iago's malignity motivated: coleridge's unpublished "opus magnum"

George Washington University

Iago's Malignity Motivated: Coleridge's Unpublished "Opus Magnum"Author(s): Elinor S. ShafferSource: Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 19, No. 3 (Summer, 1968), pp. 195-203Published by: Folger Shakespeare Library in association with George Washington UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2867975 .

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Jago's Malignity Motivated: Coleridge's

Unpublished "Opus Magnum"

ELINOR S. SHAFFER

N one of the Notebooks belonging to the "Opus Magnum", the vast, complex, still unpublished work in which Coleridge attempted to incorporate and sum up the thinking of his lifetime, occur some further observations on the character of Iago.' These are of the greatest interest, not simply because any remarks of Coleridge on Shakespeare are interest-

ing, and particularly any that bear on the tragedies, but also because they occur in the context of Coleridge's most mature thought about the problems of evil and the maintenance of the self, and go to the heart of the romantic conception of tragedy.

They have the further interest, therefore, of showing very clearly what has not always been evident in Coleridge's published notes on the plays, the very close connection between Coleridge's metaphysical preoccupations and his practical criticism. It can nearly always be shown that Coleridge's luminous phrases represent a solution to a long and tangled history of debate over difficult questions. A famous dramatic example is "the willing suspension of disbelief"; but his works are compact of them, not so well documented as this.2 Coleridge's prose is like a dolphin, or perhaps even a whale: one can never be sure when a larger portion of the bulk will show itself, and when it will submerge altogether.

Here in the "Opus Magnum" is one instance at least in which the luminous critical phrases appear embedded in the philosophical considerations to which they owe their existence.3 These Notebooks, unlike most of Coleridge's

1 The name "Opus Magnum" is applied to a number of associated MSS. In what follows I shall be referring to the MS in the possession of Victoria College, Toronto. It should be remarked that these Notebooks have been misnumbered, so that "Book III" is actually the first book, and "Book I" the third. It should be remarked that these Notebooks have been misnumbered; whether "Book III" is actually the first book, and "Book I" the third, or whether Books II and III have been reversed, is still a matter of controversy. I shall adhere to the present faulty numbering as, in the absence of satisfactory editing, the least confusing procedure.

Scattered passages from these volumes have been published in Alice D. Snyder, Coleridge on Logic and Learning (New Haven, i929), John H. Muirhead, Coleridge As Philosopher (London, 1930), and elsewhere.

I am grateful to the Librarian of Reading University for allowing me access to the microfilm copy of the Victoria College MS, and to Mr. A. H. B. Coleridge for permission to quote from it.

2 In my article, "Coleridge's Theory of Aesthetic Interest", JAAC, in press, I have described another instance.

3 The editor of Coleridge's Shakespeare criticism held the view that Coleridge "cannot be said to succeed in his occasional violent efforts to engraft his metaphysical conceptions upon his criticism" (Thomas Middleton Raysor, ed., Shakespearean Criticism, 2nd ed. (London, i964), I, xli). Professor Rene Wellek has put forward similar views. To my mind, the "metaphysical conceptions" and the "criticism" are inseparable. Although such a question can scarcely be explored here, I hope this paper offers a persuasive illustration of their close relationship.



I96 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY

notebooks, are not made up of isolated jottings, but represent an attempt to compose a complete, connected treatment of his ideas, in short, the philosophical magnum opus he had promised under a variety of titles throughout his life.

The remarks specifically about Iago are not unfamiliar; their context for that very reason throws light on the whole mass of Coleridge's Shakespeare criticism. Coleridge himself calls attention to the generality of reference:

If in the present work we may without impropriety refer to the work of an author next to Holy Writ the most instructive, we would add that without the perception of this truth it is impossible to understand/ I might say Shakespeare generally, but more particularly / the character of Iago, who is represented as now assigning one & now another & again a third motive for his conduct, each a different motive and all alike the mere fictions of his own intellectual superiority & a vicious habit of assigning the precedence or primacy to the intellectual instead of the moral; and haunted by the love of exerting power on those especially who are his superiors in moral and practical estimation. Yet how many among our modern critics have attributed to the profound author this the appropriate inconsistency of the character itself.4

We recognize Coleridge's old emphases: the motive-hunting of Iago; the elevation of intellectual over moral values as a source of evil (Coleridge called attention to "the dreadful consequences of placing the moral in subordination to the intellectual" (Raysor, I, 205) as characterizing the whole series of "Machiavellian" figures-Richard III, the Bastard Falconbridge in King John, and Edmund, as well as the more ambiguous Falstaff); and the con- comitant desire to bring down moral superiors. As for the more general points, the consistency of Shakespeare is a recurrent theme of the romantic argument in favor of Shakespeare's "judgment" and conscious artistry; and it is subordinate to the still more general point that Shakespeare is ultimately moral and philosophical in significance.

