Chapter I (1)

WORDSWORTH AND COLERIDGE: THEIR COMPANIONS AND ADVERSARIES.

WORDSWORTH AND COLERIDGE—THE FORMER’S PREFACES—THAT TO ‘LYRICAL
BALLADS,’ 1800—ITS HISTORY—THE ARGUMENT AGAINST POETIC DICTION, AND
EVEN AGAINST METRE—THE APPENDIX: POETIC DICTION AGAIN—THE MINOR
CRITICAL PAPERS—COLERIDGE’S EXAMINATION OF WORDSWORTH’S VIEWS—HIS
CRITICAL QUALIFICATIONS—UNUSUAL INTEGRITY OF HIS CRITIQUE—ANALYSIS
OF IT—THE “SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF”—ATTITUDE TO METRE—EXCURSUS ON
SHAKESPEARE’S ‘POEMS’—CHALLENGES WORDSWORTH ON “REAL” AND “RUSTIC”
LIFE—“PROSE” DICTION AND METRE AGAIN—CONDEMNATION IN FORM OF
WORDSWORTH’S THEORY—THE ‘ARGUMENTUM AD GULIELMUM’—THE STUDY OF HIS
POETRY—HIGH MERITS OF THE EXAMINATION—WORDSWORTH A REBEL TO LONGINUS
AND DANTE—THE ‘PREFACE’ COMPARED MORE SPECIALLY WITH THE ‘DE
VULGARI,’ AND DANTE’S PRACTICE WITH WORDSWORTH’S—THE COMPARISON
FATAL TO WORDSWORTH AS A CRITIC—OTHER CRITICAL PLACES IN COLERIDGE—
THE REST OF THE ‘BIOGRAPHIA’—‘THE FRIEND’—‘AIDS TO REFLECTION,’
ETC.—THE ‘LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE,’ ETC.—THEIR CHAOTIC CHARACTER AND
PRECIOUSNESS—SOME NOTEWORTHY THINGS IN THEM: GENERAL AND PARTICULAR—
COLERIDGE ON OTHER DRAMATISTS—THE ‘TABLE TALK’—THE ‘MISCELLANIES’—
THE LECTURE ‘ON STYLE’—THE ‘ANIMA POETÆ’—THE ‘LETTERS’—THE
COLERIDGEAN POSITION AND QUALITY—HE INTRODUCES ONCE FOR ALL THE
CRITERION OF IMAGINATION, REALISING AND DISREALISING—THE
“COMPANIONS”—SOUTHEY—GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF HIS CRITICISM—
REVIEWS—‘THE DOCTOR’—ALTOGETHER SOMEWHAT “IMPAR SIBI”—LAMB—HIS
“OCCULTISM” AND ALLEGED INCONSTANCY—THE EARLY ‘LETTERS’—THE
‘SPECIMENS’—THE GARRICK PLAY NOTES—MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS—‘ELLA’—THE
LATER ‘LETTERS’—UNIQUENESS OF LAMB’S CRITICAL STYLE AND THOUGHT—
LEIGH HUNT: HIS SOMEWHAT INFERIOR POSITION—REASONS FOR IT—HIS
ATTITUDE TO DANTE—EXAMPLES FROM ‘IMAGINATION AND FANCY’—HAZLITT—
METHODOF DEALING WITH HIM—HIS SURFACE AND OCCASIONAL FAULTS:
IMPERFECT KNOWLEDGE AND METHOD—EXTRA-LITERARY PREJUDICE—HIS RADICAL
AND USUAL EXCELLENCE—‘THE ENGLISH POETS’—THE ‘COMIC WRITERS’—‘THE
AGE OF ELIZABETH’—‘CHARACTERS OF SHAKESPEARE’—‘THE PLAIN SPEAKER’—
‘THE ROUND TABLE,’ ETC.—‘THE SPIRIT OF THE AGE’—‘SKETCHES AND
ESSAYS’—‘WINTERSLOW’—HAZLITT’S CRITICAL VIRTUE, IN SET PIECES, AND
UNIVERSALLY—BLAKE—HIS CRITICAL POSITION AND DICTA—THE “NOTES ON
REYNOLDS” AND WORDSWORTH—COMMANDING POSITION OF THESE—SIR WALTER
SCOTT COMMONLY UNDERVALUED AS A CRITIC—INJUSTICE OF THIS—CAMPBELL:
HIS ‘LECTURES ON POETRY’—HIS ‘SPECIMENS’—SHELLEY: HIS ‘DEFENCE OF
POETRY’—LANDOR—HIS LACK OF JUDICIAL QUALITY—IN REGULAR CRITICISM—THE
CONVERSATIONS—‘LOCULUS AUREOLUS’—BUT AGAIN DISAPPOINTING—THE REVIVAL
OF THE POPE QUARRELS—BOWLES—BYRON—THE ‘LETTER TO MURRAY,’ ETC.—
OTHERS: ISAAC DISRAELI—SIR EGERTON BRYDGES—‘THE RETROSPECTIVE
REVIEW’—THE ‘BAVIAD’ AND ‘ANTI-JACOBIN,’ WITH WOLCOT AND MATHIAS—THE
INFLUENCE OF THE NEW ‘REVIEWS,’ ETC.—JEFFREY—HIS LOSS OF PLACE AND
ITS CAUSE—HIS INCONSISTENCY—HIS CRITICISM ON MADAME DE STAËL—ITS
LESSON—HALLAM—HIS ACHIEVEMENT—ITS MERITS AND DEFECTS—IN GENERAL
DISTRIBUTION AND TREATMENT—IN SOME PARTICULAR INSTANCES—HIS CENTRAL
WEAKNESS, AND THE VALUE LEFT BY IT.

