"Like a Guilty Thing Surprised": Deconstruction, Coleridge, and the Apostasy of Criticism

the deconstruction of deconstruction will reveal, against apparent intention, a tacit political agenda after all, one that can only embarrass deconstruction, particularly its younger proponents whose activist experiences within the socially wrenching upheavals of the 1960s and early 1970s will surely not permit them easily to relax, without guilt and self-hatred, into resignation and ivory tower despair. [CSC, p. 40]

Schelling's model of dynamic polarity purged of its pantheistic implications. Specifically, he aimed to avoid the Schellingian error of the "establishment of Polarity in the Absolute.""12 At first Coleridge hoped to find an alternative to Schelling in Bohme. His marginalia record his disappointment: "As I read on, I have found that this first Chapter [of the Mysterium Magnum] is a deceptive Promise: that Behmen soon deviates into his original error ... and places the polarities in the Deity, [making] them eternal." In other words, Bohme is guilty of an "anticipation of the Apostasis in the Stasis" (M 1:678, entry 158). The terms are important. Coleridge has come to regard apostasis as the crucial articulation of a cosmogonic paradigm that would take account of the law of polarity and yet preserve the determinant, singular unity of an absolute which is not nature, not, that is, the mere copula or exponent of polar energies. Immediately following this arcane deduction Coleridge asks the question which must be in the mind of every uninitiated reader: "Well but what is the use of all this?" My answer is not the same as his. The use, clear from our neo-Hazlittian perspective, lies in the transformation of "Once an Apostate and always an Apostate" into a cosmogonic crux. Apostasy is the crucial, or rather, the critical stage of Coleridge's paradigm because it is the first break in the stasis that precedes all paradigms, the standing away that precipitates the creation. The first move, apostasy is also the essential move-a move in the service of essence; for only the standing off permits the manifestation of the godhead--either as stasis or as what, in the marginalia on Bohme, Coleridge calls Prothesis: For in God the Prothesis is not manifested for itself, but only in the Fountain which he is from all eternity because he never can subsist but with the Light in the bosom of the Fountain, whence proceeds the Spirit. But in the Creation as conditioned by the Fall of, Apostasis, the Prothesis is manifested as the Hardness, the Apostasy is, then, that once, the detachment or fall of man from the divine that was originally his base, as it also is, in a curious sense, that always-for the continual standing forth of man's will is a continual apostasy that reenacts his providential fall--providential because, though a fall, it manifests the divine stasis and promises the anastatic return of the human to that eternal light. Although proved on the ragged pulse of Coleridge's social and political life, his apostasy is supposedly redeemed when referred to the life of that life, that "I am," which is the finite repetition of "the All-might, which God's Will is, and which he knoweth within himself as the Abyss of his Being-the eternal Act of Self-constitution" (M 1:659, entry 135), and which endows all human action with meaning. Coleridge's metaphysics could be read as a transcendental excuse for the moral weakness of the political journalist-one example among many of the Coleridgean aptitude for turning diseases into pearls and a maneuver not less effective for its transparency.'5 From that perspective Coleridge's super-Bohmenist paradigm does not so much rebut the indictments of Thompson and Hazlitt as annul them by referring them to a higher court, preserve of a purer, more categorical law.
If this sublimation thwarts the attacks of the Hazlittian line, it is, however, also the move that invites the intervention of the deconstructionist. Without mounting a full-scale assault it is possible to outline the procedures that would be undertaken to problematize the authority of the metaphysical construct on which Coleridge relies. They would consist of a criticism of the enabling distinction between an absolute stasis and a consequent but completely distinct polarity, a disenfranchisement of the priority given to the former over the latter, and a challenge to the unity of the one as well as to the bivalence of the other. There would follow an exploitation of the dependence of the system on a difference (that between stasis and apostasis) which is not a polarity, a probing of the infelicitous reliance of the absolute on the fall for its very manifestation. The plot would inexorably ravel toward the conclusion that the metaphysical necessity of this movement to the outside is not something that accidentally befalls the absolute stasis but the genetic destiny of a logos that is always only a formation by virtue of that which is about to be extrinsic to it.
