as those suggested by the designations 'Romantic' and 'Victorian'. We welcome new ideas and theories, while valuing traditional scholarship. It is hoped that the world which predates yet so forcibly predicts and engages our own will emerge in parts, in the wider sweep, and in the lively streams of disputation and change that are so manifest an aspect of its intellectual, artistic and social landscape. Vincent Newey Joanne Shattock University of Leicester

Acknowledgements Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, generously granted me a Visiting Fellowship during Easter Term, 2000. It was during that stay that I hammered this book into its present form. I will always be profoundly grateful to the Master and Fellows of Sidney Sussex for their generosity and for reminding me what real intellectual fellowship means. In particular I would like to thank Claire Preston, who proved a sage friend in helping me to navigate Cambridge protocol, and Chris Page, who guided me through the mazes of university legend and to the most attractive scenes of Cambridgeshire. My thanks to the staff of the Rare Books Room of Cambridge University Library, who tirelessly and patiently tracked down my requests. In addition I toast that Diamond Geezer, Kevin Jackson, to whom I owe countless rounds for sharing his opinion of what lies beyond maps. Two chapters of this book have been printed elsewhere. Chapter 2 appeared previously in Journal of English and Germanic Philology (2000) 555-75, and is included here with the permission of University of Illinois Press. A shorter version of Chapter 6 appeared in Schelling Now: Contemporary Reading^, ed. Jason Wirth (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 2003) and is reprinted in its current form by permission of Indiana University Press. Numerous trips to libraries across America were made possible by the Oklahoma Foundation for the Humanities and the Oklahoma Humanities Council. My home department supported my research with a sabbatical, release time, and with opportunities to present early drafts and speculations in casual symposia. Two departmental heads especially - Ed Walkiewicz and Carol Moder - have devoted themselves to finding the means to facilitate scholarship. For their efforts in that regard, and for their continued encouragement of this project, I give them warm thanks. Richard Frohock kindly helped unravel Schelling's tortuous grammar. Linda Austin patiently proffered the criticism and advice that only a trusted friend can give; she has made living on the prairie an experience I would gladly repeat. Finally, it is only the certainty that they will never read these pages that keeps me from listing the horses, birds, and dogs who have shown me their own and very different topographies of health.

Abbreviations and Symbols

1813

Ages of the World. Second draft, 1813. Trans. Judith Norman. In The Abyss of Freedom / Ages of the World. Ann Arbor: UofMichigan?, 1997.

AW

F. W. J. Schelling. Ages of the World. Trans. Frederick de Wolfe Bolman, Jr. New York: Columbia UP, 1942.

BL

Biographia Literaria. Eds. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate. 2 vols. Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge vol. 7. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1983.

CL

Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Ed. E. L. Griggs. 6 vols. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1956-71.

CM

Marginalia. Eds. George Whalley (vols. 1-2), and H. J. Jackson (vols 3-4). 4 vols. to date. Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge vol. 12. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980-92.

CAT

The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Ed. Kathleen Coburn and Merton Christensen. 4 vols. to date. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957-.

C&S

On the Constitution of Church and State. Ed. John Colmer. The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge vol. 10. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1976.

CW

Humphry Davy. The Collected Words of Sir Humphry Davy, Ban. Ed. John Davy. 9 vols. London, 1839-40.

DM5

Coleridge's 'Dejection': The Earliest Manuscripts and the Earliest Printings. Ed. Stephen Maxfield Parrish. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988. Quotations cited by line number.

Abbreviations and Symbols

ix

EM

John Brown. The Elements of Medicine. London, 1795.

F

The Friend. Ed. Barbara E. Rooke. 2 vols. Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge vol. 4. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1969.

Hygeia

Thomas Beddoes. Hygeia, or Essays Moral and Medical on the Causes Affecting the Personal State of our Middling and Affluent Classes. 8 essays, paginated separately. Bristol, 1802.

LoL

Lectures 1808-1819: On Literature. Ed. R. A. Foakes. 2 vols. Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge vol. 5. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1987.

LS

Lay Sermons. Ed. R. J. White. Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge vol. 6. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1972.

PI

F. W. J. Schelling. Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom. Trans. James Gutmann. La Salle, Illinois: Open Court P, 1936.

Prelude

The Prelude, 7799, 1805, 1850. Ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill. New York: W. W. Norton, 1979.

SW

F. W. J. Schelling. Sdmmtliche Werke. Ed. K. F. A. Schelling. 14 vols. Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1856-61.

SWF

Shorter Works and Fragments. Eds. H. J. Jackson and J. R. de J. Jackson. Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge vol. 11. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1995.

TT

Table Talk. Ed. Carl Woodring. 2 vols. Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge vol. 14. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990.

[word]

A word supplied by Coleridge's editors.

Later addition by Coleridge in the manuscript.

x

City of Health, Fields of Disease

ward

Text struck out in Coleridge's manuscript.

WProse

William Wordsworth. The Prose Works of William Wordsworth. Ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser. 3 vols. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1974.

Introduction Definitions of health as a condition or quality in itself are surprisingly rare. Most commonly we think of health as the absence of disease, saying for example, at least I have my health. But that definition does not say what health is. Nor do claims that it is healthy to do one thing rather than another. In these sorts of statements, health serves as an ideal standard that is always threatened: we measure it mostly by the absence of its opposite, but even then without much specificity. For seldom does anyone provide a list of non-ailments; to do so would be considered vain and smug - a disease of tact. Nor is it any easier to define disease without reference to its opposite, well-being.1 We identify individual diseases more specifically than health; but if we ask what a disease is, we are told it is something that causes ill-health. Such tautologies, such question begging, reinforce the absoluteness of this polarity, tacitly affirming that we all know what each state is because we have experienced its opposite. One distinction we can determine, however, lies in the nouns themselves. We may speak of many diseases - we may experience almost as many - but health occurs only as a singularity. We cannot identify different healths, since we either have it or have some kind of disease. My title, City of Health, Fields of Disease, comes from the distinction Socrates makes in the Republic when he delineates his ideal society from the insalubrious regions to which he banishes the mimetic poets. That opposition between the singular space, in which people find a home, and the multifarious fields beyond shaped the conceptual framework bequeathed to romantic poets and philosophers by the tradition of Socratic idealism. This framework became especially prominent in the romantic era not only because it facilitated the realignment of human relations to one another and to nature, but also because during this same time medical doctrine realigned itself away from the Galenic system to something approaching the modern system. Therefore, these basic terms were overtly re-evaluated for one of the few times in history, even while they were used to enforce the traditional value instilled in them by Socrates. The Socratic opposition established the model of the inner space delineated through a defense against the outer. Inside the city of health, we find the citizens aligned hierarchically, according to the value of their contributions. The highest citizen, of course, is the philosopher, who serves as guardian, ensuring that everyone else performs their duty without meddling in

2

City of Health, Fields of Disease

others', and protecting the entire city against the chaos of disease that always threatens from without. Socrates' description of the healthy city is intended as an analogy of the just, or healthy, individual, since, as he explains, it is easier to understand the composition of the larger construct than it is the smaller.2 So the descriptions of the healthy city - the hierarchy of citizens and their occupations, and its opposition to the fields of disease lying beyond - apply equally to the ethical construct of individuals who seek to unify themselves into a coherent and meaningful identity. In this way, health acquires the moral quality of ethical integrity. Correspondingly, Socratic disease constitutes any threat to that integrity, and is symptomized by ethical chaos and the dissolution of identity. The opposition distinguishes itself at the same time in terms of the organizational stasis within the city and the chaotic motility without. Inside the city, everything and everyone is arranged into an orderly permanence, and they are provided with the sense that this arrangement has always existed, and is even the state toward which all things tend, except where it is distorted and concealed. Outside, everything continually changes shape and shifts positions, so that no particular person or thing is truly distinguishable from any other. The sense is that health is static and stable, while disease is unstable, indeterminate, and fluid. Logically, then, Socrates' division of healthy and unhealthy poets follows these same characteristics. The poets who are granted citizenship in the city of health speak in their own voice, describing the actions and feelings of those citizens who serve the city (usually by dying in battle) or teaching other people to change their mind toward what is just.3 The unhealthy poets, represented throughout the Republic by Homer, and in the Symposium by Agathon, and on par with the sophists who distort the actions of true philosophers like Socrates himself, do not speak in their own voice, but as though they were someone else.4 They thus express no single identity, but an ethical fluidity. Further, instead of educating their fellow-citizens into the standards of health, they seek the popularity of large festival crowds who are unmanageable and are continually changing. To garner their praise, the unhealthy mimetic poet appeals to the correspondingly unmanageable and base parts of the crowd's soul.5 These base crowds have no allegiance to any particular city, and so do not look to the higher good but only to the immediate gratification of appetite. In order to preserve the stability of the healthy city, therefore, Socrates banishes these poets to their proper place, the fields of disease, which like them is everchanging, hungry, and undefinable. The Romantics upheld the Socratic distinction of health and disease because it seemed natural to do so. There does not appear to be any evidence of

Introduction

3

a conscious decision on the part of Wordsworth, Coleridge or Beddoes to adopt the Socratic model - though Schelling certainly makes his decision clear enough by orienting much of his work as a direct confrontation with Plato's texts. The lack of direct reference to Socrates by Coleridge or Beddoes in their adoption of the paradigm suggests they would not have thought of it as originating with the dialogues - or originating anywhere other than in nature. For thinkers like Coleridge and Beddoes, the paradigm of an ordered space secured against external threats through both the regulation of activities within and the vigilance over the boundaries by an educated few would seem the natural order for society to take. And, through the parallel qualities of naturalness and healthiness, the paradigm loses the distinction of being a Socratic design - and one possibility among others - and becomes the one most likely to arise if artificial restraints are removed. Already, in the previous generation, Schiller links classical Greece with nature. In Naive and Sentimental Poetry, he goes a long way in defining nature as well as the modern stance toward Greece. First of all, nature stands in opposition to art, as what is already there stands in opposition to the newly created. Of the objects in nature Schiller says,' They are what we were; they are what we should once again become. We were nature just as they and our culture, by means of reason and freedom, should lead us back to nature.'6 Schiller centers his contrast of the Greeks and moderns around a feeling of nature in humanity. He concludes the contrast by stating, 'The feeling of which we here speak is therefore not that which the ancients possessed; it is rather identical with that which we have for the ancients. They felt naturally; we feel the natural.'7 Schiller's identity of nature and feeling for the Greeks focuses on the organization of their social life 'founded on perceptions, not on a contrivance of art.'8 Schiller's faith that Greek society is natural while the modern is artificial reflects the tendency of both his generation and the next to look upon Greek, and especially Platonic, political discussions as descriptions of the natural, healthy model of society. The central political account, and the one that develops the equation of health with the singular state guarded against diseases, is the Republic. There is little accident, then, that from the many poets expelled by Socrates for being unnatural or diseased, the one poet held back and given a place in the healthy city is the same kind emulated by Wordsworth as being the most natural - indeed the very kind of poet who will cure the age of its various diseases. What makes the turn of the nineteenth century a particularly compelling moment for study is that, as Michel Foucault has pointed out repeatedly, it is the time in modern history when the greatest number of epistemic paradigms

4

City of Health, Fields of Disease

changed most dramatically. The definition of health and disease underwent broad and specific re-examination as investigators speculated on whether these two terms constituted a simple opposition or some other relation, and as old diseases were redefined into new ones. The cultural realignment did not occur as the simple movement from one epistemic paradigm to another, however. Rather, as one paradigm began to lose its currency, it opened the way for numerous previously unthinkable possibilities to contend for dominance. These contentions each involved a range of paradigmatic possibilities - entirely different ways of defining basic issues - that have become difficult for us to retrieve and understand now, because the paradigm that succeeded did so in part by labeling the others as disease. My concern in this book is with the three disciplines that underwent paradigmatic shifts simultaneously, and interacted with one another in reorienting themselves. Medicine as a discipline underwent perhaps its greatest paradigmatic shift at the end of the eighteenth century, as it moved from the Galenic doctrine toward the cell theory that eventually came to dominate biological science. In Galen's view the person constituted a single body that had to be treated as a unit. Romantic physicians, like Thomas Beddoes, began to reconsider the body as a system of interrelated parts, each of which had to be understood on its own as well as in terms of its contribution to the whole person. Even though a medical doctrine like Beddoes' might from our perspective seem closer to Galen's than to our own, it was the romantic emphasis on parts making up the whole that opened the possibility for cell theory. And yet romantic medicine does hold some important differences from our own. The nosology inherited by William Cullen, Thomas Beddoes, or Andreas Roschlaub was much less voluminous than that of the late twentieth century, since these physicians still considered diseases and treatments in terms of the whole person, albeit not just the body, but the interrelated components of organs, along with emotions and thoughts as well.9 One disease, such as scrofula, might include far more possible disorders than today's equivalent, lymphatic tuberculosis: scrofula was said to be caused by weather, living conditions, sensibility, and possibly intelligence, while lymphatic tuberculosis is caused by the tubercle bacillus. The only real difference between the archaic disease scrofula and its modern equivalent, however, is that the older one signifies a plurality of pathologies affecting the entire person, while the modern term carries a much narrower meaning of a single infection by a bacillus targeting particular organs. Because the romantic physician, like his ancient forebears, treated the whole body rather than isolated parts, the terms, health and disease, as signifiers of general states, along with the various names of diseases themselves, carried broader ethical

Introduction

5

and physical implications, both when used specifically within medical discourse and when used more generally in discourses on ethics or aesthetics. The starting point for my study is the question of why Socrates uses the polarity of health and disease so forcefully, and why that same forcefulness (and righteousness) should still be possible when Wordsworth distinguishes his own writing from that of others. Even after we recognize that Wordsworth's gesture depends on the identification of health with nature, the moral claim which the gesture is intended to serve reveals the dependence on Socrates' own moral distinction. All of a culture's values come into effect in setting the limits between health and disease; and this is especially true for the Romantics who were redefining their disciplines and reassigning values to terms within those disciplines. The history of how medical science re-organized itself around specific cultural or political demands entails a broad range of complex narratives. But the specific chain of events in that history is not my concern here; it is sufficient for my purpose to recognize that the Galenic doctrine was challenged from different directions, and as part of the general reconfiguration of how individuals relate to their environment. The Romantics all saw themselves as the corrective to their misdirected age; throughout their works they proclaim themselves the embodiment of the new, healthy, natural culture and society. Over and again, romantic polemicists charge that whatever does not belong to their party is diseased and artificial, and should be purged. Wordsworth - only the most obvious, though certainly not the simplest, example - sets his poetic appeal to readers 'in a healthful state of association' in direct opposition to the 'sickly' productions of 'outrageous stimulation' (WProse 1: 126, 130). The personal ill-health of someone like Coleridge becomes representative of ethical errancy that can provide a moral lesson for what others should avoid in order to remain healthy, and then allows the recovering Coleridge himself to serve as the guardian of social and poetic health. Thomas Beddoes states plainly and repeatedly that he aims to correct the social diseases that have debilitated all classes of English society. Schelling lays out the principles of a poetry, philosophy, and history that all serve the new mythology he called for in his undergraduate days with Holderlin and Hegel, and that he believes will cure the disease of modern life. The dichotomy of health and disease permeates the proclamations and justifications of these romantic figures. In fact, this dichotomy is even more pervasive than such famed oppositions as organic-mechanic, nature-artifice, or imagination-reason; for the categories of health and disease direct the valuations of all these other oppositions. To the Romantics this one division instigates all the others, and it remains so effective because it propels investigations into the best way of conducting one's life and of expressing

6

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oneself. The highest poetry, we are told, is that which promotes health. The scientific investigations of the forces constituting nature seek to reveal those that also affect humans healthily and pathologically. Ethical doctrines then attempt to direct behavior in a fashion to maximize exposure to healthy forces and to eliminate exposure to deleterious ones. Again and again through romantic polemics in all disciplines, we find the call for a restoration of health and expulsion of disease; and just as consistently, health appears as a single standard of unity, while disease constitutes the multiple and obscure attacks. What proves surprising is just how closely the poet's understanding of health and disease resembles the philosopher's or the physician's. This dichotomy of opposing states is effective because it is real and at the same time highly elastic in its reference. The pervasiveness and the directive power of the opposition of health and disease can be noticed by the multifarious qualities of its appearance. It may show up as a seemingly innocent metaphor whose tenor is merely the convenient delineation of favorable and unfavorable qualities. Or it may appear as the overt reasoning for governmental restriction on behavior and activities, so that the health of the body politic is said to be threatened by infectious immoralities, and diseased ideologies, and so on. At these extremes, and all the possibilities in between, the division into categories of health and disease reveals the reliance of romantic discourses on the Socratic tradition that first makes the startlingly fundamental identification of health with life, order, and truth, disease with death, disorder, and falsehood. John Brown's medical theory - which provides a kind of ironic focal point for much of this study - gained widespread favor in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries because of its similarity to the developments in electrochemical investigations: Brown's doctrine places health and disease along a continuum, making the two states analogous to the charges of electricity, or the attractive powers permeating the chemical universe. Brunonianism sparked widespread interest because for the first time the oppositional states could be quantitatively, and therefore measurably, distinguished. For once, health and disease actually had specific meanings divorced from any moral framework, because health could be gradated as much as disease, and doing so fractured the singularity that had upheld the value of health as an ideal and as a synonym for both truth and life. And Brown's theory drew such hostile detractors and ultimately fell from favor for precisely the same reasons, because it denied any qualitative opposition that extended medical evaluation to moral judgment: health and disease, like the positive and negative poles of electricity, reflected the complimentary aspects of a variable state - life. That his theory gained popularity during and immediately

Introduction

7

following the French revolution, lost its adherents in England by 1800, and then gained a following in Germany that lasted almost two decades, might tell us a good deal about that period.10 Even without going into the political and social turmoil of the romantic era, we may examine the romantic determination of what constitutes a legitimate, healthy ethos or doctrine through the opinions of Brown expressed by Coleridge, Beddoes, and Schelling. Coleridge was an early active participant in another, competing medical doctrine, centered at the Pneumatic Institution, which was presided over by Thomas Beddoes, translator of Brown's Latin treatise. And though Coleridge did not read Brown's Elementa Medicinae, he was receptive to Beddoes' ideas which were informed partly by Brunonianism. For Coleridge, disease most often consisted of a material threat to the spirit, so that Brown's continuum, which did not distinguish between body and spirit, would actually pose a serious pathological threat to any dichotomous structuring of the world. For Coleridge, in spite of his affiliation with Beddoes who did much both to disseminate Brunonianism and to discredit it, Brown's theory came to represent the 'doctrine of death' (CN4: 4832), in that it viewed the mind physiologically rather than as a spiritual opposition to the body and matter. Schelling was instrumental in reviving Brown's theories in Germany in the first few years of the new century. Brunonian doctrine made sense to the philosopher as he sought to heal the Cartesian rift of body and spirit and looked for an account of a vital force to supplant spirit. Schelling proved, like Beddoes and many others, significantly ambivalent toward Brunonianism, first denouncing it, then embracing it and even seeking to put it to use, and then establishing a medical journal aimed exclusively at disproving Brunonian tenets. Schelling's extremes of support and detraction coincide with his efforts at grounding a new discourse that would govern all aspects of culture, all the disciplines of learning. His general interest in medicine focused his desire to direct all arts and sciences toward a single aim; his specific interest in Brunonian medicine derived from its apparent promise of explaining how physical being can become active and conscious. His final rejection of Brown's concept of life as 'a forced state' marks the period of his serious interest in electrochemistry; but it is important to note that the key claims of his most important philosophical speculations arise from his study of medicine, along with the effort to gather all disciplines into a single investigation of being. He continued trying to unite poetry and philosophy (and medicine), but thereafter through the force of electromagnetism as understood from Humphry Davy's experiments. Nonetheless, the reliance on electromagnetism arose alongside the early interest in Brunonian medicine, and only replaced the

8

City of Health, Fields of Disease

medical doctrine by providing what Schelling thought Brown had already determined. The roles of Wordsworth, Coleridge and even Schelling in this study are obvious. Wordsworth exploited medical values to provide the ethical and political justification for the sort of poetry that remains dominant in our own time. The father of modern criticism, Coleridge set down the principles for reading literature, and for determining what constitutes literature; he thus instituted criticism as a guardian of literary and cultural health. Schelling pursued the issues of consciousness, proper reading, the role of human being and nature, in a different direction, even though he started from the same point as his British contemporaries. Though not as prominent in the canonical history of philosophy or natural science as Coleridge is in the canonical history of literature, Schelling's work formulates a set of possibilities that could still redirect aesthetic and ethical studies today. The paucity of studies on Schelling's work - until quite recently - indicates the broad success of the doctrines of Wordsworth and Coleridge in instituting themselves as the natural and commonsensical views, just as the Socratic doctrine had been. Less obvious in this study is the appearance of Thomas Beddoes, even though of the four figures he is the only physician. But Beddoes served as Brown's biographer and posthumous editor, and he introduced Coleridge to German philosophy, as well as to Humphry Davy and chemistry. But nor is he a secondary figure, for he wrote voluminously on health and illness; and through practical pronouncements on social health he sought to realize the Socratic ideal in a democracy of informed individuals guided and protected by cultural and medical guardians. Beddoes couches his arguments for the restriction of opium and spiritous liquors to medicine, and therefore regulated by physicians, in terms that he formulated in his attack on Brunonianism which makes liberal use of both stimulants. In this same detailed attack - his biography of Brown - Beddoes makes plain how the ethical health of an individual will reflect itself in any attempt at systematic expression, literary, philosophical, or medical. Thus, he insists that the corrupt character of John Brown, besotted with opium and whisky, expresses itself directly in the questionable system of Brunonian medical doctrine. Beddoes ceaselessly argues for a universal education that would direct the populace away from gross stimulants, and into a natural intelligence. He lived and died a democrat, while Wordsworth and Coleridge moved into high Toryism, and Schelling sought the new aristocracy of nature-philosophers. But fundamentally their politics are all concerned with directing individuality, with locating individual consciousness within the meaningful social context delimited by Socrates and expanded by them into nature. That Beddoes should attack the Brunonian

Introduction

9

system for reflecting its author's moral flaws, that Coleridge should condemn the system - without having read it - as the doctrine of death, and that Schelling should see its promise for nature-philosophy and then reject it in favor of electrochemistry - all reflect the analogous shaping of the inner ethical space and the outer social or natural space, as instituted by Socrates. Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Beddoes ardently uphold that pattern as the standard of health. Brown simply ignores it. Schelling dismantles it to open the way for a radical alternative. Brunonian doctrine provided a focus for much of the widespread debate that reshaped medicine generally at the end of the eighteenth century. When Michel Foucault analyzes the medical revolution, he points to the rise of clinical medicine as the orientation that came to dominate all other possibilities. Curiously, Beddoes attacks Brown for lacking the discipline and integrity of a clinician; when Schelling attacks Brunonianism - in the figure of his mentor Andreas Roschlaub - it is for being too much of a clinician, and not allowing sufficiently for any view beyond the bounds of the clinic. Beddoes himself establishes a clinical space over which he - and all future physicians like him will preside as a Socratic guardian. Schelling seeks to replace the clinic with an alternative perspective that does not require regulation and adherence to an idealized standard of health. Schelling's early attempt to evade the guardianship of health leads him in his later work to explore the possibilities forbidden by Socrates and repressed in other romantic thinking. The drive in romantic medicine to reclassify diseases is of a piece with that of natural philosophy to search out, identify, and classify new species of flora and fauna, and most importantly to delimit and classify new cognitive faculties. As natural philosophers like Humphry Davy isolated new elements and showed that the electromagnetic force could be regulated, so Wordsworth and Coleridge followed the Kantian trend to differentiate the component elements of an ethical and aesthetic individual through 'desynonymization,' in other words through the division of compounded terms into elementary oppositions. What Coleridge and Beddoes object to in the iatrological continuum of Brunonianism is that the states of health and disease are not desynonymized, and do not even oppose each other; in fact for Brown health and disease are relative conditions of a single state, namely existence. For Wordsworth and Coleridge, on the other hand, life and health are necessarily progressive, and thus historical. These poets require that health be aligned with the creative spirit - the essence of progressive individual life, of history, and of nature that rises from the mollusc to the self-conscious human being. In that way they can identify those statements contributing to such progress as healthy and condemn as disease those that interrupt that progress.

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City of Health, Fields of Disease

For Coleridge, whose oppositions tend to be reductive, the distinction is fairly simple: health unifies and is productive, disease is fragmentary and deathly. The relative simplicity of the opposition allows Coleridge to apply it extensively, imposing a polar valuation on almost all experience. And, because health and spirit are so easily aligned with nature, these values come to hold a universal validity. For Beddoes the distinction dominates both the clinically concrete aim of eradicating bodily ailments on one hand, and, on the other, the more broadly social aim of eradicating ignorance. Throughout his voluminous writings, Beddoes promulgates the educational doctrine ofpaideia, expounded through the Republic as the formation of people into citizens who each play one role (unlike the mimetic poets, who are always pretending to play other roles): Beddoes would form the healthy individuals who understand their function in society and the dangers of exposure to excessive natural forces, and who then take their health to be a personal duty and obligation. As he states, 'To be understood [health] must no doubt be taught To form a moral sense . . . is not more practicable in itself, than to form a sense for health' (Hygeia 6: 96). From the beginning, the romantic definition of health entails an act of expulsion to establish boundaries and to end any conception of relativity along a sliding continuum. In an overt way the expulsion focuses on Brown. And at the same time, the expulsion is more or less hidden within the pattern of oppositions, since disease is not placed in competition with health but is identified as an active threat to be guarded against. Health appears as the primary point of reference, as it maintains itself, while disease has no substance, value, or aim of its own, but seeks only to destroy health. This opposition creates the appearance that health does in fact have a particular quality; for, having expelled disease, the guardians of well-being establish distinct boundaries that seem to define health by proving that what lies within is specifically not what lies without. Health remains the freedom from and resistance to disease. Beyond the boundaries disease upholds its constant threat of disrupting the civic order of the political body and the ethical order of the personal identity and body. The boundary establishes two opposed spaces, the inner, which is mapped out into harmonious components and functions, and the outer, which remains undifferentiated, aimless, and dissonant. The inner space analogously constitutes both the inner person - the ethical body - and the body politic, differentiated into coordinated faculties; the outer space, without any real co-ordinates of its own, threatens the harmony and progress of the inner space, and threatens the boundary between the spaces. Standing as a dike between reclaimed land and the angry sea, this boundary divides a harmonious and stable unity from chaos. The inner space opens historically as

Introduction

11

the subjective world of the perceptive individual functioning within the historical community, and as the social world of the healthy, stable and natural society that opposes the discordant, undifferentiated, and threatening world beyond. Needless to say, this opposition has long served to justify colonial aims as the British and European guardians of moral health sought to expand the boundaries of well-being and stability.11 The outer space beyond the boundary of health resists organization toward a single positive goal; and so it resists any historical narrative. As natural philosophy expands through the nineteenth century, it extends the boundary to Socrates' city of health by historicizing nature. Not only do Darwin's histories tell how nature progressed, but all the sciences that take their cue from chemistry explain how apparently disparate forces and clashing elements actually work together in an ecological unity. But the extension of the scientific realm does not concern me here. My focus lies on how the shift in the medical paradigm, which occurred at the same time as the awe-inspiring accomplishments in chemistry, opened the possibility for the poetic and critical revolution of Wordsworth and Coleridge on the one hand and the poetic and historical speculations of Schelling on the other. While Wordsworth and Coleridge successfully institute the modes of poetic expression and critical reading as those that uphold the ethical, social, and natural health promulgated by Socrates and honed into the principles of social reform by Beddoes, Schelling collapses the basic opposition between health and disease that upholds the standard of health. In Socrates' description, fields of disease have no real being, because they are undifferentiated and unmapped in the way that the city is. Schelling, influenced by Brown, grants disease an ontological status equal to that of health in order to determine its origin, which he says must be the same as being and health. Consequently, he redirects the question of human being's relation to the world, moving away from the paradigm in which subjective consciousness opposes unconscious material objects and toward an open paradigm where dynamic matter is conscious of itself. He repeatedly asserts that Cartesian subjectivity is the disease of the modern age, and that he hopes to cure us of it through his identity philosophy. In working toward this cure, Schelling raises the possibility of a poetry wholly other than what Wordsworth either institutes or opposes. And yet Schelling's speculations arose from the same cultural milieu as Wordsworth's lyrics and Coleridge's criticism. National differences aside, Schelling witnessed the paradigmatic shift in medicine and the rise of chemistry as a discipline. He paid close attention to Brown's doctrine - even attempting to put it to use, with disastrous results. And he followed Davy's

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chemical discoveries. In the medical essays, written after he had moved away from Brunonianism, Schelling describes a chemical nature organized on decidedly different principles than the Socratic city on which Wordsworth and Coleridge (and Beddoes) depend. Schelling's chemical nature raises the possibility of a standard of health based not on an individual subject's allegiance to the social weal, but rather on recognition of common physical being, which the philosopher describes as chemical bonds that arise and fade on the currents of electromagnetic fluid. In this way the identity philosophy supersedes the privilege afforded to the individual throughout Wordsworth's poems, and Plato's dialogues. Schelling calls for a nature poetry antithetical to Wordsworth's and to that Socrates allows to remain in his city. As an added twist, Schelling presents his accounts of non-subjective poetry and nonprogressive history with references to another Platonic dialogue, the Sophist, which enable him to transform Socratic idealism into the speculations on material consciousness. As a result of the same epistemic shift that allows Wordsworth and Coleridge to establish the standards of poetical and critical health still holding sway today, Schelling raises the possibility that wholly different standards of health and disease, along with different conceptions of poetry and consciousness, could prove viable. This goes against the view of Schelling that has until recently been held by romanticists. Most of us in the discipline of English have come to his works through the passages of System of Transcendental Idealism and 'On the Relation of the Plastic Arts to Nature' that Coleridge plagiarized to construct his image of the subjective critic. The speculations on medicine, chemistry, history, and poetry permeating Schelling's work in the decade following these early essays move so far from the Coleridgean critical doctrine that we generally resist those speculations wholesale by saying that Schelling committed philosophical errors, was seduced into a mystical materialism by Brown and Jacob Boehme, and embarked on wildly self-indulgent schemes that are largely unreadable. The unreadability of these speculations is due more, I claim, to the success of the doctrines of Coleridge (and Hegel) than to Schelling's texts themselves. As our reading is governed by Coleridgean and Hegelian standards, speculations like Schelling's now appear diseased. And indeed they are, so long as we read them only from within the modes privileging subjective interiority and spiritual dominance over the body as standards of health. For one thrust of Schelling's non-progressive history in The Ages of the World is to undermine the primacy of human consciousness with all its attendant claims to rights of expression and freedom. In a history like Schelling's, epistemes appear and disappear with a consistency that precludes the progressive

Introduction

13

narrative culminating in rational human being. Schilling's history moves us toward the discomfiting recognition that other modes of being, other epistemes, might be just as healthy as our own, and that there are indeed multiple healths. Socrates' expulsion of mimetic poets, and all the doctrines like Wordsworth's that re-enact that gesture, constitutes the act of violence Schelling seeks to cure us of by setting up alternative narrative and poetic forms based on the same scientific discoveries that figure so largely in his contemporaries' doctrines. Schelling exploits the dichotomy of health and disease no less than do Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Beddoes; and he also uses it to condemn his ideological opponents. He differs from his English contemporaries, however, by trying to dispel the dichotomous paradigm that imposes oppositions of consciousness and matter, health and disease. Whether he succeeds remains to be seen. Recent work by scholars in the fields of Romanticism and Continental Philosophy has returned to Schelling's speculations. This work has shown in various ways how Schelling's thinking provides a powerful alternative to the spirit-driven doctrines of Coleridge in English poetry and Hegel in philosophy. As these scholars and philosophers expand their dialogue on Schelling, they promise to reorient our assumptions of what poetry and science can and should do, along with the historical view of the Romantics. Thus what has seemed diseased in Schelling's work is now beginning to disclose new possibilities for history, poetry, and philosophy. Schiller's identification of Greek society with nature affirms that the romantic interest in the Socratic city comes out of the sense of belonging, which grounds the essential theme of justice in Plato's dialogue. The far-ranging effectiveness of medical metaphors is due to the sense that recovery may be the restoration of well-being through retrieval of something like the grounding memory of an individual's identity, or the analogous cultural memory, but it always implies at the same time the sloughing off of falseness. This is true for Schelling just as much as it is for his British contemporaries. Romanticism as recovery of the primordial heritage of European culture entails the correction of the faulty reading of Greece, and especially Plato. Since Greece is analogous to nature - as evidenced by Schiller's formulation romantic conceptions of medicine are very often entwined with programs of reading. The cluster of medical metaphors shall therefore allow us to trace how Romanticism instituted theories and values that seem commonsensical by condemning any alternative as a threat to moral and cultural health. And, by looking beyond the mainstream of Wordsworth and Coleridge's well-known pronouncements on poetry, nature, and ethics, we shall re-evaluate our own dependence on the metaphorical opposition of health and disease.

Chapter 1

Lyrical Health in Wordsworth and Coleridge Wordsworth's 'Preface' has long been taken as the description of the poet, poetic style, and poetic activity that marks the break with an earlier poetic mode.1 The essay has held such sway because it has been accepted as almost a common-sense statement on natural issues, especially the image of the poet communing inwardly with his or her own feelings and outwardly with the real world that is recognizable to all of us, and then addressing us directly without artifice. My own concern lies with the way Wordsworth in the 'Preface,' followed by Coleridge in his prose, works on the same issues to construct the image of a poetic interiority as a spatial organization. This interior organization attains reality only insofar as it can be described as a space analogous to that of the outer world. And as 'nature' moves in the eighteenth century from a hostile environment of chaotic forces to an organized ecosystem, it supplants the city as the model for spatial organization, even while it retains the organizational principles set out in the ideal Socratic/?o//s. My focus, consequently, is on the rhetoric throughout the 'Preface' that establishes a poetic subjectivity as a mapped-out space, and as a microcosm of the romantic version of the Socratic city, nature. I am less interested in such cultural-historical forces as sensibility than I am with Wordsworth's application of the view of health as a space delineated through the perception of pathological threats. The image of healthy space comes to serve Wordsworth as the arena of subjective interiority that identifies him as the primary example of health. Coleridge's parallel delineation of the proper reader sets up the critic as mediator between the poetic exemplar of individual health and the broader audience, and as a guardian over the healthy space who ensures that the poet performs properly and that the social space remains attuned to the values of poetic health. The role of guardian that Coleridge establishes for the critic not only restricts the kind of literature that can be accepted as healthy but also limits what the reader can recognize as literature, or can even read.

Lyrical Health in Wordsworth and Coleridge

15

Health, in the Socratic discourse naturalized in Wordsworth and Coleridge's description of the poet, means the situating of individuals within a topography so that they hold clear and definite relations to one another and to the organizational whole; within this topography individuals become members, parts, citizens, participants - and, in the topography of subjective interiority, faculties. It is a necessary feature of this scheme that the organized space of health be constantly under siege, by a specific kind of opponent who remains characteristically non-specific even when identified as a single figure, like Napoleon or John Brown: the spatial topography is threatened with dissolution that would melt the relations among members causing them to lose their sense of meaning - their identity - and would make the organization within the delimited space seem less than permanent and absolute. So a vital gesture for anyone like Wordsworth or Coleridge setting themselves up as arbiter of health (ethical, political or poetical) is the identification of external threats that seem specific while remaining rather flexible, and that represent dissolution of topographical relations into nonspecificity, couched in terms of fluidity, dissolution, liquefaction - and their expulsion from the city of health. This expulsion more than anything defines health as inwardness for the city and the individual, while disease lurks outside, threatening to dissolve the boundary that allows for interiority, and the distinctions of individual parts within that makes the interior meaningful. Wordsworth and Coleridge directly identify health with nature as the standard obscured by literary ills, and they thereby give their particular valuation of poetic modes universal applicability. Their success in establishing their valuation as the standard way of talking about poetry and the poet was enabled by the shift in medical theory that began looking at the body as an inward structure bounded by the skin and besieged by pathological threats from without.2 If they had been less successful, the common sense of their comments on the poet, poetry, and reader would not have compelled the deconstruction that occupied much of the past three decades. And so we have the paradigm that I take as the basic opposition Wordsworth employs in the 'Preface' - the spatial organization that turns individuals into members and establishes meaningful relations between them on the one side, and the indeterminate, shifting, unmapped, and even ineffable threats lying in wait to infect the healthy space with confusion and discord. My focus throughout this entire book is on how thinkers like Wordsworth, Coleridge, Beddoes, and Schelling either set the paradigm as the object of a moral endeavor to recover a genuine, because ancient, standard of acting, or as the emblem of disease that has traditionally obscured and repressed alternative values and possibilities for understanding actions and for assigning meaning to

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expression. Wordsworth's 'Preface' receives the initial attention in this study because, along with the poems of Lyrical Ballads, it can still be seen as the inauguration of modern poetry through its foregrounding of subjective individuality. My argument is that such foregrounding is only possible through Wordsworth's use of the Socratic paradigm in a way that makes it seem commonsensical. Wordsworth's success is not just personal, but is the success of a broad mode of ethical delineation that appeared in other cultural forms as well. By the time of the Biographia Literaria, what had seemed commonsensical became reified to the point that Coleridge could turn the standards of health back onto Wordsworth to criticize his lapses from the paradigm he had instituted. With this turn, Coleridge sets himself up as guardian of lyrical and ethical health. The literary critic is thus conceived to play a role analogous to that of the philosopher in Socrates' city - the guardian physician who maintains the integrity of the city of health through the integrity of its members. Coleridge's critic-physician ensures the health of poetry by enforcing the ethical doctrine that the individual's personal development - relying increasingly on higher faculties to regulate the lower ones - re-enacts the histories of nature and culture as development from fluid indeterminacy to the conscious organization of the regulated space. The narrative of organizational development, which usually remains implicit, turns the lyric statement into the revelation of ethical delineation that replicates the mapped-out order of the community. This narrative of development transforms the flow of time into the spatial arrangement of hierarchy, so that the passage from cultural primordiality to the present is re-enacted in the ethical alignment that progresses from base appetites to the higher faculties, the natural progression from molluscs to humans, and the political progression from primitive society to the community guarded by the philosopher-poet. Every healthy lyric in this romantic scheme constitutes a statement within this progressive history. And this history must be recognizable in all healthy, publicly acceptable expressions.3 Of course Wordsworth included numerous poems in Lyrical Ballads that are not technically lyrics, but are more accurately classified as narratives. These poems serve much the same function as the lyric, however. As Wordsworth employs his lyrics to map out the elements of an inner ethical landscape, so the narratives map out the details of the external landscape. The people he describes, along with the places he names, provide historical records and landmarks to organize the landscape into a meaningful topography. Through the following discussion, I shall consider Wordsworth primarily as a lyric poet, since my concern is with his role in the development of terms to

Lyrical Health in Wordsworth and Coleridge

17

describe an ethical interiority as a topography that re-enacts the mapped landscape of health, and that enables humans to recognize the health of nature. The corresponding task of the literary critic as instituted by Coleridge is to make the implicit re-enactment explicit. Coleridge's critic performs the role of guardian by identifying the placement of each lyric expression within the ethical topography of the poet, both in terms of what faculty the poem embodies and what event within the personal history is being revealed for its contribution to the ethical whole. In showing how individual poems disclose the elements of ethical coherence, the critic consolidates the poet's contribution to the city of health and affirms his or her own role as guardian of health. The literary critic distinguishes a role for him or herself inaccessible to either the poet or the philosopher by bringing together the qualities of each in order to read lyrical expressions properly, making the implicit explicit. For that reason, the account of how Coleridge creates this new role shall follow hard upon the account of how Wordsworth establishes the standard of healthy poetry as lyrical expressions of interiority. The Wordsworthian Standard of Health My concern in this initial discussion shall be with the rhetorical strategy Wordsworth uses in the 'Preface' to establish his concepts of the poet and lyric poetry as standards of health. He enforces the equation of his poetry and his poetic persona with health by establishing nature and ethical interiority as unassailable categories whose definitions he can present as common sense. By placing the examination of Wordsworth's rhetoric first, therefore, I shall foreground the romantic assumption of universality, naturalness, and common sense that has given their statements a sustained force. As I shall show in the next section, it is by reinforcing Wordsworth's categories that Coleridge develops his own critical persona who criticizes the elder poet for departing from the standards of health. Wordsworth opens his famous critical argument in the 'Preface' to Lyrical Ballads on the importance of the lyric by denying that he is doing anything other than allowing his poetry to speak for itself. He does not wish to undertake the task of explaining a theory to his poems, because it would smack of reasoning' the reader 'into an approbation of these particular Poems,' and because to do so adequately would require an account of public taste, 'how far this taste is healthy or depraved: which again could not be determined, without pointing out, in what manner language and the human mind act and react upon

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each other, and without retracing the revolutions not of literature alone but likewise of society itself (WProsel: 120). Wordsworth ostentatiously demurs here from pursuing the two key points to his argument. He in fact does intend to direct the reader 'into an approbation' (or else there would be no need for the prefatory statement), and he especially intends his direction to rest on a disclosure of the unfit state of contemporary taste. He stages this hesitation in the name of his primary concern, the insistence that the poems of Lyrical Ballads - indeed, all the poems he shall henceforth write - are 'materially different from those, upon which general approbation is at present bestowed' (WProse 1: 120). Such difference proves vital to Wordsworth's overall poetic project, and much of the reception of his work has focused on this claim. Thus we have the question as to whether his poetry should be read for its distinctiveness or should instead be recognized as belonging to a mode already common in Wordsworth's time. The question of whether the poems or 'the views, with which they were composed' truly differ in any marked way from a host of others written around the same time does not concern me. What does matter is that Wordsworth insists that his poetry is different, that he has written the poems with a different aim than that guiding his contemporaries, and that to be appreciated properly, his poems must first be recognized for their difference. More than anything else, Wordsworth wants us to understand that his works constitute a different class of compositions than is common. Every other point he makes throughout the 'Preface' depends on this basic detail: his judgment of contemporary writing, of the sickly taste fostered by his contemporaries, his ability to cure that taste and direct it into a new understanding of the construct of human consciousness, and the over-arching and insistent claim (even plea) that he has fulfilled his duty as a poet, all hinge on the claim to difference. And in turn, Wordsworth's claim of difference rests on his assertion that he wrote the poems with a distinct aim. He in effect states that he has combined the spontaneity and immediacy of Doric poetry with the study and reflection of critical examination. As Clifford Siskin points out, the 'conjuncture' of the lyric and the critical was 'a lyric feature' at this historical moment.4 Throughout the 'Preface,' Wordsworth describes how he combines the two modes by recovering his original feelings from within a critical framework that reveals their meaning and composition, and then expressing them directly as lyrics. The demurral opening the 'Preface' works to create the impression that the essay accomplishes the same process in reverse: he will allow the poetic expressions to stand on their own as direct presentations of feelings, but only after telling us about the critical framework that distinguishes them from other lyrics and, especially from other modes of writing.