[Sidenote: _Wordsworth and Coleridge._]

There are many differences, real and imaginary, partial and general, parallel and cross, between ancient, and mediæval, and modern poetry; but there is one, very striking, of a kind which specially differentiates ancient and mediæval (except Dante) from modern. In the former class of poets the “critic whom every poet must contain” was almost entirely silent, or conveyed his criticism through his verse only. It would have been of the very first interest to have an Essay from the hand of Euripides justifying his decadent and sentimental fashion of drama, or from that of Lucretius on the theory and practice of didactic verse: but the lips of neither were unsealed in this direction. Dante, on the other hand, as we have seen, was prepared and ready to put the rationale of his own verse, his own beliefs about poetry, into prose: so at the Renaissance were the poets of Italy and France; so was Dryden, so was Pope.

In no instance, however, save perhaps that of the Pléiade and Du Bellay’s _Défense et Illustration_, did a protagonist of the new poetry take the field in prose so early and so aggressively as did Wordsworth in his Preface to the second edition of _Lyrical Ballads_. In none, without exception, was such an attack so searchingly criticised and so powerfully seconded, with corrections of its mistakes, as in the case of the well-known chapters of the _Biographia Literaria_ in which Coleridge examined Wordsworth’s examination. These, it is true, came later in time, but when the campaign, whereof the first sword had been drawn in the _Lyrical Ballads_, and the first horn blown in the Preface of their second edition, though far gone was not finished, when the final blows, by the hands of Keats and Shelley, had still to be struck.

[Sidenote: _The former’s Prefaces._]

The _Preface_, with the little group of other prefaces and observations which supplements it,[349] provides a bundle of documents unequalled in interest except by the _De Vulgari Eloquio_ in the special class, while, as it happens, it goes directly against the tenor of that precious booklet. Wordsworth, there can be no doubt, had been deeply annoyed by the neglect or the contemptuous reception of the _Lyrical Ballads_, to which hardly any one had done justice except the future Archdeacon Wrangham, while his own poems in simple language had offended even more than _The Ancient Mariner_ had puzzled. To some extent I do not question that—his part of the scheme being to make the familiar poetical, just as it was Coleridge’s to make the unfamiliar acceptable, the uncommon common—the refusal of “poetic diction” which he here advances and defends was a _vera causa_, a true actuating motive. But there is also, I think, no doubt that, as so often happens, resentment, and a dogged determination to “spite the fools,” made him here represent the principle as much more deliberately carried out than it actually was. And the same doggedness was no doubt at the root of his repetition of this principle in all his subsequent prose observations, though, as has been clear from the first to almost all impartial observers,[350] he never, from _Tintern Abbey_ onwards, achieves his highest poetry, and very rarely achieves high poetry at all, without putting that principle in his pocket.