The certainty that a deconstruction could be carried out makes the execution unnecessary. Such a supplemental maneuver would only confirm that Coleridge's plot had already provided for its deconstruction, that deconstruction is just another version of the apostasy which Coleridge has already embraced. Supplementarity is Coleridge's device as the margin is his home. To put it another way, metaphysics or philosophical criticism was for Coleridge both apostatic, an ostensible turn away from political Critical Inquiry Summer 1986 775 activism and poetic ambition, and an apology for apostasy as the prerequisite for critical reflection, indeed, as the preliminary and continual "Act of Self-constitution" which grounds all meaningful action. The pattern for Coleridge's strategic apostasy was neither Schelling nor Kant but Edmund Burke, in whose "writings indeed the germs of almost all political truths may be found" (BL 1:217) and whose Reflections on the Revolution in France is the chief eighteenth-century instance of the deployment of the apostatic trope. Here again, my concern is not partisan nagging; I do not care to judge whether Burke actually reversed his earlier political principles. In retrospect, far from the hurly-burly pamphletmongering of reform and reaction, the distinctive achievement of Burke's Reflections, that which makes a certain kind of historical reflection-call it Burkean-possible, is his promulgation of the idea of an ancient constitution. For Burke, as J. G. A. Pocock has convincingly argued, the ancient, prescriptive constitution "has two characteristics: it is immemorialand this is what makes it prescriptive and gives it authority as a constitution-and it is customary."16 Nowhere detectable by the physical eye, the constitution is, like our revered forefathers, all the more imperiously present by virtue of its empirical absence. The idea of the ancient constitution presupposes an aboriginal law from which Englishmen have necessarily fallen-not morally, as Pocock shows, but historically and hermeneutically, in what Burke calls a "liberal descent" (R, p. 121).17 Descent produces the metaphor of genealogical connection but also functions as a metonym which inscribes the irreducible distance that makes it both possible and necessary that men act "upon the principle of reference to antiquity" (R, p. 117). Englishmen can never hope to be those fathers, nor could their fathers or theirs hope to be those fathers who are constitutionally already there before them. The absoluteness of the paternal anteriority, however, is the precondition for a liberal descent. Descent succeeds to a primordial detachment of son from father, reader from writer, which inscribes a contingency in the relation between the present and the past, thereby requiring that any necessity in the connection between past and present be adduced retrospectively, chosen by the son rather than imposed by the father. "We wished," writes Burke, "at the period of the Revolution, and do now wish, to derive all we possess as an inheritance from our forefathers" (R, p. 117). The emphasis should fall not on "inheritance" but on "wish" and "derive." Wishes may not be horses, but in the absence of any father except the one he imagines, even the most beggarly Englishman (or Irishman) can ride his wishes into an inheritance that is wholly his option, that is, indeed, nothing other than his interpretation of it: in "this choice of inheritance we have given to our frame of polity the image of a relation in blood; binding up the constitution of our country with our dearest domestic ties"; we "have chosen our nature rather than our speculations, our breasts rather than our inventions, for the great conservatories and magazines of our rights and privileges" (R, The Apostasy of Criticism pp. 120, 121; my emphasis). The aporia between the static and immanent grammar of an absolute law and its performative application to particulars, which de Man has analyzed in Rousseau's Social Contract,18 is exactly the dynamic by which Burke's text and Burke's nation thrive. The distance between the law and its application, as between the father and the son or between the ancient constitution and contemporary cases, is that distance which we have descended consequent upon our turn from grammar, from law, from the past, and which enables us, apostates all, to return in the full force of our wishful derivations, to return in a reading of the history of our descent, a history that is always ancient but which would not be there to be read had we not figured it through our apostasy.
Each man-child is born into this chartered island as a reader of that law which sponsors his historical existence and which by its "penetrating style has engraved in our ordinances, and in our hearts, the words and spirit of that immortal law" (R, p. 104). Burke insists that this reading is entailed; but he repeatedly demonstrates that its impression on our hearts is only made possible by our voluntary standing away from a past law or father in order that it can represent itself in us. The text is constituted by the head's bloodless detachment of itself from its heart in order to read the history of the mystical body (a history which presupposes such "deviations" [see R, pp. 105-6]), in order to return and metaphorically "frame a polity in blood." For Burke, England exists in time and space as a self-reading text; its history is nothing but the allegory of its reading.'" England reproduces itself in a male parthenogenesis, fathers endlessly propagating sons who, never coincident with the original law from which they have fallen, have as their historical mission endless reflection on it. English history is simultaneously fidelity to and apostasy from the law, a paradox that makes and preserves the constitution by insuring that it is at once ancient and continually reconstituted by reflection. 20 The content of individual reflections is not important to Burke, nor is indefinite interpretability a problem-so long as the indefinite is disciplined and redeemed by the shaping spirit of a continual apostasy, a continual alienation from some undiscovered country of the past.