Lyrical Health in Wordsworth and Coleridge

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Transmuted into an ethical framework, the critical exposition has the power to confer legitimacy or illegitimacy on faculties, experiences, or statements. Any statement that can be, or generally is, associated with what Wordsworth terms the ephemeral or sensational does not belong in the framework, and is therefore labeled a pathological threat and is expelled. The absence of any explanation of how values are assigned - or of how feelings, experiences, and so forth, are valued as healthy or diseased - enforces the sense that the ethical delineation Wordsworth presents is the natural one and the model for all others, the only one worthy and capable of being examined at length in such a critical-lyrical framework as the 'Preface' followed by the series of lyrics of Lyrical Ballads. The feigned hesitation to write the 'Preface' strategically foregrounds a stance of gentlemanly disregard for whether the poems are well-received or not. It is 'several of [his] friends [who] are anxious for the success of these poems' (WProse 1: 120), and so he writes the 'Preface' only from deference to their concern. The tacit claim that he would rather let the poems speak for themselves indicates that the persona Wordsworth develops in both the poems of Lyrical Ballads and this 'Preface' is akin to the natural poet who writes simply as he must without regard for style or effect, or for profit, and that his intentions are so pure and clear that he is confident he has done what he should. This persona is what we have accepted as Wordsworth, 'where he is indeed Wordsworth' (BL 2: 141). It is what Coleridge uses to gauge his individual works, linking them into a coherent body as expressions of this created character. It is this persona, supposedly, who speaks directly to us from the poems, and who here in the 'Preface' demurs from letting on that there is indeed a strategy to the poetry.5 Such is the intention of the demurral, to cast the morality as that of a simple man, natural and just, and right, and to conceal the self-creation of the persona as the critical framework that provides meaning for the individual poems, making each of them into a phenomenological delineation that categorizes and locates a particular feeling within the ethos of the spontaneously expressive poet. How well Wordsworth regulates the persona of the poet who is critical and spontaneous at the same time determines his success in making the framework appear less as a critical construct with its own aims beyond those of the poems, and more as a naturally generated ethical space opened by the interaction between consciousness and nature. By establishing his difference from contemporary poets, Wordsworth can begin with the assumption that he has not participated in the trends he shall condemn. Similarly, his poetic project - his 'experiment' - entails the reeducation of English readers, so that they may put aside the kinds of writing that have corrupted them. Establishing his persona of straightforward Doric

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bard as the exemplar of the poet England most needs at the current moment, Wordsworth does not have to claim any overtly didactic role for himself or his poetry.6 Instead, he may simply present the poems as works that fulfill his obligation, protecting him, as he says, 'from the most dishonorable accusation which can be brought against an Author, namely, that of an indolence which prevents him from endeavouring to ascertain what is his duty, or, when his duty is ascertained prevents him from performing it' (WProse 1: 122). Wordsworth's humble tone shifts the focus away from his creation of a framework so that he can deny any charge of 'reasoning' his readers into a view they do not themselves already possess. After asserting that each of his 'poems has a purpose' (WProse 1: 128), Wordsworth extends the differentiation of his work from that of his contemporaries by pointing out their disease. He emphasizes this distinction presumably that his poems each fulfills a purpose - because that is what matters most in poetry, and purpose is what renders the mind 'capable of excitement without the application of gross and violent stimulants' (WProse 1: 128). Such excitement of the mind by itself is so important that Wordsworth establishes a hierarchy according to how much individuals are capable of arousing it in themselves. And then he states boldly that to teach people how 'to produce or enlarge this capability is one of the best services in which, at any period, a Writer can be engaged.' With this reminder that he has not only recognized but fulfilled his duty, Wordsworth launches into some of the most vituperative prose in his oeuvre, pointing out the pathology of his age: For a multitude of causes unknown to former times are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor. The most effective of these causes are the great national events which are daily taking place, and the encreasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies. To this tendency of life and manners the literature and theatrical exhibitions of the country have conformed themselves. The invaluable works of our elder writers, I had almost said the works of Shakespeare and Milton, are driven into neglect by frantic novels, sickly and stupid German Tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse. - When I think upon this degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation I am almost ashamed to have spoken of the feeble effort with which I have endeavoured to counteract it. (WProse 1: 128, 130)

Newspaper accounts of the Napoleonic wars provide such immediate and

Lyrical Health in Wordsworth and Coleridge

21

varied excitement that readers lose their discernment, their ability or willingness to look for depth of meaning, occupying themselves instead with ephemeral sensations and overlooking the framework of values that constructs subjective depth and inwardness by determinations of permanence. So the 'savage torpor' to which readers have been reduced is a symptom that they have neglected their duty by not developing an ethical interior along the progressive hierarchy. Wordsworth casts his diagnosis as a moral outrage and thereby conceals the fact that his condemnation is of a difference in framework, and asserts that his own framework, his own poetic and ethical values hold universal legitimacy. Having lost the power of 'voluntary exertion,' the savage readers of sensational journalism reveal how society itself is on the verge of falling apart; these readers are symptoms of the general inability to discriminate base excitement from higher stimulation, ephemera from permanence. The 'discriminating powers of the mind' have been blunted, so that readers can no longer distinguish between health and disease, and are ruled by elements at the low end of the hierarchy, craving and thirst. Having been drunk only once, Wordsworth's discrimination is 'never so clouded by the fumes of wine' or any other 'gross and violent' stimulant that he has neglected his duty to develop upward until the higher faculties have full control over the lower (Prelude 7: 387-8, 441-2). Readers who 'thirst after outrageous stimulation' have abandoned their duty and stunted their growth by becoming slaves to their 'craving for extraordinary incident' and 'the rapid communication of intelligence.' English literary works 'have conformed themselves' to the slavish hunger for quick gratification of the unruly appetites. Literature and the theater have abandoned their sense of duty of instructing the people in how to develop progressively. The 'discriminating powers' belong to the mind and raise the person above the appetites. With this tension between mind and appetites, we get the oppositional extremes of the ethical hierarchy. Appetites lie at the low end, with their need for hourly gratification - immediate and therefore unsustainable. Undirected by higher faculties, appetites steer a person to ephemera, which are more readily available than the joy found by the mind. So we have the contrast between superficial stimulation associated with physical hunger and the deeper satisfaction found by the mind, and which is nonphysical. The identification of non-physical mind with depth, and with a sense of control, cultivation, and duty governs the inward ethical framing of health Wordsworth promotes. Depth, as a reigning value of ethical health, gives the appearance of complete naturalness to interiority. By assigning greater worth to whatever is further removed from the border separating inner from outer, degrees of inwardness are established. The question of whether interiority

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exists as anything beyond a linguistic trope disappears as the properly modulated poetic expression becomes the primary symbol of spiritual vastness. In drawing the lines distinguishing his poetic ethos, Wordsworth makes the decision to assign value solely to the poetic mode that represents spiritual inwardness. The devaluation of appetite, and consequently of the physical generally, reinforces the view that a poetic text is analogous to the body as it symbolizes a mind, as well as to the natural object that symbolizes a universally organic creative force linking all individuals into a healthy community. Undue emphasis on the text, or on language as performance obscures the mind in the same way as unregulated appetites. Wordsworth blames the diseased writing of his contemporaries for prohibiting the expansion of ethical interior space. The 'frantic novels' that have 'driven into neglect' the 'invaluable work of our elder writers' appeal only to the base appetites of the mob, and create a reading public who can no longer recognize depth of mind in themselves or in a literary work, or even wish to do so. Readers of 'frantic novels' hunger only for varied and ambiguous gratification, and in losing the ability to read for depth forsake the depth of their own interior space, which becomes mere surface - and surface can mean nothing without an ordered space beyond. Coleridge adds to this denigration of novels in Biographia Literaria, stating that they belong to the same genus as 'swinging or swaying on a chair or gate; spitting over a bridge; smoking; snuff-taking; tete a tete quarrels after dinner between husband and wife' (BL 1: 49n). In the moral perspective asserted by Wordsworth and Coleridge, these basely entertaining, ephemeral works discourage readers from developing higher, spiritual, and more permanent faculties, least of all the vigilant and protective faculty that would put everything in order according to its suitability and then would preserve the order from disturbances within or without. In presenting the diseased literature and the disruptive political events as 'causes unknown to former times,' Wordsworth can cast his theoretical framework as a return to something lost, or at least neglected. The standards he imposes, of authorship, literary mode, and reading, are not of his devising, he implies, but the legacy accompanying 'the invaluable works of our elder writers.' His delineation of health can be accepted as the recovery of what has actually existed all along. Just as the sick patient recovers health by returning to the quality of life enjoyed prior to the attack of illness - a quality which seemed to persist though somehow hidden by the disease - so English letters will once again stand forth in their proper and true state, if readers will only take their cure and recognize the healthy poet in his poetry. Immediately following the attack on journalism and novels, Wordsworth

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makes the rather stiff transition to his next topic: ' [hjaving dwelt thus long on the subjects and aim of these Poems, I shall request the Reader's permission to apprize him of a few circumstances relating to their style' (WProse 1: 130). The formal announcement that he has reached the end of his discussion on the aim of the poems reiterates the implicit claim that they function within the critical framework of his ethical construct and that this construct has a natural a universal - foundation that should be evident both in the poems and in the critical essay. The attack on contemporary literature, therefore, lies very much at the heart of what Wordsworth understands the purpose of his poetic project to be, and how he draws the boundary around his ethical interiority. Clearly his duty is to counteract the thirst for sensation by educating the populace about the 'inherent and indestructible qualities of the human mind, and likewise of certain powers in the great and permanent objects that act upon it which are equally inherent and indestructible' (WProse 1:130). What these qualities and powers are, Wordsworth strategically never says, except that they are permanent and inherent in both the mind and nature, so that the bond between the two exists through the concurrence of these powers, making inner and outer healthy spaces into analogues. The purpose of the poems, then, Wordsworth's own personal duty as a poet, is to reveal to readers that these powers exist and their excitement is somehow greater and more satisfying than the titillation gotten through journalism and through sensational novels, tragedies, and extravagant verse narratives. The particular duty of each individual poem is to detail a certain kind of feeling. The body of poems, taken as a whole, combines all the various sorts of feelings into the vital ethical framework of the model poet, model citizen of nature, who has arranged all his feelings and faculties appropriately. Such a model poet can then, we are to understand, serve as a guide or map for others to become dutiful citizens of nature. The disease of the age is superficiality of excitement which shapes a thirst for ephemera, and distracts readers from the permanent forces holding inner and outer spaces in an analogous union. Wordsworth points both to himself and to his poems as examples of the way for readers to re-engage themselves with these forces of greater excitement. Wordsworth speaks simply and directly throughout to show us what he, as an ethical subject, experienced on a given occasion, and with what faculty, inherent to the human psyche generally, he experienced it. 'Poems to which any value can be attached,' he states in an earlier paragraph dealing with one aspect of his purpose, were never produced on any variety of subjects but by a man who being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility had also thought long and deeply. For our continued influxes of feeling are modified and directed by

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He himself can serve as a model of healthy response to experience because he has studied his own ethical formation - learning which faculties respond to which natural stimuli, and how - and through his study he has shaped himself to give precedence to the most important faculties, namely those attentive to the permanence of natural forces and those directed toward fulfilling his ethical duty. His poems serve as a kind of phenomenological examination of the exemplary subjective engagement with the world. They each reveal the relations between subjective elements, and then between those elements and the external world. The ethical space defined through the critical framework is never questioned within this framework. Wordsworth's poems detail the structure and actions of a healthy, just, and natural ethical interior space that reenacts the exterior space of nature - the romantic city of health. And as far as the reader of these poems goes: 'the understanding of the being to whom we address ourselves, if he be in a healthful state of association, must necessarily be in some degree enlightened, his taste exalted, and his affections ameliorated' (WProse 1: 126). That qualification stands out, for only the healthy reader will be able to comprehend Wordsworth's poetry. Such a reader will be in a proper 'state of association' - one that corresponds to Wordsworth's own - understanding which faculties to bring to bear, and which cravings and thirsts to ignore. This healthy reader would be the one who wholly accepts Wordsworth's critical framework as the ethical organization which the 'Preface' claims the poems collectively present. This healthy reader would overlook the creation of the critical framework, and even its critical role in assigning values, taking it as the natural state of ethical interiority. And yet the suggestion remains, and quite forcefully, that Wordsworth's poetry should not only appeal to those who are already healthy, but it should also have the effect of curing those whose discriminating powers have been blunted: just as his own flight to the country saved Wordsworth from the evils of London, so reading his poems about the feelings of those who inhabit the countryside will show the diseased citizen how to shape him or herself ethically into a healthy person. No doubt - but this remains unstated in the 'Preface' the healthy reader would not need the critical presentation to know how to read the poems; such a reader would be the one described in the 'Advertisement' as being 'conversant. . . with our elder writers, and with those in modern times who have been the most successful in painting manners and passions' (WProse 1: 116). Elder writers share with those already successfully presenting manners

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and passions the same fulfillment of duty Wordsworth claims for himself here, namely writing poems that contain 'a natural delineation of human passions, human characters, and human incidents' (WProse 1:116). In other words, they accept the ethical framework that values certain human experiences, through the assignation of naturalness, over others that can only therefore be considered unnatural or diseased. Within his critical framework, Wordsworth is not just a nature poet, but, like the elder and most successful writers, he is - following Schiller's formulation - a natural poet. In linking himself to the elder writers, he plants himself in the progressive genealogy of the normative English literary tradition. At any rate the reader who looks inward at his or her own feelings upon reading these poems should recognize that Wordsworth's descriptions are just and accurate. Such is the claim, couched within the parting request 'that the Reader would abide independently by his own feelings, and that if he finds himself affected he would not suffer such conjectures to interfere with his pleasure' (WProse 1: 154). The 'conjectures' Wordsworth warns us against are our concerns that to 'such and such classes of people' the style or expressions of the poems might appear 'mean or ludicrous,' which would then prevent us from engaging the poem directly and without bias. The implication is that the poems embody the power to recreate the described feelings in their readers. Wordsworth's aim is, again, to instruct his readers into the way feelings and ideas become associated in someone who is emotionally healthy. Wordsworth explains that his ability to recreate powerful feelings was partly acquired through self-reflection and partly through the events - recounted throughout The Prelude - through which nature instructed him with an overt intention of singling him out as the model of ethical health (Prelude 3: 82). As we read accounts of his own responses to the great forces of nature, we will supposedly learn to identify our own deeper and more genuine feelings along with the faculties that perceive the complex of relations sustaining meaning in nature. It would seem that simply by encountering the operation of such faculties readers will pursue the qualities of ethical health. Given the choice between dissolution and health, Wordsworth claims, any of us would choose health. By reading his poems with such an open mind, his readers would naturally turn away from the tawdry sensationalist literature that only instructs them in developing a thirst for titillation. Wordsworth's claim here is at once disarmingly naive and downright arrogant.7 He has taken care to obviate the charge of arrogance, however, by pointing to his difference from his contemporaries, not his superiority: a poet, Wordsworth says in the 1802 revision, 'is a man speaking to men' (WProse 1: 138). The qualifications he adds stress his difference through a developed

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attention to his inner life: he is endowed with sensibility, enthusiasm, and tenderness in greater quantities than 'are supposed to be common among mankind.' He is different because of his health, preserved against the sensational distractions of modern writing. His difference would consist, then, in never having abandoned the proper regulation of his appetites, and in always maintaining the healthy ethical arrangement of his inner world analogous with the permanence of nature. Within the rhetorical performance of the 'Preface,' the naivete of his insistent assumption that he serves as the ethical and expressive model everyone wishes to follow - even if they have yet to recognize that fact - becomes one of his most effective tools. As he has said at the beginning, he does not want to be suspected of selfishly and foolishly hoping to reason the reader into approval. His desire for acceptance does not arise from selfishness, he would have us understand, but from his sense of duty. Wordsworth has the faith in his success afforded only to evangelists. And the religious echoes are not to be passed over lightly; for he did succeed in instituting his poetry and his lyrical persona as the ethical norm of health, so that John Stuart Mill, for example, could regain his well-being from reading Wordsworth's poetry. Wordsworth selected his poetic themes according to their contribution to the analogical relation between interiority and landscape of meaning - a connection only emphasized by arranging the poems for the 1815 volume 'with reference to the powers of mind predominant in them' and naming one prominent category, 'Poems on the Naming of Places' (WProse 3: 28). He chose to write about 'low and rustic life,' he says, 'because in that situation... our elementary feelings exist in a state of greater simplicity and consequently may be more accurately contemplated and more forcibly communicated; . . . because in that situation the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature' (WProse 1: 124). Wordsworth's account of his subjects here brings 'the passions of men' with 'beautiful and permanent forms of nature' into the very same sort of mutual reflection. When seen in their simplest form, free of all the sophisticated sublimation of fashionable life, human passions are nothing other than the 'beautiful and permanent forms of nature.' He reiterates this point just after the attack on the diseased state of current readership when he expresses his hope that such debility can be cured by leading people to recognize once again the vital reflection of inner subjectivity and the outer natural world: 'I should be oppressed with no dishonourable melancholy, had I not a deep impression of certain inherent and indestructible qualities of the human mind, and likewise of certain powers in the great and permanent objects that act upon it which are equally inherent and indestructible' (WProse 1: 130). These are the sorts of statements that have

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fostered the heritage of Romanticism as the study of subject-object relations. This heritage is epitomized in M. H. Abrams' account of romantic poems as the process 'in which mind confronts nature and their interplay constitutes the poem.'8 But this sort of account neglects to question 'mind' and 'nature' as categories within a culturally attuned discourse and so overlooks how Wordsworth's rhetorical strategies and his polemical and narrative strategies give those categories - along with the valuation of health as a non-physical interiority - the quality of pre-existing truths that are being recovered. Poetic interiority arises in Wordsworth's lyrics through descriptions that arrange specific feelings into an order whose apparent meaning depends on their association with certain remembered events and create an inner topography parallel to the outer landscape of places that have been named to commemorate notable events. Such events acquire a formative quality as they are 'recollected in tranquillity' by the poet who then profits 'by the lesson thus held forth to him' (WProse 1: 148-50). The lesson, as suggested by the spots of time recounted in The Prelude., concerns the fundamental identification of inner space with nature through intangible creative forces - or 'renovating virtue' (notably a 'fructifying virtue' in 1799) by which 'our minds / Are nourished and invisibly repaired,' and that 'lurks / Among those passages of life in which / We have had the deepest feeling that the mind / Is lord and master, and that outward sense / Is but the obedient servant of her will' (Prelude 11: 259-73). The inner space of mind is given primacy over outward senses because of its spiritual re-enactment of the creative power of nature. The feeling Wordsworth has of this spiritual power extends the ethical space into a depth that is repeatedly signified by an inability to describe it. His theme in The Prelude is What passed within me. Not of outward things Done visibly for other minds - words, signs, Symbols or actions - but of my own heart Have I been speaking, and my youthful mind.. .. This is in truth heroic argument, And genuine prowess - which I wished to touch, With hand however weak - but in the main It lies far hidden from the reach of words. Points have we all of us within our souls Where all stand single; this I feel, and make Breathings for incommunicable powers. (Prelude 11: 173-88)

The narrative account of the experiences contributing to the formation of his poetic identity becomes something of a travelogue by which Wordsworth can

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detail the topography of his mind through the troping of the landscape. Such troping is the governing device in Abrams' reading of romantic poetry through the 'correspondent breeze.'9 The healthy poet, we are told in the 'Preface,' seeks to direct readers to examine their own interior space in order to set up a good self-government, and at the same time to study their role in the external structure. Ethical health may be characterized quite simply as being able to signify deep interiority.10 Wordsworth's claim to embody such health entails the assertion that his language has been purified of all stylistic qualities that would prevent readers from perceiving his own depth. In following the Socratic strategy of identifying the two healthy structures - the parallel frameworks of ethical interiority and nature - Wordsworth makes his most fertile statement of purpose. He assigns ethical meaning to individual actions, feelings, and memories according to how they contribute to the overall identity of the individual person; the individual can find meaning for him or herself as a construct of these integrated elements through his or her contribution to the external structure of nature perceived as an allencompassing spiritual hierarchy. Nature looms so large in Wordsworth's poetry - and in this 'Preface' - because it provides the very same space for meaning, or self-discovery, which the Socratic city does for its citizens. In a delightful reversal of terms - and it amounts to no more than that Wordsworth has replaced and expanded Socrates' city into and beyond the countryside, locating the city of health nationalistically in the landscape that predates the 'encreasing accumulation of men in cities.' But of course, the fields of disease that surround the Socratic city of health persist in Wordsworth's scheme, for it is still possible to function out of nature, to be unnatural (or to be un-English). And most often, those who are unnatural remain unaware of their debility. So it is that he turns away from the unnatural poetic language used by 'Poets, who think that they are conferring honour upon themselves and their art in proportion as they separate themselves from the sympathies of men, and indulge in arbitrary and capricious habits of expression in order to furnish food for fickle tastes and fickle appetites of their own creation' (WProse 1: 124). In separating themselves, these poets neglect the duty of contribution and participation in the structure of health. Their expressions prove arbitrary and capricious because - in terms we can now apply on the basis of Wordsworth's modernization of the Socratic city into nature - they are unnatural. The appetites satisfied by unnatural poetry are 'fickle' because they have not been oriented by the permanent forms of the city of health, nature. Unnatural poets write only to satisfy the tastes of those who do not even know why they read. Wordsworth takes this point a step further in 1802 when he lashes out in

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hectoring tones at those 'who talk of Poetry as of a matter of amusement and idle pleasure; who will converse with us gravely about a taste for Poetry, as they express it, as if it were a thing as indifferent as a taste for rope-dancing, or Frontiniac or Sherry' (WProse 1: 139). By making poetry into 'the image of man and nature,' however, Wordsworth can lay claim not only to a higher purpose than amusement, but to purposefulness generally. And, because his poetry differs from that of all his contemporaries, as he has established from the beginning, his alone should serve as the standard for what is healthful. Such is the power that Wordsworth appropriates for himself that he successfully establishes himself as the image of the poet expressing his bond to nature in pure and direct language. His lyrics do not, therefore, only create the formula for the speaking subject behind the poem, rather they show us how to identify our feelings in response to nature. His success has depended as much as anything on these simple assertions in the 'Preface' that the ethical interiority reflects the outer world of nature in terms of the interconnectedness of particular elements. In the claim that he has chosen rustic subjects because their feelings and relations to natural forces are more easily discerned, Wordsworth establishes the universality of the ethical components he focuses on and the certainty of their bond to the natural world outside. This bond is sufficiently direct that when Wordsworth turns to the matter of poetic style he essentially claims that he has successfully avoided any kind of style per se, and has written a series of poems wholly transparent in their presentation of ethical interiority forming itself in conjunction with the order of nature. Avoiding personifications, abstract ideas, and poetic diction, he tells us, he has kept c in the company of flesh and blood,' and has 'at all time endeavoured to look steadily at [his] subject' (WProse 1: 130, 132). By turning away from poetic convention, or more exactly from the poetic fashion that has diseased both expression and ethical formation, Wordsworth presents subjective experiences without adulteration from adventitious forces. So he asserts, in the form of expressing a hope, that 'it will be found that there is in these Poems little falsehood of description' (WProse 1: 132). His steady and direct gaze has given us a map of the ethical exemplar whose feelings we can learn to distinguish from one another and then begin to recognize in ourselves. The implication in Wordsworth's assurance of having looked steadily at his subject is that he has indeed maintained a healthy ethical governance by watching over the lower faculties with the higher ones. With this bold and self-imposing claim, Wordsworth completes the exposition of his authority as lyric poet. His poems, so goes the claim, will present nothing other than the events that always occur within a properly delineated and fully visible subjective interiority engaged with the enduring forces of nature. In asserting

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the steadiness of his own gaze, Wordsworth assures us that he has laid out the entirety of his subjective being for examination. Through the Wordsworthian gaze, the ethical space turns into a topography with regions categorized and delineated from each other. When terms like imagination and fancy are assigned distinct functions, they can then be given a particular place and be shown to contribute in specific ways to ethical unity. They are given a reality attested to in a logical circularity that makes ethical health dependent on them. And with the authority he assumes through his role as guardian, Wordsworth turns the lyric itself into the gaze probing into all the different parts of his ethical topography. In using terms like 'topography' and 'ethical construct' that can be mapped out, I wish to underscore the spatial quality of the Wordsworthian subject. The association of feelings and ideas in states of excitement is governed by laws that Wordsworth says constitute the 'principle object' of his poetry (WProse 1: 122). That means that such associations, and the feelings themselves, must adhere to a predictable regularity that allows them to be labeled and categorized. The equation of health and nature with which Wordsworth establishes his difference from his contemporaries provides the rhetorical force that has given the lyric poet such a prominent role in postromantic culture, as the emblem of the author speaking from within a personal experience of truth with the aim of making that truth public. Coleridge's Guardian Critic In the decade from 1808 to 1818, Coleridge repeatedly tries to delineate a critical framework on par with that Wordsworth presents in the 'Preface.' In notebooks, letters, lectures, and published essays, Coleridge lays out the general principles of his literary criticism, and he asserts his authority to serve as critical guardian. In all these texts, he follows the strategy of framing a critical ethos capable of distinguishing healthy poetry - and literature generally - from unhealthy productions. Within the critical ethos, Coleridge identifies a faculty of transcendent perception that enables the critic to perceive persons in their ethical unity or disunity. Correspondingly, in the 1816 Biographia, he famously identifies the poetic faculty that generates healthy poetry. And he affirms his own critical perspicacity and ethical health by condemning the diseases of uneducated popular literature and Edward Gibbon's atheistical history of Rome. In later chapters I shall show how Coleridge's urgency in asserting both his own healthiness and an authority comparable to Wordsworth's came from

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the fear that he lacked any determinable identity. Such urgency compelled him to present shifting narratives of himself that only reinforced that fear which came out of his failure to bring any substantial work to completion. Thus, behind and leading up to the successful presentation of the critical and moral authority in the Biographia and the subsequent critical works lie indications that Coleridge was trying out different versions of himself in the effort to place himself on par with Wordsworth. I shall show how, in ranging through the different narratives, Coleridge came close to developing a critical framework antithetical to the idealist one centered around the imagination and organic unity for which he is best known. Here I shall focus on the statements that develop the familiar persona who made the transcendent vision of idealism into the touchstone of criticism. In this section my concern shall be with the wellknown Coleridge who laid down the principles of poetic imagination along with the principles that governed much of literary criticism as the attentive reading of unified and expressive poetry. In a strategy paralleling Wordsworth's distinction of the healthy poet, Coleridge formulates the role of the critical reader by distinguishing it from the activity of the popular reader. In The Friend he lays out the framework through which the critic properly reads; in the first volume of Biographia Literaria, he traces his own ethical development, from poet to philosopher, that enables him to see farther than do common readers. And in volume two, he implements his gaze as the critical reading that completes Wordsworth's poems by uncovering their expression of ethical depth. He separates the critic's reading from popular reading to privilege the former as being alone capable of comprehending the full sense of the poet. The critic is thus both on the same level as the poet, sharing the creative faculty and seeing into the depth of interiority, and above the poet, possessing the philosophical faculties that enable him or her to oversee the interconnectedness of all literature and social and natural history. As will become evident, Coleridge institutes the role of the critic through re-enacting Wordsworth's demonstration of his authorial health; in different contexts Coleridge expels both diseased authors, as Wordsworth has done, and diseased readers who lack the vision of the philosophically oriented critic. In expelling weak and even false reading, Coleridge draws the limits around legitimate and healthy criticism; in purging poetry of its diseased authors and texts (for even a healthy poet like Wordsworth may go astray without the guidance of the critic), he establishes the critic in the role of guardian of poetry. The faults for which he condemns both false reading and corrupt authors conversely enable Coleridge to detail the ethical qualities of the critic. The diseased reader cannot rise above particularities to find a principle of unity,

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either in a literary text or the world. The diseased author - who immorally spreads his or her disease in textual form - exploits the uneducated reader's lack of unifying perspective by providing titillating and disjointed details. Such an author, represented generally by popular novelists but epitomized for Coleridge particularly by Edward Gibbon, hides behind an obscurantist style. In contrast to the uneducated reader, the Coleridgean critic is educated into a transcendent perspective that comprehends all parts of a literary work in its unity. In the Biographia Coleridge identifies the poetic power of unification that guides the healthy poet, even as he asserts his own intellectual unification of philosophy and poetry. Within a year of that work, he goes on to focus more exclusively on the perception of the critic in 'Essays on the Principle of Method.' Having already granted the poet the creative faculty of imagination, he then assigns to the critic a transcendent vision that comprehends the poet and the poet's work within their social and historical contexts. Through this vision, the critic attains the role of guardian. At the opening of volume two of the Biographia, Coleridge provides the measure of healthy poetry that will serve as his framework for the poet's lyrics. Notably he casts his standard as a reformulation of Wordsworth's question from the 'Preface,' 'What is a Poet?' (WProse 1: 138). Coleridge states: 'What is poetry? is so nearly the same question with, what is a poet? that the answer to the one is involved in the solution of the other' (BL 2: 15). The expressive text can be identified directly with the person constructing the expressions; the text and expressive poet both represent an ethical depth which the reader must learn to fathom. The poet thus brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other, according to their relative worth and dignity. He diffuses a tone, and spirit of unity, that blends, and (as it were) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and magical power, to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of imagination. (BL 2: 15-6)

Unity, fusion, and appropriateness are the three values that constitute the standard of poetic health, according to Coleridge's critical reading, and these become the values over which the critic will stand watch to ensure that poetry maintains its health and fulfills its function. The entire, singular person must be brought into the activity of expression, and thus lyric expression is made into the full identification of poet and poem. The healthy romantic poet puts the imaginative power 'in action by the will and understanding' (BL 2: 16), and works upward through the faculties, fusing them all in the outcome. Through blending, fusing, and subordinating, the poet contributes to the health of the

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community by stimulating the 'tone, and spirit.. . that synthetic and magical power' that binds the individual members of a body, ethical interiority, and community, so that from a plurality they become a unity. It is vital to this magically fused unity that its parts be put into their proper relations to one another, subordinating the faculties 'according to their relative worth and dignity,' so that the inner space reflects the socially organized outer space. By adhering to the hierarchical alignment, the critic can determine the relative merit of any given poem according to how fully it brings subjective experience into expression, and can give a precise account of the relative health of a poem and poet according to how appropriately they adhere to the value of the faculty they purport to represent. Coleridge follows his account of the 'synthetic and magical power' with a list of the oppositions reconciled by the poet. This includes sameness and difference, the individual and the representative, the sense of novelty with the familiar (BL 2: 16-7). These reconciliations follow the action of the healthy poem through the stimulation of the magical blending power. Wordsworth has already made essential to his healthy poet the stimulation of the mind of the healthy reader without adventitious devices (or physical substances). Wordsworth's stimulation entails the recognition that the forces working in nature also play a vital role in the ethical interior. Coleridge extends this recognition into the activity of the reader, so that the healthy poem is stimulated by the healthy reader into the active agent fusing humans into a cultural community with a history that can be narrated as a progression through the hierarchy of faculties. In placing most emphasis on such issues as organic wholeness, fusion, and appropriateness - and then quibbling over the relative merits of verse and prose - Coleridge reinforces Wordsworth's naturalization of subjectivity as an interior space analogous to the outer world of organic and creative nature. It thereafter becomes the common view that a literary text presents the inner life of the author in ways that informed readers can recognize as similar to their own inner experience. Ethical interiority ceases to be examined critically as a possibility, and is accepted as the basis for other questions that occupy the mainstream critical discourse that extends to Arnold, Eliot, and the New Critics. Coleridge develops the role of the critic by extending Wordsworth's account of the healthy reader and adding the feature of necessity, that without the critic's reading healthy poetry cannot fulfill its duty. The necessity of the critic's relation to the poem ensures that the Coleridgean reader will always hold a status at least equal to that of the Wordsworthian poet; and it grants the power of enforcement to the reader who can determine whether or not a poem succeeds ethically as an expression of unity and depth.