[Sidenote: _That to_ Lyrical Ballads, 1800.]

That the actual preface begins with a declaration that he was rather more than satisfied with the reception of his poems, and that the appearance of a systematic defence is set down to “request of friends,” is of course not in the least surprising, and will only confirm any student of human nature in the certainty that pique was really at the bottom of the matter. As a matter of fact, there is no more typical example of an aggressive-defensive _plaidoyer_ in the whole history of literature.

[Sidenote: _Its history._]

It begins with sufficient boldness and originality (indeed “W. W.” was never deficient in either) with admission that “by writing in verse, an author is supposed to make a formal engagement that he will gratify certain habits of association,” and merely urging that these habits have varied remarkably. The principle here is sound enough; it is in effect the same which we have traced in previous “romantic” criticism from Shenstone onwards; but the historical illustrations are unfortunate. They are “the age of Catullus, Terence, and Lucretius” contrasted with that of Statius and Claudian, and “the age of Shakespeare and Beaumont and Fletcher” with that of Donne and Cowley or Dryden and Pope. The _nisus_ of the school towards the historic argument, and, at the same time, its imperfect education in literary history, could hardly be better illustrated. For, not to quibble about the linking of Statius and Claudian, the age of Catullus and Lucretius was most certainly _not_ the age of Terence; and the English pairs are still more luckless. Donne _and_ Cowley, Shakespeare _and_ Beaumont and Fletcher, are bad enough in themselves: but the postponement of Donne to the twin dramatists, when he was the elder of Fletcher probably by six or seven years, of Beaumont by ten or twelve, is rather sad. However, it is not on history that Wordsworth bases his attack.

[Sidenote: _The argument against poetic diction, and even against
metre._]

His object, he tells us, was to choose incidents and illustrations from common life; to relate and describe them, as far as was possible, in a selection of language really used by men; and at the same time to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect—a long but much less forcible appendix examining why the life so chosen was not merely “ordinary,” but “rustic and humble.” The kernel of his next paragraph is the famous statement that all good poetry is “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” and then, after a little divagation, he sets to work to show how such a style as he was using was adapted to be the channel of such an overflow. He utterly refuses Personification: he “has taken as much pains to avoid what is called Poetic Diction as is ordinarily taken to produce it”; he “has at all times endeavoured to look steadily at the subject with little falsehood of description”; and he has not only denied himself false poetic diction, but many expressions in themselves proper and beautiful, which have been foolishly repeated by bad poets till they became disgusting. A selected sonnet from Gray[351] is then rather captiously attacked for the sake of showing (what certainly few will admit) that, in its only part of value, the language differs in no respect from that of prose: whence the heretic goes farther and, first asserting that there is _no_ essential difference between the language of Prose and that of Poetry, proceeds in a note to object to the opposition of Poetry and Prose at all, and to the regarding of the former as synonymous with metrical composition. Then he asks what a poet _is_: and answers himself at great length, dwelling on the poet’s philosophical mission, but admitting that it is his business to give pleasure. He anticipates the objection, “Why, then, do you not write in Prose?” with the rather weak retort, “Why should I not add the charm of metrical language to what I have to say?” A little later comes the other famous definition of poetry as “emotion recollected in tranquillity,” with a long and exceedingly unsuccessful attempt to vindicate some work of his own from the charge of being ludicrous. And the Preface ends with two candid but singularly damaging admissions, that there _is_ a pleasure confessedly produced by metrical compositions very different from his own, and that, in order entirely to enjoy the poetry which he is undertaking, it would be necessary to give up much of what is ordinarily enjoyed.