But what is "this truth" without perceiving which Coleridge tells us we cannot understand either Shakespeare generally, or, more particularly, the character of Iago? It is here that we are drawn back to the general context of the argument of the "Opus Magnum", and it is here that we find a quantity of fresh light thrown on all these familiar matters.

We cannot, of course, even begin to indicate here the full scope of Cole- ridge's undertaking, much less assess it. The immediate context offers suf- ficient difficulty. It is a refutation of the theoretical possibility of basing morality on self-love, or what Coleridge pointed to in Iago as "the dreadful habit of thinking of moral feelings and qualities only as prudential ends to means" (Raysor, I, ii2). Coleridge's argument is a difficult one: it takes place as part of the controversy between, on the one hand, the sceptics, notably Hume, who claimed that the self is a kind of fiction, an unwarranted con- clusion from the "heap of perceptions" of which the mind is composed, and, on the other hand, Kant and, more extravagantly, the idealists, who suggested various versions of a fundamental self that could not be reduced to the flow of sense impressions. Coleridge argues that the self is indeed a kind of fig-

4"Opus Magnum", III, 56-57.



IAGO'S MALIGNITY MOTIVATED I97

ment, unless it is grounded in an idea of God which lends it reality; and that since there can be no rational proof of the existence of God, the idea can be attained only by a "good will" capable of accepting and acting upon a moral, rather than an intellectual premise. "Self-love" in asserting its separate, finite existence over against God precludes any such acceptance. Para- doxically, "Self-love", in separating the self from God, annihilates the self: for it is reduced to the disconnected and ephemeral passage of sense perceptions. Coleridge in the following passage sets Kant's version of the self, the "synthetic apperception" which unites sense impressions, against the Humean "semblance" or fiction of unity; he then interprets Kant in an idealist sense as assuming a self antecedent to all sense impressions.5

Thus Coleridge writes:

The doctors of Self-love are misled by the wrong or equivocal use of words. We love ourselves they say: now this is impossible for a finite being in the absolute meaning of the term Self for if by the "Self" we mean the principle of individuation the band or copula, which gives a real unity to all the complex products functions and faculties of an animal -a real unity, I say, in contradistinction from the mere semblance or total impression produced by an aggregate on the mind of the beholder and even from that combination of parts which originates and has its whole end and object in an internal agent, a unity different in short from that of a heap of corn or from a steam engine or other machine-it is manifest that the Self in this sense must be anterior to all our sensations &c and to all the objects, toward which they may be directed. ("Opus Magnum", III, 48-49)

Coleridge continues-and this is the crucial point for the characterization of Iago-by pointing out that the self has no direct access to itself, but recog- nizes itself only in and through the "contents" of consciousness. Here Cole- ridge adheres to the Kantian position that the self is simultaneous with and inextricable from its function of uniting sense impressions, as against the more extreme idealist view that a direct intuition of the self as such is possible. For Coleridge the self can be known only through its "representatives". 'Nothing can become an object of consciousness", he writes,

but by reflection, not even the things of perception. Now the Self is ever pre-supposed and like all other supersensual subjects can be made known to the Mind only by a representative: And again what that representative shall be is by no means unalterably fixed in human nature by nature itself; but on the contrary varies with the growth bodily, moral and intellectual of each individual. Even the combination of the sense of Touch and more strictly of Double-touch with the visual image of such parts of our body as we are able or accustomed to behold is so far from being the only possible representative of Self that it is not even the first in the earlier periods of infancy, the mother or the nurse is the Self of the child. ("Opus Magnum", III, 49)

This notion Coleridge expands at length in the next volume, showing how the original or anterior self-which exists although it cannot be known

The idealist interpretation is considered to run counter to Kant's own final intentions, although the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason gives considerable support to it.