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Coleridge thus foregrounds the value of appropriateness throughout his critical comments on Wordsworth's 'Preface.' He takes his former collaborator to task for claiming that poetic language and prose are essentially the same, and that an educated poet may represent the language really spoken by rustics. The rustic and the educated person may share the same basic language (if the rustic's is purified of grossness and grammatically re-constructed), but the rustic, from the more imperfect development of his faculties, and from the lower state of their cultivation, aims almost solely to convey insulated facts, either those of his scanty experience or his traditional belief; while the educated man chiefly seeks to discover and express those connections of things, or those relative bearings of fact to fact, from which some more or less general law is deducible. (BL 2: 52-3)

The rustic cannot bring the entire person into play when constructing expressions. Rustic expressions can only ever be disjunctive, and thus non-poetic, since they do not blend and fuse experiences into an expression of ethical wholeness. Rustics - like readers of novels - cannot escape the lower faculties, so that they cannot incorporate all elements, all experiences, into a singular, over-arching statement of ethical wholeness or unity with nature. The rustic's focus on 'insulated facts,' contrasts that of the educated man who looks to connections and 'some more or less general law.' The educated man recognizes that each fact is actually a symbol, and holds, within an inner depth, an essential quality that connects it with other facts in accord with a general law. Similarly, in correcting Wordsworth's claim that poetry and prose are fundamentally similar, Coleridge focuses his comments around the organic essence of poetry, asserting that meter constitutes the union of passion and volition, 'that spontaneous effort which strives to hold in check the workings of passion' (BL 2: 64). Poetry and prose each constitutes different 'facts' and serves a purpose appropriate to itself. They are related, however, in that they both follow the general law that dictates how organic expression works to reveal an ethical unity. The intent of Coleridge's argument is not to refute Wordsworth on the basis of technicalities, the specifics of what distinguishes poetry from prose, but rather to affirm Wordsworth's assertion of lyric poetry as the most exemplary mode of direct ethical presentation, and to promote it as the exemplary mode of literature, which the critic must approach as the discursive embodiment of an ethical topography. Coleridge redirects Wordsworth's

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commentary on the directness of expression into a delineation of the laws of genres. Thus he asks 'whether there are not modes of expression, a construction, and an order of sentences, which are in their fit and natural place in a serious prose composition, but would be disproportionate and heterogeneous in metrical poetry' (EL 2: 64). In poetry alone is meter truly appropriate, as the union of the higher and lower faculties - feeling and thought. Reconciliation of these oppositions constitutes the form and the content of poetry, thus establishing the lyric as the emblem of ethical depth, and the lyric poet as the emblem of ethical health. But prose also adheres to a standard of appropriateness, achieving a reconciliation of particularities into a wholeness through principles identical to lyric expression. Coleridge strategically signifies his adherence at the beginning of his biographical narrative, when he recounts how the schoolmaster, James Bowyer, insisted on plain language and appropriateness. Through reconciliation, Coleridge argues, poetry incorporates the entire person in the expression. As the fourth point in his objection to Wordsworth's presentation of the argument, Coleridge adduces 'the principle, that all the parts of an organized whole must be assimilated to the more important and essential parts' (BL 2: 72). The higher up the scale of cognition we go, the more we find the entire being contained in single faculties. And the higher up the scale of life we go, the more we find the entirety of existence contained in individuals; the highest form of life, in this scheme, is the human, and the highest human is the philosophical (as opposed to the entertaining) poet. The critic is the reader trained to perceive the literary text as the author's selfpresentation in its entirety. Poetry necessarily enacts the evolutionary process by which creative power rises out of darkness through individuation and then up into public consciousness. This is the progressive history, we are to understand, which reflective, lyrical individuals are able to find in themselves. It is less a history of change than of the re-enactment of the synthetic and magical power rising through the hierarchy of faculties by uniting them toward a common aim, making them into parts of the ethical whole. The question ceases to be whether these faculties exist, and instead becomes that of how to regulate them in order to uphold ethical health. The Coleridgean critic concentrates on whether an author's statements are appropriate to the kind of experience they describe; the critic identifies the proper relation between the genre and faculty or experience, and then determines whether the individual statement fulfills the requirements of the genre. Just as the particular faculty must serve the ethical whole, and just as the individual person must serve the social whole, so the critic ensures that each statement serves the genre. Repeatedly, with genre, poetic ethos, and - as

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a re-enactment of Bowyer's exercise of tearing up students' compositions repeating sentences from others - individual texts, regulated spaces are framed through instituting a standard of normality or health that allows for little deviance or pluralism. Each space becomes the analogue of the others, and then precludes any questioning of what these divided and regulated spaces cover over. The possibility that human experience, as well as nature, might follow a different model than that of the city of mapped-out relations is cast beyond the limit of acceptable questioning into the fields of diseased speculation.11 Divisions between genres, and between sub-genres, modes, and so on, become just as vital to the authority of the critic as the fundamental division between nature-health and the unnatural-disease. The more divisions are drawn, within the realm of writing just as much as within the ethical realm, the more the discursive quality of those realms disappears into the reified backdrop of ethical and social schemes making claims of universal standards. Coleridge follows Wordsworth's strategy of opening a space that will make his type of reader necessary by expelling the false readers who claim to know how to read. In The Statesman's Manual of 1816, he sets up a scene of himself among the false readers in terms of having to sit at an indigestible dinner among those whose heads and hearts are dieted at the two public ordinaries of Literature, the circulating libraries and the periodical press. . . . Alas! if the average health of the consumers may be judged of by the articles of largest consumption; if the secretions maybe conjectured from the ingredients of the dishes that are found best suited to their plates; from all that I have seen, either of the banquet or the guests, I shall utter my Profaccia with a desponding sigh. From a popular philosophy and a philosophic populace, Good Sense deliver us! (LS 38) This diet of common education has fostered 'the misgrowth of our luxuriant activity . . . a READING PUBLIC' (LS 36). Coleridge here, and elsewhere, extends Wordsworth's attack on contemporary authors to include the readers such authors attract. Coleridge ranks readerly ability in a correspondence with the social hierarchy. He parallels the lower social ranks with the lower faculties in their need to be controlled by the higher; hence his contempt for popular writing and popular reading, from which only the 'Good Sense' wielded by educated men can deliver us. His own performance as reader can be characterized in his reaction to this insalubrious populism whose literary and political judgment amounts to the pernicious sophistry that he is left to correct. As Sheila Kearns points out, Coleridge closes the Biographia with a figure of 'continuity between faith and reason,' which 'opens up the space for the

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"inward act" of reading.'12 A vital force in his criticism is the education of the reading public in what they should read and how they should read it. The literary feast at which Coleridge unhappily finds himself is one where the most plentiful dishes are also the unhealthiest, because they are so easily available and require no cultivation of taste, but ultimately demand a drastic purgation. The public who swarm to this feast consist of 'devotees of the circulating libraries' whose 'kill-time' he refuses to compliment 'with the name of reading': Call it rather a sort of beggarly daydreaming, during which the mind of the dreamer furnishes for itself nothing but laziness and a little mawkish sensibility; while the whole materiel and imagery of the doze is supplied ab extra by a sort of mental camera obscura manufactured at the printing office, which pro tempore fixes, reflects and transmits the moving phantasms of one man's delirium, so as to people the barrenness of an hundred other brains afflicted with the same trance or suspension of all common sense or direction. (5Zl:48n)

Like Wordsworth, Coleridge believes that the primary purveyance of false reading is to be found in novels (BL 1: 49). For Coleridge the 'kill-time' quality of novels debases the act of reading into 'a sort of beggarly daydreaming.' He sees education as the necessary re-orientation of the public away from the lower faculties and toward the higher ones that alone can comprehend the 'imperishableness of a spiritual music' (F 1: 450). The common education that has given rise to the reading public Coleridge hopes to counter with his methodical education directed at 'men in whom [one] may hope to find, if not philosophy, yet occasional impulses at least to philosophic thought' (LS 39). His desire for a learned reading class above the reading public develops into his call for the clerisy, or 'the permanent learned class' whose members would serve as 'agents and instruments in the great and indispensable work of perpetuating, promoting, and increasing the civilization of the nation' (C&SSO).13 Popular reading, consisting of promiscuous interpretations of uninformed works, 'transmits the moving phantasms of one man's delirium' into the empty space of entranced brains. Certainly this is a kind of exchange, but only of a diseased sort governed by delirium, daydream, and laziness - the greatest sin of which Wordsworth says an author can be accused. Instead of discovering the well-defined ethical elements in correspondence with the permanent forces of nature, this 'beggarly daydreaming' resembles nothing so much as the prisoners in the allegorical cave, who take shadowy representations as reality. There is no genuine exchange of ideas or feelings bonding the two minds, but

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only a delirious transmission of isolated phantasms. Popular reading perpetuates more than general ignorance in Coleridge's view, since, in conveying phantasms, it seduces the public into a faith in illegitimate knowledge. The beggarly daydreams possess brains barren of any innate 'sense or direction,' and must turn to the illusion of being filled 'by a sort of mental camera obscura manufactured at the printing office.' These dreams, delirium, and phantasms lack reality because they are manufactured 'ab extra,' and are not native to the English landscape of interiority. The proper reading which Coleridge would promote is that exemplified by his own attentive reading of Wordsworth's lyrics. In this reading, both poet and critic participate in the expression, with the reader actively completing the lyric's presentation. In popular reading, in contrast, the reader remains passive - 'entranced' while the novelistic phantasm passes through his or her delirium. George Rousseau points out that eighteenth-century commentators describe the imagination 'most often as an image-producing aspect of the "mind,"' and, distinguishing between healthy and diseased versions of the faculty, 'centred their attention on the diseased rather than healthy imagination.'14 In doing so, Rousseau claims, the Enlightenment authenticated the imagination, as something that had to exist before it could be cured. Coleridge's description here of popular reading in terms of the mental imagery of delirium advances out of that eighteenth-century mode to identify the diseased imagination with delirious phantasms. Taking up the association of imagination with mental imagery already sanctioned, and then exploiting the traditional distrust of imagination as fantasy dissociated from the rational comprehension of nature, Coleridge identifies diseased imagination as the untrustworthy development of delirious fantasies transmitted sleepily among idle brains. In identifying and condemning the diseased imagination, he can begin to delineate the healthy form as that which is not diseased. As Rousseau points out, authenticating the imagination by dividing it into healthy and diseased versions made it possible 'for the first time in the history of medicine . . . for man's body to be sick and his psyche to be healthy.'15 Such a possibility played a considerable role in Coleridge's own claim to have become too philosophical to remain a poet, as we shall see in the next chapter. But, by the time he attacks popular writing and reading in the Biographia, Coleridge has added another twist to this strategic authentication by pointing to Wordsworth as the exemplar of the healthy imagination that he himself shall protect, and by extending the attacks on sensationalism from the 'Preface' to identify the diseased imagination as that which remains too close to the body and its appetites.

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When he attacks popular literature - epitomized by novels - Coleridge seems to have in mind sensational works like The Monk or The Italian, which do little in his view toward presenting a character ethically unified, whose higher faculties observe and regulate their lower ones. The popular literature, and 'kill-time' novels in particular, that he condemns provide no characterization, like that of Wordsworth's poems, to support and to reflect moral and communal unity. In neglecting the 'common sense or direction,' popular narratives weaken the unity that healthy individuals find inwardly within themselves and expand outwardly into an historical community. These attacks on popular literature and the reading public effectively repeat Socrates' condemnation of the poetry whose appeal is to the festival crowd. Popular appeal must follow the mercurial nature of the crowd; and when popular literature relies on sensationalism, it must 'degenerate into repetition, and . . . disappoint curiosity,' as Coleridge says in a review of The Italian (SWF 1: 79). 'The horrible and preternatural,' he says in regard to The Monk, 'can never be required except by the torpor of an unawakened, or the languor of an exhausted, appetite' (SWF 1: 58). Such works represent both moral and cultural decline in their appeal to a delusion which a moral reader could only 'break with abruptness from . . . and indignantly suspect the man of a species of brutality, who could find a pleasure in wantonly imagining them' (SWF 1: 59). Again we see the association of sensational novels with diseased mental imagery, and with the 'low vulgar taste* of the uneducated (SWF 1: 55). Coleridge also adheres to Socratic standards in his comments on style. Just as Socrates condemns mimetic poets for not directly expressing their own character, Coleridge attacks the style which does not clearly present a unified and distinct ethos. Matthew Lewis's prose, for example, 'is gaudy where it should have been severely simple' (SWF 1: 60). And so Coleridge, whose own style can rival anyone's for its impenetrability, condemns obscurity as the stylistic disease that precludes expression of ethical depth. Such obscurantism he finds not only among the rustics whose lack of education confines them to 'insulated facts,' but also in Gibbon's history of Rome. Gibbon's style fully embodies, for Coleridge, the disease of shallowness - and it is worth noting that Gibbon himself embodies the diseases of Frenchified atheism and sexuality, which set him up as the representative of materialism. In what could very well be his most vituperative attack on Gibbon, tucked away within a complex series of notes written in 1810, Coleridge provides a list of specific ethical and narrative 'defects' that must be interdicted to restore historical writing to health. He writes that Gibbon commits the sin of carrying the insincere politeness of courtly conversation into the solemn chair

40

City of Health, Fields of Disease of History, thence the perpetual terror of saying any thing plainly & directly, and the various artifices of periphrasis . . . and the truly ridiculous repetition of the conditional tense - might - I . . . the even ungentlemanly use of doubles entendres, &c in the notes - & the truly gallican mode of speaking of the sexual appetite as a sort of omnipotent power, which is never resisted without a MIRACLE - i.e. without giving occasion to a sneer . . . this in part doubtless owing to his Frenchified Education & Habits of Intercourse & his preference of French Manners & Language - but in part, I doubt not, attributable to his secret infirmities, which he dwelt the more on because he imagined them a profound secret, and therefore could not but haunt & disease his imagination - (C7V3: 3823)

The stylistic excesses in Gibbon's narration are connected directly to 'moral delinquencies,' and 'secret infirmities.' His style could be taken as almost the extreme opposite of Wordsworth's. Gibbon's indirectness turns his stylistic politeness into the insincerity of courtly conversation, the mannered and artificial phatic language of the poseur debasing the professorial position of learning into sophistic fashion. Since Gibbon does not address the reader directly, but through the guise of courtly manners which demand periphrasis and the conditional tense, the only possible conclusion is that he possesses a secret disease that has warped him physically, morally and mentally. Indeed, within Coleridge's guidelines, indirection itself becomes a sign for a haunted and diseased imagination. Gibbon has forsaken the narrative mode appropriate to the historical education of the philosophical guardian. He perverts the natural English mode of narrative by relying on the artificial French style.16 The particular context of Gibbon's history that has sparked Coleridge's outrage is the account of Christianity arising out of the misreading of a few Platonic metaphors.17 It is a symptom of Gibbon's ethical illness that he speaks 'of the sexual appetite as an omnipotent power' in a historical work, which should trace the development of humans into higher states of culture and selfawareness. According to Coleridge's values, Gibbon's sexual references are pathologically inappropriate in a historical account of the rise of Christianity. Following such a violation of genre, Gibbon has unmanned himself with the 'effeminate structure' of his prose, de-anglicized himself through his 'Frenchified education,' and has made himself and his history into the ethical and stylistic disease threatening English letters. Elsewhere, Coleridge claims specifically that Gibbon has supplanted the rational faculty proper to the historian with the faculty of understanding. In a marginalium to the same passage from The Decline and Fall tracing the rise of Christian doctrine that earns the outrage in the notebook, Coleridge entreats James Gillman to prepare himself for reading Gibbon's faulty history by

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mastering the function of the understanding in order to recognize when it is misused, such as when it 'is employed on truths that have no connection with the senses, nor are capable of being generalised from sensible objects. This absurd misapplication of the understanding, Gibbon makes in order to expose these truths to ridicule' (CM 2: 844). Gibbon errs, in Coleridge's ethical judgment, not simply in misunderstanding Christian belief or doctrine, but in relying on an improper - and base - faculty in his attempt to ridicule Christianity. As J. G. A. Pocock suggests, Gibbon asserts that the strength of modern Europe consists of its pluralism, in contrast to the 'unitary despotism' that led to the decline of the ancient world.18 In Coleridge's view, pluralism could only result from dependence on the understanding, which blinds Gibbon to truths generalized from the sense and to the universality of Christian doctrine. Pluralism could only indicate the absence of 'that synthetic and magical power' of healthy imagination that 'blends, and (as it were) fuses' the individual faculties into an ethical whole, and individual authors into a unified and progressive cultural history. Like the festival mob or popular readers who rely on lower faculties, Gibbon is incapable of the 'prophetic vision . . . conveyed by means of the imagination,' which Elinor Shaffer says characterizes Coleridge's hermeneutics, and which seeks unity as the identification of a single governing aim.19 The demand for such singularity could only compel Coleridge to find any pluralism diseased. Just as he is rigidly absolutist in his attack on any whiff of religious or social pluralism, so he will allow for only one mode of literary expression, that exemplified by the stylistically transparent Wordsworthian lyric. Gibbon's double entendres threaten the singularity inherent in Coleridge's standard of stylistic health, and draw attention to the materiality of language obscuring the signification of ethical depth beyond the text. The revelatory meaning that should be conveyed by language is obscured, so that Coleridge describes reading Gibbon's 'detestable' style as 'looking through a luminous haze or fog, figures come and go, I know not how or why, all larger than life or distorted or discoloured; nothing is real, vivid, true; all is scenical and by candlelight as it were' (TT 1: 418-9). The infirm style resembles the performance of popular reading, full of the phantasms of delirium. Gibbon creates an 'artificial construction,' privileging the 'dramatic ordonnance of parts' over 'the truths of political philosophy' in the same way that the rustic conveys 'insulated facts' rather than general law (TT 1:419). Such language interrupts the transmission that would make the subjective space analogous to the objective order of nature and society; and it precludes the presentation of an ethically unified commentator who can recognize the progressive unity of history.20 The ambiguity and irony of the double entendres dissolve the critical

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framework that assigns meaning to particular statements. So the figures within this narrative do not contribute to progress in 'the truths of political philosophy,' but only 'come and go, I know not why.' The overall result is that language loses its function within a critical framework of providing authorial depth and takes on the textual impenetrability of performative rhetoric. Coleridge further develops the principles framing his critical mode of reading in the 'Essays on Method' appended to the 1818editionof TheFriend. These essays mark the culmination of his efforts to delineate for himself a critical framework as efficacious as Wordsworth's. Placing his critical framework at the foreground of the account of method, Coleridge hinges it on the education of the entire person, so that all parts re-enact the whole. Method provides Coleridge with a classically mandated term with which to present the framework of his critical reading built upon the assumption of the inner ethical space that needs regulation to uphold its healthy organization. Method achieves the primary aim of asserting a public authority for the critical guardian based on the claim to possess a transcendent vision that beholds both the individual and the whole of the cultural context at the same time. And, because method is itself the quality of ethical unity, the essays on its principles implicitly award their author with such unity and vision. Extending the emphasis on education as ethical unification that he pursues in the Biographies criticism of the uneducated rustic, Coleridge begins the 'Essays on Method' with the question, 'What is that which first strikes us, and strikes us at once, in a man of education?' (F 1: 448). The account of education immediately assumes ethical overtones, for the distinguishing mark of an educated man ' is the unpremeditated and evidently habitual arrangement of his words, grounded on the habit of foreseeing, in each integral part, or (more plainly) in every sentence, the whole that he then intends to communicate. However irregular and desultory his talk, there is method in the fragments' (Fl: 449). The man of method possesses a transcendent faculty that gives him immediate access to a general law through which the parts all reconcile their differences to make up the ethical unity. This faculty is the 'prophetic vision' Shaffer describes, and is developed through Coleridge's statements on critical reading during the decade after 1808. Repeatedly, in the works laying the foundation to his critical framework, Coleridge emphasizes the quality of attentive reading. In The Friend of 1810 he calls for both thought and attention from his readers, offering two vital definitions: By THOUGHT I here mean the voluntary production in our own minds of those

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states of consciousness, to which, as to his fundamental facts, the Writer has referred us: while ATTENTION has for its object the order and connection of Thoughts and Images, each of which is in itself already and familiarly known. (Fl:16)

The thoughtful reading recognizes the elements of the author's descriptions because they belong within the reader as well. The attentive reader sees how each particular element contributes to the whole of the author's text. The 'elements of Geometry require attention only,' he says, tellingly employing the system of spatial measurement to illustrate the activity requisite to his own work; and through this requirement, he distinguishes the appropriate reader of his work from the reader of periodical literature and the rustic, who, because of a want of education, can only perceive insulated facts. The thoughtful and attentive reader constitutes an ethical space analogous to that of the author: the reader must possess as much ethical depth as the author. The problem which tacitly plagues Coleridge, however, is that the reader imputes depth in the author through the text, and is left to assert his own depth that enables him to read thoughtfully and attentively. The aim of the autobiographical narrative in the Biographia, therefore, is to trace Coleridge's own progressive development that subordinates his 'faculties to each other, according to their relative worth and dignity' (BL 2: 15). Coleridge parallels Wordsworth's narration of 'The Growth of a Poet's Mind' to delineate his own education into a reader who is as ethically unified, active, and profound as the poet. And if Coleridge cannot relate experiences comparable to Wordsworth's adventures in the Alps or revolutionary France, he can certainly describe his ethical growth within a landscape of poetic and philosophical experiences, where he learned how to write, and what to think, and how to read. In Chapter 12 of the Biographia Coleridge identifies the higher faculties that distinguish the critical reader from the general reader. Paralleling Wordsworth's claim that a poet is endowed with 'a more comprehensive soul than [is] supposed to be common among mankind' (WProsel: 138), Coleridge asserts that the critic who has been trained to exercise the higher faculties possesses a farther-reaching and more penetrating vision. Again he uses a spatial, topographical image, distinguishing philosophical consciousness from less encompassing spontaneous consciousness that would characterize the noncritic: 'As the elder Romans distinguished their northern provinces into CisAlpine and Trans- Alpine, so may we divide all the objects of human knowledge into those on this side, and those on the other side of the spontaneous consciousness' (BL 1 : 236). The trans-Alpine belongs, of course, to transcendental philosophy, which renders 'the mind intuitive of the spiritual

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in man' (BL 1: 243). From this point the chapter moves into the idealist account of the coincidence of subject and object drawn from Schelling's System of Transcendental Idealism. The detailed account that fills this chapter is intended as the penultimate step in detailing Coleridge's own philosophical evolution into the critic of imagination. He distinguishes himself from the cisAlpine readers who have yet to recognize within themselves either the philosophical faculty of reason or the poetic faculty of imagination and are therefore unable to extend their consciousness beyond the limit of insulated subjectivity. These ordinary readers lack the penetrating vision necessary to establish the vital bond between author and reader that enables the critic to recognize subjective states described by the poet and to evaluate them and the worthiness of the poet's expression. Having affirmed his philosophical authority, Coleridge can then make use of the faculty that even the poet has not developed to show where Wordsworth's poetry succeeds and where it fails. And, in asserting the claim to be one of the few capable of moving beyond ordinary consciousness, he trumps Wordsworth's distinction of himself as the poetic antidote to popular literature; Coleridge can project his gaze farther than even the poet, because, in accord with the tradition originating with Socrates, the philosopher sees beyond all, comprehending the entire city of health (and the entire ethical topography). In terms that are again reminiscent of Wordsworth's 'Preface,' Coleridge delineates in the 'Essays on Method' a version of the educated man by separating him from his faulty counterpart according to his power of vision: If the idle are described as killing time, [the educated man] may be justly said to call it into life and moral being, while he makes it the distinct object not only of the consciousness, but of the conscience. He organizes the hours, and gives them a soul: and that, the very essence of which is to fleet away, and evermore to have been, he takes up into his own permanence, and communicates to it the imperishableness of a spiritual music. (F 1: 450)

The methodical man spatializes time by capturing the 'imperishableness' secreted within the fluidity. This power of the methodical man to grasp the imperishable is that transcendent consciousness that enables the critical reader to extend his gaze beyond the limits of subjectivity in order to recognize states common to him and others. This power is precisely what distinguishes Coleridge's educated reader from the popular one and from the diseased, atheistical historian: the educated, critical reader sees farther and deeper, perceiving the 'imperishableness' of the historical soul.21 Coleridge's description of creating the object of consciousness and conscience hinges, in fact, on

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its distinction from the activity of the popular reader. Expelling populism enables Coleridge to claim a membership in the community of higher consciousness that perceives individuals contextually. His moral obligation to this community is to identify the meaning of its genuine expressions, and to expel the improper expressions.22 The critic's trans-Alpine vision extends beyond his own subjective particularity to penetrate the poet's representation of his experiences. The act of reading thus becomes the reconciliation of separated ethical spaces into the common space of a community. The trans-Alpine vision perceives, Coleridge says, the spiritual; it perceives beyond the material boundary of insulated facts that confine uneducated readers. The critical, trans-Alpine vision corresponds, of course, to the active imagination, which Coleridge's critic must possess no less than the Wordsworthian poet, except that the critic also has the philosophical power of transcendence to perceive further, deeper, and more inclusively than the poet. Unlike the philosopher, the critic can access the poetic imagination in order to read poetry and to engage in the creative power of the world as the poet does. Unlike the poet, the critic can extend the active imagination into a transcendent perception in order to see all things in their unified landscape. Coleridge thus combines elements of the poet and the philosopher in a way that distinguishes him from the philosopher and that places him above the poet (particularly Wordsworth) in the literary hierarchy. Thus the critic reads poetry more effectively than the philosopher can, and appropriates the philosophical role of regulating and directing the poet. Coleridge designates imagination as the poetic faculty less as a correction of Enlightenment notions of consciousness and poetry than because he needs a faculty that both perceives and makes present to the reader the permanent and unifying spirit of human being and nature. Coleridge privileges the imagination, not reason, because it is the literary faculty par excellence; recalling Wordsworth's assertion of difference from other authors, the primacy Coleridge accords imagination as the faculty that repeats 'the eternal act of creation' (BL 1: 304), distinguishes poetry- and subsequently literature - from other modes of writing, such as history, journalism, and philosophy. And, just as the greater extension of vision separates the critic from the poet, so the possession and understanding of imagination distinguishes the critic from the philosopher. By identifying the magical power that blends and fuses as the imagination, Coleridge reifies that faculty and makes it into the standard for judging (and defending) poetry - and for distinguishing it from other modes of writing. By calling the imagination a magical power, Coleridge achieves the same effect as with his truncated definition in Chapter 13 of the Biographia. After

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establishing his credentials as a Kantian critical philosopher of subjective faculties, Coleridge can name the power, and assert that he has studied it thoroughly enough as a philosopher to authorize him to serve as arbiter of its presence; and then he blocks any further examination of it, appropriating it entirely to the literary domain of poet and critic. If it is 'magical,' any analysis in the mode of Kant's critiques would reduce it to the status of a utilitarian faculty like understanding, and would undermine the claim that it sees into the essence of nature and re-enacts the creative force of that essence. As something magical and unapproachable - but wholly and immediately recognizable to those who know it and possess it, namely the healthy Wordsworthian poet and Coleridgean critic - the imagination is set apart from the analytic faculty of philosophical reason. And that it cannot be approached, especially by reason, removes any sense of limitation, any restriction to its power: it becomes the force that alone can move among the other faculties, and that can attain the overview of the ethical and social spaces that allow for the great unification of particularities as multeity in unity. This is the power that serves the trans-Alpine projection of consciousness, moving beyond borders of individuals to unite them into a progressive spiritual history. If the Wordsworthian poet serves as exemplar of ethical health, the Coleridgean critic serves as guardian of literary and public health by regulating both the poet and readers. The strength of Wordsworth and Coleridge's definitions of the activities of the poet and reader, and particularly of the faculties involved in those activities, depends largely on the language of sensibility inherited from the previous generation. As John Mullan shows in detail, this language, in both medical treatises and novels preserves a vital ambiguity among its key terms.23 Coleridge's definitions carry such force because they maintain just such an ambiguity, even while asserting that they achieve a concrete specificity. Coleridge presents himself as one who understands the imagination so well that he can distinguish it from fancy and then between its primary and secondary modes. These divisions - these desynonymizations - provide no more concrete an account of the poetic process than the definition of it as a magical power in the second volume of the Biographia. But these distinctions achieve the aim of pushing into the background the question of whether there actually is something distinct from reason, understanding, or any other inner faculty that is responsible for the creation of a particular kind of poetry. They also push into the background the question whether any of these faculties exists as anything beyond culturally oriented modes of activity and rhetoric. With the romantic reification of imagination, it has become virtually impossible to think of poetry apart from that faculty. Thus, as Rousseau observes, Coleridge's

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theories are 'best understood as another chapter in the medical history of the discovery of the imagination.'24 That Coleridge possesses a greater ability to reflect on the ethical construct than does Wordsworth becomes one of the crucial themes of the Biographia, foregrounded in the identification of attentiveness and thoughtfalness as essential qualities of the reader. The critic is ethically more inclusive, possessing the faculty of the poet as well as the greater power of perception. And this inclusiveness makes the lyric dependent on the critical reader. As Nigel Leask has shown, Coleridge's privileging of the imagination could only occur in conjunction with the rise of the lyric as expression of interiority, for such privileging represents the attempt to identify the unifying faculty that perceives the identity of subject and object, individual and community.25 The 'integration' of faculties away from philosophical analysis opens a new faculty that satisfies Coleridge's need to ground the subjectivity of the critic, and of the poet, in a certifiable quality. Poems may be called - and valued as - imaginative if they integrate the key polarities - self and other, individual and whole. They must be expressions of an individual who successfully finds him or herself within the critical framework of a general law. The lyric, as imaginative expression, attains privileged status because it is held to reveal the expressive presence of the creative force both within the poet and nature. Coleridge can thus criticize Wordsworth in certain poems for not being true to himself, for not revealing the creative power. At the same time, however, in formulating the critical reader through his rather complicated relations with Wordsworth's poetry, Coleridge creates a critic who is dependent on the one mode of writing that is best characterized by the lyric - that is, the mode of direct address by a mapped-out and regulated ethical interiority. In this mode the text serves as the emblem of direct expression, signifying an active and organized inner space. The extensiveness of the organization is what the critical reader must recognize, and more penetratingly than the poet and more familiarly than the philosopher. It is imperative that Coleridge make his reading capture the whole person,26 since his reading always carries the regulative quality of guardianship. The emphasis on unity, singularity, and appropriateness not only enforces the same values Wordsworth laid out in the 'Preface,' but prohibits any other reading than the transcendent one that can see the text as a symbol of an organized ethical space. In a fundamental way, then, we could say that Coleridge cannot read Gibbon's narration because it does not present itself as a symbol of the deep and delineated ethical space. To identify Coleridge as the founder of a critical tradition is to say that he institutes a mode of exclusionary reading that can only comprehend texts that lend themselves to imputations of

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authorial depth and to an appearance of participating with other texts in a progressive history. If there is indeed a critical tradition stemming from Coleridge, it would be the narrative of the collective ethical development of literature. If we accept that tradition, it would have to be through the exclusion of non-progressive texts, that is those that do not consciously contribute to the singular progressive history. The narrative of the Biographia traces the alignment of faculties 'according to their relative worth and dignity,' and - as Wordsworth's 'Preface' does for the elder poet - proves that Coleridge has not been indolent during the thirteen years since publishing 'Dejection,' which putatively sang his farewell to poetry. Coleridge narrates his own ethical development by tracing his struggles through the histories of philosophy and poetry to detail how each experience provided instruction in the appropriate faculty. Each false philosophy (such as Berkeley's) that he rejects, each inadequate poetry (such as Bowies') that he outgrows, marks a step in his progression up the cognitive hierarchy until he finally incorporates all faculties into the whole and healthy critical reader capable of judging the new genre of Wordsworth's poetry. This reader must be the ethical complement to the lyric poet: both entail full awareness of the ethical growth that has brought them to the present state of complete expression. This ethical growth parallels - and even reenacts - that of nature and society, and as reader and poet each recounts it, they not only reveal how creative elements are repeated in the spaces of ethical interiority and the natural / social exteriors, but they establish that repetition as the critical framework of the new mode of poetry - the poems themselves and the reading of them by the critic. In reinstating the essential, generic difference between prose and verse, and in pointing out the difference between Wordsworth 'when he is Wordsworth' and when he is not, Coleridge shows his own intention of serving as guardian of poetry by drawing lines between genres of writing and between healthy and diseased literature. More broadly, the critic will preserve the boundary of literature by reading within the critical framework whose guardianship Coleridge appropriates from Wordsworth, leaving to the poet the single task of expression. As a guardian of literary health, Coleridge will oversee the space of literature ensuring that all works present a unified and appropriate character. And he will ensure that the poet remains healthy by writing poetry through the appropriate faculty. As guardian, the Coleridgean critic serves as health officer who excludes all but expressions of the welldefined ethical construct. Behind Coleridge's assertion of his critical authority lies a protracted struggle to match Wordsworth's success. In the years between the 1800

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'Preface' to Lyrical Ballads through the 1808 'Prospectus9 to The Friend, Coleridge wrote at great length of his illnesses in the terms that eventually served his critical doctrine. In the years following the collapse of the periodical version of The Friend, Coleridge found himself tempted to employ terms that would have committed him to a pluralistic and non-spiritual doctrine. The ambiguity inherent in the discourse of sensibility, to which Mullan refers, and a rhetorical sleight of hand enable Coleridge to assimilate the terms of illness into his doctrine of critical health without threatening his authority. The drama of his self-transformation into the guardian of poetic health out of the very sort of diseased discourse he most condemns is what will occupy the next few chapters.

Chapter 2

Coleridge's Scrofulous Dejection As mandated by both the 1800 'Preface' and the 1816 Biographia Literaria, romantic poetry and criticism entail the effort by individuals to delineate their ethical topography. Thus Wordsworth's lyrics at least putatively attempt to state what he is, and his narrative poems locate figures within a landscape of meaning; and Coleridge's reading of those poems attempts to state what the modern ethos is that both writes and reads properly. The problem Coleridge faces, especially in his relation to Wordsworth, is how to unify what he is in private with how he wants to be perceived in public, especially since, unlike Wordsworth, he has much in his private life that would shame the public figure he wishes to become. Coleridge seeks to serve as guardian to the healthful public by establishing himself as the ethical exemplar who is stable and unified. The case is complicated for him by the fact that the person against whom he measures himself is Wordsworth, who accomplishes (by Coleridge's estimation) in his philosophical poetry exactly what Coleridge has sought to do. His success depends ultimately on doing Wordsworth one better, and this he achieves by charging his sometime collaborator with a confusion of terms in his critical 'Preface' and then establishing himself as the critic who possesses all the power of the poet plus the greater vision to resolve poetic ambiguity. By the time Coleridge writes the Biographia, he has supposedly rid himself of that same ambiguity to establish himself as critical guardian. From the time of the 1800 'Preface' up to the 1816 Biographia, Coleridge struggles seriously with a sense of his failures. The role of philosophical poet he has effectively signed over to Wordsworth and he cannot devise an ethical formulation for himself sufficiently distinct from the elder poet to consider himself a public individual. During much of this period leading up to the major critical essays, Coleridge is ill, from a number of complaints, which become the focal point of all his intellectual and emotional anxieties. By 1808, when he begins working on The Friend, which he hopes will establish his public authority as a guardian of morals, he proclaims that he has overcome his personal conflict between poetry and philosophy, and has resolved any ethical ambiguity by curing himself of an apparently specific, though in fact nebulous, disease, namely scrofula. Scrofula effectively embodies for Coleridge the

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ethical ambiguity of one attempting to fill a double role. If ethical ambiguity is itself the most frightful disease for Coleridge, he can focus his anxieties, and his claims to self-treatment, on the specifically identifiable yet strategically vague malady of scrofula. The course of the disease, in Coleridge's case, also traces his move from poet overshadowed by Wordsworth to philosopher (cum literary theorist) who holds his own with Wordsworth. The case study of Coleridge's disease is found in the rich text of 'Dejection.' The story behind Coleridge's 'Dejection: An Ode' is well known: his unhappy marriage, his hopeless love for Wordsworth's sister-in-law, and his protracted illness all conspired to dry up his poetic power, such that he turned to philosophy to develop his critical ideas. Coleridge's problems with his health and his marriage, along with his inability to work, find expression in the verse letter to Sara Hutchinson that he revised into 'Dejection,' which he himself encouraged readers to take as his farewell to poetry. This letter was written as one of several appeals to friends to understand the reasons for his lack of productivity, and to believe that he still possessed the potential to write something that would match Wordsworth's achievement. As Norman Fruman points out, an implicit competition with Wordsworth motivated much of Coleridge's writing.1 The 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads listed William Wordsworth as sole author, and its 'Preface' announced the principles governing his poetic persona. With no successful book or Preface of his own in the first decade of the new century, Coleridge needed either to match his friend's achievement or, as Luther Tyler argues, to preempt Wordsworth's authority altogether,2 which is what he attempted to do in the serial publication of The Friend and what he eventually accomplished in Biographia Literaria. The principles of criticism and moral philosophy that sustain the persona of the Sage of Highgate arise out of a rhetoric first formulated in Coleridge's descriptions of his illnesses sent to friends along with revisions of the verse letter. In minutely detailing his sufferings, Coleridge convinces his readers he does possess the 'distinct character' that the 1800 'Preface' intimates he lacks (CL 1: 602n).3 Of all the ailments he complains of, scrofula provides an overarching diagnosis that explains a host of problems; and the available medical accounts of scrofula provide him with a rhetoric elastic enough to convince his readers that his numerous hardships cohere into a unified persona. The period of the scrofula letters is also delimited by addiction. Coleridge was probably addicted to opium by 1799, but did not admit it to his friends until 1808. Unlike De Quincey, Coleridge could not exploit his addiction publicly, for it always seemed to him a failure of will, precluding the distinct character he sought to present to the public. For Coleridge, addiction meant the absence of ethos, and was the aspect of his life which he could least make

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public. At the same time, as David L. Clark comments, there is no way for the addict to avoid speaking of addiction: 'insofar as addiction names a structure that precedes and exceeds the knowing subject. . . . that subject is always "speaking" of it.'4 As such, Coleridge is faced with the impossibility of pronouncing himself an addict, along with the unavoidability of not doing so. He therefore strategically transfers the symptoms of addiction onto the nonspecific illness of scrofula. I shall show that scrofula provides Coleridge with a name for his anxiety over being outdone by Wordsworth and for the dilemma of how to write of himself as an addict without explicitly admitting to addiction. Scrofula unifies all his problems, along with his potential for literary achievement, into a character his readers can sympathize with. Certainly scrofula - today defined as lymphatic tuberculosis - is not the only disease Coleridge suffers from, but it does provide him with the most manipulable rhetoric in which to explain why he has not accomplished more than he has.5 In writing frankly of his scrofula and the struggles to cure himself, Coleridge dramatizes a self-willed development into a distinct character without having to admit his addiction. Coleridge's efforts to cure himself are therefore synonymous with his creation of a public role for himself as an author. As Thomas Vogler argues, for Coleridge only the publication of a book with his own name on it would demonstrate 'a personal and intellectual existence,' and the writing of his book would 'perform a self-constituting... act.'6 The scrofula letters conclude with the announcement of The Friend, the work that is supposed to establish him publicly as an ethical authority. As we shall see, however, the crash of that work leaves him in the dangerous situation of almost having to admit fully to his physical dependencies. The Biographia succeeds in constituting a cured ethos, because, by following the rhetorical strategy developed in his letters, Coleridge can write and publish a detailed account of himself, without giving himself away as an addict. What links the performance of the scrofula letters to the later critical works is a dependence addiction if you will - on a rhetoric that seems to provide full exposure of his essential and transcendentally unified character while concealing his fear that he lacks any character at all, or possesses one whose wholeness must include and account for physical dependence. Thomas Beddoes and the latrology of Scrofula Because Coleridge derives his medical terminology from his friend, Thomas Beddoes, I shall begin with a brief account of the Bristol doctor's description of scrofula. In the sixth essay of his most important work, Hygeia, or Essays

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Moral and Medical on the Causes Affecting the Personal State of our Middling and Affluent Classes, Beddoes initially describes scrofula in terms of the symptoms that had been associated with it for several centuries:7 enlarged lymph glands, bloated face (or enlarged head), scabs along the nose, and boils on the neck and inner thighs. He then allows, however, for broader conceptions of the disease, beginning with his comment that' [t]he intellectual superiority of children of the scrophulous temperament has long been noticed,' and '[t]hat sensibility or openness to impression, which is one of the principal constituents of genius, has often been observed to accompany different diseases of debility' (Hygeia 6: 23). The form of scrofula to which the intellectually superior are susceptible, curiously enough, impairs the intellect. And this form is always easily distinguished by a particular symptom: 'an enlargement and hardness of the belly, especially towards evening' (Hygeia 6: 24). Three accompanying signs are generally evident: the sensation of 'a weight about or below the navel,' a capricious appetite appearing sometimes as aversion to food and sometimes as an insatiability, and irregular bowels (Hygeia 6:30-1). We should also note a fourth sign for Coleridge's reliance on it: 'A general indisposition and lassitude will come on, especially in the evening' (Hygeia 6:31). In addition to such symptoms, Beddoes introduces an important causative factor into his account of scrofula: 'it is owing to the nature of our climate,' he says, 'that scrophula so frequently attacks people distinguished by these particularities' (Hygeia 6: 37). Scrofula occurs more frequently in England than in virtually any other country because of the cool and wet weather to which people are exposed. Beddoes in fact attributes a number of common complaints - such as the rheumatism of which Coleridge also complained - to the English weather. Cold weather endangers those with a high sensitivity to outward effects because it lowers the degree of stimulation received from without, thereby threatening internal organs with atrophy. To ward off this danger, Beddoes forever preaches the preventive effectiveness of wearing woolens rather than fashionable cotton clothing (Hygeia 1: 19),8 and of avoiding mental suffering (Hygeia 6: 59). Beddoes holds a low regard for most of the medicines currently sold for scrofula, since they tend to contain mercury, which serves only to 'remove the local affections' (Hygeia 6: 72). This view derives from a crucial quality of scrofula - that it is a constitutional and not a merely local disease. The best cure, in Beddoes' opinion, is to attend to the entire constitution by avoiding the cool English weather. It is this constitutional view of scrofula in particular, and of disease in general, that appealed to Coleridge, who struggled during this period to create an acceptable public character whose parts made up a constitutional whole. Coleridge's letters throughout this period, and until he