[Sidenote: _The appendix: Poetic Diction again._]

There is an appendix specially devoted to “Poetic Diction” in which Wordsworth develops his objection to this. His argument is curious, and from his own point of view rather risky. Early poets wrote from passion, yet naturally, and so used figurative language: later ones, without feeling passion, imitated them in the use of Figures, and so a purely artificial diction was formed. So also metre was early added, and came to be regarded as a symbol or promise of poetic diction itself. To which of course it is only necessary to register the almost fatal demurrer, “Why, if the early poets used figurative language different from ordinary, may not later ones do so? or do you mean that Greek shoemakers of Homer’s time said _koruthaiolos_ and _dolichoskion_?” Again, “How about this curious early ‘superadding’ of metre? Where is your evidence? and supposing you could produce any, what have you to say to the further query, ‘If the metre was superadded, what could have been the reason, except that some superaddition was felt to be wanted?’”

[Sidenote: _The Minor Critical Papers._]

It is proof of the rather prejudiced frame of mind in which Wordsworth wrote that, in some subsequent criticisms of particulars, he objects to Cowper’s “church-going bell” as “a strange abuse”—from which we must suppose that he himself never talked of a “dining-room,” for it is certain that the room no more dines than the bell goes to church. The later papers on “Poetry as a Study,” and “Poetry as Observation and Description,” are also full of interesting matter, though here, as before, their literary history leaves much to desire, and though they are full of examples of the characteristic stubbornness with which Wordsworth clings to his theory. The most remarkable example probably of this stubbornness is the astonishing note to the letter on the last-named subject (addressed to Sir George Beaumont), in which, after attributing to the poet Observation, Sensibility, Reflection, Information, Invention, and Judgment, he adds, with a glance at his enemy, Metre—“As sensibility to harmony of numbers _and the power of producing it_ are _invariably_ attendants on the faculties above specified, nothing has been said upon those requisites.” Perhaps there is no more colossal _petitio principii_, and at the same time no more sublime ignoring of facts, to be found in all literature, than that “invariably.”

[Sidenote: _Coleridge’s examination of Wordsworth’s views._]

Interesting, however, as the Preface and its satellites are in themselves, they are far more interesting as the occasion of the much longer examination of the main document which forms the centre, and as criticism the most valuable part, of the _Biographia Literaria_[352] of Coleridge, Wordsworth’s fellow-worker in these same _Lyrical Ballads_. That Wordsworth was himself not wholly pleased with this criticism of his criticism, we know: and it would have been strange if he had been— nay, if a much less arrogant and egotistical spirit than his had taken it quite kindly. But Coleridge was on this occasion entirely within his right. The examination, though in some parts unsparing enough, was conducted throughout in the most courteous, indeed in the most eulogistic, tone; the critic, especially after the lapse of so many years,[353] could not be denied the right of pointing out the limits of his agreement with a manifesto which, referring as it did to joint work of his and another’s, might excusably be supposed to represent his conclusions as well as those of his fellow-worker.

As to his competence for the task, there could even then be little, and can now be no, dispute. Wordsworth himself, though he has left some valuable critical dicta, had by no means all, or even very many, of the qualifications of a critic. His intellect, save at his rare moments of highest poetical inspiration, was rather strong than fine or subtle; and it could not, even at those moments, be described as in any degree flexible or wide-ranging. He carried into literature the temperament of the narrowest theological partisan; and would rather that a man were not poetically saved at all, than that he were saved while not following “W. W.’s” own way. His reading, moreover, was far from wide, and his intense self-centredness made him indifferent about extending it: while he judged everything that he did read with reference to himself and his own poetry.