A crossing from Burke to Coleridge can be made via the following passage, a good example of the kind of attention to principles for which Burke was consistently applauded by his successor: On what grounds do we go to restore our constitution to what it has been at one definite period, or to reform and reconstruct it upon principles more conformable to a sound theory of government? A prescriptive government, such as ours, never was the work of any legislator, never was made upon any foregone theory. It seems to me a preposterous way of reasoning, and perfect confusion of ideas, to take the theories which learned and speculative men have made from that government, and then, supposing it Critical Inquiry Summer 1986 777 made on those theories, which were made from it, to accuse the government as not corresponding with them.2' The best Coleridgean gloss on this ridicule of the preposterous is the famous Leibnizian aphorism from the Biographia, "There is nothing in the mind that was not before in the senses, except the mind itself,"22 which, to adapt it to Burke, should be revised thus: "There is nothing in the constitution that was not first the work of a legislator, except the constitution itself." In the Biographia the equivalent of Burke's ancient constitution, that which grounds and entails all our reflections, is the mind itself: "I began then to ask myself, what proof I had of the outward existence of any thing?... I saw, that in the nature of things such proof is impossible; and that of all modes of being, that are not objects of the senses, the existence is assumed by a logical necessity arising from the constitution of the mind itself" (BL 1:200). "The constitution of the mind"-the phrase is not in Johnson but may be met with at the beginning of Burke's "Letter to a Noble Lord," where Burke summons the idea of a "complete revolution" that has "extended even to the constitution of the mind of man." 23 Coleridge's usage is thoroughly Burkean; it comprises the way the mind is constituted and the way the mind constitutes, which ideally come to the same thing, for "Truth is the correlative of Being" (BL 1:142). This identity is ancient because it must be postulated as subsisting before any moment in which we can come to know it: "During the act of knowledge itself, the objective and subjective are so instantly united, that we cannot determine to which of the two the priority belongs.... While I am attempting to explain this intimate coalition, I must suppose it dissolved" (BL 1:255). For Coleridge as for Burke all understanding is reflection on a past moment that is the condition of our knowledge but that can never directly be known. The mind is a self-reading text reproducing itself in an aporetic descent.
As is the Biographia, which resolutely rejects all readers except that one who proves his gentleness by absenting himself in favor of the author: "If however the reader will permit me to be my own Hierocles," Coleridge requests at the beginning of chapter twelve, referring to the Alexandrian commentator on neo-Pythagorean texts. If the reader does consent, he lets the Biographia be what it wants to be, at once (or almost at once) Pythagorean oracle and Hierocletian commentary. The Biographia is a continuous falling away from itself that is a reading of itself, falling to know its constitution, falling to know the course of its descent-a narcissism providentially flawed by the apostasis that motivates a theoretically endless tracking. 24  In Coleridge's usage the very insight of the visionary, the coincidence of the spiritual eye with its ideal object, is identical to his blindness and known only by his fall into bewilderment. As night passes into day the visionary's tracks lead to the understanding Coleridge, who stands apart from his benighted predecessor. The commentator can explain a blinded insight because he has fallen farther; he can stand back from the experience that enfolded its author and see it as a page, as something already written; and he can follow the betrayed man's tracks to a source where he understands the visionary's ignorance but where, in his very lucidity, he becomes equally blind to his own. There are numerous places in the Biographia where such a procedure could be illustrated. Some of them, such as the anecdote of the 'possessed' German maid in chapter six, the interruption of the letter from a friend in chapter thirteen, the criticism of "Fidelity" in chapter twenty-two, and the account of the epiphany of Wordsworth's genius in chapter four, I have analyzed elsewhere with the objective of releasing the uncanny rhetoricity of this astonishing book. My objective here is to persuade that such tropism serves a purpose. Let us refer to the autobiographical account in chapter ten of a strange evening during the young Coleridge's subscription campaign for his radically evangelical periodical The Watchman. Suffering equally from the "poison" of tobacco and the tonic of the night air, surrounded by a crowd of well-wishers and potential subscribers, he had "sunk back on the sofa in a sort of swoon." On awakening from "insensibility" and being asked, "by way of relieving [his] embarrassment, ... 'Have you seen a paper to day, Mr. Coleridge?,'" Coleridge, like a guilty Critical Inquiry