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takes up residence with Gillman, contain extended references to his various complaints, ranging from accounts of his nightmares and screaming vomiting fits, to minutely detailed descriptions of his pathological dysentery, to selfinterrupting exclamations that he has become 'literally sick of thinking, talking, & writing' about his illness (CL 2: 1105). His understanding of himself as a diseased man reverberates from factual accounts to metaphor. The slippery rhetoric of iatrology allows Coleridge to think, talk, and write about himself in terms that mask his uncertain persona. Coleridge's Scrofulous Condition At the close of 1802, Coleridge wrote to his brother James, who was suffering from what had been identified as pulmonary consumption, that a single name may identify '20 different Diseases' (CL 2: 896). Coleridge goes on to 'intreaf his brother to write a detailed account of your Health to Dr Beddoes . . . there is no man in Europe who has had under his inspection so many cases of Scrofula, Hypochondriasis (or Complaints of the Stomach & other digestive organs) and of consumption, whether purely organical & pulmonary, or scrofulous, or hypochondriac, or all conjoined - & these in all possible stages of the Disorders & modified by all possible Differences of Age, Habits, Sex, & Constitution - . (CL 2: 896) Needless to say, Coleridge exaggerates the facts contained in Beddoes' records;9 but the vagueness of what exactly scrofula is allows Coleridge (and Beddoes) to group large categories of pathologies, and to conceive an ethical category - the type of character who is susceptible to scrofula and who carries a broad spectrum of hazily distinguished qualities, such as perceptual acuity, emotional sensitivity, and intelligence. By exaggerating the prevalence of scrofula, Coleridge makes the disease even more elastic as a characterizing category: his expansion of an already loose rhetoric allows him to assign almost any trait he wishes to his scrofulous constitution. In this same letter to his brother, Coleridge describes himself with the apparent precision of a personal and technical medical history; and yet the rhetoric he depends on resists definite diagnosis apart from determining that he is a sensitive and intelligent man who has sadly made little use of his abilities. 'My stomach is weak,' he says, & I have no doubt that there is a taint of Scrofula in my constitution Where you find a man indolent in body & indisposed to definite action, but with lively

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Feelings, vivid ideal Images, & a power & habit of continuous Thinking, you may always, I believe, suspect a somewhat of Scrofula - With me it is something more than a suspicion -1 had several glandular Swellings at School - & within the last four years a Lump has formed on my left cheek, just on the edge of my whisker -. The swellings in my knees were from the same cause. (CL 2: 897)

Grounding his present indolence in a history that extends back to childhood, Coleridge diagnoses himself as being constitutionally scrofulous without ever having to identify a specific malady. The broad terms of Beddoes' account allow him to define himself concretely and yet flexibly: he can write with detachment of specific functions but in a rhetoric sufficiently broad to mask whether he refers to bodily functions alone, or to bodily functions combined with emotional and intellectual functions. His account of himself as 'indolent in body' and continually active in mind repeats Beddoes' attribution of a certain type of scrofula to the intellectually superior, who are more sensible to external forces. He thus employs the elastic rhetoric of scrofula to frame accounts of his indolence as though it were something other than inactivity, as though it were something and not the lack of something. The three secondary symptoms by which Beddoes characterizes the type of scrofula found among intellectually superior patients recur throughout Coleridge's complaints. His 'capricious Appetite,' indigestion, and painful evacuations accompany his preoccupation with his stomach and intestines. He complains of his stomach and bowels from the time he first became seriously addicted to opium (prior to that he generally complains about pains in his head, shoulder, throat, etc. that 'made the frequent use of laudanum absolutely necessary' [CL 2:276]). Indeed, his stomach effectively becomes the center of all his problems, so that, 'whatever affects my Stomach, diseases me' (CL 2:1052).10 What accounts for his stomach, we might say, explains his constitution. Applying Beddoes' terms to his stomach enables Coleridge not only to explain its derangement, but also to begin accounting for his entire being. What remains now is to see how the disease shapes the context of the letters that become 'Dejection.' The Poem and the Weather The poem - in each of the letters, as well as in its published forms - opens with bad weather, which always has a negative effect on a constitution susceptible to scrofula. Accordingly, Coleridge's illness is always most irritated by 'The coming on of Rain and squally Blast' (DMs I. 14); on numerous occasions he is laid up in bed because he gets wet, or simply because

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the weather is stormy. 'I feel,' he says in August 1801, 'that there is no relief for me in any part of England. - Very hot weather brings me about in an instant - & I relapse as soon as it coldens' (CL 2: 748). He begins the April 1802 verse letter to Sara Hutchinson - the first recognizable version of 'Dejection' - with a forecast of a coming storm. His complaint to Sara is of 'A Grief without pang, void, dark, & drear, / A stifling, drowsy, unimpassion'd Grief' (DMs II. 17-8); but it is intimately bound up with the weather, which he knows will turn wet and 'colden.' Beddoes plainly states, 'No single cause contributes more to the production of scrophula than cold' (Hygeia 6:56). So, as Coleridge knows he will find no relief from the stormy inducement of his scrofula on the Sunday evening of 4 April, his grief 'finds no natural Outlet, no Relief/ In word, or sigh, or tear' (DMs II. 19-20). In the verse letter, Coleridge's connection of his grief with the weather indicates a source beyond hopeless love, and in the broader complaint he has consistently, yet nebulously, diagnosed as scrofula. Similar expressions of scrofulous grief (or lassitude) abound: 'there is one thing more deplorable than [nausea and giddiness] - it is the direful Thought of being inactive & useless' (CL 2: 740), he writes in a letter in which he tells of 'fever & the most distressing stomach-attacks' which left him 'very sick & somewhat sad' (CL 2: 739). In attacking his stomach, the center of his being, scrofula affects his entire constitution, imposing on him the lassitude, which, as Beddoes explains, comes on 'especially in the evening' (Hygeia 6:31). As in the letter to James, Coleridge fills the void created by his indolence with scrofula. In the autumn of 1801, a few weeks after suffering from 'scrophulous Boils and Indurations in the Neck' (CL 2: 757), Coleridge finds it 'more than merely expedient to lie in perfect calmness after so violent an agitation of the body & the spirits' (CL 2: 763). In July of 1802 he writes to George Coleridge: It seems as if there were something originally amiss in the construction of our family... connected intimately with our moral & [intellectual characters but we all, I think, carry much passion [& a] deep interest, into the business of Life - & when to this is superadded . . . great bodily fatigue, the organs of digestion will soon be injured. (CL 2: 805)

All of Coleridge's complaints, including those in the verse letter, follow the patterns of stomach attacks, lassitude, and reflection on how his intellectual activity has been stifled by his scrofulous stomach. As synecdoche for his entire constitution - even his family - his stomach defines him as a victim who suffers from his sensitivity as much as from his pathological incapacity. These epistolary complaints lead up to a letter to William Godwin in January 1802, in

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which Coleridge says, 'I have no other wish, than that you should know "the Truth, the whole Truth, & (if possible) nothing but the Truth" of me in the sum total of my character' (CL 2: 782). Coleridge's singular ethical concern here anticipates a similar stance in his verse letter to Sara Hutchinson, written a little over two months later; he attempts in both texts to account for his responses to other people and the world outside him through the rhetoric by which he has identified his scrofulous constitution. In both letters Coleridge provides an account that is ostensibly rigorous and concrete, relying on his learning and his astuteness of observation; but the rhetoric promoting his rigor and astuteness is strategically ambiguous. The stated impetus of the letter to Godwin is Coleridge's discovery that Godwin believed him to have altered his feelings of friendship: You appear not to have understood the nature of my body & mind -. Partly from ill-health, & partly from an unhealthy & reverie-like vividness of Thoughts, & (pardon the pedantry of the phrase) a diminished Impressibility from Things, my ideas, wishes, & feelings are to a diseased degree disconnected from motion & action. In plain & natural English, I am a dreaming & therefore an indolent man - . . . . The same causes, that have robbed me to so great a degree of the self-impelling self-directing Principle, have deprived me too of the due powers of resistances to Impulses from without. . . . I ask for Mercy indeed on the score of my ill-health; but I confess, that this very ill-health is as much an effect as a cause of this want of steadiness & self-command; and it is for mercy that I ask, not for justice. (CL 2: 782-3)

Beddoes describes one of the key qualities of the scrofulous constitution as a 'sensibility or openness to impression' (Hygeia 6: 23). Because Coleridge is constitutionally scrofulous, he suffers, due to this openness, from a lowered resistance 'to Impulses from without.' But, as Beddoes also indicates, the form of scrofula distinguished by 'indisposition and lassitude . . . especially in the evening,' actually impairs the intellect (Hygeia 6: 31). Coleridge's problem, in the 'pedantic' terms he has to correct with 'plain & natural English,' is 'diminished Impressibility from Things' The apparent contradiction between the pedantic and the plain descriptions is resolved by the inactivity that he attempts in both accounts to justify by characterizing himself in rhetoric that conceals his lack of real self-definition through technical diagnoses that appear to offer precision. According to his account, he is constitutionally open to impressions that make him scrofulous, which, in turn, impairs his sensitivity, so that he cannot merely will himself to participate in the world around him (his 'genial Spirits

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fail,' he writes to Sara in the April verse letter [CM? 7. 44]). But in a broader sense, the truth he implores Godwin to recognize is that he is best characterized as a sick man, and that his illness begins at the physical level, but extends throughout his feelings, his will, and his mind. To know 'the whole truth' of his character would be to understand the technical account of his disease. Taking Beddoes' assessment of the intellectually superior victim of scrofula, Coleridge purports to offer absolute self-revelation; his delineation of himself is in fact allusive, presenting conflicting statements, each one claiming the synecdochal status that he has already granted his stomach. Coleridge presents two accounts of himself that cancel each other out: he is deadened to the world around, and he is hyper-sensitive to the world. Both accounts, though self-canceling, are the same, in that they both fill the void of his indolence, turning his inactivity into a sign of something beyond him - the disease victimizing him. Writing of the rhetoric of sensibility governing eighteenth-century novels, John Mullan points out how the medical doctrine consistently describes nervous diseases as possessing 'symptoms of a peculiar privilege, of heightened faculties or unusual intelligence.'11 Beddoes' connection of scrofula to intelligence was by no means radical, therefore; and Coleridge's exploitation, within his explanations of his behavior, of this same connection, would have been accepted as common medical doctrine. In fact, the entire myth that Coleridge sacrificed his health for his intellectual - and ethical accomplishment finds its impetus right here, in the medical doctrine in which those prone to certain diseases 'are blessed as well as cursed.'12 As an intellectual peer, Godwin can offer the mercy and understanding that would affirm Coleridge's own intellectual standing. The rhetoric of this selfrevelation puts Godwin in the position of having to understand Coleridge or to renounce his own identity as an intellectual. If Godwin refuses to extend his mercy, it is because he does not understand the technical jargon signifying Coleridge's learning and astuteness. In other words, while pleading for mercy, Coleridge bullies Godwin into recognizing him as a member of the intellectual community. The community that Coleridge believes will define him through his membership must be no less malleable than the disease that defines him constitutionally: it may be his family, who show signs of scrofula, or the intellectual community, in which Godwin might also share a sympathetic understanding. At any rate, membership in a community would implicitly grant Coleridge the ethos that he cannot delineate on his own. A little over two months after the letter to Godwin, Coleridge writes the verse letter to Sara, in which he makes much the same plea for understanding based on the diseased interruption of his engagement with the world. ' [W]ith how blank an eye' he gazes on the green Western Sky, in which the 'crescent

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Moon' is made to suggest the 'Sky-Canoe' of Wordsworth's 'Peter Bell' (DMs 11. 34, 39, 41). His plain and natural English reminds his correspondents in the Wordsworth household that he is not just any sick man, but one who legitimately holds a membership in the literary community of Grasmere. And, because of where the assertion of his membership appears in the two texts amidst diagnoses of his disease - the implication is that he can make such a diagnosis because of his membership. To Godwin he asserts his membership in the broad community of intellectual life; with Sara he alludes to his membership in the community in which she also plays a role - the household of Wordsworths and Hutchinsons - a membership that would make him into Wordsworth's peer. His ability to diagnose himself comes from an implicit membership in the group, but his disease is that he is either cut off from the community, or has neglected his duty to it; in any case he pleads that he not be expelled, because it is his disease - a false or stifled version of himself - and not his true self that has caused the neglect. By bemoaning his diseased constitution which keeps him from doing his duty, he can keep his correspondents focused on his potential accomplishments, what he would do and be were he not victimized by illness. The aim in both letters is to convince his readers to perceive his potentiality as his actuality, to grant him membership, and character, on the basis of what he might do were he not ill. Coleridge focuses his readers' sympathy on his illness as an implicit demand that they not believe his failure to match Wordsworth's achievements is due to a lack of will - or is a lack of any sort. This misdirection becomes prominent in his address to Sara, claiming an intimacy on the basis of what they both know cannot be said. Suppression of actuality, we now see, has been the aim of the scrofulous rhetoric all along. The actuality that it avoids expressing lies in the contrast, presented in the verse letter, between the woman Coleridge loves and the woman he lives with.

The Two Saras In the verse letter Coleridge refers to his own non-poetic household as a key cause of his debility, one that reinforces his sense of exclusion. In a passage, the importance of which he indicates in subsequent letters through its suppression, Coleridge introduces by way of apophasis the domestic scene that he hopes the Wordsworth family will not condemn him to: I speak not now of those habitual Ills, That wear out Life, when two unequal minds

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City of Health, Fields of Disease Meet in one House, and two discordant Wills This leaves me, where it finds, Past cure and past Complaint! . . . Not that I mourn - O Friends, most dear, most true, Methinks to weep with you Were better far than to rejoice alone But that my coarse domestic life has known No Griefs, but such as dull and deaden me, No Habits of heart-nursing Sympathy, No mutual mild enjoyments of it's own, No Hopes of it's own Vintage, none, o! none - (DMs 11. 242-6, 254-61)

The fact that these lines disappear in all subsequent references to the poem, along with their apophatic structure, gives them prominence in Coleridge's scrofulous rhetoric of misdirection.13 They are more significant for allowing Coleridge to suggest that he is not saying something - that he could say much more - than for actually concealing some dark secret. The lines reveal the banal impetus of his dejection, that his wife does not offer him what Sara Hutchinson might; but as Vogler indicates, the goal of Coleridge's poetic practice is 'to hide the original and the source from view.'14 The harsh environment of his home is conflated with the weather as the cause of his distress, so that references to the storm may indicate both a meteorological and a domestic event. Earlier in the verse letter he refers to his boyhood, when'farcloister 'd in a city school / The Sky was all I knew of Beautiful' (DMs 11.634). Now he is again 'cloister'd,' since 'his coarse domestic life' - replacing his stomach as the seat of his woes - cuts him off from all direct intercourse with the beautiful, which is what lives in the Wordsworth-Hutchinson household. His appeal to Sara is for her to aid in his convalescence by providing him with the special understanding denied him in his un-literary home. This is the same constitutional understanding he seeks from Godwin through the self-canceling synecdoches that make his ethical void appear to be something other than a void. The tractability of his illness always deflects attention from himself, as the missing ethos, to the external agent that denies him an ethos. And, even more notable, the conflation of his household and the weather proves tractable in a wholly different direction when he looks to his wife for the sympathetic understanding denied him by his environment. On two occasions when struggling with his loneliness, Coleridge writes to the less sympathetic Sara (Coleridge), anguished over not having received any letters from her. Both times he is alone, but in extremely different climates frozen Germany and warm Malta. From Gottingen he writes to his wife that he

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has 'thought & thought of you, and pictured you & the little ones so often & so often, that my Imagination is tired, down, flat and powerless' (CL 1:470). The collapse of his imagination results from his confinement in a lifeless, cold environment and 'languishing] after home for hours together' (CL 1:470). He writes to Sara Hutchinson likewise that he loses his 'shaping Spirit of Imagination,' though not from the absence of Mrs. Coleridge, but because of her 'Visitation,' 'when two unequal minds / Meet in one House' (DMs II. 241, 239, 243-4). In frozen Germany, 'forsaken by the forms and colourings of Existence,' he experiences 'an extinction of Light in [his] mind' (CL 1: 470). The world around him, coldened so much as to be 'choked with Ice' (CL 1: 470), offers him so little ground for sympathy that he begins to grieve. This response is common to the intellectually superior who are constitutionally scrofulous; as Beddoes indicates, when the sufferer is burdened with a 'smoth'ring weight' (DMs I. 46), '[t]here will exist an interior disorder, corresponding to the exterior' (Hygeia 6: 30).15 This is the same impairment of sympathetic cognition that plagues Coleridge on the evening when he is isolated from the Wordsworth-Hutchinson household: It were a vain Endeavour, Tho' I should gaze for ever On that green Light, that lingers in the West I may not hope from outward Forms to win The Passion and the life, whose Fountains are within! (DMs II. 47-51)

In pedantic phrasing, he suffers from a 'diminished Impressibility from Things,' which results in a pathological isolation (CL 2: 782). In Beddoes' system of preventive care, health is maintained by regulating the individual's interaction with the forces of the external world, such as weather and diet. A person may become sick from either too much or too little stimulation. Coleridge's isolation in Germany proves debilitating not simply because he misses his family, but because the frozen world has caused 'the organs of Life' to dry up 'as if only simple BEING remained, blind and stagnant' (CL 1: 470). Without the exchange of affection between his inner being and the outer world, he fears losing his intellect. This is precisely the danger of which Beddoes warns intellectual scrofula victims to beware. Cold weather, he states, exacerbates the symptoms of scrofula and thereby threatens well-being through its diminished impressibility. The only possible antidote is stimulation of the entire constitution through food, alcohol, or opium, or removal of the victim to a more congenial climate. And so, on the advice of 'three physicians of eminence,' Coleridge travels to the Mediterranean, assured 'that a single

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Winter passed in a warm, even, and genial climate will entirely restore' him (CZ1: 1048). From the therapeutically warm Malta, Coleridge writes to his wife in July 1804, describing many of the same symptoms that plagued him in frigid Germany. He tells her that he has arrived safely after a very painful Passage, in which I was miserably ill - since then I have never had such sharp illnesses as in England - but dreadful Languor, weight on my breathing, & a sort of sudden fits of Sleep with nervous Twitches in my Stomach and Limbs & then comes on the dreadful Smothering upon my chest. (CL2: 1143)

The warm Maltese climate has relieved him of the 'sharp illnesses' he had in England. But exactly how the climate has improved him is wholly unclear, since he still suffers from the same problems he had in England, those which had led him to write the sorrowful verse letter to Sara Hutchinson. Seemingly, the worst of his complaints (since he refers to it in several letters) is the 'weight on [his] breathing,' or 'the dreadful Smothering upon [his] chest.' This symptom is also noteworthy because it is one of the primary metaphorical cues of his dejection in the verse letter: My genial Spirits fail And what can these avail To lift the smoth'ring weight from off my breast? (DMs II. 44-6)

Both occurrences of the weight on his chest are identical in that the scrofulous pressure persists because of his lassitude, his inability to feel the beauty of nature - in other words, because, as he writes in the letter to Godwin, of a 'diminished Impressibility from Things.' Here is where the value of Beddoes' nebulous terminology comes into play for Coleridge, since identical descriptions of his agony can hold divergent values: in Malta he presents the weight as a literal symptom of his still unabated scrofula, while in the verse letter he turns it into a metaphor for his potential poetic interaction with nature. The symptoms described in these two letters to Mrs. Coleridge, as well as in the verse letter and the letter to Godwin, indicate a common malady. In each case Coleridge may be describing the literal state of his physical being, or a more general - more constitutional - condition. In seeming to disclose himself, he points away to an unsympathetic, 'coldened,' environment that conceals his own lack of ethos. By the time Coleridge refers to the weight in the verse letter, it has become part of the standard repertoire of ailments that

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excuse his lack of work and induce his reader to consider instead what he might have been. The verse letter extends the demand for sympathy identified in the letter to Godwin into a concrete cure for scrofulous dejection. The cure is not simply a change in the environment, as we know from the fact that Coleridge has suffered in both ice-bound Germany and in warm Malta, but rather it is admission into a community - in particular that community of Hutchinson women that Wordsworth has enjoyed hitherto. In contrast to the unhappy domestic setting that he can describe only apophatically, Coleridge graphically recalls the scene that starkly contrasts with his dejection: the happy Night When Mary, Thou and I, together were . . . Dear Mary! - on her Lap my Head she lay'd Her Hand was on my Brow, Even as my own is now; And on my Cheek I felt thy Eye-lash play Such joy I had that I may truly say, My Spirit was awe-stricken with the Excess And trance-like depth of its brief Happiness. (DMs II 99-110)

That 'happy Night' becomes the emblem of joy, just as the evening in which he writes the letter is the emblem of dejection.16 The joy originates from his excess happiness in having the two women lift the weight off his breast through their caresses, and expands into the Spirit and the Power That wedding Nature to us gives in dower, A new Earth and new Heaven . . . JOY is that sweet Voice, JOY that luminous cloud! (DMs II. 314-8) Through metaphorical expansion, joy becomes the universal union that he describes as being 'impossible /Not to love' in 'The Eolian Harp,' addressed to his 'pensive Sara.'17 When he was 'the buoyant Thing [he] was of yore,' that is, when he 'to Joy belong'd,' he endured 'all things then, as if [he] nothing bore' (DMs II. 227, 228, 230). Like so many other terms, buoyancy plays a dual role in Coleridge's narrations of his healthy engagement with the outer world: either it precedes his burden of the oppressive weight, or it allows him to ignore it. Likewise, for Sara he prays that after 'gentle Sleep' covers her 'with wings of Healing,' she may rise 'Healthful, and light' (DMs II219,224). Joy in its earliest form is the freedom from a chest burdened with the

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oppressive weight of a hostile environment - a freedom that comes from 'wedding Nature,' and from the community that he cannot gain in actuality from either of the two Saras. He cannot find the ideal community that would affirm his intellectual and literary stature; but he can appeal to both Saras for a therapeutic sympathy -just as he did to Godwin - on the basis of the illness that has caused his exclusion. Coleridge repeatedly argues that he has been excluded from his ideal community because of his inactivity; but he has been inactive only because of a constitutional illness beyond his control. By convincing his correspondents that he has been victimized by this disease, he compels them to attribute to him an ethos constructed out of potentiality. Because it is his present environment (almost anywhere he is) that causes his illness, his correspondents must also project an entire community of potentialities; and, as indicated by the scene of 'the happy Night,' this community would be centered around him. The distinguishing contrast between the letter to Sara Hutchinson and those to Sara Coleridge is that the former transforms literal states into metaphorical ideals, and the latter remain literal descriptions of literal states. Whereas Coleridge reminds Sara Hutchinson that the healthful joy brightening the entire world has its origin in 'fair Remembrances, that so revive, / [His] Heart, and fill it with a living power' (DMs II. 111-2), he reminds Sara Coleridge that her health depends on making herself'flannel Drawers, &c,' and taking 'the Mustard Pill, night & morning. Do it regularly & perseverantly, or it will not signify a farthing' (CL 2: 779). And so the literal Sara, as we might now identify Mrs. Coleridge, plays the foil in the verse letter to the metaphorical Sara. For it is the literal Sara emblematic of Coleridge's own literal life of indolence - who is responsible for 'those habitual Ills, / That wear out Life' (DMs II. 242-3). In their actual persons the women do not hold a consistent relation to him; it is only in their characters as epistolary addressees or apophatic referents that they take on value. While in Germany, Coleridge had written to the literal Sara (who from that distance appeared more metaphorical than usual) of his worry that if he continued in a frigid world, 'among objects for whom I had no affection, I should wholly lose the powers of Intellect' (CL 1: 470). 'Sara' becomes the title of the ambiguous addressee, emblem of his environment, whose transferable state as literal and diseased or metaphorical and healthfillly joyful reflects Coleridge's own ambiguous health. What remains in question is why he cannot directly name the literal situation. Coleridge consistently identifies his constitutional 'openness to impression' (Hygeia 6:23) with his spatial environment; where he is not being caressed with the promise of future literary accomplishment, he is ill, and only in an allusive or

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metaphorical world in continual reference to his potential can he hope for health. Whatever (or whoever) fails to generate a metaphorical ideal cannot arouse Coleridge's affection, and actively starves him of'the vital air of [his] Genius' (CL 1:471). ' Sara' as a metaphor for ideal unity carries the medicinal power of joy; but as the literal woman, 'Sara' poisons the air and suffocates him with a 'smoth'ring weight' in a domestic situation that can be mentioned only apophatically. As an ideal,' Sara' provides the antidote to his constitutionally scrofulous lassitude. As an actual person with whom he must deal on real terms, 'Sara' is the merciless reader who does not appreciate his potential, and only exacerbates his suffering by insisting on reading his fluent expressions of pain literally. Coleridge complains of his wife that, after he had sent her three letters 'written with great effort during Pain and desperate weakness,' she responded: 'Lord! how often you are ill! You must be MORE careful about Colds!' (CL 3:61; emphasis in text). His anger toward the literal Sara is bred not only by the proximity that undermines the beauty he finds in theoretical nebulosity, but by her role as a bad reader of his self-presentations. The literal-minded reader does not participate in the deflections of Coleridge's rhetoric but demands, impatiently, that he account for himself concretely. The literal Sara has long plagued Coleridge, even before he diagnosed himself as scrofulous - first assuming her role of unsympathetic reader when her 'more serious eye a mild reproof/ Darts,' in 'The Eolian Harp.'18 'Sara' fills the role of plastic reader, the correspondent by whom his letters may be read either as repetitious and long-winded catalogues of ailments, or as if the soul itself' sent / A sweet and potent Voice of it's own Birth, / Of all sweet sounds the life and Element' (DMs II. 304-6). The role is plastic enough to include other correspondents, just as his own expression varies itself no less than the wind that blows through the eolian harp. But at the same time, it is Coleridge who assigns or awards - that role, on the basis of the relative position he himself adopts, as we may see in the letters that present 'Dejection' as a crucial step toward his cure. The Therapeutic Institution of Public Character In other letters during this time, Coleridge begins to refer to the verse letter as the cathartic moment when he overcomes a debilitating split in his character. These letters still compel his correspondents to impute a distinct character to him, but as one who has purged himself of illness. They advertise his transformation from poet to philosopher. As he had done with Beddoes' iatrology, Coleridge manipulates the apophatic passage from his verse letter, altering the tenor from a complaint about his unsympathetic household to his necessitous transformation. These letters lead up to the prospectus of The

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Friend, and conflate the cure for his scrofulous dejection with the institution of himself as a public figure. In three letters from the summer of 1802, Coleridge quotes from the apophatic passage in the verse letter describing his domestic unhappiness. In all three he changes the passage into a statement of his own transformation from poet to philosopher, recasting his complaint about the literal Sara into a poetic statement of metaphysical principles. The fullest development of this strategy appears in a letter to William Sotheby. Coleridge explains that he has recently translated a poem by Salomon Gessner because he 'could not endure to appear irresolute & capricious to you . . . & partly too, because I wished to force myself out of metaphysical trains of thought' (CL 2: 814). Every attempt to write poetry has raised not 'poetic Partridges with whirring wings of music,' but only 'a metaphysical Bustard, urging it's slow, heavy, laborious, earthskimming flight, over dreary & level Wastes' (CL 2: 814). The strategy Coleridge follows here is consistent with that of the other letters in which he pits his actual yet nebulous suffering against some cure that will affirm his intellectual stature. Instead of obscuring the nature of his illness with pedantic phrasing, as he did with Godwin, he refers to an unspecified ' Sickness & some other & worse afflictions [which] first forced [him] into downright metaphysics I for I believe that by nature I have more of the Poet in me' (CL 2:814). Like his wife, like Germany and Malta, like scrofula, the 'smoth'ring weight' of metaphysics is stifling his genial poetic spirit. As Ruoff points out, at this stage in the development from verse letter to published poem, the change of address from Sara to Wordsworth converts the conflict between the two Saras into 'an obliquely aesthetic crisis.'19 The address to Wordsworth recalls the strategy used to put Godwin in the position of seeking admission into a desirable community from Coleridge. In refraining the poem for Sotheby, from an appeal to the metaphorical Sara to an expression of sympathy for his fellow poet, Coleridge casts himself as Wordsworth's peer, and as one whose greater experience allows him to offer advice. Coleridge presents the poem to Sotheby as a series of fragments, the pivotal passage on his marriage appearing first. The lines Coleridge quotes to Sotheby are excerpted from the suppressed passage explaining why he is 'not the buoyant Thing, [he] was of yore' (DMs /. 227). In the letter to Sara Hutchinson, the section opens: 'E'er I was wedded, tho' my path was rough, / The joy within me dallied with distress' (DMs //. 231-2). In staging the excerpt for Sotheby, Coleridge redirects the reference from any association to his marriage with Sara Coleridge to a more generalized time:

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Yes, dearest Poet, yes! There was a time when tho' my Path was rough, The Joy within me dallied with Distress. (CL 2: 815)

The distress becomes more suggestive and less specific. The suggestion is of a creative struggle holding instructional value for anyone seeking to understand the poetic process. Coleridge himself here takes on the role of his ideal sympathetic reader. In quoting the poem, he shows how it should be read, and how he should be read. He thus changes his strategy from that used with Godwin to one where he can play both victim and sympathizer. He performs the hermeneutic task to ensure that Sotheby will read the poem as evidence of Coleridge's comprehension of the poetic process; and at the same time accept the potentiality of Coleridge's poetic and philosophical authority as fact. In the letter to Sara Hutchinson, Coleridge continues after this point for 25 lines to contrast his own 'coarse domestic life' (DMs I 257) with the buoyant and joyful life in the Wordsworth-Hutchinson household. In the letter to Sotheby, he deletes this whole comparison, openly marking the suppression with a double row of dashes: But O! each Visitation Suspends what Nature gave me at my Birth, My shaping Spirit of Imagination! For not to think of what I needs must feel, But to be still & patient all I can; And haply by abstruse research to steal From my own Nature all the natural Man; This was my sole Resource, my wisest Plan - (CL 2: 815)20

Without the personal complaint that his wife is coarse, the account of his lost imagination demands more thoughtful (and sympathetic) attention, as it now conveys the private grief of a public character who has found himself changing constitutionally from poet to metaphysician. He purges himself of his disease by transforming the apophasis into suppression. What he had demurred from saying because it was too personal - too much an indication of his lack of anything other than potential - is now the sign of a purgation. The restorative purge is of his literal self, which for him means his fear that, compared to Wordsworth, he lacks an ethos. With this self-purgation his disease changes its constitution, and actually begins to play a vital role in his planned and regulated development. Indeed, immediately following the quotation,

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Coleridge exclaims, 'Thank Heaven! my better mind has returned to me - and I trust, I shall go on rejoicing' (CL 2: 815). The purgative catharsis he enjoys results not simply from copying the description of his conflict, but from reenacting the conflict in terms with a different tenor, more appropriate to the public figure he aspires to be. As the diagnosis of his sickness changes from scrofulous lassitude to ambivalent participation in the two contending communities of poetry and philosophy, the key terms in the poem become even more indirect, suggesting that poetic power operates only in service to a greater, more inclusive character. Instead of overtly detailing his scrofulous symptoms as he moves toward his generalized public image, he shifts the whole problem to the ancient conflict between poetry and philosophy. As Coleridge redirects his exclamations from the metaphorical Sara to Wordsworth (who, in this letter to Sotheby, becomes the metaphorical poetic addressee), his metaphors acquire a new, healthful environment in the ancient struggle: Ah! from the Soul itself must issue forth A Light, a Glory, a fair luminous cloud. . .. This Light, this Glory, this fair luminous Mist, This beautiful and beauty-making Power! JOY; blameless Poet! . . . Joy, William! is the Spirit & the Power. (CL 2: 817)

Far from being the state of buoyancy that resulted from the 'happy Night,'joy now plays an attractively metaphorical role in the Coleridgean theory of poetic creation that conceals the more proximal role it had played as simple contrast to his home life: Spirit and 'beauty-making Power' hold a philosophical promise lying well away from the banal personal problems with his marriage. He resolves his own grievous ambiguity by separating the terms - poetry and metaphysics - into a traditional opposition, the rift of which it is his triumph to have healed by using the occasion of a lyric to develop metaphors of the cognitive activity requisite to poetic creation. The banal complaints that his 'Stomach, or Liver, or mesentery, is deranged' (CL 2: 1141) are redirected into suggestions of intellectual and spiritual struggles to outline, not organs, but perceptive, conceptual, and comprehensive faculties along a meaningful scale.21 In reformulating his private grief into something with a public interest, Coleridge cures his scrofula. The cure is at once simple and pervasive, according to what Beddoes says is appropriate for treating a constitutional disease: Coleridge shifts the iatrology of organs into terms of cognitive hierarchies. The result is the

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transformation of an obsessive detailing of his pathological body into a critical analysis of the operations of creative faculties within an integrated ethos. The cure that Coleridge takes is to adopt the persona of the man who has painfully sacrificed his poetic youth in order to write mature prose works critically delineating the poetic process. He has effectively manipulated accounts of his constitution to create a persona with full membership in a philosophical community that he himself has founded. Relying on the nebulous, figurative sense of his terms, Coleridge assigns them a metaphorical tenor understood by the type of reader he exemplifies in his presentation of the verse letter as a poem. Instead of seeking admission to others' communities, Coleridge may now entice a select few into his, depending on their qualifications as readers of his character. Having built a sympathetic community based on the regulation of references to the literal Sara - signifier of all the reasons for his dejection he may at last write openly of what lies at the root of his scrofulous symptoms. In 1808 Coleridge began admitting to friends that he was addicted to opium, and for the first time he attributed his stomach complaints to the use of opiates. In a letter to John Prior Estlin addiction wholly supplants scrofula, as Coleridge writes of the 'inward Anguish that was consuming [him]' (CL 3: 128). He offers proof of his friendship 'by unbosoming [him] self with the admission that he has for years 'struggled in secret against the habit of taking narcotics' (CL 3: 127). After putting himself 'under the eye of a Physician' who shall ensure he has no secrets, he promises 'henceforward never to conceal any thing of any kind from those who loved me and lived with me' (CL 3: 128). His addiction plays the role that the literal Sara had earlier: it is what he has not been able to mention, his unspeakable secret burden that is responsible for his lack of character. This unbosoming - lifting the burden of secrecy from off his chest - carries the implicit claim that, because he is now revealing his secret that something beyond his control has stifled his poetic character, he has mastered that something and begun to do what is necessary to bring his potential character into fiill expression. Thus he is able to tell Estlin, 'I look forward to my future Exertions with humble Confidence. By the work, of which you have here the Prospectus, I have received strong encouragements to the belief that I shall do good' (CL 3: 128). The prospectus is that of The Friend, the first of the prose works that occupy the next decade. 'The first Essay,' he says, in concluding the letter, 'will be - On the nature and importance of Principles. The blindness to this I have long regarded as the Disease of this discussing, calculating, prudential age' (CL 3: 129). Coleridge's announcement of his addiction coincides with his first efforts at the philosophical writing that will lead up to his most famous critical work,

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Biographia Literaria. As Jerome Christensen points out, the works of the next decade 'show the pervasive influence of his physical illnesses.'22 But the meaning of this conjunction goes well beyond coincidence; the letters quoting 'Dejection' indicate that the turn to philosophy is itself the cure from the rhetoric of scrofula. Philosophy, and particularly Schelling's works (and, as we shall see, a secret manipulation of the medical doctrine Beddoes himself denounces), provides Coleridge with the principles vital to the prose works. The rhetoric built upon these philosophical principles holds all the therapeutic qualities he sought in Beddoes' iatrology and which shaped his appeals to the two Saras. Like the metaphorical Sara, Schelling is removed from Coleridge, both in terms of his physical distance from England and his linguistic distance. In lifting precepts from works almost certainly unknown to most people in England (Beddoes would have recognized them, but he died in 1808), Coleridge can achieve what he had attempted to do with the medical rhetoric of his self-diagnoses: he can conceal the dependence (on Schelling's philosophy) that is both a sign and the result of his indolence. Further, he can use the precepts he claims to have originated to narrate his ethical development in the Biographia. Throughout the decade following Wordsworth's 'Preface,' Coleridge relies on Beddoes' medical rhetoric to justify his indolence and to conceal an addictive dependence. The scrofula letters reveal the transference of dependence from opium to an iatrological rhetoric that seems to express a truth about him while actually concealing the truth. The turn to philosophical prose, which he proclaims to be a sign of his cure, is in fact merely a second transference, from dependence on the rhetoric of scrofula to dependence on the rhetoric of a post-Kantian philosophy of faculties. Schelling allows Coleridge once again to appear to make accurate and direct statements about himself, couched in highly technical rhetoric that indicates his membership in an esoteric community, when he actually conceals his lack of any delimitable ethos. In writing openly of his addiction to opium, Coleridge turns what had had to be interdicted into the sign that he has begun to reveal himself completely. Complete revelation would imply a distinct ethos that can be revealed. The admission of his addiction allows him to redefine the notion of 'constitution,' to provide for an essential part of himself that has not been tainted by either scrofula or opium. Addiction, in the accounts to Estlin and others, becomes emblematic of the lower parts of his constitution that need to be managed by the higher, more essential and more genuine faculties. His admission, then, is aimed to indicate that he has controlled his lower addictive parts. This is the control that comes to play a prominent part in the critical guardianship asserted

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in the Biographic*. As he writes more of his dependence on opium prior to 1808, the diagnoses of his constitutional scrofula suffered since childhood disappear. Opium, not scrofula, becomes the cause of his indolence, and the indolence itself becomes the sign, not of weakness, but of the misfortune that disrupted his early life and stifled his great potential for poetry. His self-proclaimed cure - which is also the cure of the age - is the recognition that the essential part of his ethos - the higher faculties, primarily imagination - has remained untainted and may be recovered intact. At the heart of his self-revelation lies the unspoken fact that his recovered ethos consists of unexpressed potentiality. Throughout this cure Coleridge manipulates 'Dejection' as the expose of himself that proves he had a poetic potential as great as Wordsworth's. Even without writing poetry, he retains the potential for poetic expression that itself signifies possession of imagination, without having to bring the potential to actuality. His prose works depend on this signifying potential (which constitutes an extension of his apophasis, what he shall not say but needs to have understood by his readers - what goes without saying), and on his readers' recognition of this potential and the imagination it signifies within his philosophical writing. His writing approaches philosophy, moving from poetry; but his most important philosophical work delineates the poetic character, stopping short at the imagination, casting it into the most famous apophasis in his canon. The unspoken - the unspeakable - changes from the cause of his scrofulous dejection to the ultimate proof of an ethos. Coleridge's preoccupation with the unspeakable - the constant denial that his ethos remains unexpressed - apophatically foregrounds the link between his opium addiction, his scrofula and his rhetorical pyrotechnics, particularly the dependence on apophasis. In transferring the unspoken from source of disease to sign of cure and health, Coleridge removes the burden of identifying his ethos from off his chest and onto his reader. In his own 'Essay on Scrofula' (1817), Coleridge shows that he can turn his former dependence on Beddoes' iatrological rhetoric to good use: Scrofula is a constitutional disease, by which, if we attach any distinct sense to our words, we must mean a derangement of some one or all of the primary powers in the harmony or balance of which the health of the human being consists. (SWF1:478)23 A constitutional disease is no longer the defining quality of his organic being, but merely a temporary imbalance. The 'Essay' is most noteworthy for the absence of any reference to Coleridge's own suffering from the disease. Suppression of that reference signifies his continued dependence on a strategy

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of misdirection, proving that he possesses a rigorous and detailed understanding of the disease, without ever revealing where he might have gained his understanding. While his ability to describe a disease, and his insistence on his being distinct, indicate his intelligence and discipline, the more important significance, which we are not supposed to read in this work, lies in the absence of any connection between scrofula and himself. He has cured himself, and made himself capable of curing his unprincipled age, simply by never having had scrofula.