198 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY

directly--comes to be obscured through the gradual objectification of experience in the infant and young child. The feelings, he says, are "alienated and estranged from their rightful objects" (II, 72), and manifest themselves in their contraries. The bodily image, that by which the mind represents its own unity in the imagination, is mistaken for the true self (II, 73).

This Self is indeed a mere phantom, and like all other images that recur so constantly as at no one time to attract any distinct and conscious attention is soon bedimmed into a mere blind feeling even as pictures degenerate into hieroglyphics, and these again into mere configurations that betray their origin only by exciting a portion of the same feelings as had been habitually associated with the primary forms, and the objects represented by them. .. . (II, 73-74)

This self is "the phantom by which the individual misrepresents the unity of his personal being" (II, 76). By constant association with this feeling, external objects acquire a false worth; and "the self borrows from the objects a sort of unnatural outwardness" (II, 77). "It becomes as it were a thing, and the habit commences of reflecting thereon as on a thing . . ." (II, 77).

Coleridge, in the passage on self-love, goes on to describe the effects of this process. His description owes much to Schelling's wholly metaphysical description of the developing Ich in the System des transzendentalen Idea- lismus, but Coleridge characteristically seeks confirmation in experience, and, by extension, in literature. He refers first to dreams for confirmation that such processes are familiar to us in experience. "And who has not experienced in dreams the attachment of our personal identity to forms the most remote from our own" (III, 50). We recall his comment on how self-confirmation is found in Shakespeare's art: ". . . in the plays of Shakespeare every man sees himself, without knowing that he does so: as in some of the phenomena of nature in the mist of the mountain, the traveller beholds his own figure, but the glory round the head distinguishes it from a mere vulgar copy" (Raysor, II, i3o).

In a striking image the MS continues:

All actions therefore which proceed directly from the individual without reflection as those of a hungry beast rushing to its food, all those in which the volition acts singly and immediately toward the object to be appro-. priated may be classed as selfish perhaps but have no pretence of the name of Self-love or as far as our reflection is supposed or as far as the simple perception of the object is taken as a substitute for reflection we ought to say that the food in the trough is the temporary Self of the hog i.e. that form with which the volition the thoughts and the sensations of the animal are united without any intermediate. In the absolute meaning of Self as the perpetual antecedent within us Self-love we repeat is incon- ceivable and in its secondary representative or symbolical meaning Self signifies only a less degree of distance a determination of value by distance and the comparative narrowness of our moral view. (III, 50)

Although this alienation from the true self is unavoidable, yet the "secondary" self need not necessarily become hog-like.

Even in this life of imperfection there is a state possible in which a man



IAGO'S MALIGNITY MOTIVATED I99

might truly say my Self loves A or B freely constituting the object i.e. the representative or objective Self (as distinguished from the primary originative and subjective Self) in whatever it wills to love, commands what it wills, & wills what it commands. Without this power indeed the commandment that we should love our neighbour as our Self and God more than either would be a mockery. (III, 51)

Coleridge gives considerably more attention to distinguishing between "Self-love and a Self that loves" (III, 51). For our purposes, an important point is that Self-love necessitates an "abandonment to its animal life", for it is determined from without by "the law of the senses and organization" (III, I51). "Hence the body becomes our Self . . ." (III, 50); this secondary self is dependent on "proximity" (III, 53). Genuine love, on the contrary, is freely chosen and not tied to space and time.

Having established the possibility of the self "objectifying" itself-finding its secondary or representative-in this way over a great moral range, Coleridge goes on to discuss motives, and how they are to be discovered and assessed.

Since we cannot inspect even our own self directly, it is very difficult to ascertain motive. Nevertheless, Coleridge denies that we need be reduced to the utilitarian's or behaviorist's method of measuring motives through assessing the relative separate strengths of externalized desires. Rather it is possible to spy out the central tendency of the character. Our question, Coleridge says, must be, "'What does he habitually wish?'" (III, 56). In this question is recognizable the interest in the "predominant passion" that runs through all his Shakespeare criticism, linking eighteenth-century psychology with the German emphasis on locating the "idea" of the play.