Summer 1986 779 thing surprised, confessed to his doubts regarding the morality of a Christian reading "newspapers or any other works of merely political and temporary interest"-a repudiation of the very course of action to which he had applied all his energies (BL 1:183). Not only is this an instance of Hierocletian commentary, of the insightful, self-reading autobiographer tracking the bewildered visionary of his youth; that bewilderment, an emblematic moment of social blindness, is itself presented as an insight into an apostasy which has already occurred and been repressed. Coleridge had earlier adapted Wordsworth to describe his autobiographical progress as "'sounding on my dim and perilous way'" (BL 1:105). In this passage resonate soundings both canny and uncanny. Coleridge's daylight,journalistic intention to sound out support for his radical newspaper is thwarted by nocturnal soundings from the land of smoke and mist. The spirit of apostasy, "which the writings of Burke" legitimated for "the higher and [for] the literary classes, may ... like the ghost in Hamlet, be heard moving and mining in the underground chambers" (BL 1:192). Hearkening to that spirit, the aroused Hierocles awakens from his jacobinic slumber and, in a moment of spontaneous reflection, sounds out his own "grounds, and [exposes] their hollowness."
The return of the Burkean specter, ventriloquizing like truth itself, bewilders the visionary, mocking the "pert loquacity" of the social critic and political activist, and undermining any practical, worldly action whatever. Even in the first flush of his enthusiasm, Coleridge, as a wiser Coleridge tells us, had already turned away from the faith he was proselytizing.
The objective correlative of his apostasy, Coleridge's dramatic swoon amidst a group of left-wing sympathizers, both makes possible his blindly insightful ejaculation and protects it from censure. Because clearly he cannot mean what he says, he is released from the consequences of his utterance by a general laughter. But, of course, one point of the anecdote in the context of chapter ten is that eventually Coleridge, who devotes much of the Biographia (as he had The Friend) to attacks on the production and consumption of periodicals and novels, did come to mean what he said. When did coming to mean occur? Could the turning point be pushed back to the moment (prophetic, as things turned out) of coming out of the swoon? Was Coleridge then confused or canny in his utterance? Did the swoon release an inadvertent prophecy, or did Coleridge swoon in order to tell a, if not the, truth? Does Coleridge the autobiographer mean to raise the question of meaning or is it an exegetical imposition? We enter the zone of that undecidability that de Man has glossed with reference to Proust: No one can decide whether Proust invented metaphors because he felt guilty or whether he had to declare himself guilty in order to find a use for his metaphors. Since the only irreducible 'intention' of a text is that of its constitution, the second hypothesis is in fact 780

Jerome Christensen
The Apostasy of Criticism less unlikely than the first. The problem has to be suspended in its own indecision. [AR, p. 65] De Man works hard to produce these aporias in the texts he reads. Coleridge, as we know from the preface to "Kubla Khan," which tells of another drug-induced swoon, is at work even when he is asleep, and there is work being done here, work that produces the curious suspension that de Man identifies as quintessentially literary, and work that pits the literary so defined against all forms of ideology. The autobiographer endorses a self-reading that stands apart from any political or social goal whatever: it is, as the amused reaction of the reform-minded audience shows, exempt from the judgment of worldlings, beyond good and evil. The anecdote represents a Coleridge who was an apostate from the beginning and who approves apostasy as at worst an innocent act of some amusement to "the multitudinous public," or, at best, as a method for incisively discriminating between the temporary and the permanent, for transforming social and political "realities" into texts able to be read, for suspending action in favor of reflection. What are opposed to works of "merely political and temporary interest"? Works of permanent interest-and permanent because productive of true and lasting pleasure. Poetry, in other words. But not just any poetry, and not necessarily even that poetry which yields the most immediate pleasure: "not the poem which we have read, but that to which we return, with the greatest pleasure, possesses the genuine power, and claims the name of essential poetry" (BL 1:23). Opposed to works of science by its object, poetry is opposed to works of politics by the durability of its pleasure. The merits of poetry are neither substantive nor intrinsic. If poetry is in some sense the hero of the swooning episode as it is in some sense the hero of the Biographia as a work of philosophical criticism, the action which proves the merit of the hero-the allegory of its matchless identity-is a commentary. Every hero requires his Hierocles. Every poem requires a critic. As the vindication of Wordsworth's genius is not its actual epiphany in illo tempore but Coleridge's return to and dramatic repetition of that revelation in chapter four of the Biographia, so does the merit of every poem depend on such a return-anastasis. And every return requires an initial departure, a standing away or apostasis, which is metastatically hinged to its successor.