Chapter 3

The Medical Frame of Character and the Enforcement of Normative Health in Thomas Beddoes' 'Observations on the Character and Writings of John Brown, M.D.' Coleridge derived most of his scrofulous rhetoric from the work of Thomas Beddoes, who played a prominent role in the intellectual world of England and Germany at the end of the eighteenth and the start of the nineteenth centuries. Beddoes was interested at once in educational reform, German philosophy, chemistry, and medicine. He fostered Humphry Davy's early experiments at the Pneumatic Institute in Bristol. He encouraged Coleridge to go to Germany and to read Kant, and in 1795 he edited the English version of Elementa Medicinae, the revolutionary medical treatise written by the renegade Scottish theorist John Brown whose doctrine influenced not only Beddoes himself, but also Coleridge and Schelling. The translation, which Brown himself had done prior to his death, was so bad, Beddoes proclaims in his introduction, that it had had to be largely redone (EM ix). The only motive that could prove compelling enough for Beddoes to undertake the work was the need to raise money for Brown's family, who had been left in penury; Beddoes expresses doubts, however, that the project will provide them anything more than the public recognition of Brown's genius that he had been denied during life - a reward, Beddoes comments, 'as soothing as the prospect of posthumous fame' (jEMviii). Nonetheless, Beddoes published the new translation under Brown's name, and attached as an introduction his own biography of the Scottish theorist, the 'Observations on the Character and Writings of John Brown, M.D.' It is Beddoes' translation that people still rely on, and it is Beddoes' biography that people still turn to for the details of Brown's life. This is one of only two accounts of Brown's life, a status which gives it powerful authority as

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a biography.1 That is an important fact to note, for much of what now seems risible in Brown's self-promotion and in his medical doctrine must be admitted to have its source in a narrative that is openly hostile to the man and the doctrine. Brown based his claim to fame on the medical system contained within the Elementa Medicinae. And indeed the system attracted a great deal of attention - and possibly more after his death than before. In the age when all the major systems of belief in England and the continent were undergoing drastic change, Brunonianism appealed to many important thinkers, like Andreas Roschlaub, Christoph Girtanner, and briefly Schelling, for it overturned the Galenic medical doctrine and asserted that the human body was the site of an active interchange of forces with the external world. The system was one of many circulating at the end of the eighteenth century, accompanying the rise of chemistry as the science revolutionizing ideas of how individuals - human and elemental - relate to one another. At least briefly, Beddoes ranked among those who were attracted to Brunonian doctrine, but the biographical introduction to the treatise makes it clear that he had come to reject its principal tenets, and largely on the basis of Brown's dubious character. But behind Beddoes' moral and nationalistic denunciations lies his competition as the proponent of another medical doctrine - revolutionary but less radical that Brown's. Beddoes makes his attack on Brown a moral and ethical one, rather than merely an intellectual one, because his own doctrine is overtly moralistic, even equating medical diagnosis with moral judgment. This equation of medicine with moral guardianship gives Beddoes' medical doctrine its considerable authority. This chapter will show that the narrative strategy Beddoes follows in the biographical introduction enables him to frame Brown as the moral disease to which he alone can provide the antidote - and Brunonianism as a pathological threat that follows a common pattern recognizable to the moral physician. After a brief summary of the principal components of Brown's doctrine of excitement, followed by an overview of Beddoes' educational program inculcating his new morality of social health, I shall turn to the biography itself to show how Beddoes portrays Brown as a threat, and exploits the narrative of Brown's questionable career to assert his own medical authority as guardian over a singular ethical norm. Beddoes' own system of health and education are worth noting because they are very much in the current of ideas that grow into the mainstream of medical doctrine, where the clinical physician holds the authority of guardian regulating behavior, and medical opinions are broadened into moral precepts. The portrait of Brown shows how Beddoes' medical ideology defines itself by depicting a competing

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system as a pathological threat to society and then casting itself in the role of protector against the threat. This polarized depiction requires the blurring of significant similarities, but it also establishes the framework in which clinical medicine has operated since. And the ethical principles established through the condemnation of Brown are very much in line with what at this same time comes to be expected in the literary portrayal of an individual identity in the two burgeoning narrative modes of the novel and biography. In this regard, then, Beddoes' 'Observations,' with its argument that a character who cannot be presented in a narrative as ethically whole and consistent in his relations to other characters and events must be diseased, is in accord with the high romantic privileging of ethical integrity as the standard measure of meaning in all literary genres. Wordsworth's claims to epitomize ethical health, and Coleridge's corresponding claim to guard and regulate poetic health both reflect the union of physical and moral well-being that Beddoes asserts as his first principle of medical guardianship. In addition, Beddoes' personal competition with Brown dramatizes the broader competition among systems in all areas of belief vying for prominence. At the end of the eighteenth century numerous new medical theories competed for prominence within the reorganization of medical perception that Michel Foucault explores in The Birth of the Clinic. The importance of this reorganization lies in the authority it afforded medicine and the life sciences in mapping out the relations of significance of our bodies and body parts, and in mapping out analogous relations of significance for the actions we commit as individuals within society. Although Foucault does not explore the specific doctrines that competed for prominence - and he largely ignores British medicine - he does delineate the shape of the doctrine that succeeded in attaining the dominant authoritative role, and thereby lays out the assumptions that demanded alternative doctrines like Brown's be reviled and condemned to obscurity. A doctrine that failed, like Brown's, can show us what assumptions were still possible at the end of the eighteenth century, even while the dominant discourse was taking shape. Foucault centers his examination around the privilege given at the end of the eighteenth century to 'the gaze' that maps out the space of meaning through relations of significance. The rising and concomitant science of chemistry drove medical vision to assign value to objects according to their relations within a sharply delimited space.2 Anything beyond the limited space, or whose relation to objects did not reinforce the limit, posed a threat. The authority and prestige attained by medical observation depended on a static ideal of normality based on the preservation of 'a space whose profound structure responded to the healthy /

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morbid opposition.'3 Health came to be understood in terms of a static normality that needed to be preserved against morbid threats. Just as the poetic and critical doctrines of Wordsworth and Coleridge shape themselves along lines of the Socratic city of health, so Beddoes delimits a space of health over which his watchful gaze imposes his authority as medical and moral guardian. Brown's doctrine shows us that, because these revolutions in medicine (as well as in poetry and philosophy) had taken only the first steps from Galenic doctrine, other alignments of health and disease beyond a simple dichotomy remained possible at this time. The Brunonian Revolution Widely controversial, Brown's doctrine was seen by many- in England and in Germany - as the great revolution long needed in medicine. Brunonianism accommodated the new view that human beings were engaged in an active interchange with natural forces, most of which were still being discovered. On the other hand, just as many intellectuals looked upon the doctrine as nothing more than quackery. And it is now easily ridiculed because it reduced all disorders to a single imbalance in the interchange of a single force and then made wine and opium into the two most prominent cures. But, even if it did not itself replace humoral medicine, it nonetheless helped to redefine human being in an active-reactive relationship with natural forces. Brown's medical system held considerable influence for two decades, because of its striking simplicity. As Brown himself proudly exclaims throughout the treatise, it all rests on the single doctrine that life is a forced state.4 He assigns a single power - excitement - the role of impelling organic objects toward life, as well as leading them into illness. Every power that acts on the body constitutes an excitement, for example heat, air, and food, as well as muscular exertions, passion, and thinking. Correspondingly, each organism houses a specific amount of excitable substance in the medullary portion of the nerves and muscles, which is stimulated by the incoming excitement to 'produce sense, motion, thought or passion' (EM36). In a state of good health both the incoming excitement and the internal substance are balanced. Illness consists merely of an imbalance between the excitement and excitability, in either of two directions. If the organism receives too much excitement from the outside, the store of excitable substance is consumed to a dangerous degree. These are termed sthenic diseases, replacing the former name of 'phlogistic' diseases, which had referred to their origin in heat (EM 51). If the organism receives an insufficient amount of excitement, the result is a surplus of the

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excitable substance, leading to asthenic diseases. All states of health and illness fall into these contrasting categories, and result from the single force of excitement. 'If the just degree of excitement could be constantly kept up, mankind would enjoy eternal health,' Brown states with breezy confidence (EM55). All remedies in Brown's system therefore aim to stabilize the amount of excitement received by the body in order to uphold the proper level of excitable substance and maintain a fair balance between the two. So simple is this system that a single 'Table of Excitement and Excitability' proves sufficient in listing most diseases and their cures.5 This table consists of a scale from zero to 80, where each numerical extreme represents death; good health ranges from 30 to 50, and perfect health stands in the middle at 40. For the physician the only thing necessary to do is to determine the range of the disease - whether it is due to an excess or an insufficiency of excitement - and then either lower the amount of incoming excitement with bed rest, or raise it by administering, in ascending order of potency, the flesh of land animals, spiritous liquors, or opium (EM 107-8). Brown's system ranks diseases on the 'Table' according to how much the organism is excited. Correspondingly, the cures offered for the various diseases are also ranked by their ability either to reduce the incoming excitement or to increase the body's store of excitability. Although different parts of the nervous system, such as the brain and alimentary canal, possess more excitability than others, such as 'the parts below the nails' (£71/38), the stimulation of any single one 'immediately aflfects the whole excitability' (EM 37). In this way we can recognize Brown's proximity to the Galenic doctrine he seeks to overthrow, as his cures consistently address the whole organism rather than an affected part.6 The key difference between Brown and his Galenic predecessors lies in his rejection of the view that nature 'had a strong healing force . . . and that the main role of the physician was to assist nature in this healing process. '7 In Brown's doctrine the physician, not nature, is the one required for healing, and thus it rejects the antiphlogistic therapies of diet, purging, and bleeding, in favor of more aggressive treatments through alcohol and opium. Nonetheless, he maintains the view that treatment can only address the whole body. Because he is still imbued with Galenic monism, he declines to offer any clear principle for measuring excitement or excitability. The closest he comes is a sample calculation of how much excitement a given remedy contains and how it will affect the whole person: Suppose the greater affection of a part to be as 6, and the less affection of every other part to be 3, and the number of the parts less affected to amount to 1000; which is keeping greatly within the truth. The ratio of affection

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City of Health, Fields of Disease confined to the part, to the affection of all the rest of the body, will be as 6 to 3000. (£M38-40)

Although Brown's calculation does seem to be 'within the truth,' how he has hit on the specific values of 6, 3, or 1,000, or how this ratio determines the amount or type of therapy, remains unstated. His system thus demands a considerable amount of interpolation, which, in fact, it was generally granted. This looseness allows his sympathetic readers to believe they might actually put his program to use and opens the possibility that every person might serve as his or her own physician. To Beddoes - democrat though he be - such an assault on centralized authority is pernicious. But the popularity of Brown's doctrine rose because its emphasis on excitement as a force affecting the body coincided with the research into the influence of electromagnetic or galvanic forces on humans. In fact, Brown's ideas seemed at the time to coincide attractively with many other new theories and discoveries.8 Because there was only one force to be governed in Brown's system, it appealed to natural philosophers for its potential to turn medicine into a 'science of life' (.EMxxvi). It offered the promise of universal iatrological delineation and simplicity of both cure and prevention. The numerical scale made virtually all imaginable states of health and disease into differences of quantity, so that they were mere variants of a single state. Brown's account of the interchange of excitement and excitability cohered neatly with the view that nature consisted of active forces, which was gaining prominence at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century.9 As Ramunas Kondratas points out, medical systems were formed around the principles of chemistry, 'from which, by deductive reasoning, all clinical and therapeutic phenomena supposedly could be explained.'10 So, for example, Hans Christian Oersted, in his lectures on chemistry, argued that every physical body was combustible because it contained a positive element which ignited when combined with the corresponding negative force.11 When seen within the broad discourse that understands human being through the interchange offerees with the surrounding world, Brown's doctrine does not seem so aberrant. Indeed this same discourse also had a considerable impact in both the poetic and philosophical revolutions of the same era, as is evident in the works of Coleridge and Schelling. Michael Barfoot makes the pertinent observation that Brunonianism struck a chord in the new generation of young doctors, who saw it as a guide toward 'substituting fresh observation for authoritative experience.'12 Theoretically, when considered from within the context of post-Kantian thought, Brown's system would appear viable.13

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Brown's monism might be partly a holdover from Galenism, but it also opens him to Beddoes' strongest vituperations. In addressing a person as a single physical unit - rather than as a physical vessel containing a mind or spirit - Brown expresses a principle that is too radically democratic for Beddoes, leveling the spiritual faculties onto a par with physical members, or even eliminating spirit altogether by transferring its animating function to the external physical force of excitement. Human actions would be governable, in this view, not by a transcendentally vigilant power attuned to humans alone of all things in creation, but by the same forces that affect objects in nature. The moral doctrine that depends on the interior ethical space regulated by higher faculties, and Beddoes' medical authority, which depends on this doctrine, are equally threatened by Brown's leveling. Beddoes is the English representative of the clinical mode Foucault sees rising to prominence in France at the end of the eighteenth century. Its equation of the individual's vigilance over his or her appetites with the physician's vigilance over society's appetites, extends the authority of clinical medicine throughout the entire body politic. The medical gaze requires of itself that it reach unobstructed throughout the social space, acquiring complete factual knowledge of the population. This clear field of observation, Foucault says, is similar 'in its implicit geometry to the social space dreamt of by the Revolution . . . : a form homogeneous in each of its regions, constituting a set of equivalent items capable of maintaining constant relations with their entirety, a space of free communication in which the relationship of the parts to the whole was always transposable and reversible.'14 Medicine becomes the guardian of normative health at both the individual and social levels.15 A prolific writer like Thomas Beddoes, whose works cover a wide range of topics, shows us how clinical discourse in England follows Foucault's formula: in the array of topics on which he opines, Beddoes extends his moral precepts into as many areas as possible in order to maintain a constant relation with the entirety of eighteenth-century discourse. That is, he transposes the medical dichotomy of health and disease into moral values by which he can judge actions in all areas of society. Beddoes achieves the transposition by asserting the universal validity of his medico-moral values. He then constructs a restrictive ideal of individual and social health based on the elimination of any sort of behavior that does not unambiguously contribute to the strict ideal of public health. In the 'Observations on the Character and Writings of John Brown, M.D.,' the introduction he appends to Brown's treatise, he portrays his subject as one who has violated the restrictive ideal of health, and who therefore can only be understood as ethically diseased (and even as an ethical disease that threatens

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healthy society). The putative biographical narrative, which Beddoes claims is based on objective, authoritative observation, transforms Brown from a somewhat shady, uncertain author of a competing medical doctrine to the singular anti-type of health. This condemnation enables Beddoes to canonize his own ideal of individual and public health and thereby validate his restrictive ethical model that cannot comprehend any ambiguity except as pathology threatening the social order. The severity of this model lends considerable social and moral authority to the physician who, as moral judge, possesses the gaze capable of extending unobstructed through social space. Foucault's association of the unobstructed gaze with 'the social space dreamt of by the revolution' extends as well to Beddoes' democratic view that all persons could benefit from the moral guardianship of the doctor, just as Coleridge implies that all poets could benefit from the guardianship of the critic. Of course, Beddoes' democracy, which depends on the protection by vigilant guardians, is intended as a stark contrast to Brown's unrestricted democracy where individuals determine on their own the intensity of relations they might hold with the world. Beddoes makes it plain at the beginning of his account that he is not providing a full scale biography of Brown, but 'Observations on the Character and Writings of John Brown, M. D' (my italics). Like Johnson's Lives of the Poets, Beddoes' 'Observations' explains what sort of character has compelled Brown to author the sort of text he did. Unlike Johnson's mostly sympathetic accounts - that of the scurrilous Savage is the most pertinent - Beddoes makes no apology for Brown's character, and even condemns it. The reason for this somewhat paradoxical situation lies in the competing relations between the two men and their medical doctrines. The 'Observations' actually works, therefore, as the strategic elimination of a rival through medical diagnosis; Beddoes casts himself in the role of writing the etiology of a particular ethical pathology. And, in defining Brown's character as the pathological opposition to his own, Beddoes shapes his medical doctrine around the ideal of ethical health as a static normality. The performance in the 'Observations' shows how the doctrinal thinking that rises to dominance in the nineteenth century shapes itself through the opposition that becomes unquestionably fundamental to concepts of individuality and the social context. The Spatial Model of Health in Beddoes9 Educational Doctrine In what is probably his most important work, Hygeia, Beddoes delineates what should be done to improve the state of health. He consistently foregrounds the

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public role of individuals to the point that any private quality disappears; in fact he insists on opening both the body and the character to full view by assigning clear names to all faculties and parts, so that everyone may know how external influence works to bring the various functions and members together into an ethical and bodily whole. His aim is to promote activities that lead people toward healthy, cohesive experiences, and to suppress those that have the unhealthy effect of dissolving the relations he holds to be vital to physical, ethical, and social health. The greatest threat to the healthy society, therefore, is any kind of dissolution of the static order of relations into fluidity melting the hierarchical alignment of social members. Through his major medical works, Manual of Health and Hygeia, Beddoes seeks to dam the tide of pathological ambiguity threatening the public. Pathological threats, for Beddoes, consistently take the form of fluids, both literal - alcohol and tea - and metaphorical - circulating libraries and medical doctrines that dissolve the opposition of health and disease into a sliding scale. All these fluid threats he seeks to dam with activities that will shore up social relations and protect individuals from ethical and physical dissolution. Beddoes posits a spatial model of health in which all elements are plainly visible to the vigilant physician. He sets strict boundaries to what behaviors are acceptable, and establishes the physician as the guardian over these boundaries. The space within constitutes health, and whatever lies without poses the threat of disease. The delimited space Beddoes regulates by figuratively drawing a map that defines the accepted elements and their relations. As with the Socratic city, Beddoes' spatial model of health follows an ideal, singular standard; in his Manual of Health, Beddoes makes one of his characteristic forays against the variability of fashion by contrasting it unfavorably with health, the only accomplishment 'independent of convention, and enduring for ever the same.'16 The role of the physician is regulative, ensuring that these normative elements remain in their proper place and fulfill their function. Throughout his writings on health and education, and in 'Observations on the Life and Writings of John Brown, M.D.,' Beddoes consistently uses this image of the mapped-out and delimited space to denote his idea of health - on both the individual and social levels - and he identifies all pathological threats to this spatial stability as indeterminate liquids. For Beddoes, son of the Enlightenment, the role of physician exceeds merely curing the immediate ails of his patients, as he seeks through general education to effect a social reform and establish a morality of healthy behavior. Beddoes thus aligns health with morality. 'To form a moral sense,' he states with characteristic forcefulness, 'is not more practicable in itself, than to form a sense for health, or for happiness, which latter must be, in great measure

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composed of the sense for health' (Hygeia 1: 84). In making health synonymous with morality he can focus on such details as dress and conversation, subordinating fashion to principles of usefulness. He fully believes that with the proper education fashionable society would alter its view of pleasure so that it would become healthful rather than dissolute. 'Consciousness of health,' when properly contemplated by the individual, he proclaims, 'will become just as much a source of pleasure as the consciousness of virtue (Hygeia 1: 84). If health is to become a standard of regulation in the public realm, then the individual's education should focus on the anatomy and physiology of internal prosperity. Such an education necessarily considers itself progressive, measuring itself with a strict hierarchical scale: the body and its relation with the physical world constitutes the greatest threat to stability and the higher mental faculties promise the most stability. Individual progress consists of the development of the higher faculties toward regulating the wayward body and its appetites. Social progress, for the democratic Beddoes, consists of raising as many people as possible to a state of higher individual existence. The individual ethos, therefore, can be laid out according to the faculties that enable one, more or less, to contribute to the social body. The higher faculties, which immediately recognize the importance of serving society, should be nourished by the lower ones. Most bodily sufferings, Beddoes points out, do not 'spring from malignant supernatural agency, against which there is no defence; but may in most instances, be satisfactorily traced to the want of appropriate intellectual culture' (Hygeia 1: 22). In the educational system Beddoes details throughout Hygeia, collective intellectual culture directs the individual through a progressive historical development: 'Mathematical, philosophical, chemical, botanical, and technological instruction, judiciously intermixed, but at the same time carried on in conformity with a system . .. would keep the physical and moral faculties in perpetual and proportional progress' (Hygeia 4: 82). By channeling the faculties progressively, Beddoes' educational system shapes each individual identity into a developmental history reflective of ethical health and social harmony. Because progress moves upward, toward greater control and rational vigilance, it is healthy. Over and again Beddoes stresses that the one possible means for keeping 'the physical and moral faculties in perpetual and proportional progress,' is to regulate the body and its appetites. Regulation requires vigilance by the higher faculties. Vigilance can only work effectively if the higher moral faculties can identify the parts of the body they need to regulate, and where the parts belong, and what their proper function is. Beddoes thus proposes

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teaching children accurately to distinguish the parts of the body. Such information will lead them to observe many important changes, which as they take place slowly are apt to proceed unobserved. It would also render them alive to sensations, that would otherwise escape attention.... The ignorant of all denominations, and the poor and the young among the rest, we perpetually find unable to fix, with any tolerable accuracy, the seat of their maladies. Hence arises one great difficulty in their treatment. (Hygeia 6: 46-7)

This proposal amounts to teaching children how to map out their bodies, how to view themselves topographically. In mapping themselves they learn to identify body parts and faculties with specific activities and sensations, and to ensure, through healthy vigilance, that each part performs only the single function proper to it. In rendering children 'alive to sensations,' this education would shape them into aesthetic citizens who understand how to parse their responses to external stimuli. Until the moral faculties have a map to the body, they cannot distinguish between appropriate sensations and those threatening 'perpetual and proportional progress.' This map corresponds to Wordsworth's moral and historical landscape, and to the healthy city laid out by Socrates. Notably, then, Beddoes' concern lies most with 'the poor and the young' because these are the least educated, the least vigilant, and consequently the least aware of what role they serve in society. His educational doctrine itself constitutes a mode of policing - or, to speak positively, of guardianship - by inculcating the value of self-policing among those over whom the healthy society needs to be most vigilant. The education in identifying and naming body parts and sensations serves Beddoes' overarching aim of establishing ethical values among members of society. He teaches the poor and young to assign values to body parts and sensations according to how they serve the single upward movement of progress away from unchecked physical existence. The individual's body is thus turned into an instructive analogy of the social body. The more likely a body part or sensation is to distract a person from the regulated progress, the greater its propensity to disease and the more vigilance it requires. Every body part has its place, and every healthy sensation affirms the propriety of the spatial arrangement of the parts and their relations to one another. A sensation that does anything but affirm that spatial propriety constitutes, in Beddoes' scheme, the threat of fluidity. The most overtly pernicious liquids are, of course, spiritous liquors. The healthy society progresses along a singular development through vigilance of its poor and young. This development constitutes the history of a people, and Beddoes is optimistic enough to hold that history does show a

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general progress from primitive society to modern enlightened society. He foresees that the next logical stage in social progress will be the advent of democracy with its emphasis on the individual and self-governance through universal acceptance of the authority of the medical professional. Consequently, he directs his educational programs toward teaching individuals to direct themselves in a personal development analogous to society's. Any narrative of an individual life should rehearse the same sort of progress Beddoes sees in the history of society. The social morality into which he wants to lead society will expel all those harmful pleasures found in liquids. One of Beddoes' oft-repeated aims is to exclude spiritous liquors entirely from social interaction. Wine and spirits are literally the liquids that threaten the regulated space of an open, healthy society by seducing people from the upward progression. Alcohol has been given a false value, he argues, one that prevents genuine intellectual growth and blurs vital boundaries. Teaching children to recognize the existence of cognitive faculties should be related, he believes, to the instruction on the evils of wine. 'Children will not crave this dangerous beverage, unless they are instigated by example or have been taught to relish it by frequent use,' he writes (Hygeia 8:38). In order to eliminate the attraction of wine, it is necessary to find another source for 'that effervescence of the animal spirits which takes place just on this side of intoxication, [which] ranks among the highest of human pleasures' (Hygeia 8: 39). Ever optimistic, Beddoes is certain that' [a]t some future period, a sufficient fund of hilarity will be discovered in social exercises, and in the communication of ideas, belonging to literature and science' (Hygeia 8: 39).17 Beddoes' healthy society would no longer be brought together through communal drinking, but instead through the exchange of ideas in thoughtful conversations. The replacement for wine would be found in three areas: nature, art, and polite letters. Beddoes proposes that gatherings be organized to replace the parties currently designed for boys and girls to meet; these should begin when children are old enough 'to use their reason' (Hygeia 8: 40) and should direct the person to assign increasing value to faculties according to their supposed distance from the physical appetites and their external stimulants. Healthy conversation, therefore, would naturally exclude 'the petty malignant topics' of drinking parties and would kindle 'a zeal for information which would make them find a new pleasure in existence' (Hygeia 8:41). This new pleasure would emanate from the moral vigilance that assigns names to sensations and connects them to both body parts and external objects. The higher sensations, let us say of perceiving natural beauty or - as Beddoes suggests - of studying chemistry or mathematics, would provide a more valued pleasure, as soon as fashionable people were taught to recognize the place of

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that pleasure on the scale of ethical and social development. Beddoes' pleasure of health would turn his education in the mapping of individual bodies outward so that people would assign names and values to objects in the world. In this way, just as in Wordsworth's narrative depictions of healthy people working in a mapped-out landscape, all of nature could be said to take on the meaningful shape of the healthy society, in which everything that properly belongs has its use and everything without use, or that undermines usefulness generally, has been expelled. In contrast to the healthy society of 'some future period' we have fashionable society of the day with its plague of social and individual ills caused by the indulgence of lower faculties and the neglect of the higher, cohesive ones. Beddoes does not relent in his attacks on fashion, which directs people to drink wine and other spiritous liquors, and produces 'an impotence of mind' that allows for aimless, non-progressive activities (Hygeia 2: 64). In 'modish conversation' the habit is 'to fly zig-zag, always making as quick turns as lightning'; among those seduced by the ephemera of fashion, there is 'a restless disposition for shopping and running about on morning calls'; the watchword among these followers of fashion is 'as soon as possible,' for they never recognize 'what a foolish race must that be, where there is no goal' (Hygeia 2: 65-6). Aimlessness and hurry lead to the preoccupation with trifles, which in its turn has very damaging effects recognized by the physician: While the faculties are dwindling away under its influence, the spirit is necessarily debased, and the moral sentiments, too, become perverted, as in certain diseases, debility is attended by movements, contrary to the natural. (Hygeia 2: 66) Fashion, with its emphasis on restlessness, on trifles, and on alcohol, seduces people away from 'natural' movements, which would be what Beddoes identifies as the singular progress away from the body. Fashion disrupts moral vigilance. Beddoes emphasizes the need to direct energy productively so that it does not dwindle away. The ethos he wishes to create through the naming of parts, polite conversation, and the resistance to fashion is stable and topographically arranged around the contribution of body parts and sensations to progressive development. In contrast, what Beddoes wishes to exclude in order to ensure the success of the spatial ethos, are liquids, which impose a false education on the young precluding them from progressing toward any stable, and mappable, interiority. Spiritous liquors, of course, melt the individual and society into what Beddoes considers a false social sympathy blurring the vigilance of moral

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faculties and allowing physical appetites to prevail without regulation. Likewise, if the higher classes cloud their reason with drink, they will be unable to regulate the actions of the lower orders, represented by the poor and young. And if it is not wine, then there are plenty of other liquid 'substances, capable of heightening the feelings, or of producing a temporary flow of spirits,' such as tea (Hygeia 3: 32). After quoting medical authorities from Holland and Edinburgh, Beddoes states that' [ejxcellent observers of their own feelings report of themselves, that in certain states they experience, even from moderately strong tea, a sense of intoxication, with enfeebled faculties, uncomfortableness and languour afterwards' (Hygeia 3: 33-4). Laudanum, wine, and tea stimulate the lower faculties aimlessly, driving them into activity that makes no social contribution, and they enfeeble the moral faculties that should regulate activities.18 Boys and girls who learn to seek liquid pleasures grow up believing these titillations constitute a social bond. If they do not get their pleasure from tea or wine, then mature citizens may find the sensational press exciting enough. News stories satisfy the fashion for haste, for zig-zagging, and for the same base stimulations found in wine and tea. Not only newspapers but novels provide the excitement sought by the fashionable mob. 'Quick, desultory reading in general' leads to mischief (Hygeia 9: 164). In Beddoes' ethical hierarchy, 'the ideas of the mind influence the bodily members' (Hygeia 9: 164); the mind that is preoccupied with haste and quick pleasure will not be able to direct itself toward its duty to the healthy social progression, but will mistake fluid stimulation for the satisfactory fulfillment of duty. On the basis of this principle, Beddoes hopes to restrict not only institutions of drinking and lighthearted conversation, but the lending libraries that distribute the sensational and fashionable literature which Coleridge - Beddoes' protege also condemns. Dr. Beddoes assures us 'that a variety of prevalent indispositions, asfluor albus, tendency to miscarriage, and even a dropsy of the ovarium, may be caught from the furniture of the circulating library' (Hygeia 9: 165). The unhygienic furnishings of the establishments given over to letting their books flow among people indiscriminately will induce the diseases of liquidity, either as the unwanted accumulation of fluids or diseased flow. Fluid infection spreads, through both furniture and novels, 'attended by movements contrary to the natural' (Hygeia 2: 66). Thus, in warning of the 'power of certain ideas to irritate certain organs,' Beddoes points his finger at circulating library literature to account for a great deal of the sickliness we find existing in society. The sensations, to which all these melting tales immediately give rise, and the voluptuous reveries, which they leave behind,

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may, without injustice, be regarded, as part of the concealed fountains, from which the NILE of female unhealthiness derives its origin. (Hygeia 4: 45)

Circulating novels and 'melting tales' carry the young females through the Egyptian flood of disease whose source remains disturbingly unknown. The concealment of the origin threatens the topography of health by suggesting something that cannot be mapped, thus evading the vigilance of the physician. And so the reading of 'melting tales' leads young women 'into a pernicious clandestine practice' (Hygeia 4: 46n).19 Any contribution to society is precluded by the clandestine nature of the practice. Masturbation, and the sensational reading which causes it, provides no service as far as Beddoes is concerned, and so holds the same threat of melting the ethos as drinking and petty conversation. All of these activities obscure the moral vigilance vital to social health, and lead to unhealthy flows, likefluor albus and fashionable zigzagging. To stem the flow of disease among both sexes, Beddoes proposes that boys be taught not to depend on spiritous liquors and tea to stimulate conversation, and that girls direct their reading to 'fictitious biography' (Hygeia 4: 77, 8:41). These moral texts, in Beddoes' view, should describe the 'system of communication among families' free of the topics that zig-zag in an over-excited flow (Hygeia 8: 41), and should show the value of health and pleasure attendant on a non-liquid society.20 In 1792 Beddoes published the fictitious biography, The History of Isaac Jenkins, and of the Sickness of Sarah his Wife and Their Three Children. This is the story of a laborer given to drink after a quack takes all his money for medicine that fails to cure his children. All ends well for Isaac, however, after the local surgeon convinces him to stop drinking. This work is intended for the laboring class, and shows the evil of drink and the contrasting value of sobriety and fulfillment of family duties. The biography of John Brown, written three years later, as the Introduction to the new edition and translation ofElementa Medicinae, takes this same moral stand against drinking, but with the further elaboration of the impossibility of a liquid ethos finding a place within society. This biography fulfills the educational function of detailing the etiology of a diseased, liquid ethos, and showing how the pathologies of adulthood are formed by early influences: 'The seeds of future disease must be destroyed' early on by the physician-educator (Hygeia 4: 73). As Isaac Jenkins provides the negative example for the laboring class, the biography of Brown reveals the dangers awaiting those of intellectual and professional ambition in the free circulation of fluids.

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The Spatial Biography of a Liquid Character Two strains work simultaneously in Beddoes' portrait of Brown that actually support one another. First is the fact that Brunonianism constitutes a rival doctrine to Beddoes' own, and one that does not impose a strict polarization between health and disease; in fact, Brown eliminates the polarity altogether, asserting that 'health and disease are the same state depending on the same cause, that is, excitement, varying only in degree' (EM 136). Brunonian doctrine thus precludes any normative ideal of health that would create boundaries between it and disease. Without the ideal, notions of health and disease become relative. Second is the ethical consequence: without a normative ideal, medicine loses its authority to delineate an ethical norm. A person's behavior- and, in this context, specifically regarding consumption of alcohol and opium - cannot be judged by an absolute standard. Health and disease would no longer hold the values that enable authorities to restrict actions - to promote some and to interdict others - on the basis of medical value. The sliding scale of health and disease in Brunonian medicine allows for virtually all behaviors, and evaluates them quantitatively in terms of the degree to which they excite or depress the individual. The value of any single behavior depends on circumstances of the individual, and refers only to physical states, not to an ethical interiority. Without the normative ideal of semiotic values that link actions to specific ethical elements, as in Beddoes' (and Wordsworth's and Coleridge's) model, behaviors cannot be read as signifying an interior ethos. Instead, any action is simply measured for its stimulation of the organism. In Brown's system, no moral value inheres in any action. Or, rather, the moral assessment of actions simply does not belong to the physician. Medico-moral vigilance is not part of Brown's doctrine. Brown does not promote the spatial opposition that gives Beddoes' doctrine all its moral authority. And, according to Beddoes, then, Brown himself lacks the ethical interiority that is the major prerequisite for integrity and for medical authority. Working within the same broad discourse of the late eighteenth century that gives rise to the delineations of inner character in novels, biographies, and lyric poetry, Beddoes succeeds in casting Brown as an unethical man.21 Beddoes presents Brown as a man wholly without character, without a mappable ethos, because, when the Scotsman eliminates the opposition of health and disease, he undermines the foundation to medical authority as Beddoes understands it. Since medical authority for Beddoes rests on the delineation of ethical space through the expulsion of pathological threats - following the model of the Socratic city of health - Brown's dissolution of the dichotomy of health and disease poses a serious threat which must be

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eliminated, and as though it were a disease. As biographer, Beddoes consequently presents Brown as someone who lacks an inner being that could be delimited and mapped out in a conventional narrative and brought outward to public scrutiny, and therefore poses a threat to the public health. And as he does with all pathological threats to the social space over which he is vigilant, Beddoes aligns Brown with liquidity. Beddoes prefaces his 'Observations on the Character and Writings of John Brown, M.D.,' with the statement that he feels 'obliged to relinquish the office of biographer,' on the grounds of having 'had few opportunities of personal inquiry' and receiving little information. 'Nevertheless,' he interjects, 'I may succeed in delineating the moral portrait of my hero, for his character was exceedingly open to observation; and in his productions the temper and understanding of the man are most faithfully exhibited' (.EMxxxvi). Though he did not know his subject well, Beddoes implies, he can still present the entirety of Brown's character since everything lies on the surface 'exceedingly open to observation.' Beddoes' claim to perspicacity becomes ironic because the narrative succeeds 'in delimiting the moral portrait of [the] hero' by presenting an ephemera, a zig-zag, a melting tale belonging to sensational literature. Beddoes' assertion of narrative competence in this opening statement is also an assertion of his personal medical authority based on experience in judging character. In using a biographical narrative to present Brown's lack of character, Beddoes begins with an aporia. For the narrative must work as an explanatory history of a subject who offers no sense of personal progression. Brown's ethos and medical system are disguises, in Beddoes' view, for undelimited liquidity. Beddoes 'relinquishes] the office of biographer' because there is no character to delineate; instead, almost as with the fictional biography of Isaac Jenkins, he has to construct a fanciful image of an ethos, etiologically delimiting Brown in such a way that allows for narrative development - into the opposition to health. The narrative begins by emphasizing the obscurity of Brown's origins. Relying on supposition, hearsay, and anonymous authorities, Beddoes identifies Brown's birth date as 1735 or 1736 (£Mxxxvi). He then says that the actual birthplace, Buncle in the county of Berwick, is concealed by Brown himself, who, 'in order to associate his name with that of John Duns Scotus, commemorates the place of his education [the grammar-school of Dunse] rather than that of his birth' (£Mxxxvii). Beddoes strategically makes Brown like the Nile of female unhealthiness, charging that he conceals his origins, and attempts to make himself more prestigious by adopting a birthplace less mean

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than his actual one. Try as he may, however, Brown cannot evade the lynx-eyed vigilance of Doctor Beddoes. Beddoes establishes his narrative and medical authority by turning from Brown's indeterminable origin to stress his own ability to read the signs of Brown's ethical potential: 'From expressions he sometimes dropped in his lectures, I conclude that he was endowed with that quickness of sympathy and that sensibility to the charms of nature, which characterize the infancy of genius. This warmth of heart, I believe he never lost' (EM xxxvii). From Brown's recognizable sensibility Beddoes draws the portrait of the intelligent young man innately attuned to his own faculties and to the environmental forces that make up the sensible universe. Beddoes cites this same quality repeatedly, and in almost identical terms, stressing that Brown 'was endowed with uncommon susceptibility to impressions. By whatever object they were touched, the springs of his nature bent deeply inwards; but they immediately rebounded with equal energy. This quality is the foundation of all moral and intellectual superiority' (EM xciv, my emphasis). Beddoes establishes his authority as biographer on the physician's ability to judge a person's inner condition through outward symptoms. Brown gave signs that Beddoes could interpret as characterizing 'the infancy of genius,' but not a matured sensibility constituting a subjective interiority. Even though Brunonian doctrine insists more than any other Beddoes knows on the relation between the inner individual and the outer environment (EMclix), it does not allow for an inner state beyond the physical one of organs and nervous substance. So Beddoes can laud Brunonianism its emphasis on relations, for, he says, 'there are no means of promoting morality... except on the true relations between man and other beings or bodies' (.EMclix); but he must at the same time condemn, and fear, Brown for dismissing any spiritual or non-physical interiority. Beddoes certainly agrees that human life should be reassessed in terms of its relations to external forces. Indeed, in the clinical setting of his Pneumatic Institution, he went on to make forces such as the weather, diet, and social activities into objects of study in their effects on the body and how our relations to them might be regulated toward better physical and moral health.22 The sensibility that Beddoes lauds in Brown is recognizable in terms of these relations - and through Brown's own theories. The definition of life as 'a forced state' (.EMcxxvii) appeals to Beddoes as a reflection of the sensibility to external forces that compels 'beings, endowed with feeling . . . to draw all possible gratification from the things, by which they are surrounded' (Hygeia 8: 5).23 Brown's instinctual appreciation of environmental influences might have led him to develop a sound moral interiority, just as his system had the potential to revolutionize medicine. How, in Beddoes' view, he came to pervert

