Seamus Perry, Coleridge and the Uses of Division. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1999. ISBN: 0-19-818397-6. Price: £45 (US$72).

Recently, Coleridge has been well served by his interpreters. Richard Holmes has provided a good solution to the problem of writing the second portion of his life: where previous biographers had found themselves somehow shoe-horned into chronicling a steady series of illnesses and disasters until they themselves lost patience with a man who seemed unable to organize his life better, Holmes saw that it was much more rewarding to view Coleridge as a figure of amazing resilience, able to rise as from the dead over and over again. The question why we should regard him as important in the first place tended to be left on one side, as something we should take for granted. Seamus Perry, on the other hand, makes the second issue his point of departure. He also has it in mind that attempts to demonstrate Coleridge's consistency often founder on his frequent apparent desire to have things both ways. Taking his cue from John Bayley's The Uses of Division, Perry turns this apparent weakness around, proceeding to argue that attention to it can, on the contrary, furnish a central key to Coleridge's importance. Among other things, Perry dwells on the element of 'muddle' and the degree to which muddle can be a fruitful condition. The 'muddle' of a supposedly muddle-headed person may in fact lie not in his head but in the confused agglomeration of the world he is trying to understand. (He quotes E. M. Forster: 'This approaching triumph of India was a muddle (as we call it)'; there are many more reflections on the word—in counterpoint but not ultimately in contradiction to his view—across the rest of Forster's work.) Despite the existence of superficial justifications for dismissal of his work Perry still wonders, with George Watson, at the long-standing tendency to 'patronize' Coleridge and builds on Rosemary Ashton's perception that before accepting adverse criticisms too readily one might notice how often he is beforehand with his critics—even wording their criticisms more eloquently before they can get to them. Instead of the clear-cut set of positions that critics vainly look for he finds lived-through contradictions, each term being of value—and sometimes giving place to a (more tentative) third position. As a young man Coleridge was fond of the speculative expression 'And what if. . . '; Perry finds an even more telling turn in his frequent 'And yet. . .'s, where, having acknowledged the strength of a counter-argument, he still finds that unsatisfactory, also. If attitudes to Coleridge have softened in recent times this may be associated with publication at full length of the Notebooks. The Letters too were valuable—but an ambiguous gift. Expressing as they do Coleridge's tendency to project himself sympathetically yet also ingratiatingly, they can be a source of embarrassment to later readers when they show how their author, little dreaming that all of them would be preserved, can indulge in useful evasions or happy confabulations which will eventually be exposed to a Last Judgment from the later reader. Norman Fruman, pouncing on some of them, was able to produce an indictment of his misdemeanours that would hold back the development of more positive views of his reputation for a generation. The Notebooks are a different matter. There Coleridge is more consistently honest—regarding them indeed as confidants with whom he can afford to be frank: 'to whom but thee, white-faced Friend & comforting Pandect. . . have I the power of disburthening my soul?'. (It is true that Fruman at one point suggested that he might have been faking even his dream-records, but I do not think anyone has ever taken that …