That plot comprises the moves identified by de Man in "Literary History and Literary Modernity" as "the three moments of flight, return, and the turning point at which flight changes into return or vice-versa" (BI, p. 163). De Man abstracts those three moments from a plot shared by Nietzsche, Rousseau, and Baudelaire, who, exemplary modernists all, aspire to a clean rupture with literature and the past, and who suffer the ironic consequences of that ambition:

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The continuous appeal of modernity, the desire to break out of literature toward the reality of the moment, prevails and, in its turn, folding back upon itself, engenders the repetition and the continuation of literature. Thus modernity, which is fundamentally a falling away from literature and a rejection of history, also acts as the principle that gives literature duration and historical existence.
[BI, p. 162] De Man is repeating a Coleridgean insight and mystifying it as he goes along, for de Man insists that his story is told from "the point of view of the writer as subject," whereas his examples (Boileau, Fontenelle, Nietzsche, and Baudelaire) and the Coleridgean precedent both argue that the actual point of view from which de Man tells his story is that of the writer as critic. If we are to accept that "the only irreducible 'intention' of a text is its constitution," it should be added that the only constitution of a text is its criticism. Coleridge's aphorism of departure and return is the story of criticism, which is distinguished from common reading insofar as it is motivated, insofar as the standing away is an apostasy (or flight), and insofar as the return is an anastasis (or reflection). It takes a critic to tell the common reader those works which he should reread. The best critic is the lapsed poet. The high drama of the Wordsworthian epiphany in the Biographia is owed to Coleridge's endeavor to depict it as a rapturous stasis from which he can fall away into the seminal imagination/fancy distinction that concludes chapter four and that ordains his blossoming as a genuine critic. Coleridge manages a double flight: from Wordsworth and from his own poetic ambitions. This apostasy makes possible and prepares for the reading of Wordsworth that occupies most of volume two-completing the constitution of Wordsworth's genius and, incidentally, modern poetry. This is not by any means the only story in the Biographia or the only apostasy in a text that moves from faith to faith, master to master (Bowyer, Bowles, Hartley, Wordsworth, Kant, Schelling)-all the while subjecting each authority to an allegory of apostasy mastered only by Coleridgean criticism. The critic derives his inheritance; like Burke, he engineers the metalepsis of coming to author the text he reads: hence the curious coincidence between becoming one's own Hierocles and being the commentator on a poetic text. The critic is always the author of the texts he reads, constituting literature as his autobiography, as the history of criticism. By claiming always I do not appeal to logic but to history: this state of affairs is not necessarily so, but it has ever been so since Coleridge. We critics would not know what social reality is if Coleridge had not fallen away from it. His falling away makes the "criticism" of social reality possible by rendering it as a topic completely interchangeable with any other god term that criticism symbolically substitutes for that absolute whose given name is "poetry" or "literature" The Apostasy of Criticism and which criticism uses retrospectively to motivate and glorify its flightto turn metonymy or mere contingency into apostasis. Every celebration of the recuperative powers of literature assists in the institution, elaboration, and reproduction of modern, that is, post-Coleridgean criticism.