It is at this point in the discussion of motive that the passage already quoted on the character of Iago occurs. The method of seeking out all of Iago's declared motives and comparing their strengths is, in short, wholly useless as a means of comprehending Iago. The inconsistency of the character, Coleridge has said, is "appropriate"; and in the analysis of the self that we have just reviewed he has shown us the reason why. Iago's is a character thoroughly alienated from its true self,, a character whose "secondary self" is directed in fragmentary and unwilled fashion toward the passing things of the world. The true self destroyed, animal sensation and the "heap of perceptions" become dominant. The self casts itself outward, like the hog into its feeding-trough, onto proximate objects. The sensuality of Iago's character has often been noticed, and sometimes felt to be inconsistent with his "rationality". But it is clear from Coleridge's analysis that the two 'stand in the closest possible relationship. Objecting to the tendency to identify "the creator with the aggregate of his creatures" to which reason is brought by the impossibility of proving the existence of God, Coleridge cried out:

Vain Pride of Intellect! Mad Narcissus, that in barren Self-love trans- formed thyself to Form without Substance, Surface without depth, the Object a Shadow, and the Subject the Notion of a Shadow! Whence did this Nothing acquire a plural number? From the Senses? But this either confutes the assumption, or virtually repeating it substitutes the problem itself for the solution of the problem. In each sense the forms are num- berless: & whence the number, and the diversity of the Senses, that




multiply or rather transnihilate the absolute Something into the Universe of Nothings? And what is that inward Mirror, in and for which these Nothings have at least a relative reality? Or dost thou wait till Pain and Anguish and Remorse with moody scorn ask thee: And are we Nothings? (III, 37)

The intellect, then, the modern intellect-what Coleridge elsewhere was wont to call "the understanding"-is precisely the intellect alienated from the true self, the intellect which casts about among the mere phenomena, the empty appearances of the world, seeking connective links which cannot be located there. Through the pride of intellect it is disabled from the task of intellect: to create an ordered, coherent universe. This can only be accomplished through a moral postulate. This interpretation supports and explains the prominence of the handkerchief. Coleridge praised Shakespeare as "the man who from a handkerchief can weave a dreadful tissue of human calamity" (Raysor, II, 63); it signifies not only the genius of the playwright, but the particular nihilism of the self-alienated whose self lies only in such flimsy sensuous appearances.

Such are the tenuous grounds of this falsified self. Coleridge gives us a profound confirmation of Bradley's judgment of Iago:

His fate-which is himself-has completely mastered him: so that, in the later scenes, where the improbability of the entire success of a design built on so many different falsehoods forces itself on the reader, Tago appears for moments not as a consummate schemer, but as a man abso- lutely infatuated and delivered over to certain destruction.6

Through Coleridge's Shakespeare criticism runs like a refrain the diagnosis "pride of intellect, without moral feeling", and its concomitants, contempt for others, and a strong desire to make dupes of the morally superior. This psychology, which Coleridge has described with so much insight into the inner connections of its various manifestations, is ultimately grounded in the attempt in the "Opus Magnum" to show that indispensable to all exercise of intellect is a moral (rationally unprovable) assumption. The false intellect of self-love necessarily falls into contradiction, for contradiction is by definition the mark of false reasoning. He who most relies on his self-will has no will, but is the myriad reflection of a chaotic world. This is the inward form of tragedy.

All the characteristics, then, of the "Machiavel"-rationality, self-interest, hypocrisy, cunning, expediency, efficiency-can be seen to fall into place under Coleridge's interpretation. Hypocrisy in particular is illuminated, and we are not surprised that Coleridge discussed it in the "Opus Magnum" following his remarks on Iago. The objectified self necessarily finds most congenial to it a semblance, a disguise, indeed, a series of them. It becomes clear why hypocrisy so often appears not merely a rationally assumed cloak, but a spontaneous, unavoidable, almost pathological feature of Shakespeare's Machiavels: one thinks of Richard III's wit, and of course of Hamlet, with whom many critics have felt drawn to compare Iago.7

6 A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (Cleveland, I955), p. i88. 7 William Empson in his essay, "Honest in Othello", remarks in passing on the parallel be-

tween Iago and Hamlet: ". . . he seems to be wondering what his motives for action can be,



IAGO'S MALIGNITY MOTIVATED 20I

Returning to Coleridge's earlier critical remarks on Othello, we find that the conception of the self set out in the "Opus Magnum" unites them into a complete interpretation of the play. It becomes evident that Leavis' attack on Coleridge (and Bradley) for "subtilization and exaltation of the lago-devil (with consequent subordination of Othello)" is quite unjustified.8 On the contrary, Iago is put firmly in his place; Coleridge never, and least of all here, exalts this kind of mind. The "Opus Magnum" passages, moreover, suggest the sense in which Iago and Othello are inseparable: if Iago represents the last extreme of self-alienation, Othello represents the process by which this alienation step by step takes place. Iago is Othello's "objectified self", his self weaned from its own truth. Othello, like the infant and young child in Cole- ridge's account, is led out into the shadows and surfaces of the world. The interest, then, is placed clearly where it belongs, on Othello's experience.