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that youthful sensibility into a system of sensual indulgence lies at the heart of the biographical narrative. As Beddoes recounts them, the facts of Brown's life are as follows. When a young man, Brown traveled to Edinburgh to find employment after being dismissed from a job as family tutor. In what was then the center of the British medical establishment, Brown 'regularly entered upon his theological studies' toward becoming a member of the clergy (jEMxlvi), but at the final moment withdrew from religion. Hereafter 'it was remarked that the strictness of his religious principles was relaxed. He even began to be accounted licentious both in his principles and conduct' (jEMxlvii). The emphasis in Edinburgh on reason over religion is the primary if not sole reason for Brown's renunciation of his 'hereditary creed' (EM xlvii). Moving out of the environment of superstition and into that of reason, Brown, always sensitive to his surroundings, exchanged the one creed for the other. And if the rationality fashionable within the university led Brown to renounce divinity, 'the scene before him must have directed his thought to the study of medicine' (EM xlviii). Unfortunately, Edinburgh provided only a corrupted version of the healthy community, so that its influence on Brown was not to direct him toward openly contributing to the social body, but to teach him to conceal and distort his actions. Brown formed a close alliance with 'the celebrated [William] Cullen,' who 'was accustomed to watch the fluctuating body of students with a vigilant eye, and to seek the acquaintance of the most promising' (EM liv). Because Cullen valued Brown's facility with Latin, he employed him as an instructor in his family, 'and spared no pains in recommending him to others. A very strict and confidential intimacy ensued' (EMlv). Ostensibly, Brown's sensibility led him to interpret Cullen's actions toward him as a promise of support in his advancement in the medical establishment; but, as Beddoes comments, 'friendships originating in protection are very prone to terminate in enmity, unless difference of rank and pursuits totally preclude competition; and it is well known that the friendship in question was far from permanent' (EMlv). When the 'theoretical chair of medicine' became vacant, Brown gave his name as a candidate, fully expecting Cullen to support him. Even though Brown 'acquitted himself in a manner far superiour to the other candidates, private interest then prevailed over the juster pretensions of merit' (EM \vi-\vii). On being presented with Brown's application, Cullen betrayed his protege with a sneer that ensured his application would be set aside. Beddoes recounts that 'Cullen, on being shown the name, after some real or affected hesitation, is said to have exclaimed in the vulgar dialect of the country - Why, sure, this can never be our Jock!' (EM Ivii-lviii; emphasis in text). Beddoes recounts the

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story of Brown's rejection from the establishment and the subsequent estrangement from Cullen as a pivotal event in the biography. This episode rouses Beddoes' ire as a prime example of the machinations of 'that debasing system of influence, which has infected the land so thoroughly, that the post of a scavenger, were it held by appointment, would hardly be procured without cabal, or retained without servility' (EMlvii). Beddoes is very much the radical republican, whose own opposition to the establishment contributed to his removal from the faculty at Oxford.24 His condemnation here of the Edinburgh establishment arises from his desire for the open, scientific society, fueled by the healthy interaction of members along the lines described in Hygeia, not by 'private interest' or influence that would lie beyond the regulation of health officials. Edinburgh's medical establishment epitomizes for Beddoes a debased, closed society. Instead of promoting the advancement of qualified candidates in a manner analogous to the disclosure and mapping of faculties within the ethos, Cullen, a decided arbiter of medical judgment within the establishment, has used his 'vigilant eye' to exploit 'the fluctuating body of students' through secret cabal. The Edinburgh establishment, Beddoes would have us understand, actually discourages the development of the healthy ethos; instead it instills the qualities that debase and disease the ethos, turning it from identification with an open community and toward closed secrecy.25 Rejected by this institution, Brown, 'endowed with uncommon susceptibility to impressions,' carries its influence with him as a diseased sensibility, and a debased idea of intellectual society. Any ethical interiority he might develop from the influence of Edinburgh would be secretive and unexpressed - therefore unmappable. Beddoes puts his medical vigilance to work in illustrating how the corrupt establishment (with which he had his own problems) has perverted the innate sensibility of the potentially healthful young Brown. Beddoes shores up his narrative and medical authority (the two become identical at this point, as he uses the one to strengthen his claim to the other) by shaping this biography into a moral lesson, almost as openly allegorical as the fictional biography of Isaac Jenkins, on the corrupting influence of a closed institution. Rejected by the Edinburgh establishment, and at the same time influenced by the closedness and secrecy of its society, Brown attempts to create a community of his own, with himself and his revolutionary system at the center. The institution that Brown creates is modeled after that of Edinburgh: he centers himself in a system of personal influence twisted into the extreme of secretive indulgence. Brown's sensibility to the environment is debased into mere appetite - expelled by secret machinations, he hungers for the ability to wield his own private influence. Brown's appetites find their expression in the

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system he creates in reaction to the public Edinburgh institution: in Beddoes9 narrative, Brunonianism becomes a closed cult of drunken fanaticism that violates almost point for point the open system of knowledge and health Beddoes idealizes as conducive to the construction and expression of a healthy ethos. Beddoes recounts Brown's strategies of self-presentation as the author of a medical revolution to show that in being shut out from a corrupt establishment, Brown himself excludes all legitimate institutions, serving not an open society of refined ideas, but a secret cult of inebriation. Brown's appetites, driving and thus debasing his sensibility, were never tutored sufficiently to allow him to see Edinburgh as a corrupt institution, or to replace it with a system of open expression and cultivation. Just as the fundamentally good Isaac Jenkins is seduced into the alehouse by debased men from London, so the perceptive yet naive Brown is led astray by the corrupt institution; instead of growing into someone who might have genuinely contributed to medical science, Brown who has 'little medical erudition' (EMxcvii) - adopts the false guise of radical medical theorist. His self-presentation, according to Beddoes' narrative, does not serve any notion of expression, but only sensual indulgence disguised as systematic ethical self-maintenance. Beddoes employs another, less subtle strategy to undermine Brown's medical authority, making plain his unease and distaste at presenting a man he finds ridiculous: 'In the recital of this scanty information, my own sentiments have fluctuated so much that I am doubtful whether I have preserved impartiality, or shall appear consistent in the distribution of pity, ridicule, censure and applause, among the incidents of Brown's life' (EM xciv). Beddoes creates the mild drama of fearing that he has gotten too close to his unhealthy subject, so that his narrative authority is in danger of being swept away in the undertow of Brown's destabilizing influence. He shows us that he now has to master his own drifting focus, to explain how Brown replaced cognitive faculties with base urges, and established himself at the head of a drunken cult concealing itself behind the guise of revolutionary medicine. Paralleling his broader aim of divorcing himself wholly from such a ridiculous man, Beddoes here makes use of indirection to undermine Brown's authority: he demurs, allows another authority to describe events in a light positive to Brown, rejects the account he has just quoted, and then offers an exegesis that condemns Brown and his supporters for their drunkenness. He cites a 'Dr. S ,' who claims that because Brown had taken a number of students away from the established professors, he was repaid with the persecution 'which was carried on with such rancour that it at length obliged

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[Brown] to leave Edinburgh' (EM Ixii). Beddoes counters Dr. S partisan narrative with this qualification:

's

Meanwhile, if it be undeniable that, as the Cullenian hypotheses were sinking into disrepute, many of the ablest students resorted to the standard of Brown, it ought not to be forgotten that it was joined also by the most idle and dissolute. Their misconduct and their master's imprudence in private life, together with the offensive manner in which he spoke of himself and others, kept the system and the author in constant discredit. (EMlxii)

Those students swept away in the tide of Brunonianism adhere to no system at all, according to Beddoes. The only possible members of the Brunonian cult are those outcasts who are as dissolute and unethical as Brown. Beddoes recounts an autopsy performed on one of Brown's patients, who dies 'in spite of the full and avowed use of diffusible stimulants' (£Mlxxv), that is in spite of the Brunonian application of alcohol and opium:26 During the examination of the appearances, Brown with an air of great sagacity remarked that the body was unusually fresh. The dissecting surgeon, whom perhaps kindred devotion to Bacchus had inspired with tenderness for the Doctor, replied that, considering the circumstances, he had scarce seen an instance where putrefaction had made such little progress. Then, gentlemen,' rejoined the doctor, 'I appeal to you if we may not consider this as a clear proof of the propriety of our practice.' (£Mlxxv)

The healthy reader of Beddoes' presentation can only deduce that, if Brunonianism does attract a following, it is only as a Bacchic cult no less conspiratorial than the Edinburgh institution. The Brunonian devotion is not to healing and the frankness with which Beddoes characterizes medical authority, but to drink and self-obfuscation. Hence the cult is willing to distort and suppress facts in order to promote a doctrine of drunkenness and befuddlement. ' [T]he propriety of our practice,' which Beddoes has Brown proclaim with the melodramatic flourish of a mountebank, is nothing other than the application of alcohol and opium in large quantities. Beddoes' distaste for the conspiracy based on 'devotion to Bacchus' is clear, as is the implication that this procedure parodies and perverts the proper course of a medical examination. Instead of revealing the true cause of morbidity or disease, and whether the principles of Brunonianism hold validity, the staged scene of the autopsy - at which the narrative leaves us unsure whether Beddoes was present - signifies Brown's use of secret influence over institutional medical judgment. Brown suppresses true expression by creating a 'tenderness' among his followers through drink,

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and opens the possibility that consumption, not expression, constitutes the primary human activity. Beddoes explains that notoriety finally came Brown's way when a disciple, Robert Jones, attempted to force his cure on a patient, tampering with a nurse 'to induce her secretly to administer strong stimulant medicines' (£Mlxvii). At a later inquiry into the affair, the nurse testified that Dr. Jones' 'clandestine proposals were rejected,' and that Jones himself had attempted 'to administer a dose of his diffusible stimulant' (EM Ixx). She went on to tell how he repeatedly tried to bribe her, and 'that the medicine he wished her to administer was a bottle of double rum, of which she was to give [the patient] a glassful, with fifty drops of laudanum in it, the first night; and another glassful, with one hundred drops of laudanum in it, the second night, if the first dose should have a good effect' (EM Ixxi). After the nurse refused to collaborate, she caught Jones surreptitiously giving the laudanum to the patient who, according to the nurse, '"spit it out of his mouth; cried out that it was laudanum, and that he was poisoned; but to the best of her observation, he did not swallow any of the medicine"; which, soon after was thrown into the fire' (EM \xxii). What troubles Beddoes about this case - and the obvious reason he includes it - is the surreptitious quality of the intervention. In the misguided attempt to gain public recognition for his system, Brown or his epigone resorts to 'secret proceedings' (EM Ixx), 'intrigue' (EM Ixxiii), 'clandestine interference' (EMlxxiv) - actions expected from the sensational, melting tales found in circulating libraries, not from a serious medical theorist. Beddoes charges that Brunonianism could not stand the open scrutiny required to attain legitimacy; the result is that Brown acquired the reputation of a charlatan and the character of a fool: Brown, for a comic figure, was not inferior to Sancho Panza; nor indeed much unlike that entertaining personage: and this clandestine conference, if it had been delineated by Cervantes, would have made a good companion for the nocturnal interview between Don Quixote and the venerable duenna, Donna Rodriguez. (£Mlxix)

If Brown were a character in a comic novel, the healthy public might have a place for him, as anti-hero, or carnival fool. And yet Brown does not play a minor role in Cervantes' novel but rather the central role in a biographical narrative that should not only reveal its subject but its author's sentiments. And so Beddoes portrays himself struggling to preserve his own narrative integrity during the task he had never welcomed. At the point where he must deal with the 'clandestine interference,' Beddoes comes close to breaking down

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altogether. He refers to the story of Jones' meddling as 'an event. . . which I wish I could fairly pass over in silence' (£Mlxvii). Upon commenting that after the intrigue Brown's 'character among his countrymen suffered irretrievably' (EMlxxiii), Beddoes protects himself from the charge of personal bias by asserting his own integrity as a researcher: 'nor have I courage without better documents to undertake his vindication' fEMlxxiv). This portion of his narrative is 'unwelcome' (£Mlxxiv) because it shows that Brown violates all the key values of a healthy ethos, even while serving as a putative member of Beddoes' own profession. Unlike Isaac Jenkins or Sancho Panza, Brown is not a fictional character, but a real man on whose posthumous reputation a rather large family depends. In constructing the fictional biography of Isaac Jenkins, Beddoes may guide the diseased, drunken Jenkins back to health and sobriety, but not Brown, whose shameful actions must be reported no matter how discomfiting. The threatened breakdown of the narrative is disingenuous, however, enforcing Beddoes' medical authority by destroying that of Brown. If his narrative comes close to falling apart, it is because, we are to understand, Beddoes subordinates his personal feelings to his professional duty as a vigilant physician. His protestations, similarly, putatively attest to his own candidness that contrasts Brown's self-concealment. By comparing Brown to Sancho Panza, Beddoes removes Brown from the real-life role of medical competitor and categorizes him as a comic character type within a narrative. In stressing his distaste for such a type, Beddoes shifts the focus away from Brown's intellectual assault on the normative ethical ideal. Discussion about actual elements of Brunonian doctrine - their assumptions and consequences - are displaced by the judgment that Brown conducted himself unethically, as someone whose own judgment cannot be valued more than Sancho's. The medical authority desired by Beddoes would lose its absolute value in the sliding scale of Brown's doctrine. The threat to Beddoes, what he finds distasteful and what his doctrine cannot allow, is that Brown, as promoter of a medical theory, does not meet the semiotic requirement of a character in a biographical narrative: his actions do not necessarily signify any kind of interiority that would enable the vigilant and moral doctor to trace his progressive development along allegorical lines. Were Beddoes to unfold Brown's character and ideas as dispassionately as he pretends to do, he would be faced with a potentially unanswerable challenge to his own ethical assumptions. Although Beddoes says that he has come close to giving up his narrative, he continues with accounts of Brown's scurrilous behavior, compiling details that make Brown into a consistently corrupt man. Each anecdote illustrates one

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of the healthy ethical principles that Brown has perverted. Brown creates a society modeled, like that of Edinburgh, on concealment rather than scientific disclosure, on a self-serving discourse rather than open inquiry. Brown's own language becomes intemperate and obscurantist. And throughout everything there is Brown's open displays of drunkenness and his shameless promotion of unregulated appetite. Each incident outdoes the previous in its immorality and egregious behavior. In casting the anecdotes of Brown's waywardness into the narrative of a progressively debased character, Beddoes asserts his own authority as medical observer, capable of judging the relations between outward behavior and inner character, and - implicitly- between an immoral man and the sort of medical doctrine he would author. Hoping to advance his own reforms, Beddoes mocks Brown's revolutionary ambitions. Among the two competing authors, Beddoes holds the advantage in having outlived the other sufficiently to write his biography. He reviles Brown's revolutionary gestures as the posturings of a blathering, self-absorbed fool, fit only for the pages of comic fiction. 'Brown was the first person I ever saw absurd enough,' Beddoes sneers, 'to profess himself a Jacobite' (EM Ixxxi). The aim of this slur is Brown's self-aggrandizing reference to his own medical revolution, which Beddoes denies ever took place: 'No cause for such a revolution of opinion is assigned' (.EM Ixxxi).27 The question of whether or not Brown's doctrine was truly revolutionary, like that of how much Beddoes relied on it to develop his own, are issues Beddoes turns away from quietly. Instead he sneers at Brown's Jacobinism, devaluing any claim that the Scotsman might have influenced medical theory generally, and Beddoes' in particular. The allegorical aim governing Beddoes' narrative is to show that Brown's false ethos ensures a dangerous system based on febrile rhetoric standing in for genuine communication. Brown spoke in a 'Doric dialect,' Beddoes relates, 'so broad as to leave me often uncertain of what he said' (EM Ixxxi). The accent is made to serve as proof of an unwillingness to communicate, as before Brown 'undertook the charge of a private tutor, he had attended an English master at Edinburgh, for the purpose of acquiring pronunciation and method of teaching that language, which he had not before had an opportunity of being improved in. But the vestigia ruris were not to be effaced, or else he had voluntarily resumed his original notes' (£"Mlxxxi). Brown not only renounces such trappings of the establishment as an educated accent, but he flaunts his marginal status with a dialect so impenetrable that 'social intercourse independent of the bottle' becomes impossible. And, even though he could write clearly, 'uniting perspicuity with acuity,' in his public works 'he has succeeded to his utmost wishes in constructing a style of classical obscurity'

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(EM xcvi). What might appear to be mere slovenliness on Brown's part becomes, in the biography, an intentional strategy for self-concealment that contrasts sharply with Beddoes9 own self-avowed narrative candor. The narrative repeatedly reminds its readers that Brown substitutes the stylistic clarity of which he is capable for sensationalist rhetoric that obscures the spuriousness of the doctrine by titillating base appetites. The overcharged rhetoric driving Brown's system prevents it from serving an open social structure based on stable relations, turning it instead to the clandestine feeding of untutored appetites. As the feverish zig-zag of fashionable people arises from their dependence on liquids like alcohol, tea, and the circulating library, so, we gather, Brown's language arises as the distilled fumes of his liquid ethos. While the healthy ethos can be mapped out and regulated by the higher, perspicacious faculties, the liquid ethos can only be said to flow from obscure origins into a fevered torrent that finally evaporates in overstimulation of unrestrained appetites. Beddoes ultimately condemns the entire Brunonian system of medicine as nothing more than an elaborate ruse for Brown's indulgence with spiritous liquors and opium. He recounts with horror that when he found himself languid, [Brown] sometimes placed a bottle of whisky in one hand, and a phial of laudanum on the other; and that, before he began his lecture, he would take forty or fifty drops of laudanum in a glass of whisky; repeating the dose four or five times during the lecture. Between the effects of these stimulants and voluntary exertion, he soon waxed warm, and by degrees his imagination was exalted into phrenzy. (EM Ixxxvii)

This public display of drunkenness parallels the overcharged rhetoric. Brown's use of laudanum and whisky - and at a public lecture no less - epitomizes the diseased ethos dependent on spiritous liquors that Beddoes describes in Hygeia. Brown the lecturer proves to be nothing other than a frenzied proponent of the liquid economy that relies on 'substances, capable . . . of producing a temporary flow of spirits' (Hygeia 3: 32). In his role as public educator Brown promotes all the vices that Beddoes as educator tries to eliminate. Brown's shameless display goes beyond a case of bad manners, it repudiates the public control and the subsumption of the individual ethos into the community that are vital to Beddoes' own topography of health; Brown does not merely violate the ethical principle of civic responsibility, he melts it into a fluid relativity analogous to his numerical scale that shifts health and disease from absolute opposites into undelineated personal experiences that have no absolute and universal referent.

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By this point Beddoes finds it difficult to avoid stating simply that Brown exploits a dubious system to justify a public exposure of himself as an inveterate drunkard. But the strategy throughout the narrative is to avoid the appearance of overtly competing against Brunonianism for the place of legitimate medical authority. Instead the narrative claims to present Brown on his own for the reader (properly educated in moral medicine) to judge. We are shown without comment, for example, how Brown's clownish logic convinces him that because the gout, from which he had been briefly free, returned at a time when he had conducted an 'experiment of abstemiousness, he returned to the bottle, and never afterwards relinquished it' (EM Ixxxix). If we are properly educated, if we are morally vigilant, we will agree with Beddoes that this is the obscure logic of inebriety, directed not to truth or to service, but only to appetite. As medical judgment becomes institutionalized into an ethical authority, Beddoes exploits the biographical narrative to show how Brown operates within a false system so that his appetites govern his behavior, and his cult provides the arena for him to display his indulgence in spiritous liquor, laudanum, and invectives. His appetites remain untutored because they are unregulated, unformed by the open society envisioned in Hygeia that would locate them within a topography and then direct them upward through a developmental progression serving the higher faculties. In his delineation of the anti-ethos, Beddoes is compelled by his own system of moral medicine to contend that Brown degenerated into drunkenness for that one reason: energy that has no direction will dissipate through over-heated self-indulgence. And the Brunonian system merely extends the indulgence by attempting to justify the bacchic frenzy as a mode of public behavior. What makes Brown and his conversation 'so little agreeable' to his biographer is the unthinkable implication posed by his public drunkenness and his unabashed extension of intoxication into a medical system that indulgence is not only not evil and diseased, but may actually be valued as good and healthful. That implication is unthinkable to Beddoes for the same reason that he must obscure the competition between his doctrine and Brown's: if two such different doctrines hold equal potential legitimacy as modes of judgment, then Beddoes' values are not absolute. Brunonian doctrine threatens Beddoes personally as the possibility of a real alternative to his authority as medical and as moral judge. He fears, therefore, that Brown's cult might spread, systematically encouraging individuals to privilege appetite over intellect, and thus exacerbate the already corrupting force of fashion. Brown threatens Beddoes' assertion that morality based on a topographic health may become 'a source of pleasure' (Hygeia 1: 84). In Brunonian usage,

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the terms of health and pleasure certainly achieve synonymity, but not in the moral and progressively directed sense hoped for by Beddoes. Pleasure for Brown can mean drunkenness and base revenge, precluding any hope for Beddoes' society based on tastes refined in accord with high morals. In Brown's system, objective and universal standards that would shore up Beddoes' desired society simply do not exist. More dangerous still is the fact that within Brunonian doctrine, health is never wholly distinct from disease, and only tentatively separated by the quantity of a force that is nothing other than reframed sensibility: 'health and disease are the same state depending on the same cause, that is excitement, varying only in degree' (EM 136). Quantification of excitement lies at the heart of Brunonianism, so that health and disease lose their absolute status as antitheses. If a polarity that holds such obvious importance can lose its boundary, then all the boundaries from which the healthy community and ethos begin their essential unfolding dissipate into Brunonian fluidity. Health may thus be made into the pleasure of the drunkard, of personal appetites, not public service. The dichotomy vital to Beddoes, and mainstream medicine, that strictly delimits health to a single normative value dissolves in Brown's hands to an open-ended possibility. The ethical topography that enables the physician and the moralist to locate and value the individual according to the exchange of vital services is dissipated, in Brown's doctrine, to the flow of appetite. In Beddoes'judgment, the liquid Brunonian ethos makes ambiguity the principle behind its system of deregulation. Beddoes uses his narrative to make a case for regulating Brunonianism through medical - not narrative - authority, and to assert that knowledge of Brown and Brunonianism must be restricted in the same way as access to medicine / poison. Beddoes pointedly corrects Brown's bad Latin, and his bad English translation; and he presents Brown as a known bibulist in order to show the outcome of a corrupt institution like the Edinburgh medical establishment, and of what happens to the individual who fails to develop his or her higher regulative faculties. Through Beddoes' narrative, Brown does not acquire an ethos so much as he is made to serve as a pharmacological antidote to his own infectious fluidity. In this way Beddoes reinforces the medical polarity he values so highly by making Brown into the absolute antithesis of ethical health. The biographical narrative becomes an instruction in Beddoes' strategy for subordinating the Brunonian indeterminacy to the pharmacological ambiguity permeating medicine and on which the professionalism of medicine depends, since only the trained doctor can manage it. He reasserts the integrity of his own medical vision that delimits health from disease by expelling the unmappable ambiguity. In Brown, Beddoes confronts the unplaceable,

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unsemiotic fluidity that always threatens the delineation of the individual ethos and threatens the ideal community of health with dissolution. As physician, Beddoes puts to work the strategy that is commonplace in the discourse of public health: he transforms Brown's unmappable fluidity into the distinct and singular threat of the false knowledge that stems from the corruption of innate sensibility. The narrative that traces the history of dissipation enables the social physician to define Brown as an anti-ethos, and to assign him a place, namely outside the healthy community. The biography thus fulfills the moral mandate set out in the medical essays to expel whatever disrupts the ethical and social topography. Brunonianism advocates individualized regulation of stimulants through spiritous liquors and laudanum. Beddoes denounces Brown, and to a large extent Brunonianism, as the disease of fluidity, distancing himself through expressions of contempt. He thus re-instates the boundary between Brown and himself, so that fluidity remains outside the healthy topography, and healthy pleasure is qualitatively distinct. Beddoes is able to claim victory over his subject, presenting him to plain view and expelling him from the discourse on health (even a discourse that might accept key elements of Brunonian doctrine). In his closing statement, Beddoes proclaims: 'To speak of the dangerous influence of [Brown's] system on practice, I think as useless now as to detect plagiarisms. . . . What he has left can only inform or exercise the understanding; but he retains no power to inflame the imagination from the grave' (jEMclxiv). By the time he makes this exultant statement, Beddoes has fulfilled his aim of spreading an accurate knowledge of Brunonianism which holds 'indubitable . . . utility to mankind' and which had previously been presented to the public by 'adventurers unequal to the task' (TsMxxix-xxx). Beddoes can make a useful program available while warning that the selfregulation and knowledge facilitated by the system should mandate expulsion of its author. Through the presentation of his biographer, Brown loses any vital ambiguity to become the singular antithesis of ethical health. With his death, as Beddoes gloats, Brown reverts to his natural element with 'no power to enflame.' Purely liquid, undirected flow, Brown can be said - to Beddoes' great relief- to have been a name writ on water.

Chapter 4

A Secret Excitement: Coleridge, John Brown, and the Chance for a Physical Imagination In May 1810, when Coleridge was working hard to formulate an account of poetry, along with that of the relations between reader, poem, and poet, he wrote a number of entries in his notebooks that attempt to employ terms from chemistry, natural philosophy, Schelling's early speculative philosophy, and medicine to focus his critical theory. Many of these entries became working notes for the lectures of 1811 and published texts like 'On Genial Criticism,' 'On Poesy or Art,' and the Biographia Literaria. They show how Coleridge tried steadily to merge his spiritualist rhetoric of poetry as an active flowering of the divine creative force - the great I AM - with accounts from natural philosophy offerees in nature. At least one notable entry in this wide mix of references shows Coleridge borrowing from a doctrine he publicly opposed, and entertaining a concept that could have led him to a physical definition of imagination. Although the notes never abandon the metaphysical rhetoric of transcendent unity, they show that Coleridge was also fully aware of the materialist implications of the concept he appropriated. This particular notebook entry also holds importance for understanding how Coleridge developed the principal tenets promoted in the works commonly used to represent his critical doctrine - and that of the Romantic revolution generally works such as the 1811 and 1818 lectures on literature, the 'aesthetic essays,' and the Biographia. Seminal as they are for those public works, the notes of 1810 also come out of the crash of The Friend, and thus reflect the tangled feelings of that venture. The general range of notebook entries Coleridge wrote during May 1810 extends over a fascinating mix of comments on imagination, the Platonic definitions of matter, speculations on electrochemistry, the attack on Gibbon which we have already examined - and concerns about his own drunkenness, addiction, and sexual frustrations. Within this tangle of ideas, emotions, and unhappy urges, it is perhaps not surprising that Coleridge should briefly

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speculate on a Brunonian imagination, a possibility that is counter to most of his other statements on the faculty, which tend to emphasize its spiritual aspect.1 And, indeed, almost as soon as he introduces the possibility of a Brunonian material quality to poetry and to reading, he sublimates it through a series of reformulations that ultimately allow him to appropriate Brown's terms without implicating himself in the doctrine that he opposes very strongly. Throughout his life Coleridge attacked Brown's theory as the 'Doctrine of Death' (CN 3: 4834) because of its materialism. He probably first encountered Brown's ideas through Beddoes, and, as Neil Vickers convincingly argues, as early as 1796.2 Coleridge first refers directly to Brown in two notebook entries from 1799, during his trip to Germany, in which he tries to work out the meaning of the key concepts, excitement and excitability (which he renders 'incitement,' and 'incitability'), and then lists the available German translations of Brown's treatise and Beddoes' biographical introduction (CN 1: 38S-9).3 In 1812 Coleridge makes a brief reference to Brown's egotism, which suggests he relied on Beddoes for his view of the theorist's character (SWF 1: 306). But Brown's doctrine was well enough known during the first two decades of the nineteenth century that Coleridge could have gathered a general understanding of the doctrine and its central terms just from the popular reception. Nowhere does he provide a detailed account that would indicate he had read Elements of Medicine entirely or even in part, but his brief and often fragmentary statements consistently categorize the doctrine as materialistic and mechanistic, the doctrinal qualities he most ardently opposes. His opposition to these qualities is exemplified elsewhere in the attack on William Lawrence in 'Theory of Life,' which Coleridge wrote some six years after the 1810 note, and as part of his 'Essay on Scrofula.' The Abernethy - Lawrence debate provided a focus to the conflict between spiritualist and materialist doctrine, and centered around John Hunter's rather vague reference to a living principle. Abernethy asserted that such a principle must be an animating immaterial power giving rise to the organization of life, and impelling the evolution into increasingly complex organizations. He furthermore argued for the need to keep science united with religion. Lawrence, on the other hand, asserted that life was dependent on organization, and that science should be separated from religion. Lawrence considered mind to be 'the product of matter and the growth of the senses and [that it] sought knowledge through the senses rather than through reason.'4 In his admirable account of how materialist doctrines of the mind developed at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, Alan Richardson shows that the tensions between the materialist and the spiritualist doctrines were high. Materialism was increasingly associated

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with atheism and French science, so that Lawrence, accused of being antiEnglish, lost his academic position and was forced to recant his materialist views. The overall result of Lawrence's defeat was that 'the tradition of "materialist psychology" running from [Erasmus] Darwin to Lawrence now had to move "under-ground."'5 Coleridge's contribution to the debate, attacking Lawrence's materialism, aligned him with political as well as philosophical orthodoxy. This alignment is already clear in the statements on Burke throughout The Friend, and it is further represented in his public statements on Brown. A manuscript fragment of 1823 contains a short comment, 'On the Theory of Brunonian Medicine,' that illustrates the general nature, and the broader context, of Coleridge's opposition to materialism and to Brown's doctrine. The passage opens with the remnant of a sentence whose beginning is lost: with the mechanical and chemical Physicians at the other. This opinion adopted and appropriated by Brown prepossessed many in favor of his System, whom the System itself, as far as it [is] his System, and subtracting what belonged to Hoffman, would rather perhaps have repelled. In giving to the Assumption here spoken of a share in misleading the Brown and his Disciples into the notion that Life is a forced state, a notion which were it true would preclude the possibility of any philosophical explanation of the external generic & specific Characters / of the animal world, I do not pronounce the Assumption itself erroneous. (SWF 2: 1038)

The reference in the opening sentence fragment to 'mechanical and chemical Physicians' indicates that this entire statement arises from the context of Coleridge's expressed opposition to William Lawrence's definition of the mind as a product of matter. This brief passage thus connects Brown to the materialist physicians whom Coleridge reviles publicly and at length. Even without a detailed understanding of Elements of Medicine, Coleridge clearly knows enough of the general principles to categorize the doctrine as one among those he diametrically opposes. The comment in the final sentence expresses his primary objection to Brown's doctrine, that claims, 'it is certain, that life is not a natural, but a forced state; that the tendency of animals every moment is to dissolution; that they are kept from it not by any powers in themselves, but by foreign powers' (EM 58). This claim drives the whole doctrine, so that to individuals, for example, who find themselves without sufficient or customary stimulation, Brown advises that 'the substitution of others, less habitual, and less natural, will support life' (EM 28). The implication of these important statements is that individuals are distinct beings acted upon by external and accidental powers. Brown's statement effectively eliminates both the Christian

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belief in a divine plan, and the organic view of human consciousness as the culmination of natural progress. If life is forced, then the hierarchical model of a development uniting all creatures into an organic unity would be replaced by one of distinct individuals arranged contiguously with no clear developmental or hierarchical relation. These are the implications to which Coleridge objects just as strongly as does Beddoes, and for much the same reason. Trevor Levere summarizes the objection very succinctly when he says that for Coleridge '[l]ife, whatever it might be, was natural and unforced.'6 For Coleridge, Brown's doctrine made life artificial, and the mind material. Everything in these general comments coheres with the persona of the Biographia - the proponent of a metaphysical doctrine of the imagination supporting standards of wholeness and unity, who opposes materialism and associationism in philosophy just as he does the sensuality in Gibbon's history. And yet, as the scrofula letters reveal, there may be different ways of narrating the formation of that recognizably Coleridgean persona. As we have seen, those letters undermine the image presented in the Biographia of a steadily evolving ethos, and instead depict a rather fluid character recasting himself for different correspondents by exploiting the ambiguity of his apparently technical rhetoric, finally gaining his direction when he openly admits to his addiction and begins working on the serial publication of The Friend. Deirdre Coleman has detailed how The Friend originated in Coleridge's hopes for rehabilitation from addiction to opium and alcohol and from his marital problems. Coleman traces at length the entanglement of the serial with Coleridge's desires for Sara Hutchinson, which involved sexual yearning, jealousy of Wordsworth's domestic success as a parallel of the elder poet's intellectual success, and an idealized hope that Sara would guide him to a stable identity. Coleridge's feelings for Sara were so tangled with his own anxieties, Coleman observes, 'that the relationship which was supposed to bring his whole being into harmony became a deep source of confusion, guilt and instability.'7 Further, the composition of The Friend reflected the awkwardness of Coleridge's relations with Sara and the Wordsworths: 'The lack of confidence his close friends displayed affected The Friend directly by provoking him to vindicate the value and integrity of his inner life.' At the beginning of the venture, when he began dictating the serial to Sara, Coleridge 'felt relatively free of his addiction, and . . . believed his love for Sara was returned.'8 At this early stage, his faith in the value of hard work, voiced at the time he had begun openly admitting to his opium addiction, still held. Very quickly, however, troubles arose from Coleridge's inability to focus the argument of his serial, and from the tensions in the household between

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Coleridge and the Wordsworths and between Coleridge and Sara, his amanuensis. She left Allan Bank, where they had all resided during the run of The Friend, in March 1810 when the situation became unbearable, and Coleridge 'reverted to the state in which the Wordsworths found him upon his return from Malta.... "Just as much the slave to stimulants as ever.'"9 With Sara's departure, The Friend, which Coleridge had designated the work through which he would attain everything he lacked, came to an end. In April 1810, a month after the collapse of The Friend, along with the promise of rehabilitation, Coleridge writes to Lady Beaumont in much the same strain, with the same sort of complaints, that characterize his letters prior to the inauguration of his publishing venture. He tells her, I am filled with shame and self-dissatisfaction - Your letter arrived when I was labouring under a depression of spirits, little less than absolute Despondency . . . one of the symptoms of this morbid state of the moral Being is an excessive sensibility and a strange cowardice with regard to everything likely to affect the heart or recall consciousness to one's own self and particular circumstances. (CL3: 287)

As when describing his scrofula, Coleridge asserts that his particularly acute sensitivity is partly responsible for his ailment. Coleman points out as well how he employs the same strategy in the Prospectus to The Friend, 'an amusing sleight of hand in which personal weaknesses take on the aspect of virtues.'10 He adds to this the further causes of despondency and cowardice, suggesting that he has succumbed to the temptations of opium and drink from which he had promised to free himself through hard work. The cowardice, furthermore, is twofold, involving whatever affects the heart or recalls 'consciousness to one's own self and particular circumstances.' The latter aspect seems to refer simply to the frustration over The Friend and guilt about taking opium. The cowardice over everything affecting the heart is derived from his 'excessive sensibility,' and re-enacts the cluster of emotions he detailed in the numerous reformulations of the scrofula letters that basically served to justify his inaction. The collapse of The Friend signals his failure to establish an identity for himself in the public sphere of letters or in the private sphere of his relations with the Wordsworth circle. The complaint to Lady Beaumont reflects in general, therefore, the shame over withdrawing from his promise to establish himself as a moral authority. It is in this context, where all his ambitions and professed values seem to be in question, that Coleridge begins formulating the critical doctrine that will after all establish his public authority. During this same month, he writes the

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notebook entry on John Brown, which begins with an expression of fear similar to that he revealed to Lady Beaumont: I wish, I dared used the Brunonian phrase - & define Poetry - the art of representing Objects in relation to the excitability of the human mind, &c or what if we say - the communication of ew Thoughts and feelings so as to produce excitement by sympathy, for the purpose of immediate pleasure, the most from each part that is compatible with the largest possible sum of pleasure from the whole - ? The art of communicating whatever we wish to communicate so as to express and to produce excitement - or - in the way best fitted to express & to &c - or as applied to all the fine arts Tfee A communication of excitement for the purposes of immediate pleasure, in which each part is fitted to afford as much pleasure as is compatible with the largest possible Sumfromthe whole Many might be the equally good definitions of Poetry, as metrical Language . . . / But of Poetry commonly so called we might just say call it A mode of composition that calls into action & gratifies the largest number of the human Faculties in Harmony with each other, & in just proportions - at least, it would furnish a scale of merit if not a definition of genus Frame a numeration table of the primary faculties of Man, as Reason... And whatever calls into consciousness the greatest number of these in due proportion & perfect harmony with each other, is the noblest Poem. (CN 3: 3827)

In the context of the letter to Lady Beaumont, this note underscores the anxiety Coleridge felt over what mode of discourse would be most appropriate to describe the effect on a sensitive man of external objects, particularly poetry. In the context of the failure of The Friend to provide the vehicle for his rehabilitation, the entry expresses Coleridge's anxiety over finding the way to establish himself as a public authority on par with Wordsworth. The desire to use 'the Brunonian phrase' within a notebook at the same time that he is formulating his public persona reveals that Coleridge's despondency toward the moral authority he had hoped to win with The Friend is such that he is willing to look in the direction from which he had separated himself intellectually and morally - namely materialism. The collapse of The Friend, along with the disastrous lecture series of a few years before, not to mention the problems with his wife, Sara Hutchinson, and the Wordsworths, has raised the fear that the Burkean morality presented throughout the serial simply had no real standing in his own life. The despondency he admits to Lady Beaumont is that without a delimited identity he has no way to regulate