Apostasy is to metonymy as the Fall is to a lapse. The distinction measures the distance between Coleridge's early nineteenth-century and de Man's late twentieth-century projects. Imagine that distance as two points of view on difference. Coleridge wants to motivate a difference that de Man aims to abstract from all intention."2 Writing at Highgate and trying to salvage something from a spendthrift career of erratic brilliance, humiliating dependency, and steady marginalization, Coleridge uses "apostasy" to render the possibly contingent as somehow necessary and to figure the ostensibly compulsive as somehow purposeful." Writing after the storm of mid-century European history, centered and chaired within a prestigious department within a powerful university, addressing a profession whose most engrossing critical debates have always taken place on familiar Coleridgean grounds, de Man can afford the askesis that strips literature to its blind mechanisms, defrauds it of its glory. Surely Lentricchia is right that there is nothing subversive or risky about this maneuver. It is because Coleridge is writing in the wilderness outside an academy yet to come that he needs to motivate the "same" move and give it purpose, so that the plot of criticism he identifies can presuppose its history, establish its tradition, simulate permanence and progressionin short, make the world safe for Paul de Man.
After Coleridge there is no criticism without apostasy. And there are no heroes of criticism who were not first apostates. Kenneth Burke is no exception. Lentricchia begins his "pursuit of the issue of criticism as social force" by recalling an episode, recounted by Kenneth Burke, in which Burke delivered his paper "Revolutionary Symbolism in America" to the first American Writers' Congress at Madison Square Garden in 1935. Burke's paper, in which, according to Lentricchia, he rewrote and elaborated Marx's first thesis on Feuerbach, proposed to America's radical left not only that a potentially revolutionary culture should keep in mind that revolution must be culturally as well as economically rooted, but, as well ... that a revolutionary culture must situate itself firmly on the terrain of its capitalist antagonist, must not attempt a dramatic leap beyond capitalism in one explosive, rupturing moment of release, must work its way through capitalism's language of domination by working cunningly within it, using, appropriating, even speaking through its key mechanisms of repression. [CSC, p. 24] Lentricchia admires Burke's unscared awareness of the force of ideology, his keen sense of the cultural basis of domination and, in stark contrast

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Summer 1986 783 to the de Man of "Literary History and Literary Modernity," his disavowal of a "romantic" notion of revolutionary rupture, which is a prescription for failure, whether espoused by American Marxists or Yale critics. Lentricchia notes, however, that when Burke recalled the incident he gleefully attested to the irate reaction of his audience: it "produced hallucinations of 'excrement ... dripping from my tongue,' of his name being shouted as a 'kind of charge' against him, a 'dirty word'-'Burke!"' Lentricchia applauds the "heresy" and "deviance" of Burke's portentous and prophetic remarks but fails to comment on the circumstantially specific irony that Burke's "challenge to the Marxist intellectual" to forswear self-defeating, paralyzing notions of rupture is just such a moment of rupture (CSC, pp. 21, 26). In that locale Burke's turn to symbolism and culture, a move that, for Lentricchia, is the paradigmatic action constituting a socially effective criticism, was in fact an apostasy. To what are we to attend, Burke's text or his performance? Which has more social force? Which is more symbolic? Or is there any difference? Who can say? What is to be done? Who can tell the saying from the doing? Lentricchia does not risk his confidence in intervention by taking up those rhetorical questions. But if his avoidance saves him from the more overt symptoms of paralysis, it decisively blinds him to the preternaturally acute insight expressed by Burke's audience, who, with a wit of dreamlike velocity and aptness, instantaneously deployed "Burke" as a "kind of charge," as "dirty word," catching the pun that twins Kenneth with that Edmund whose surname has been, ever since the explosive publication of Reflections, a byword for political apostasy. To follow out that dreamlike association, to inquire into the complicities between revolution and reaction under the rubric of "culture," would be to derive the descent from Burke's Burke to Burke's obsessive identifications with Coleridge to the point at the beginning of de Man's Allegories of Reading where he cites Burke's mention of "deflection ... defined as 'any slight bias or even unintended error,' as the rhetorical basis of language"-a notion which de Man subsequently employs to deconstruct all intentionalist, not to mention interventionist, notions of rhetoric (AR, p. 8). It is not merely the work of de Man, then, that has "the insidious effect of ... paraly[zing] praxis itself." The sleep of praxis is the birth of criticism. Or so it is if we take Coleridge as our canonized forefather and regardless of whether we opt for Paul de Man or Kenneth, not Edmund, Burke as godfather. Paralysis or a constitutional "aversion to real action" is the characteristic that this critical Hamlet installed at the center of the literary culture of which he was the chief, if not only, begetter. To freely adapt the critic: The critical mind, ... unseated from its healthy balance, is for ever occupied with the world within, and abstracted from external things-giving substance to shadows, and throwing a mist over all