THE CHILD'S EYE

“To carry on the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood; to combine the child's sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances, which every day for perhaps forty years had rendered familiar”: this, Coleridge affirms, “is the character and privilege of genius, and one of the marks which distinguish genius from talents” (BL 1:80–81). Defamiliarization takes place through dialectical synthesis, whereby the temporal oscillations and specular reversals that haunt the Prelude are recuperated in a narrative of development. Wordsworth can thus claim, in the final book of the Prelude, that “we have traced the stream/ From darkness, and the very place of birth,” then “given it greeting as it rose once more/ With strength … / And lastly, from its progress have we drawn/ The feeling of life endless” (Prelude 13:172–84).

The philosophical critic's prescription echoes repeatedly in the memoirs and contemporary portraits of his disciples, from Crabb Robinson's sentimental comment on “how Lamb confirms the remark of the childlikeness of genius” (HCR 185) to De Quincey's opiated experience of a “re-awakening of a state of eye generally incident to childhood” (C 67). Precisely fulfilling Coleridge's first condition, both Lamb and De Quincey are represented as failing in the second: De Quincey finding himself at the same time “powerless as an infant” (C 67), Elia avowing as an “infirmity,” to “a degree beneath manhood,” his trick of looking “back upon those early days” (LM 3:6 [E 32]).