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the effect of external influences on his thoughts, emotions, or body. The broader anxiety, expressed throughout May 1810, involves his desire for a public persona that will equal or exceed Wordsworth's for moral and intellectual authority. Wordsworth provides an ever-painful example of poetic, marital, and social success that seems ample proof of a moral success as well in framing an acceptable persona. With the evidence of his own failures before him, and his sense of ethical weakness continually recalled by his dependencies, Coleridge finds himself tempted to dare use the phrase he knows he opposes. Regardless of how much of, or whether, Coleridge had read The Elements of Medicine, he is familiar enough with the general ideas of Brunonian doctrine to know that the central term, 'excitability,' holds implications that make it intellectually dangerous for him to use by undermining the ethical and aesthetic doctrine that he still sees himself publishing. And yet he is tempted: 'I wish,' he writes, 'I dared used the Brunonian phrase.' Want of courage is clearly preying on him at this time, for only a few pages earlier in this notebook he wonders if he has 'both Leisure and Courage sufficient for the Task' of writing an 'Examination of the Credibility of Socinian Christianity' (CN3: 3817), the doctrine he equates with the religious schematism of Hartley and Priestly.11 His desire to use the Brunonian phrase marks an ambivalence in trying to appropriate a materialist concept without appearing to ascribe to any view of consciousness that is not utterly spiritual. He wishes to wrest the phrase from its cultural and historical context of competing medical doctrines and to invest it with his own value within his spiritually oriented description of aesthetic pleasure. Coleridge takes six steps within the note to transform the tempting phrase from its Brunonian sense into a different Coleridgean sense. As he revises his use of the phrase, he formulates the statement that will become a mainstay of his critical theory. His first effort at using the phrase is to work it into an account of the effect poetry has on its reader. He tries out a definition of poetry as 'the Art of representing Objects in relation to the excitab ility of the human mind.' Framing the particular relation between poetry and the mind, he finds the Brunonian concept coming to him as a description of the physical engagement of subject and world. In Brown's doctrine, excitability is the substance within the nerves which is acted upon by the external force of excitement. Not only is it material, but limited: Brown explains that individuals are born with a particular amount of the excitable substance which they use up over the span of their lives. The finitude of excitability imposes a boundary on excitement, which can only stimulate the body as long as the medullary substance endures. When excitability is used up, 'the body becomes

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no longer susceptible to the operation of stimulus; another expression for which is, that the excitability is consumed' (EM 17). Exhaustion of the excitability 'may be either temporary or irreparable,' but the result is the same, namely the external excitement will be unable to stimulate the individual. As an external stimulant of the medullary substance, poetry would have only a limited ability to affect the mind - especially a mind defined as being immaterial. Since Coleridge does not even complete the sentence on the relation between poetry and the medullary substance, we cannot speculate very far on what effect this definition would have on his critical doctrine, or the concept of imagination in particular. But he is clearly sufficiently aware of the role of the excitability within Brunonian physiology to know that to set the poetic function in relation to physical responses, and as the representation of the physical effects of objects, would define poetry itself primarily as a material object. The effect of poetry would be the physical event he attacks in the Biographia when he says, 'grant that an object from without could act upon the conscious self, as a consubstantial object; yet such an affection could engender something homogeneous with itself. Motion could only propagate motion. Matter has no Inward' (BL 1: 133). Poetry that represents 'Objects in relation to the excitability' would have no 'Inward,' and would represent no 'Inward' of the poet. Consequently, the critical 'Inward' of the reader would also be precluded as a subjective space for the hierarchical development of consciousness and spirit. Imagination would never attain its semi-divine status of 'a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM' (BL 1: 304). Critical assessment of poetry - the doctrine Coleridge spent a good portion of his life striving to develop - would have to confine itself to material relations, which is a possibility alien to most of Coleridge's other statements. Thus he fears using the Brunonian term, which would preclude him from delineating, in Kantian fashion, a mental faculty particular to poetry which is immaterial and spiritual. And to use the term central to a doctrine of materialism would admit too openly to his dependence on physical substances.12 By 1818, in the lecture, 'On Poesy or Art,' he can assert that the artist 'must master the essence, the natura naturans, which presupposes a bond between nature in the higher sense and the soul of man'; and that the 'body is but a striving to become mind' (LoL 2: 220-1). But in 1810, when he had just experienced the failure to establish his own persona as the proponent of spiritualist ethics - and had affirmed his dependence on physical substances - a term whose reference is wholly material is able to tempt him. By this point Coleridge has not quite worked out how to state that poetry actively conveys a dynamic element of the poet's interiority, and stimulates the

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corresponding element of the reader's interiority. He has been struggling to formulate an active relation between poet, poem, and reader that would parallel that between chemical elements, and between nature and human being that he works on in the notes surrounding this entry. He writes entries, for example, speculating on whether the relation between the soul and language is symbolic or actual (CN3: 3810); on Plato's definition of matter as divine will (C7V3: 3824); and on the conditional nature of electrochemical definitions of elements (CN3: 3825). Many of these notes are entangled with the attacks on Gibbon's sensuality and are possibly inspired by Coleridge's anger toward the historian's Frenchified and materialist history. So, after trying out the Brunonian phrase, he immediately interrupts himself with the interjection framed in dashes: '- or what if we say - the communication of ew Thoughts and feelings so as to produce excitement by sympathy.' The shift from 'excitability' in the first effort to 'excitement' in the second indicates that Coleridge is thinking of poetry in terms of its effect on the reader. The shift indicates a subtle retreat from a daring use of the Brunonian phrase, since 'excitement' would be slightly less obvious as a reference to Brown than would 'excitability': the latter would almost certainly be taken to mean the medullary substance, while the former could be accepted in a more general sense. The further addition of pleasure in this formulation reveals Coleridge's reliance on Kantian spiritual aesthetics that will gradually subsume the attempt to employ the Brunonian concept of a physical external force stimulating a physical internal receptor. It is in this confluence of Kantian aesthetics with Brunonian medical doctrine that this brief stuttering note holds its importance. By 1810 Coleridge's allegiance was already directed toward the Kantian delineation of faculties into a spiritual hierarchy shaped by, and expressive of, a living spiritual force. Like Beddoes, Coleridge turned away from any account of consciousness that did not affirm a stable ethical topography based on hierarchical superiority of reason and quasi-spiritual faculties over those closer to physical experience. At the same time, however, Coleridge's own history cast through the scrofula letters directed him to exploit the ambiguity of medical terms - an ambiguity only heightened by the competition among different systems whose terms and concepts for describing the relation between humans and the world derived from sources as diverse as electrochemistry, animal magnetism, and Platonic metaphysics, all reflected in this cluster of notes from May 1810. If he dared use the Brunonian phrase to define poetry either as the representation of how the mind can be excited or as the power to excite the mind, he would have to confront the implication that he was allowing for a physical relation between the poem and the mind, a suggestion sullied by its proximity to his own dependence on opium and alcohol. And

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most importantly, he would be suggesting that the mind, at least in one aspect, consisted of physical qualities. His effort in this note, therefore, is to wrest the concepts of excitement and excitability from the Brunonian sense of external physical force and internal receptive substance while linking poetry and the mind in a relation of stimulus and receptor, and retaining the language of dynamism. He immediately shifts his focus from the medullary substance of excitability to the stimulating force of excitement. As he interrupts himself after these opening statements with a different formulation, we can see him setting Brown's phrase in slightly different positions to determine whether he can use it in any sense that would conceal its origin sufficiently to free it from the implications of materialism. As he does so, he develops his central definition of poetry. Again, as in the scrofula letters, he exploits any ambiguity or elasticity of a phrase, which in this case arises from the overlapping of different doctrines which makes references to 'force' equivocal. After the first effort that we have just considered, Coleridge starts a new paragraph, the briefest in the entry: The art of communicating whatever we wish to communicate so as to express and to produce excitement - or - in the way best fitted to express & to &c - or as applied to all the fine arts

Here, Coleridge combines both possibilities that had occurred to him in his first effort, so that poetry can express or produce excitement. He has returned to the view of poetry as communication, since it can both convey the excitement from the poet and produce it in the reader. Coleridge has already taken a step back toward the Wordsworthian formulation that a poem recreates the inner experience of the poet, so that the healthy reader may have the same experience.13 And he has moved away, at least briefly, from making excitement a quality of the poem itself; instead, the poem serves as the medium conveying excitement from the poet and to the reader - expressing and producing it. The third paragraph introduces the formula that will become the mainstay of the statement he eventually succeeds in making: The A communication of excitement for the purposes of immediate pleasure, in which each part is fitted to afford as much pleasure as is compatible with the largest possible Sumfromthe whole -

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The angled brackets are the editors' indication of a later insertion by Coleridge, though it is impossible to say how much later. At any rate, the insertion of 'mental' shows that he continued to desire being able to use the Brunonian phrase - or at least an equivocal version of it - some time after writing the entry down. In qualifying excitement as a mental event, Coleridge would seem to be just on the verge of developing a physical notion of the mind. Instead he reverts to the transcendent view of mind as the perception of unity. Thus we move from an account of physical stimulation for 'immediate pleasure' to a Platonic organization of parts as expression of spiritual unity. Once he has called up the ideal of unity, everything takes a new shape, so that pleasure is no longer the immediate aim of the communicated excitement, but 'is compatible with the largest possible Sum from the whole.' With the addition of this clause, the formulation effectively repeats the definition offered in the lecture of 1808 as 'the art of representing external nature and human Thoughts & Affections, both relatively to human Affections; to the production of the most as great immediate pleasure in each part, which as is compatible with the largest possible Sum of Pleasure in the whole' (CN 3: 3286). The one difference, of course, is the Brunonian term, on which pleasure now depends. He develops the clause on wholeness into the principal concern in the next paragraph in which he extends his definition to include all arts, of which poetry is exemplary as 'A mode of composition that calls into action & gratifies the largest number of the human Faculties in Harmony with each other, & in just proportions -.' Brown's physical excitement and excitability have become the calling into action of faculties which is linked immediately to gratification of 'the largest number of the human Faculties.' The physicality - not to mention the association with the irreputable Brown - has been eliminated even while the concept of poetry as a stimulant affording gratification and pleasure remains. In fact, the addition of unity and wholeness gives the poetic stimulant a transcendent quality of activating the entire inner being harmoniously 'and in just proportions.' Coleridge can now write of stimulation and pleasure without referring (or at least seeming to be) to physical substances. Socratic ethics of health have cured Brown's concept of its physicality. With that important achievement, Coleridge can turn to one of Brown's most radical notions and again recast it so that it carries no taint of Brunonianism. This paragraph in the entry arises out of the idea in the fifth statement of furnishing 'a scale of merit' based on which poems gratify 'the largest number of the human Faculties': 'Frame a numeration of table of the primary faculties of Man . . . And whatever calls into consciousness the greatest number of these in due proportion & perfect harmony with each other, is the noblest Poem.' Although Coleridge refers to numeration tables in other

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contexts where he tries to map out the relations or relative values of particular forces, elements, races, etc., his reference here has special resonance in its proximity to his desire to use the Brunonian phrase. A numeration table of the faculties, or 'a scale of merit' based on the degree of gratification, would resemble Brown's table measuring the relative amounts of excitement coming from without and the corresponding substance of excitability within the body. Coleridge's table similarly would measure the degree to which the reader is excited as a whole. This table would allow him to combine a topographical delineation of the subjective interiority with the concreteness afforded by Brown's term to develop an account of subjectivity that allows a progressive development from physical experience to higher consciousness. This numeration table would allow for an exact evaluation of specific poems according to their degree of gratification. Brown's table depends on the holistic notion that a deficiency or excess in one area affects the whole body. Coleridge applies the concept of the numeration table to that of wholeness and harmony of action stimulated by a poem, transforming the corporeal relations and forces that Brown focuses on into spiritual ones. And by shifting the table from degrees of excitement and quantity of excitability to proportion and harmony, he can go on to assert that 'Not the mere quantity of pleasure received can be any criterion . . . but the worth, the permanence, and comparative Independence of the Sources, from which the Pleasure has been derived.' Pleasure itself becomes cloaked behind the highly nebulous values determining the merit of the source of pleasure. So, having begun with the desire to dare use Brunonian terms, Coleridge ends with a moral rejection of Brown's quantification of the relation between excitement and excitability, stressing instead that the source of pleasure must be judged for its quality. In terms of poetic pleasure, the source would naturally be the poet. Coleridge has turned from the daring venture of allowing that all poetry could be measured for its stimulation, and embraced the moral view that only certain kinds of poems - those whose power to stimulate and gratify the reader originates in a worthy poet - are worth considering for their effect on the reader. The poetic text thus becomes the active bond between critical ethos and poetic ethos, so that the healthy and moral poet gratifies the critic in an appropriate way. This is the same moral view that compels Beddoes to reject Brunonian doctrine on the basis of Brown's character. Once Coleridge has found a fit for the Brunonian concept within his idealist and moral aesthetics, he retains it as an essential part of the statement he repeats throughout his critical works. So we find him referring to excitement with fair consistency after this time, wherever he defines poetry, such as in the lectures of 1811, Chapter 14 of the Biographia, and the 1818

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lecture, 'On Poesy or Art.' Significantly, his definition in these later contexts retains the basic shape he has given it in the note from May 1810. The 1811 lectures provide a definition of poetry that Coleridge will repeat in the Biographia five years later. Coleridge's notes for the lectures also reveal a development of the key statements that re-enacts the progression from tentative use to full appropriation in the note on Brown. Coleridge distinguishes between poetry and prose, particularly scientific writing whose purpose is truth. In poetic writing, which would include Novels & other works of Fiction which yet we do not call Poems, there must be some additional character by which Poetry is not only divided from opposites, but likewise distinguished from disparate modes of composition.... What is this? It is that pleasurable emotion, that peculiar state or degree of Excitement, which arises in the Poet himself, in the act of composition. (LoLl:2ll)u Within the span of one paragraph, Coleridge offers two more slight variations on this one definition, prompting Henry Crabb Robinson to criticize him for 'too much repetition in the definition, etc., of poetry, in which he was not at last very successful' (LoL 1: 214). The repetitions consistently retain excitement as the distinctive quality of poetry, but then make notable steps overlooked by Robinson. The three statements do not actually repeat the same definition, but enact the three steps in the passage from the poet's mind to the poem ('the Language natural to us in states of excitement'), to the reader ('consciousness of pleasurable excitement from the component parts'), to the communication by the poet to the reader through the poem. The shifting role of excitement repeats the pattern of the six fragmented definitions in the note on Brown. This note also retains the emphasis on transcendent perception of parts united into a whole with which Coleridge had transformed excitement from a Brunonian force into an intellectual event. Coleridge re-enacts the Brunonian process of external excitement affecting the person in a transfer through media. In the Brunonian sense, excitement moves from an object or event into the nervous system through the excitable substance. In the Coleridgean sense, the poet's excitement is communicated to the reader through the language of the poem. But in the Coleridgean sense, excitement has ceased to be a physical force, becoming instead the heightening of consciousness. What Crabb Robinson complains of in 1811 as repetitiousness in fact shows that Coleridge is not repeating the final formulation of the 1810 note, but is rather re-enacting the thought process represented in the stuttering of that

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note. In 1811 the sequence of thoughts would still carry with it the complex of feelings it entailed in May of 1810. Because he can only hear the statements as repetitions, Robinson misunderstands the performative nature of Coleridge's slight-seeming changes in the contiguous comments that identify the passage from poet to poem to reader. And we, who have the access to Coleridge's private notebook that Robinson lacks, might also add that the 1811 reenactment represents a particular sublimation: the private use of a forbidden term into which had been crystalized a complex set of feelings is subtly changed into a public assertion of moral and critical authority. In a discussion of Coleridge's famous letter to Robert Southey of 1794 claiming to be 'a compleat Necessitarian - and . . . [to] go farther than Hartley and believe in the corporeality of thought' (CL 1: 137), Jerome Christensen argues that the claim is part of a larger performance that Coleridge puts on for Southey. The 'reconstruction' of that performance in this letter, and in the broader context of Coleridge's relation to Southey - who introduced his friend to Hartley's philosophy - Christensen states, 'does not prove that Coleridge did not completely believe what he was saying; it only admonishes us to keep our distance.'15 Similarly, Christensen shows that the published lectures Coleridge delivered in 1795 'are equivocal enough to warrant almost any political interpretation of them.'16 Throughout his writings, and, we can surmise, his lectures, Coleridge puts on a performance that relies on just such equivocation. Even his most assertive proclamations of adherence to a polemical perspective generally contain just such a performative equivocation. So, the series of notes on which Coleridge relied for the 1811 lectures is entitled, 'Final Definition of a Poem & of Poetry,' and re-enacts the three steps Robinson heard as repetitions. This definition becomes Coleridge's standard that he repeats, under this same heading, in Chapter 14 of the Biographia, with only a slight, but notable, change: If metre be superadded [to the poem], all other parts must be made consonant with it. They must be such, as to justify the perpetual and distinct attention to each part, which an exact correspondent recurrence of accent and sound are calculated to excite. The final definition then, so deduced, may be thus worded. A poem is that species of composition, which is opposed to works of science, by proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not truth; and from all other species (having this object in common with it) it is discriminated by proposing to itself such delight from the whole, as is compatible with a distinct gratification from each component part. (BL 2: 12-3)

In this version, the noun, 'excitement,' has become a verb and been removed from the 'final definition' itself to describe the effect of the fluctuation of

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'accent and sound' in meter; and yet a vestige of the Brunonian concept remains. Excitement is here subordinated from a mental event communicated from poet to reader to a function of linguistic rhythm. It has thus recovered at least some of the physical quality of its Brunonian sense. The references to excitement as noun or verb are alone enough to connect this 'final definition' to that in the draft to the 1811 lectures, and from there to the wish to use the Brunonian phrase. This genealogy is confirmed, furthermore, by the form of the' final definition' in both the Biographia and the 1811 lecture, which remains very close to the sixth effort in the note on Brown, the first to begin transforming excitement from a specifically Brunonian, and physical, force into a more general mental quality. The Kantian emphasis on deriving pleasure from recognizing the sum of parts in the whole becomes the primary thrust of the definition of poetry, allowing Coleridge to emphasize the transcendent nature of composing and reading poetry, and turning excitement into a wholly mental quality. Indeed, none of the commentators on his public lectures makes any connection at all between Coleridge's use of the term and Brown's use, indicating that the term had currency in general aesthetic discourse. It had certainly been used by Wordsworth in the 'Preface,' where he identifies the aim of his poems as tracing 'the primary laws of our nature: chiefly as regards the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement' (WProse 1: 122-4). And, in fact, Wordsworth's statement could have provided some of the impetus for Coleridge's first 1810 flirtation with the term. But Wordsworth also proclaims - in a tone with which Coleridge must have become familiar during the sojourn at Allan Bank - that 'the human mind is capable of excitement without gross and violent stimulants' (WProse 1: 128).17 In light of his need to match Wordsworth's public authority, Coleridge had good reason to conceal any interest he had in excitement as anything but an intellectual event. Only by reading the genealogy of Coleridge's definition can we see the vestige of his flirtation with Brunonian materialism. The question remains of why Coleridge should adopt the Brunonian phrase as part of his aesthetic formulation at all. Brown's doctrine was wellenough known that Coleridge's readers, and the audience in his lectures, could have been expected to make the simple connection with Brown. In describing 'the way in which Coleridge manages to keep his terms as open as possible,' Coleman observes that in the first installment of The Friend,' it is very difficult to tell from moment to moment what it is that [he] is talking about.'18 The famous obscurity of his prose is in part due to the contiguous use of terms (or statements, paragraphs) from disparate sources and contexts. His aim often is less to produce an actual argument than, as J. H. Haeger suggests, to construct an image of himself as one who has developed 'his own philosophy

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independently through assimilation of the ideas of many others whose peer he is.'19 Being publicly recognized as the peer of known philosophers matters enough that, as Coleman says, Coleridge adopts 'official postures which bear little resemblance to what he actually feels. '20 His public postures are not only at odds with his private feelings, but very often with each other. In his discussion of Coleridge's role in the spiritualist-materialist debates on the mind, Richardson recounts how 'Kubla Khan' and its introductory note associating its composition with opium raised issues for Coleridge 'that seem, from an orthodox or transcendentalist perspective, to give aid and comfort to the materialist adversary.' Such a possibility of finding himself publicly aligned with materialist doctrines led Coleridge to suppress 'Kubla Khan' for 'nearly two decades.'21 One of the most consuming issues for Coleridge was the association of the poem - or rather its composition - with opium, which 'was also widely associated with naturalistic and materialist conceptions of mind.'22 The association of opium with materialism and the political climate suppressing any suggestion of materialist doctrine would explain Coleridge's reticence in admitting to any connection between his ideas and Brunonianism, even in 1810. Brown's medicine was closely associated with alcohol and opium, neither of which Coleridge had ever stopped consuming in impressive quantities. Indeed, while detailing the value of opium as a stimulus to maintain life, Brown recounts the case of a 'gentleman, engaged in a literary composition, which required an uninterrupted exertion of his mental faculties for more than forty hours,' who productively sustained himself with a succession of stimuli ranging from food to wine to punch to opium (EMl9n). Brown himself had been described by Beddoes as an unethical, intemperate man whose doctrine embodied all the ills of his personal character. So, the Brunonian phrase held all the associations Coleridge wanted to avoid having identified with the persona he still hoped to promote publicly, even after the project with Sara Hutchinson and The Friend failed. And yet, like the opium itself, the Brunonian phrase tempts him, and he succumbs. As with the story of 'Kubla Khan,' Coleridge cannot help but recognize, at least to some extent, the materialism of the mind, based on his own experience. Fully aware of the political mood of England in the second decade of the nineteenth century, and of the moral mood within the Wordsworth circle, he confines the Brunonian associations to his private notebooks. In public he makes the phrase safe by turning it into an ambiguous term with a vague referent which finds an easy fit within the performance of claiming adherence to spiritualist doctrine.

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It is perhaps difficult to remember that the statements on unity and the transcendent imagination are themselves efforts by Coleridge to affirm, or even to discover, those qualities in his own experience. The conflict of the two Saras emphasizes how he wanted to recast the actuality of his life into a stable and unchanging ideal, though to do so would have meant divorcing himself from what he - to his shame - enjoyed. As John Beer says in regard to the experience of trying to account for both the public and private Coleridge, 'anyone who attempts to make sense of him must try to find a way of giving centrality to that constant sense of a divided consciousness.'23 In spite of moral and critical pronouncements on unity, Coleridge was a fluid character who exploited the ambiguity of language to say two or more things at once, and often in a way that is difficult to unravel. His selection of terms, as I have shown, often has less to do with a definite ideological intention than with a private tangle of associations. From his reading of Hartley in the 1790s, he had attested to the corporeality of thought.24 From the secret appeal Brown's phrase holds for him, we can tell he clearly has not abandoned that possibility entirely, leaving behind a vestige of his interest in a physical imagination. To note this one vestige of the Brunonian temptation is important, because from this point in Chapter 14 Coleridge begins his assessment of Wordsworth's 'Preface' and of the poems that characterize Wordsworth when he is indeed Wordsworth. This is the assessment that has served as the model for critical reading of poetry. It depends upon the history Coleridge provides of his intellectual life, as a promising poet and philosopher who extricated himself from the false - diseased - philosophy of associationism, but in so doing sacrificed his ability to write great poetry. As we have seen in a previous chapter, the history Coleridge provides serves the dual purpose of defining the literary critic qualified to read such philosophical poetry as Wordsworth's and of asserting that in creating the role for himself as critic he has cured himself. As we trace the vestige of Brunonian materialism in one of his central statements on transcendent critical doctrine, we see that to plot Coleridge's personal history as a progression from error and disease to enlightenment and health, conceals the repetitive performance of formulating and reformulating a public pose that accommodates his desired audience and retains signs of his own secret pleasures and pains. Coleridge's secret use of the Brunonian phrase in public venues illustrates how he habitually evades the authoritarian gaze of moral and cultural guardianship - even though he aspires to the role of guardian himself. The aim in using the phrase follows the therapeutic drive of 1808 of making public his addictions in order to attain the healthy unity that means so much to him. But in 1810 he does not just admit to his wish to use the phrase, he in fact does

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'dare use' it, albeit secretly, embedding it in a statement on transcendent unity between reader and poem. This secrecy raises large doubts about Coleridge's own claims. He is not, by using Brown's phrase, seeking merely to unify material, physiological experience with a spiritualist view of the mind, for he consistently tries to subordinate physical experience to an immaterial unity, making the poem, like the objects in nature, 'the physiognomy of the Being within' (LoL 1: 495), and separating himself from the materialist Lawrence, and referring to Brunonianism as the 'doctrine of death.' There is little reconciliation. The appropriation of the Brunonian phrase, and Coleridge's retention of it throughout the public works, provides a record of his secret temptations which shape his statements as much as his avowed sources.

Chapter 5

Schelling's Medical Singing School in the Yearbooks of Medicine as Science Even before Coleridge was secretly tempted by John Brown's terms, Schelling worked through his own struggle with Brunonianism in the texts that initiate his identity philosophy. So, just as the dubious doctrine plays a seminal role in English criticism, it also ironically sparks Schelling's most important thinking on consciousness, being, and history. In moving beyond Brown, Schelling transforms the Socratic definition of ethical space as spiritual depth into an open-ended song of material consciousness. This song is how he characterizes his alternative to the philosophical tradition stemming from Plato and culminating in the ego-centrism of the modern age. Schelling presents his song as the philosophical school that will obviate dichotomous divisions of subject and object, spirit and body, and consequently no longer require the exclusionary valuations of creative acts as healthy or diseased. In describing his song, however, he must also, just like his English contemporaries, rely on the gesture of curing his age - the gesture which effectively means accusing his opponents of constituting the sickness that he alone knows how to cure. This gesture has an important consequence for the philosophy that tries to keep its song open to the unforeseen; for, even at the moment of founding an alternative to the restrictive city of health, Schelling shapes identity philosophy around a prophylaxis that retains the standard of the singular absolute as the ideal of all value. Thus, although Schelling struggles toward an open-endedness and a model of material consciousness that would put an end to the singularity and transcendence of the Socratic city as standard of health, he ends -just as do his English counterparts - embracing a philosophical vision that remains exclusive and singular. And Brown's negative influence shapes the material consciousness in a way Schelling otherwise tries to avoid. Schelling's prophylaxis consists of re-orienting medicine and naturescience away from the one-sided materialism of Brunonianism and the restrictive spiritualism of the Socratic city, and toward an open-ended song of

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endless material creation. This song provides the emblem for the way Schelling would like to describe the world: expansive and conscious, without dichotomous divisions into objectivity and subjectivity or active stimulation and passive reception. The song also furthers his aspiration to devise the mythos of the new age, as he assigns interactive roles to chemical elements and light in the attempt to describe the world as a singular being that is active and conscious. And yet, because the song which should become the new mythos is presented as part of the prophylaxis, it foregoes its open-endedness from the start. Schelling desires mightily to redirect the Platonic theme of transcendent spiritual recognition into a revelation of the physical unity of apparently separate particulars. But, in the pointed expulsion of Brunonian medicine and its German proponent, Andreas Roschlaub, he unavoidably reaffirms the Socratic division of healthy and diseased poetry, and restricts his song to a predetermined range of health. So he provides an alternative to the Socratic scheme of health and disease qualitatively opposed as inner and outer, spirit and matter; but, at this stage of his thinking anyway - in 1805 - he cannot avoid the gesture of expelling an orientation he has determined to be false in order to purify his own. Schelling's involvement with John Brown's medical doctrine begins with the attempt to employ the innovations in chemistry for the purpose of resolving the Cartesian dichotomy of subject / object and mind / body. Schelling hopes briefly that Brown's principles of excitement and excitability will provide him with the basis for a description of the active creativity of existence and of human consciousness. Thus, in the First Projection of a System of Nature Philosophy of 1799, he comes to grips with the questions of organic being that dominate the Yearbooks of Medicine of 1805 as well as Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom in 1809 and The Ages of the World from 1811 onward. In each of these works, he takes up the issue of how being could have come to be in the first place, along with what he sees as essentially the same question, how material being could become conscious. By the time of the Yearbooks, Schelling has already tried to develop a speculative program based on Brown's theory, has attempted to put the theory to use on Caroline Schlegel's daughter - with disastrous results - and has finally moved beyond Brunonianism, though without being able to rid himself of its influence entirely.1 The Yearbooks does not express the moral outrage of Beddoes, or any of the anxiety of Coleridge. Rather, Schelling argues that Brunonianism is too narrow, characterizing it as one-sided materialism because it precludes any action on the part of the organism, and especially the self-conscious human organism, and because it fragments the world into unconnected particularities.

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On the other hand, Schelling resists any notion of a transcendent spirit, such as that adopted by Hegel or Coleridge as the means to unify particularities, since he believes that spirit, or a life force, would reinforce the Cartesian dualism that privileges the subject as the only living force of consciousness among material, unthinking objects. Schelling hopes to cure the diseases of Brown's one-sided materialism and the Cartesian dichotomy by describing a world that is unified and conscious in its materiality. Within the Yearbooks he attempts to achieve this end by combining Brown's two complementary elements of the active force of excitement and the receptive substance of excitability, he extends the combined notion of an active substance receptive to the world into his account of material being unfolding through three dimensions to become conscious of itself as a continual singing forth of self-creation. Although Schelling refers explicitly to the song in only one aphorism, the idea that being unfolds itself as a song (or poem) underlies his account of the chemical identity of individual consciousness and the absolute. His cure for both the disease of Cartesianism and Brunonian doctrine is therefore the school whose sole aim is to sing the song of creation. In this chapter I shall summarize Schelling's emergence from Brunonian medicine, focusing particularly on those aspects of the doctrine which attracted Schelling, and which he retained even after rejecting the overall system. I shall then detail his attempt to expand the positive elements of Brunonianism into the account of the three dimensions of physical, chemical being that give rise to consciousness. In venturing a medical and chemical doctrine of conscious life, Schelling emphasizes both the active quality and the materiality of all levels of existence, insisting that these two characteristics allow for an account of nonsubjective consciousness of the absolute. As we shall see, Schelling's thinking in the Yearbooks is devoted equally to describing how physical being can be active and conscious, and to asserting the identity of the individual and the absolute. So, after establishing the interdependence of these descriptions and assertions, I shall unravel the strange and complex description of the poetic singing school Schelling presents as the promise of the new age of science. And I shall close with the suggestion that Schelling reclaims the idealist restriction which becomes the self-interdiction he cannot wrest himself free of in order to write the history that consumes his thinking after 1809. The Student of John Brown and Andreas Roschlaub Beddoes' rejection of Brown and Brunonianism has its basis in the clinical perspective - focusing on the Scotsman's professional misbehavior and on the

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attempt to divorce medicine and medical authority from the clinic in favor of a theoretical perspective that reduces diagnosis to an inventory of the stimulants a patient had received prior to his or her illness. Schelling, in contrast, is first attracted by the theoretical stance of Brown's system, and subsequently turns from it as a faulty theory, but not because it is too theoretical. The Yearbooks serves the dual purpose of criticizing the simplistically oppositional view of health and disease inherent in the clinical practice of Roschlaub and expounding the general doctrine of identity philosophy as medical theory. While it might be easy to dismiss Schelling's discussion as an abandoned project,2 or as an altogether misguided effort that only segregated medicine and philosophy,3 to do so overlooks the importance that raising the question of what disease is holds for Schelling's later work. After the breakup of the Jena circle, Schelling traveled to Bamberg specifically to study Brunonian medicine with two of its major proponents in Germany, Andreas Roschlaub and Adalbert Marcus.4 Where he had previously denounced the Brunonian doctrine of excitement, which 'wrongly elevated all the material stimulating agents to the dignity of life-giving principles,'5 he began to see, from contact with Roschlaub, that the concept of excitability could supplant spiritual notions of a life force with an active substance or force that could possibly configure the identity of consciousness with being.6 Roschlaub had long been a proponent of Brown's system. He worked hard to clarify the account of excitement by giving it a more consistently scientific basis than Brown himself had managed. Roschlaub also divided medicine into the two branches of medical theory (die Heilkunde), and the practical application of doctrine, or clinical medicine (die Heilkunsf). Theory, Roschlaub argued, should concern itself with defining the states of health and disease, and with establishing the a priori principles on which a medical doctrine should function.7 Roschlaub saw in the notion of excitement the way to establish the idea that pathologies were due to deviations from the normal state which might be measured; and he believed that the real work of a medical theorist like Schelling should lie in determining the range of normality so that practitioners like himself might find the means of restoring the ill patient to that range. Even though Schelling rejects Roschlaub's privileging of clinical medicine, he retains the view that Brown made an important contribution to medical theory, and to philosophy generally. Thus, in the Yearbooks, where he stresses Brown's narrowness, Schelling insists that the doctrine's one-sidedness has served the vital function of opening inquiry into the objectivity of existence. In the previous decades, Schelling says, 'objects had become unfamiliar' as science concerned itself solely with the immaterial subject. But

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now Brown signifies 'the rebirth of science' in his attention to the distinctness of objects, which compels others to heed the outer world. And Schelling even goes so far as to say that the reality of material existence stressed in Brown's doctrine provides 'the point of certainty' for his own study (SW1\ 261). Along with the attention to objective beings, Brown's doctrine asserts the presence of the active forces of excitement through which beings influence one another. But having offered this encomium on Brown's importance, Schelling hastens to add that Brown, in paying attention to individual beings in the objective world, wholly neglects the unity of the individuals in a single organic world. This world for Schelling is active and self-generative, as natura naturans. Brown's emphasis on particularity provides the great service of reinstating the external world, and its materiality, in science; but the doctrine cannot find the way to establish real unity, bringing particularities into the unity of the material absolute. The active force of excitement through which Brown connects the particularities does not satisfy Schelling, who seeks a way of describing material being as inherently active. And Brown's nebulous excitability is a passive, receptive substance that, in Schelling's view, runs wholly counter to the notion of inherently active, unified being. For Schelling, the world must be active to allow for generation and consciousness. In his thinking, as we shall see, all of existence is one material being that actively unfolds itself into the particularities of the objective world; when this activity encounters itself, and recognizes itself, it has become conscious - or, rather, it has become consciousness. Brown's doctrine provides Schelling with the starting point for this view, but goes no further. If Schelling is initially attracted to Brown's doctrine of excitement as a possible explanation for material activity, he grows increasingly dissatisfied with its neglect of the receptive substance of excitability. Nonetheless, he attempts, while still under Roschlaub's tutelage, to develop the account of excitability from a passive receptive substance, as it is presented in Brown's doctrine, into an active force participating in the development of the organism and engaged with the environment. Toward that end, Schelling divides the original Brunonian concept into two principles, irritability and sensibility, to account both for how the physical organism regenerates itself through nutrition and receives impressions from without. Irritability regenerates the organism in the continual process of growth and expansion through the assimilation of nourishment. This is the 'productive activity itself (the formative drive [Bildungstrieb]).'* Sensibility is the process of receiving impressions that can be understood as sensory impressions. The two principles might be understood as reciprocal forces, therefore, irritability as the activity of the organism and sensibility as

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receptivity that limits activity and expansion. Schelling's aim in dividing Brown's force is twofold: first to eliminate the view of the organism as merely a passive receptor for the external force of excitement, and second to provide a means of describing the active organism as a reflection of creative nature. Schelling turns the individual into an active agent, and he tries to forge a link between that activity as physical motion and human consciousness. The division into two principles does not satisfy him, however, since that could allow only for a dichotomous conflict between expansion and contraction as opposed forces without any principle of resolution. He sees that Brunonian concepts even in this modified form are inadequate. In his decision to move beyond Brown's doctrine, he inevitably clashes with Roschlaub. When Roschlaub publishes his Entwurfeines Lehrbuches der allgemein Jaterie and ihrer Propddeutik in 1804, Schelling decides that the physician his former teacher - is no disciple. As Tsouyopoulos argues, Roschlaub, in this work, does not fully allow for Schelling's conception of medicine as speculative organicism which could treat patients at the level of ontological primordiality. She comments, 'Schelling cannot allow that Roschlaub be celebrated as the great reformer of medicine and also be the one who rejects the effectiveness of nature-philosophy for authentic medicine.'9 As Schelling grows increasingly dissatisfied with Brunonian doctrine on a theoretical level, he begins to think that Roschlaub should likewise redirect his clinical perspective. In effect, Schelling would have them exchange roles, with the sometime student guiding his mentor into nature philosophy. But, when Roschlaub remains a clinical Brunonian, Schelling focuses his dissatisfaction on him as the particular embodiment of Brunonian shortcomings. And yet the dissatisfaction points to graver problems in his own attempt to describe a way of thinking that avoids the trap of Cartesianism. As David Krell has pointed out, 'Schelling's criticisms of Brown's nosology . . . strike at the heart of Schelling's own philosophy of nature.' Even though Brown may have successfully argued, in the philosopher's view, that life is excitability, he could not explain what excitability actually i s . ' Schelling is convinced,' says Krell, 'that he is in a better position than Brown to investigate the physical sources of excitability- to leave the Brownian system behind by pushing on to the covert electrochemical and magnetic sources of its efficacy. The harder Schelling pushes, however, the more paradoxical life itself, the entire realm of the organic, becomes to him.'10 Nor can Schelling resolve that paradox, which centers on the two-dimensional definition of excitability as growth and restriction. As long as he limits his investigation to these two opposing dimensions, he is forced to admit the dualism he seeks to overcome both within the organism itself and in its interaction with the world.