[Sidenote: _His critical qualifications._]

In all these respects, except poetical intensity, Coleridge was his exact opposite. But for a certain uncertainty, a sort of Will-o'-the-Wispishness which displays itself in some of his individual critical estimates—and for the too well-known inability to carry out his designs, which is not perhaps identical, or even closely connected, with this uncertainty,—he might be called, he may perhaps even in spite of them be called, one of the very greatest critics of the world. He had read immensely, and much of his reading had been in the philosophy of æsthetics, more in pure literature itself. The play of his intellect— when opium and natural tendency to digression did not drive it devious and muddle it—was marvellously subtle, flexible, and fine. He could take positions not his own with remarkable alacrity; was nothing if not logical, and few things more than historical-literary. Further, such egotisms as came into play in this particular quarrel all made for righteousness in his case, while they were snares to Wordsworth. It may be ungracious, but is not unfair, to say that Wordsworth’s contempt for poetic diction, and his belittling of metre, arose very mainly from the fact that, in his case, intense meaning was absolutely required to save his diction from stiffness on the one hand and triviality on the other, while he had no very special metrical gifts. Coleridge, though he certainly had no lack of meaning, and could also write simply enough when he chose, was a metrist[354] such as we have not more than five or six even in English poetry, and could colour and harmonise language in such a way that, at his best, not Shakespeare himself is his superior, and hardly any one else his equal. The old, the true, sense of _Cui bono?_ comes in here victoriously. It was certainly to Wordsworth’s interest that diction and metre should be relegated to a low place. Coleridge, though he had personal reasons for taking their part, could do well without them, and was not obliged to be their champion.

[Sidenote: _Unusual integrity of his critique._]

However all this may be, there is no doubt about the importance of the discussion of Wordsworth’s literary theories, in chaps. xiv. to xxii. of the _Biographia_. Some have held that Coleridge could not write a book; more have laid it down that he never did write one. Certainly the title is to be allowed to the _Biographia_ as a whole only by the most elastic allowance, while large parts of it are at best episodes, and at worst sheer divagations. But, if books were not sacred things, it would be possible, and of no inconsiderable advantage, to sub-title this part of the book _A Critical Enquiry into the Principles which guided the Lyrical Ballads, and Mr Wordsworth’s Account of Them_, to print this alone as substantive text,[355] and to arrange all the rest as notes and appendices.

[Sidenote: _Analysis of it._]

The examination begins with an interesting, and (whether Epimethean or not) quite probable and very illuminative account of the actual plan of the _Ballads_, and the principle on which the shares were allotted. He and his friend, he tells us, had, during their neighbourly intercourse in Somerset, often talked of the two cardinal points of poetry, the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of imagination. And he illustrates this finely, by instancing the sudden charm which accidents of light and shade, of moonlight or sunset, communicate to familiar objects.

[Sidenote: _The “suspension of disbelief.”_]

The _Ballads_ were to illustrate both kinds: and the poets were to divide the parts generally on the principle of Coleridge endeavouring to make the unfamiliar credible,[356] and Wordsworth the familiar charming. And with a charity which, I fear, the _Preface_ will not bear, he proceeds to represent its contentions as applying _only_ to the practical poetical attempt which Wordsworth, in accordance with the plan, was on this occasion making. He admits however, that Wordsworth’s expressions are at any rate sometimes equivocal, and indicates his own standpoint pretty early and pretty decisively by calling the phrase “language of real life” _unfortunate_. And then he proceeds to state his own view with very frequent glances—and more than glances—at his companion’s.

[Sidenote: _Attitude to metre._]

From the first, however, it is obvious that on one of the two cardinal points—the necessity or non-necessity of metre in poetry—he is, though hardly to be called in two minds, for some reason or other reluctant to speak out his one mind. The revival of this old heresy among such men as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, is the more to be wondered at, in that their predecessors of the eighteenth century had by no means pronounced on the other side in theory, and that therefore they themselves had no excuse of reaction. No one who, at however many removes, followed or professed to follow the authority of Aristotle, could deny that the subject, not the form, made poetry and poems. But just as the tyranny of a certain poetic diction led Wordsworth and others to strike at all poetic diction, so the tyranny of certain metres seems to have induced them to question the necessity of metre in general. At any rate Coleridge’s language, though not his real drift, is hesitating and sometimes almost self-contradictory. He will on the same page grant that “all compositions to which this charm of metre is superadded, whatever their contents, may be called poems,” and yet lay down that a poem is “that species of composition which is opposed to works of science by proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not truth,” and (after adding to this a limitation, doubtless intended to take in metre, but nebulous enough to justify Peacock himself,[357]) will once more clear off his own mist by saying that if any one “chooses to call every composition a poem which is rhyme or measure or both, I must leave his opinion uncontroverted.”