Othello is the "noble Moor" in that he continues to represent the potentiality of the self for truth even as he abandons it. Without this trace of the innocent and child-like in Othello, without this reminiscence of nobility, the tragic force of his downfall would be dissipated, and the play become indeed, as G. Wilson Knight held, "a story of intrigue rather than a visionary statement"Y9 For Coleridge, the play is a visionary statement; yet his Othello is as far as possible from any static nobility. Othello is driven inch by inch, scene by scene from himself, and never recovers. The overblown, false rhetoric that T. S. Eliot unerringly spotted in Othello's final speech, while it effec- tively recalls the lost potentiality, is precisely the language of the "secondary" self in degradation, empty, hypocritical, self-deluding, the language of "the human will to see things as they are not."'0 Coleridge's comment on the speech (defending the reading "like the base Indian"), while demonstrating his sym- pathy with the false position Othello necessarily finds himself in and his consequent "struggle of feeling" (Raysor, I, 49)-what Eliot calls the "terrible exposure of human weakness-of universal human weakness" (p. I30)- indicates the same perception: "Othello wishes to excuse himself on the score of ignorance, and yet not to excuse himself-to excuse himself by accusing" (Raysor, I, 49).

In so far as Iago is considered a separate person from Othello, he too is credited with the potentiality for the good self, however remote from his present character, which ultimately explains his own self-deception: "The last speech [Iago's soliloquy], the motive-hunting of motiveless malignity-

almost as Hamlet wonders what his motives can be for inaction." In a footnote on this sen- tence, he adds, "One might indeed claim that Iago is a satire on the holy thought of Polonius-'To thine own self be true . . . thou canst not then be false to any man.'" (Quoted in Laurence Lerner, ed., Shakespeare's Tragedies (Penguin Books, i963), pp. ii6-iI7.

John Danby has elaborated on this theme in his discussion of Machiavel figures in Shakespeare's Doctrine of Nature (London, I949).

Bradley, too, made the comparison, but in a largely negative sense: ". . . compare him with Hamlet, and you perceive how miserably close is his intellectual horizon . . . " (Shakespearean Tragedy, p. I9I).

8 F. R. Leavis, "Diabolic Intellect and the Noble Hero," The Common Pursuit (London, i962), p. I40.

9 G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire (London, I948), p. I07. 10 T. S. Eliot, "Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca", Selected Essays (London, I932),

p. I3V.




how awful! In itself fiendish; while yet he was, allowed to wear the divine image, too fiendish for his own steady view" (Raysor, I, 44). Although beau- tifully differentiated, Othello's and Iago's is equally the rhetoric of the alienated self still sufficiently capable of a reminiscence of an alternative to require to delude itself with "excuses" or "motives".

The meaning of Coleridge's insistence, sometimes held to be "sentimental", if not simply inexplicable, that Othello is not jealous, that his "high honor" (Raysor, I, iii) is "above all low passions" (Raysor, I, 43), also becomes evident. Othello, in so far as he represents the genuine self before alienation ("the true Othello's not jealous character", Raysor, I, 47), cannot be a victim of an animal passion. This does not mean that Othello does not display jealousy as the play unfolds; it means, as Coleridge pointed out in his extended comparison of Leontes with Othello, that Leontes exhibited what Othello did not, jealousy as "a vice of the mind, a culpable despicable tendency" (Raysor, I, iio). This raises the problem, to what extent the alienation of the self can proceed through a course unnatural to it. Coleridge seems to suggest that alienation may proceed through any passion whatsoever; the circumstances in which it emerges are related not to any natural flaw, but to the natural virtue of the character: thus it is Othello's trust in Desdemona that provides the occasion for the operation of the passion of jealousy. To a large extent the difference between Othello and Leontes must be seen in the early scenes of the plays; but this is in conformity with romantic critical practice. Coleridge accepts the "given" of the opening scene of Lear in the same way, not in Stoll's fashion, but as laying down "these facts, these passions, these moral verities, on which the whole tragedy is founded" (Raysor, I, 50).