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If, as Krell says, Schelling believes he is in a better position than Brown to investigate the physical causes of excitability, it is for the same reason that he breaks with Roschlaub and begins writing the essays of the Yearbooks. Brown and Roschlaub both focus on the technical aspect of medicine, on the treatment of particular diseases and on the gathering of information within the clinic. Roschlaub spurns Schelling's speculative version of nature philosophy because, as Tsouyopoulos states, he considers medical theory to be 'nothing more than the presupposition of therapy in the clinic.'11 As Schelling moves into his identity philosophy, he becomes less satisfied with the notion of a human individual as a receptor of external influences, and with the doctrine that reduces all diseases to the quantifiable influence of one external force on the organism. He retains the notion of existence as an active physical force, but begins trying to formulate his own description of the conscious individual unified with the physical world. Such a description, he hopes, will account for a consciousness of the absolute along the lines of electromagnetic forces in chemistry, since these forces will both obviate the need for the transcendent spirit and overcome Brown's one-sided materialism. In turning from Roschlaub, Schelling attempts to find the connection between excitability and an active concept of nature as natura naturans that does not isolate the individual organism as he believes excitability to do; at the same time, he avoids the spiritualism that necessarily ignores the active physical forces of nature, like electricity and magnetism. If the organism is constituted of the same active force as the natural environment, then it must be no less active and creative. With that simple identity, Schelling believes he might overcome the one-sidedness of Brunonianism. What is more, that identity might also be extended into an account of how organisms are conscious of the surrounding world; and such an account might then serve to explain the revelation of the absolute - understood as the entirety of chemical forces created and shaped by an electromagnetic Bildungstrieb - with human consciousness. In short, human consciousness could be identified directly with the absolute. Such an identity cast in terms of active self-generation is what we shall see Schelling attempt to capture in his singing school; the song of this identity, furthermore, unfolds as the materiality of consciousness. The Definition of Disease and the Materiality of Consciousness Schelling's initial task in the Yearbooks is to extend the principle of excitability beyond a simple oppositional duality, to identify it with the creative force of nature, to link the active force of organic life and consciousness with the rise of

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forms in the natural world. He combines the activity of Brunonian excitement with excitability to make the outer force of influence identical to the inner receptive substance. If the same force that makes corporeal being active, and human being conscious, can also be found to generate objective existence, then Schelling can define excitability as a real element - what Brown neglects to do - and establish the fundamental principle of identity between the conscious organism and the physical environment. Identity depends on the recognition of like by like, and on the fact that 'absolute identity of the subjective and objective cannot be a simple balance or synthesis, but only a completely singular being' (SW 7: 154). To determine the actual element of excitability and to find its corollary in the objective world would prove that perception and consciousness generally- functions as self-recognition, and as the creative activity of being. Schelling hopes to 'overcome the most obstinate habit of seeing nature simply as objectivity,' and thereby to prove that perception and being are the same (SW1\ 156). Toward this end, Schelling unfolds the series of correspondences between the elements of nature and 'active principles, which, imagined as the soul of the material, appear to be absorbed in corporeality' (SW1\ 279-81). These principles correspond with those he has already delineated in regard to the 'quality or essentiality of the organism,' which, he says, consists of'the identity of matter and light' (SW1: 270). He allows three possibilities for this identity, which altogether describe the principle of organic life and consciousness: the identity appears 'under the exponent of the real principle, as the formation of light in matter, or more under the ideal as the disintegration of matter into light, or finally as absolute integration of both.' If light can be understood as a pure energy, and matter as pure inert substance, then Schelling's statement accounts for the puzzling fact that in organic life matter becomes active and even conscious. These three possible modes of identity, then, frame the process of organic development from elemental formation at the chemical level to consciousness. Schelling makes this process more explicit when he goes on to state that the 'three possibilities correspond to the three material dimensions.' So the first, where 'light - the endless possibility- is bound to matter,' corresponds to reproduction. The second, where matter disintegrates into light, raising 'the possibility of other things as other,' corresponds to irritability. And the third, where light and matter 'are completely and absolutely one, the ideal is also completely united with the ideal of the other,' corresponds to sensibility (SW1\ 270-1). These three dimensions extend the earlier dichotomous account of excitability into the three material dimensions that govern the development of

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elements into a totality of organs and functions, and that enable the organism to engage actively with other beings in the world. This extension, from the opposing forces of expansion and contraction to the third dimension of total unification, enables Schelling to link his account of organic growth and individuation to the philosophy of identity in which like causes like, and consequently like recognizes like. The unification that occurs within the third dimension among apparently opposite elements makes consciousness - as recognition - into the same activity as physical development of the world. Thus he says, 'science has long sought the point where being encloses perception and perception being' (SW1: 152). Throughout this analysis, Schelling reminds us that, in considering the relation of the individual organism to the absolute totality, he is maintaining the speculative work of understanding what disease actually is - the work that distinguishes his theoretical medicine from Roschlaub's clinical medicine. So he says, 'in order to find when disease arises and what disease is, we must necessarily consider the organism not only as subject but as object; not only should we observe the general factors of life in it, but also their relation to the organic mass and their various forms' (SW1: 272). In order to determine what disease is, Schelling follows the Brunonian principle of considering the conscious being not as an interior ethical space, but as a physically active organism engaged in the environment; moreover, he does not simply examine the organism as the passive receptor, as Brown does, but as both a receptor and an active shaper of the environment. The relation between 'the general factors of life' and 'the organic mass' is that of the individual to the whole. The 'factors of life,' or the three dimensions of reproduction, irritability, and sensibility (and their correspondence to the interaction of light and matter), function within the organism and between the organism and the environmental whole. The speculative question of what disease is immediately leads Schelling beyond the clinical concerns with patients and the regulation of individuals. For him it is an ontological query, as the problem of how the activity of physical existence interrupts - or disorients - itself. By questioning what disease is, Schelling can focus at the same time on what the forces of creativity and influence are. And framing the question in terms of orientation leads him to the powerful considerations of evil, sin, and false consciousness in the 1809 Freedom Essay. In general, his question arises out of a view of the organism contrary to that which creates an ethical interior bounded from the outside; Schelling seeks to integrate the individual organism into the living physical structure of the world in the same way that light and matter are interfused into one another. By asking what disease is, he turns from Brown's definition of it

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as the effect of the rise or fall of external excitement. He asserts categorically in this regard that 'we cannot call health and disease the degree of strength by which the organism exists; rather we generally categorize them as existent or non-existent' (SW1: 267). As something that exists, disease must be traceable to the origin of being, and must constitute an aspect of being and consciousness itself rather than some force from beyond that attacks being. The first implication of the philosophy of identity is that if disease exists, it cannot do so apart from the rest of existence, but must be like that which it seems to oppose. Disease occurs in the same way anything else occurs. Brown's model had attracted Schelling for its assertion that health and disease result from the same influences and for its emphasis on the environment as activity. But, in the Yearbooks, he rejects Brown's model because it allows only a passive role for the organism and divides the absolute into individuals who stand apart from the environment in a subject-object opposition. And yet he retains the active quality of Brown's model, locating it in the excitability of the sensible organism. So Schelling rejects Brown's onesidedness while building his concept of a physical consciousness out of an activated version of Brunonian excitability. He also believes that if he can deduce the electrochemical elements that make up the excitable substance, he will be able to uncover the origin of disease. Toward that end he devotes his attention to thinking of how the excitable substance acquires the qualities that develop into consciousness. By adding to Brown's definition of excitability the activity that had been allowed only to the external environment, Schelling attempts to overcome what he sees as the primary flaw in the doctrine. This is the flaw that prevents Roschlaub's clinical perspective from being able to ask about the origin of disease. By making the organism into a distinct individual standing apart from the world of active forces, Brunonianism sets up a void between the organism and the world, which it tries to fill by emphasizing the relations between individual organisms. These relations, of course, consist of excitement, and the organisms dependent on this distinct force for contact with and knowledge of one another would never be able to achieve any direct influence. The excitement of Brunonian doctrine is a particularity in itself, according to Schelling, and thus already other and apart from the conscious organism. Thus 'no external influence can establish asthenia or hypersthenia in the organism without mediation' (SW 7: 276). In shifting the emphasis from the external force of excitement to excitability, and in reconceiving it as a dynamic force both shaping individuals and making them aware of the world, Schelling creates the principle through which the organism and environmental whole are immediately engaged with one another. In fact, the principle makes for more

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than 'engagement'; Schelling establishes excitability as the principle of direct identity of organism and environmental whole. He also changes the conscious organism from spiritual, ethical interiority to the physical activity of organic development. And organic development becomes a neutral term, since it can occur as either or both disease and health. To Schelling, the question of what excitability is necessarily parallels that of what disease is. For when the organism consists of the same elemental forces as the environment, it is not merely affected by disease coming from without as an invasion or as malevolent influence, or as restriction. Disease, in this view, does not consist of a singular agent moving on its own to influence the singular organism. Rather, disease constitutes an orientation of the forces themselves that make up both organism and environment. Like Brown, Schelling identifies disease and health as manifestations of the same force - namely active being. But, unlike Brown, he does not allow them to be merely the effects of an external power. Instead, he defines disease as one of the two possible orientations of being as it unfolds through the dimensions; when being within one dimension attempts to act as though it were in another, or simply does not perform appropriately for that dimension, it is disease. In the Freedom Essay of 1809, he extends this ontological definition, stating that disease occurs when the foundation of being attempts to enter existence on its own instead of properly residing in the hidden depths (PI41). As we shall see, when Schelling tries in The Ages of the World to account for the origin of being, the danger of revealing the hidden depths poses an insurmountable problem. Here in the Yearbooks he identifies disease as the improper activity of any one of the dimensions that constitute the continual coming into existence of being. Cure, as Schelling describes it, consists of adjusting, re-aligning the activity conducted in a certain dimension of the organism. Brown's formalism, which confines the definitions of disease and health to the numerical scale measuring relative degrees of excitement and excitability, can only account for quantitative changes in the organism. While the identification of disease with being avoids the idealist dichotomy of a qualitative opposition, Schelling still imposes a normative value so that disease arises when one dimension steps out of place before the others and obscures the identity with the all. He thus rejects the division of diseases according to excess or insufficiency of excitement, which governs the Brunonian notion of cure as the application of substances to raise or diminish the strength of the external influence and the amount of the resident receptive substance. 'No influence of any outside principle,' he says, 'can be directed toward its exciting quality, but only toward its relation to the dimensions; and certainly my axiom

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in this regard is that like causes like and no external principle works through its opposition with the organic matter' (SW1\ 277). For Schelling, disease raises the ontological problem of how the organism reflects the absolute, so that a pathological condition is one where the dimension is disoriented and the organism 'ceases to be the pure unclouded reflex of the All' (SW 7: 276). Through its disorientation, the individual acts on its own, as though it were a particularity without connection to existence in general. With this definition of disease, Schelling shows how his thinking on medicine is necessarily entwined with his views on the gathering of disciplines into a single 'formed state' (SW1: 141), and with the identity of the particular organism and the absolute.12 The disciplines correspond to different dimensions in the development of science, and thus should each perform within a given orientation. Early on in the 'Foreword to the Yearbooks,' Schelling lays out this driving principle of identity governing his thinking: As it is one nature which begets, drives, and governs everything ailpowerfully in its freedom, so to humans it must be one divinelyoverwhelming fundamental view of the spirit from which everything divine in science and art emerges. . . . So we must see how foolish it would be to require diversity among perspectives or intentionally to establish factions in the realm of beauty and truth. (SW1\133)

Medicine constitutes one aspect of nature philosophy, and in its investigations into the ontological origin and quality of disease and health, Schelling's speculative medicine must engage in questions of the absolute. The question about the disease and health of being immediately reflects the examination of the individual organism as the identity of the absolute, and in turn repeats the question of how the philosopher can have a direct and immediate knowledge of the absolute. The answer to both of these questions is the same, according to the principle of identity, that like causes like, and like recognizes like. The healthy philosopher recognizes the absolute through his or her own organic reflection of it. The elements that constitute the philosopher (who is simply the epitome of the cognizant being, not the one who alone can attain such awareness) allow him or her immediate contact with the same elements that constitute all of nature, assuming that the philosopher is properly oriented. To explain how immediate physical identity constitutes philosophical consciousness, Schelling turns to 'the basic elements of chemistry so that the action of external things on the organism can be determined insofar as they have a definite relation with the dimension of matter and the general dynamic

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activity' (SW 7: 279). In chemistry, Schelling looks for a description that transforms matter from inert stuff to an active, generative, physical unfolding of existence and consciousness. He labels Brunonianism one-sided because it does not identify the active generation of bodies with the external stimulative forces or with consciousness. So Brunonian matter is inert until acted upon, and individuals are never united into an active whole - the absolute. Schelling calls Brunonianism a 'merely formal construction of life-situations' because it reduces the relation between the organism and the environment to only one force that affects one substance; what Schelling himself seeks is a description that integrates the entire organism into the entirety of the environment. In Schelling's opinion, Brown cannot account for the all-important revelation of the absolute in consciousness. Without that revelation, of the all-in-one, consciousness occurs only within individuals comprehended as separate and distinct particularities, and it consists of the gaze outward toward particular beings. This is the concept of a universe fractured into isolated subjects and objects that Schelling most wants to resist, and that he attacks both the Cartesian and the clinical orientations for perpetuating. The chemical correspondence between the elements of nature and 'active and effective principles' provides the focus for Schelling's improvement on Brunonian medicine and, at the same time, for the explanation of how the revelation of the absolute can occur within human consciousness. These active principles, he says, 'appear to be absorbed in corporeality' (SW1: 280). They correspond to both the dimensions of conscious being and to specific chemical elements. Pursuing the connection between consciousness and elemental nature, Schelling can begin detailing his account of a non-transcendent revelation of the absolute in the specific and concrete terms of chemistry. Schelling starts by mapping out the correspondences between the three dimensions and the basic elements. Selfhood, that 'principle with which the thing is most able to hold itself together,' he connects to 'the actual principle of the earth,' carbon, 'which develops itself in the hardest, most rigid, and most compacted bodies of metals and plants' (SW1:280). Out of the decomposition of earth and the disintegration of selfhood and carbon, light breaks forth, signified by the 'innovators,' Schelling tells us, as hydrogen. These two 'necessary and conflicting' principles conceive the third by flowing together, not as a simple synthesis of them but as something that is just as original as they are in themselves. This 'triplicity' (Triplicitdf) constitutes a completeness, establishing a stable and determinate selfhood at the same time that it is able to relax the rigidity of self-definition into an active drive (Trieb). Schelling terms this triplicity the 'ectype,' that which follows from the prototype: 'This is the ectype in the actual role of the ectypal, in the original likeness, the animal, the

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living, which in this regard is also the most ready to absorb into itself the divine seed of the idea and to form itself into the most complete body' (SW1\ 280).13 The ectype unfolds from the prototype, but does not actually become wholly separate, as a copy would from its model, but remains partly involved in it as it has fully absorbed the divine seed from which it forms itself. The divine principles of carbonic selfhood and hydrogenous dynamism drive material being to unfold itself into the existent world. It is by laying out this chemical unfolding of the ectype that Schelling hopes to deduce the origins of existence. The Greek word, CKTUTIOC;, from which the admittedly obscure English 'ectype' is derived, refers to a figure carved in relief, so that it retains an attachment to its foundational element.14 The development of ectype from prototype occurs as a concatenation, so that each dimension arises out of the previous one without wholly separating itself. Thus the dimensions are not only interlocked, but are physical outgrowths of one another, and are therefore the same. And the organism that develops as a totality of organs and inner unity re-enacts the three dimensions both at the level of individual organs and in its totality. Body parts tend to reflect one dimension or the other, which is why different kinds of disease tend to affect different organs, and is also why different cures work best for different ailments. Since the dimensions grow out of each other, each one contains something of the other, however; so any organ or body part is always in direct contact with the other dimensions, and a diseased organ affects the entire body. Schelling maps out the ectypal concatenation of the organism in terms of the first two dimensions of reproduction and irritability, and traces the correspondence of these dimensions to the basic elements of carbon and hydrogen, and the forces of magnetism and electricity, gravity and light. He then turns his attention to oxygen, which is involved in all dimensions as 'the very principle of nature . . . [which] liberates life from its chains' (SW1\ 285). Because it is 'the consuming fire-soul which counteracts the three principles of nature' (SW1: 280-1), oxygen facilitates the different functions by allowing dimensions or organs to move counter to their usual tendency, but without disorienting them. So, for example, oxygen participates in reproduction by fluidizing nutrients in digestion. Similarly, oxygen participates at the level of irritability by expanding the arteries so that they may then contract to carry the blood. Oxygen is 'the very principle of nature' and enables the organs and parts of each dimension to fulfill their function by 'liberating' them from their inherent principle, and it thus can both animate and destroy (SW 7: 285). Oxygen facilitates the activity of being, impelling it from inert stuff to the organism actively growing in unity with itself.

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This description of oxygen as 'consuming fire-soul' and 'the very principle of nature' reveals that Schelling has taken one step beyond his earlier account of it as the combustion of matter into air. But it also reveals that, here in the Yearbooks, he retains the need for being to act contrary to its own development without disrupting that development. In other words, oxygen allows being to act diseased without being disease. Schelling's inability to free himself from such a contrary - even while rejecting Brunonianism for its dependence on delimiting contraries - provides one of the first signs of trouble in his drive to absolute unity. But for now, oxygen does not seem to delimit; instead it liberates particular elements or organs from their selfhood, from the inertia of isolation, so they can unite in the third dimension.15 Schelling considers the third dimension in terms of the unification of the first two, and only after lining up the correspondence of element, organ, function, disease, and cure of the first two dimensions. Once he has mapped out the concatenation of organs and body parts characterized by reproduction, he looks to the organism as a whole and describes sensibility: 'free contiguous beings of a totality of organs and complete inner unity of all together is the only distinguishing mark of sensibility, which also represents itself as the complete image of the way things are united in the universe' (SW 7: 286). In this statement he identifies the third dimension with the individual organism that constitutes a totality of organs, and at the same time with the unity of all beings in the universe. These beings are each in themselves a totality, and in this way distinct. But the totalities also exist as the concatenation of the first two dimensions, which implies that these beings constitute the selfhood which must be dissolved into another concatenation. All beings might then be said to be physically engaged with one another. My purpose in rehearsing the Yearbooks* account of the three dimensions and their correspondences to electromagnetism, chemical elements, and bodily functions is to show how closely Schelling tries to connect all beings. He does not eliminate all difference among beings, blithely casting them into the night in which all cows are gray, as Hegel famously charges. On the contrary, he tries to describe how beings are both separate and identical. The scheme of the dimensions repeating themselves into the concatenation allows him to claim that the most fundamental substance is no less active than the highest consciousness, and that they share the same substantiality and activity. So, when Schelling presents his view, elsewhere in the Yearbooks, on the revelation of the absolute, or the totality of the universe, it is with this chemical scheme of the three dimensions in mind. Revelation of the absolute in human thought (or, more accurately, through the gathering of all disciplines into the

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'formed state') is not intended as a transcendent, spiritual event. Rather it occurs, for Schelling, as the exposition of all beings in the concatenated connectedness. His accounts of philosophy - and especially the poetry of his singing school - are oriented entirely through the scheme of chemical connectedness; indeed, the song of the singing school is none other than the chemical concatenation of ectypes. Recognition, Obscurity, and Guidance in Schilling's Speculative Medicine One driving force in the break with Roschlaub emanates from the latter's view that medical theory plays a secondary role to practical, or clinical medicine. In criticizing Brown's one-sided materialism, Schelling also attacks his mentor's practical application of a doctrine that ignores the principle of unity and identity. Diseases, in the clinical view, consist of specific problems affecting the organism, and which are treated by identifying the singular cause; similarly, the patient stands before the physician as a self-contained individual involved in the natural environment only through the distinct forces - themselves particularized - moving from objects. The attacks on Roschlaub's clinical medicine culminate in a pair of aphorisms that combine the condemnation of one-sided materialism with an illustration of Schelling's corrective vision. These particular aphorisms are important on all levels of this study. Concluding the attack, they also reveal Schelling's idea of how poetry should participate in curing the illness of Cartesian subjectivity that had only been exacerbated by the one-sided materialism of Roschlaub and Brown. Schelling makes full use of the condensed aphoristic style to broaden the discursive directness of his attacks to a general critique of clinical observation, and at the same time to pose the speculative alternative as a dramatic revelation in its own right. The attack and Roschlaub are both absorbed into the textual density that turns this particular controversy into an enactment of the recognition of like by like. This vital recognition, along with the poetic school that becomes its emblem, reveals how the disciplines are to be gathered into the formed state of science, and just how beings are connected into the organic unity of the absolute. Schelling devotes the opening 'Aphorisms on the Introduction to Natural Philosophy,' which constitute the philosopher's first contribution to the Yearbooks, to distinguishing his perspective from that of Roschlaub, whom he never actually names, however. Schelling characterizes his own view as the revelation of genuine science, and Roschlaub's as a 'one-sided abstraction,' thus aligning it with Brown's one-sided materialism (SW1\ 145). The attacks

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on Roschlaub and clinical medicine set him up as the foil to speculative medicine, and, more broadly, as the representative of the technical orientation that sees individuals as distinct particularities rather than as concatenations of the absolute. Schelling underscores the contrast between Roschlaub's clinical perspective and his own speculative medicine at the end of the 'Introduction' by pointedly quoting from Plato's dialogue, the Sophist, on the distinction between the false and genuine philosophers: the former 'takes refuge in the darkness of not-being . . . and it is the darkness of the place that makes him so hard to perceive Whereas the philosopher... is difficult to see because his region is so bright, for the eye of the vulgar soul cannot endure to keep its gaze fixed on the divine.'16 Like the false and genuine philosophers, the false and genuine physicians resemble one another no more than Plato says the wolf and the dog do.17 As the proponent of clinical, and therefore false, medicine, Roschlaub fools himself and others into believing he cures illness by focusing on the individuals, amassing factual data about their habits in order to regulate their behavior. Just as the Stranger in Plato's dialogue places the sophist in the darkness of non-being, so Schelling finds the clinician 'where the light of revelation disappears, and people no longer recognize the thing out of the All but rather out of one another, not in unity but in division . . . : for these people science stands in a wide desert... counting grain after grain of sand in order to construct the universal' (SW 7: 140). By concerning itself with individuals rather than with how all beings are united into the absolute, clinical medicine has lost the light of revelation, which Schelling will restore with his speculative philosophy. The darkness of the clinical view affords only fragmentation and discord, both among the things in the world and among the disciplines. Thus in Schilling's opinion the clinician's drive to command a full view of the public space serves only to obscure the avenue to health, which lies in the unity of the absolute. The revelation of the absolute which Schelling desires and the clinician's gaze over the public space differ, we are to gather, in the orientation of the revelation away from the particularities occupying the clinical gaze. By reorienting science to its proper function of revealing the absolute, Schelling seeks to heal medicine along with all other disciplines. In revealing that all things belong to the absolute, Schelling hopes to achieve a dual aim: he first of all intends to unite the things themselves (which include humans), and second he looks forward to uniting the disciplines which have fallen into a 'war of meanings' (SW1: 140). Thus, his condemnation of Roschlaub's clinical medicine serves as a correction of science generally, prophylactically gathering the different disciplines into unity. The fault in clinical medicine is the same one that appears in all disciplines when they are diseased through

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disorientation: 'they are all false systems,' he says, 'they are degeneracy of art and the errancy of religion; the rebirth of all science and of all aspects of culture can begin only from the recognition of the All and its eternal unity' (SW 7: 141). By restoring 'the recognition of the All' as the focus of all disciplines, Schelling will return science generally to its proper orientation, and thus heal it and the entire age. His cure of science, and of all culture, follows the very same procedure that we have already seen him describing for individual diseases. The absolute reveals itself through the series of ectypal concatenations that constitute the three dimensions. I have summarized above Schelling's account of how the dimensions correspond to different chemical elements, electromagnetic forces, and body parts. Consciousness is but one more concatenation, as are the disciplines into which it shapes itself. Disease of the body Schelling defines as the faulty orientation of an organ or function, so that it does not perform in accord with its own dimension but with one to which it does not properly belong. Quite logically then, cure consists of restoring the organ or function to its proper orientation. Likewise, to achieve the cure of science, Schelling would resolve the conflict among the disciplines, restoring them each to their proper orientation. Science as a whole properly reveals how everything is unified in the absolute. The disciplines combined all together into a 'gathered life of science' reveal how all the different modes of thought and human activity, along with the 'elements and things of nature,' share a common identity in the revelation of the absolute (SW 7:141). Schelling's cure consists of establishing speculative philosophy as the operative mode of science orienting medicine along with all disciplines. Functioning as 'a system of recognition of the whole' (SW7: 143), speculative philosophy provides the guidance through which all disciplines can work together; for 'science itself has value only insofar as it is speculative' (SW7: 158). Recognition plays the central role in speculative philosophy as the means by which individuals and disciplines gather themselves. Schelling promotes it as the authentic, and healthful mode of consciousness throughout the works on identity philosophy. In contrast to the 'religion of observing singularities,' practiced in the clinic, he identifies his own science as 'recognition of the laws of the whole' (SW 7: 141). Throughout the Yearbooks and the identity philosophy, recognition fulfills the key function in Schelling's desired cure of medicine, philosophy, and poetry by directing the theory of consciousness toward revelation, which is the full and immediate disclosure of the absolute. Schelling does not describe recognition objectively as though it were a cognitive faculty like reason or imagination that might be delimited and assigned an ethical function alongside the other faculties. Instead, he chooses

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to demonstrate it actively working through the allusively obscure aphorisms that culminate the attack on Roschlaub. These aphorisms - numbers 23 though 28 - are one of many textual sites where Schelling compels his reader to decide how to read. Here the challenge arises through a compacted allusion to the Odyssey containing a secondary allusion to the Sophist, the same dialogue from which he quotes the passage on the obscurity of both true and false philosophers. The compactness of these allusions combines references to Plato and Homer to reorient the Socratic condemnation of Homeric poetry into the potentiality for a new poetic mode of philosophy. Like Coleridge, Schelling hopes to restore the unity of poetry and philosophy lost through the Socratic banishment. But unlike Coleridge, Schelling does not seek that unity in the regulatory power of the city of health; indeed, the poetry Schelling calls for would have the ability to end the reign of Socrates' city. Schelling extends Brown's dichotomy into the three dimensions to describe physical activity and to account for consciousness. He then invokes the somewhat mystical ability of Socrates to recognize a fellow philosopher even an unknown one from another city. But, by casting Socrates' power of recognition within the context of the delineation of material consciousness, Schelling dispels any mysticism, to make the supreme moment of Socratic revelation into a representation of active material being finding itself sharing common ground with what had seemed a distant object separated by time and inclination. After stating that religion, poetry, and philosophy each serves a particular aim and at the same time 'something higher than science,' Schelling then asks sharply, 'but has the higher something been attained because science has been bungled? Just as certainly as someone must be an excellent poet because he writes bad prose' (SW1\ 145). In aphorism 24, Schelling extends this attack on the bad writing of bad science by condemning the 'rhetorical trimmings' used by certain authors to conceal the weakness of their teaching; he says, 'such authors have mouthed to me the well-known vintage that has become with them nothing but the soured wine which they, as bad hosts, seek to help out with honey or sugar' (SW1\ 145). The author who doctors his bad writing to conceal the poverty of his science does not seek to enlighten his audience but rather to distract from the achievement of genuine science. The obscurity of Schelling's own prose, we are to infer, does indeed enlighten those choosing to read it in the proper orientation. Schelling is thus a good host, offering a challenging but just science, while the clinician is a bad host. In aphorism 26, he addresses the bad host directly as someone who has forsaken his or her proper orientation as a student (who should be understood as a kind of guest):

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Those whose consciousness condemns them most for being a student, so that they cry out most loudly over the constraints of a school and seek every advantage as a competitor, have planted themselves no differently in naturephilosophy than did the arrogant revelers in the house of Odysseus. No wonder that these insolent beggars who challenge Odysseus to a fistfight and always eat up scraps from his table are poorer in spirit than Irus. (SW1:145).

As we have seen, the initial point of dissension between Schelling and Roschlaub concerns what relation speculative and clinical medicine should properly hold to one another. Schelling believes his philosophy should open the way for all other disciplines to enter into the formed state; and he believes clinical medicine in particular should seek guidance from speculative medicine. His complaint here is that Roschlaub, his sometime mentor in Brunonian doctrine, chafes against being the student under Schelling's speculative tutelage. A student who tries to take over the role of teacher commits the same crime as the guest who takes over the host's house. Roschlaub the clinician should properly be hosted by speculative philosophy, and so he tries to conceal his own ineptitude as authorial host. The clinician has wholly disoriented himself, therefore, playing the bad host in what he serves to his guests, and, especially since he himself is the guest, Roschlaub has taken on the role of those 'arrogant revelers' - the suitors in the house of Odysseus. The scene from the Odyssey to which Schelling refers tells of the failure of the suitors to recognize Odysseus upon his return from Troy and ten-years' wandering. The suitors have shamelessly abused their position as guests, taking over the role of host by serving themselves and deciding who may partake in their unjust feast. When the proper host, Odysseus himself, appears in his own house dressed in rags, the beggar Irus threatens to throw the disguised hero out of the banquet hall. The suitors encourage Irus in his taunts to the ragged stranger, and egg the two on to fight, even offering to allow the victor to share their dinner. Odysseus naturally lays out Irus with one blow of his fist, causing the suitors to applaud with hilarity at this entertainment.18 Odysseus is described by Homer in this scene as looking 'like a dismal vagabond and an old man, / propping on a stick, and [wearing] foul clothing on his body.'19 When he appears on the threshold of the house, he is immediately insulted by Antinoos, the most presumptuous of the suitors, who complains that there are already 'enough other / vagabonds, and bothersome beggars to ruin our feasting.'20 After Odysseus says that Antinoos must be a bad host in his own house, since he now sits as a guest at another's and will not give a bit of bread away, the arrogant suitor throws a footstool at him.

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Antinoos' thoughtless violence against the man who appears to be only a wayward stranger is excessive even to the other suitors. An unnamed member of the party chides him: Antinoos, you did badly to hit the unhappy vagabond: a curse on you, if he turns out to be some god from heaven. For the gods do take on all sorts of transformations, appearing as strangers from elsewhere, and thus they range at large throughout the cities, watching to see which men keep the laws, and which are violent.21

Gods who disguise themselves to test humans appear all throughout Homer. The unnamed suitor's fear that Antinoos could call down a divine curse thus has merit, and certainly forebodes the just wrath of Odysseus. The ability to recognize a god commonly serves as a test of a mortal's character. Although it is not a god Antinoos fails to recognize, it is his proper host; and this failure signifies Antinoos' broader ethical failure. Antinoos, whose name puns on antinous, or anti-mind, epitomizes the bad host, the bad guest, and the thoughtless man who cannot recognize the man who is his rightful king. Schelling's reference to this scene replays all the elements in the attack on Roschlaub, the thoughtless clinician who cannot recognize the absolute, or the identity of the individuals he observes. Like Antinoos, Roschlaub is an antimind whose system of thought blinds him. But Schelling's reference to the homecoming scene goes further than criticism of Roschlaub's blindness, for through it Schelling calls up a teasing Socratic recognition. Through the quotation we have already examined at the end of the 'Introduction,' Schelling directly aligns the 'Introduction' with the Sophist in distinguishing genuine from false philosophy. That alignment comes to mind here in Schelling's pointed distinction of true and false science, since Socrates alludes to the same scene from the Odyssey when he first meets the Elean Stranger. At the opening of the Sophist, Socrates asks his friend, Theodorus, if the Stranger accompanying him is possibly a god disguised so that he might 'mark the orderly or lawless doings of mankind.'22 When Theodorus explains that the Stranger is not a god at all, but a philosopher, Socrates continues to jest, saying, 'the type you mention is hardly easier to discern than the god. Such men - the genuine, not the sham philosophers - as they go from city to city surveying from a height the life beneath them, appear, owing to the world's blindness, to wear all sorts of shapes.'23 Socrates' joke refers directly to the lines from Odysseus' homecoming where the anonymous suitor warns Antinoos that the

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strange new beggar could be a god in disguise. In making the joke, Socrates asserts that philosophers, like the gods, take many forms, and are therefore not easy to identify. He also implies that those who can recognize the genuine philosopher - like the Homeric hero who properly recognizes a god - must possess an ethical soundness. Recognition of a god, or a philosopher, is a test of a person's character. At Socrates' behest, the Stranger proceeds throughout the dialogue to distinguish the philosopher and the sophist - the false philosopher. As we have already seen in the passage Schelling quotes at the end of the 'Introduction,' the task is complicated by the difficulty of perceiving either one. Socrates'jest at the opening of the dialogue thus plays on the theme pursued by the Elean Stranger, of how to recognize the true character of someone. Socrates makes it pretty plain in his jest that he has already recognized that the Stranger himself is a philosopher even though they seem so unlike.24 The Stranger's own analysis distinguishes the genuine philosopher from the sophist, culminating in a dramatic recognition scene where the Elean proclaims, 'good gracious, Theaetetus, have we stumbled unawares upon the free man's knowledge and, in seeking for the sophist, chanced to find the philosopher first?'25 The sophists disguise themselves as philosophers, blurring the truth with a rhetoric that tricks people into 'thinking things contrary to things that are,' confusing nonbeing with being.26 As the passage Schelling quotes at the end of the 'Introduction' shows, both the sophist and the philosopher are hard to discern. But the ease with which Socrates recognizes the Stranger as a philosopher suggests that the truth is plain to those who know how to see. The dialogue as a whole, then, presents not only the distinctions between being and non-being, the philosopher and the sophist, but also the vital function of recognition. The indirect reference to Plato in these aphorisms, combined with the direct reference closing the 'Introduction,' underscores the contrast between the clinical medicine of Roschlaub and the speculative, theoretical medicine of Schelling. Roschlaub, like the sophists, creates an appearance of being a philosopher by confusing the truth through 'rhetorical trimmings.' Like a bad host, he obscures the paucity of his offering, which is merely a phantasm of knowledge. He finds his kin in both the suitors who infect Odysseus' home and the sophists who infect Athens. More generally, we might infer, clinical medicine represents the false science, which infects the disciplines as a whole by operating outside of its proper dimension - as do guests who act like hosts in somebody else's home. If Roschlaub represents the false side of the comparison, then Schelling and his speculative medicine must represent the true side, the genuine philosopher who is also difficult to perceive, but only to the vulgar mob who have been confused by the deceptive rhetoric of false science. If Schelling is

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on the proper side of the comparison, then, like Socrates, he seems obscure except to those familiar with true understanding. The obscurity of the aphorism encloses a recognition scene of the true philosopher, which depends on our ability to penetrate the obscurity of a double allusion, first to the suitors who fail to recognize their host, and second to Socrates who easily recognizes the Stranger as a true philosopher. In the Freedom Essay, Schelling restates his law of identity in a way that dispels this aphoristic obscurity completely: ' like is recognized by like,' and 'the philosopher . . . alone comprehends the god outside himself through the god within himself' (P/8). The philosopher alone can therefore recognize the philosopher. Only someone of heroic stature can recognize Odysseus when he has disguised himself; and only a genuine philosopher can recognize another when he appears as a stranger. This double allusion enacts the fundamental principle in the law of identity. The god within seeing itself in the god without recognizes an actual bond between the two beings who seem separate and distinct. Schelling emphasizes the materiality of this bond later in the Yearbooks when he says, 'each organic reality breaks out of the essence and innermost part of nature The organism as product behaves toward the substance as the object in which the substance recognizes itself (SW1: 265). This is to say that the ectype recognizes itself in the prototype, or in another ectype, because they are physically the same substance. The god within recognizes itself in the god without, because they are the same, as ectype to prototype. The philosopher who recognizes her or himself in what appears to be an object - or a stranger affirms her or his own connection to the absolute, for 'all perception is nothing other than affirming. Science has long sought the point where being encloses perception and perception being' (SW1: 152). Recognition can be understood as the revelation that the connection of consciousness to the objective world is that of an ectype to its prototype; the substance that forms both of them unfolds into the ectype in order to look back and recognize itself in the prototype. Recognition consists of the unfolding of the prototype beyond itself, and in this way constitutes the point where being and perception are identical. The structure of Schelling's allusion provides a model of the philosophical recognition. In his reference to the bad hosts who doctor their wine and the bad guests who cannot recognize their true host, Schelling summons the portrait of Socrates penetrating the strangeness of a foreigner to recognize that they are both compatriots, or rather guest-friends.27 The allusion to Homer provides the common ground that connects the Platonic dialogue distinguishing the true and false philosopher and the aphorism distinguishing the true and false physician.

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The effect of this textual play - in which we see the image of Socrates unfold from a Homeric allusion - is to align the reader with Schelling in the attack on Roschlaub. As we catch the reference to Odysseus' homecoming, and recall that Socrates alludes to the same scene and for much the same reason, we note the thematic similarity between the dialogue and the aphorisms. Schelling's reader becomes the active participant in the uncovering of the genuine philosopher, and Schelling's text becomes the site of that revelation. In recognizing the Platonic account of the genuine philosopher lurking within Schelling's aphorism, the reader experiences the recognition of a commonality within strangeness that follows Schelling's law of identity. This experience lies at the heart of the formed state, into which the speculative philosopher hopes to unite the disparate sciences. Schelling thus turns his text away from a description of an abstract idea of recognition, and leads his reader into a shared experience denied in Roschlaub's clinical science. The attack on Roschlaub is an attack on the false philosopher in general who cannot recognize his or her own prototypal being in what appears to be an object. The one who can is none other than the speculative philosopher who seeks to cure his age by showing all disciplines that they pursue the same knowledge, namely recognition of the absolute. Philosophy thus 'must turn itself into the whole age,' since Roschlaub's clinical doctrine proves that the blindness of Irus and Antinoos 'is the situation of our own time' (SW1\ 145). With his double allusion, Schelling makes it plain that Roschlaub is blind to the disease the clinician claims to cure. Roschlaub, Schelling implies, cannot recognize the identity among beings, because he grasps only their individual differences. Similarly, he examines his patients as though they were passive receptors influenced by Brown's external force of excitement, not the active participants in Schelling's allusively formed state. Roschlaub's medicine considers individuals bound through relations - such as the influence exerted on bodies by excitement - but otherwise distinct. And Roschlaub looks at his patients within the clinical setting as though they were objects, standing over and apart from his own subjective perspective. He cannot perceive the singular being unfolding ectypally through the dimensions, and therefore cannot perceive, or cure, the disease of disorientation. In Schelling's speculative performance revealing the identity of subject and object, Roschlaub's clinical view comes to represent the false philosophy - the false science - and a primary symptom of the Cartesian disease. Already, then, in 1805, Schelling is trying to turn from the notion that the philosopher serves as guardian, and, by implication, the notion that the physician serves as lynx-eyed regulator of the clinical space of health. Odysseus must purge his house of the disruptive suitors, and Schelling, in

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similar fashion, must purge his formed state of Roschlaub's one-sided blindness in order to make speculative philosophy 'into the whole age.9 The hope that philosophy will provide guidance into the proper orientation for the entire age leads Schelling to cast aphorism 28 as a question, the answer to which at last presents us with the explicit account of the singing school: Do I desire a school? Yes, but like the old schools of poets. So might those who share an enthusiasm in a similar taste continually sing \fortdichten} this eternal poem. Give me a few of the sort, as I have found them, and see that the future enthusiasts do not err, and I promise you someday the 6|ur| poc, (the uniting principle) for science as well. Toward this there would be no students, and likewise no masters. No one teaches the other or is endebted to the other, but each to the god who speaks out of all. (SW7: 145-6)

This school would appear to resolve the post-Cartesian problem of subjectivity, for no one would incur or impose the debt of obligation, and there would be no chafing against the restrictions of propriety. There would be no followers and no leaders, but only those who fully understand the proper equation of expression, being, and recognition as experienced in the double allusion. All the members of Schelling's school would be equal, singing together in the song of active recognition which is the creative unfolding of being. The 'eternal poem' on which the enthusiasts continually work constitutes the formed state of disciplines that recognize their common identity. It would also provide the expressive identity of being and perception Schelling says is the aim of all science, as the singers actively participate in the creation of conscious being. This creativity does not make something out of nothing, but unfolds the current age, or dimension, of conscious existence from the prototype of the 'eternal poem,' or the absolute. And the absolute is 'the god who speaks out of all,' recognizing itself in each of the enthusiasts. Schelling has prepared us for the account of his singing school by drawing us into the experience of recognition through his double allusion. Just as we find ourselves creatively unfolding the ancient image of Socrates recognizing himself in the Stranger, and in so doing manifest a new in-forming of the idealist philosopher in a text that privileges the physical, so the singers in Schelling's school recall the ancient poetry in a new age divested of teacher and student, host or guest. Schelling serves as a guide, following his own personal desire, into the new age of poetry that has freed itself of all the trappings of Cartesian subjectivity. And, through the subtlety of his allusion, Schelling brings both Socrates and Homer into his formed state of identity, dissolving the boundary Socrates imposed in his expulsion of Homer to the fields of disease. By linking disease and being at their origin, Schelling has

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already reoriented medical theory away from its dependence on the opposition between the normal and pathological. By bringing Socrates and Homer together, he allows philosophy to relinquish its role as guardian of health. Schelling uses the Greek word Homeros to play on Homer's name, thus indicating the kind of expression attained within his school of poetico-scientists. Homeros generally means a 'pledge' or 'surety,' so that Schelling is pledging that 'someday' science will be unified and all debts will be forgiven. Thus Homeros is the ancient promise of a time without guards or threats of violence and exhaustion - all that is a part of a usurious economy. Liddell and Scott note, in addition, that Homeros (6 Ojiiripoc;) 'was a Cumaean word for TU(|)X6