That he himself saw the muddle is beyond doubt, and the opposite page contains a curious series of _aporiæ_ which show the difficulty of applying his own definition.[358] The first (_i.e._, fourteenth) chapter ends with a soft shower of words, rhetorically pleasing rather than logically cogent, about the poet “bringing the whole soul of man into activity”; “fusing the faculties, each into each, by the synthetic and magical power of imagination,” reconciling differences and opposites. “Finally, good sense is the body of poetic genius, fancy its drapery, emotion its life, and imagination the soul.” In the fifteenth and sixteenth the author turns with evident relief from the definition of the perhaps indefinable to an illustration of it by discussing _Venus and Adonis_. Here, though it would be pleasant, it would be truancy to follow him.

This study, however, is by no means otiose. It leads him to make a comparison between the poetry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and that of “the present age,” a comparison of which not the least notable point is a reference to the _De Vulgari Eloquio_.[359] [Sidenote: _Excursus on Shakespeare’s_ Poems.] Coleridge seems only to have known it in the Italian translation; but it is much that he should have known it at all: and though he does not try to bring out its diametrical opposition to Wordsworth, that opposition must have been, consciously or unconsciously, in his mind. And then he comes back to Wordsworth himself.

[Sidenote: _Challenges Wordsworth on “real” and “rustic” life._]

He now (chap. xvii.) strikes into a line less complimentary and more corrective than his earlier remarks. It is true, he says, that much of modern poetic style is false, and that some of the pleasure given by it is false likewise. It is true, further, that W. W. has done good by his sticklings for simplicity. But Coleridge cannot follow him in asserting that “the proper diction for poetry in general consists altogether in language taken from the mouths of men in real life.” And he proceeds to show, by arguments so obvious and so convincing that it is unnecessary to recapitulate them, that a doctrine of this kind is neither adequate nor accurate—that Wordsworth’s own poems do not bear it out, and (pushing farther) that poetry must be “_dis_realised” (he does not use the word) as much as possible. He proceeds, cautiously and politely, but very decidedly, to set the puerilities and anilities[360] of _The Idiot Boy_ and _The Thorn_ in a clear light, which must have been extremely disagreeable to their arrogant author; and goes on to pull W. W.'s arguments, as well as his examples, to shreds and thrums. If you eliminate, he says (and most truly), a rustic’s poverty of thought and his “provincialism and grossness,” you get nothing different from “the language of any other man of common-sense,” so that he will not help you in the least; his speech does not in any degree represent the result of special and direct communing with nature. Nay, “real” in the phrase “real life” is itself a wholly treacherous and equivocal adjective. Nor will you do any good by adding “in a state of excitement.”

[Sidenote: _“Prose” diction and metre again._]

In the next chapter, the eighteenth, Coleridge carries the fray farther still into the enemy’s country, hitting the blot that though W. W.'s _words_ may be quite ordinary, their arrangement is not. And after wheeling about in this way, he comes at last to the main attack, which he has so often feinted, on Wordsworth’s astounding dictum that “there neither is nor can be any essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition.” After clearing his friend (and patient) from an insinuation of paradox, he becomes a little “metaphysical”— perhaps because he cannot help it, perhaps to give himself courage for the subsequent accusation of “sophistry” which he ventures to bring. Of course, he says, there are phrases which, beautiful in poetry, are quite inappropriate in prose. The question is, “Are there no others which, proper in prose, would be out of place in metrical poetry and _vice versa_?” And he has no doubt about answering this question in the affirmative, urging the origin of metre (for which, as we saw, Wordsworth did not attempt to account), and its effects of use and pleasure. He will not admit the appeal to nursery rhymes; and he confesses (a confession which must have given W. W. dire offence) that he should have liked _Alice Fell_ and the others much better in prose.