Desdemona, of course, represents the "object" onto which Othello ought to have willed to cast himself: the love that, in Coleridge's platonic parable, helps to restore the self, as against the shred of appearance. Coleridge, we remember, calls attention to the scene in which the sight of Desdemona drives away Othello's suspicion: "If she be false, 0, then heaven mocks itself!/ I'll not believe 't", commenting, "Divine! the effect of innocence and the better genius" (Raysor, I, 48). Thus what Othello's self might have been is set against what it becomes; Desdemona's every appearance serves as a reminder of this, prolonging the effect of their first appearance together.

Coleridge's insistence that Cassio's praise of Desdemona is "warm-hearted, yet perfectly disengaged" (Raysor, I, 46) perhaps carries his defense of the mutual love of Othello and Desdemona a step further than necessary, like the "struggle of courtesy in Desdemona to abstract her attention" (Raysor, I, 47) long enough to exchange pleasantries with Cassio; but it is at least a reasonable extension of Desdemona's truth.

Even the more minor characters as they were earlier described by Coleridge confirm the interpretation, and indeed, as so often in romantic Shakespeare criticism, give at the very outset the tone-color of the whole, and provide a variation on the theme. We recall his comment on the opening scene of the play:

The admirable preparation, so characteristic of Shakespeare, in the intro-



IAGO'S MALIGNITY MOTIVATED 203

duction of Roderigo as the dupe on whom Iago first exercises his art, and in so doing displays his own character. Roderigo [is] already fitted and predisposed [to be a dupe] by his own passions-without any fixed principle or strength of character (the want of character and the power of the passions,-like the wind loudest in empty houses, form his character)-but yet not without the moral notions and sympathies with honor which his rank, connections had hung upon him. The very three first lines happily state the nature and foundation of the friendship-the purse

as well [as] the contrast of Roderigo's intemperance of mind with Iago's coolness, the coolness of a preconceiving experimenter. (Raysor, I, 42)

Roderigo, then, is described as the arena of the play, the space in which it is enacted, as Herder described the world of Lear: the emptied self through which the loud winds of passion can blow onto a series of trivial and worthless objects of the world-here the purse, as later the handkerchief, impelled by the experimenter's vain intellect, itself a passion in the empty house.

These earlier comments on Roderigo employed the imagery of the glass of the "mad Narcissus" passage of the "Opus Magnum", though in much less extended and brilliant fashion: "[I]n what follows, let the reader feel how by and thro' the glass of two passions, disappointed passion and envy, the very vices he is complaining of are made to act upon him as so many excel- lences, and the more appropriately, because cunning is always admired and wished for by minds conscious of inward weakness" (Raysor, I, 41-42). And there follows another superb image of alienation: "And yet it is but half-it acts like music on an inattentive auditor, swelling the thoughts which prevent him from listening to it" (Raysor, I, 42). Coleridge emphasizes again and again the specious quality of these "objectified" selves. One can imagine a production using a setting of baroque mirrors, dominated by a statue like the one that for Ruskin symbolized the corruption of Venice, the tomb effigy of the pestilential Doge Andrea Vendramin, carved only on the outward side intended to be seen, its face "made monstrous by its semi-sculpture."1'

So at the end the great colossus of Othello stands, emptied of self and finally of passions as well, sucked hollow by his Iago. As the last act ends, the soul, fled into the "fertile trifles" (Raysor, I, 47) of the world, rises from them again like the specters from the dead men's bodies in "The Ancient Mariner" to begin the homeward journey.

In closing, we may say of Coleridge what he said of Shakespeare, in distinguishing meditation from mere observation: the meditative mind "having formed a theory and a system upon its own nature, remarks all things that are examples of its truth, confirming it' in that truth, and, above all, enabling it to convey the truths of philosophy, as mere effects derived from, what we may call, the outward watchings of life" (Raysor, I, 9i).

Lucy Cavendish College Cambridge

11 John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice (London, I902), I, 28.



iago's malignity motivated: coleridge's unpublished "opus magnum"

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