On the whole, Coleridge still shows too great timidity. He is obviously and incomprehensibly afraid of acknowledging pleasure in the metre itself. But—in this differing more signally from Wordsworth than from Wordsworth’s uncompromising opponents—he says, “I write in metre, _because_ I am about to use a language different from that of prose.” And, though on grounds lower than the highest, he finally plucks up courage to declare that “Metre is the proper form of poetry: and poetry [is] imperfect and defective without metre.” ’Twill serve, especially when he brings up in support, triarian fashion, “the instinct of seeking unity by harmonious adjustment,” and “the practice of the best poets of all countries and of all ages.”

[Sidenote: _Condemnation in form of Wordsworth’s theory._]

It is perhaps an anti-climax, though a very Coleridgean one, when he proceeds to criticise (very justly) Wordsworth’s criticism of Gray, and some passages both of his own and others: but we can have no quarrel with him when he ends the chapter, too verbosely indeed, but unanswerably, with the following conclusion of the whole matter: “When a poem, or part of a poem, shall be adduced, which is evidently vicious in the figures and contexture of its style, yet for the condemnation of which no reason can be assigned, except that it differs from the style in which men actually converse,—then and not till then can I hold this theory to be either plausible or practicable, or capable of furnishing either such guidance, or precaution, that might not, more easily and more safely, as well as more naturally, have been deduced in the author’s own mind from considerations of grammar, logic, and the truth and nature of things, confirmed by the authority of works whose fame is not of one country and of one age.”

[Sidenote: _The_ Argumentum ad Gulielmum.]

He has now (chaps. xix., xx.) argued himself into more confidence than he had shown earlier, and seems disposed to retract his concession that W. W.'s limitations were _not_ intended to apply to all poetry. He sees, indeed, from the criticism on Gray, and from Wordsworth’s references to Milton, that this concession was excessive, but still he thinks the general notion too monstrous for Wordsworth to have held. And he swerves, once more, to point out the especial beauty of beautiful diction and beautiful metre _added_ to fine or just thought, and introduces interesting but rather superfluous examples of this from all manner of poets down to Wordsworth himself. These last lead him to the very just conclusion, “Were there excluded from Mr W.'s poetic compositions all that a literal adherence to the theory of his Preface would exclude, two-thirds at least of the marked beauties of his poetry must be erased.”[361] Which indeed is once more a conclusion of the whole matter.[362]

[Sidenote: _The study of his poetry._]

After an odd, a distinctly amusing, but despite its title a, for our purpose, somewhat irrelevant, excursus on “the present mode of conducting critical journals,”[363] Coleridge concludes with a pretty long[364] and a very interesting examination of Wordsworth’s poetry. He brings out his defects, his extraordinary declension from the felicitous to the undistinguished, his matter-of-factness of various kinds (this part includes a merciless though most polite censure of _The Excursion_), his undue preference for dramatic [perhaps we should say dialogic] form, his prolixity, and his introduction of thoughts and images too great as well as too low for the subject. The excellences are high purity and appropriateness of language; weight and sanity of thoughts and sentiments; strength; originality and _curiosa felicitas_ in single lines and paragraphs; truth of nature in imagery; meditative pathos; and, lastly, imagination in the highest and strictest sense of the word.

[Sidenote: _High merits of the examination._]

In fact this chapter, which forms in itself an essay of the major scale, is one of the patterns, in English, of a critical study of poetry. None, I think, had previously exhibited the new criticism so thoroughly, and very few, if any, have surpassed or equalled it since, although it may be a little injured on the one hand by its limitation to a particular text, and by the restrictions which the personal relations of the critic with his author imposed on Coleridge; on the other, by his own tendencies to digression, verbosity, and intrusion of philosophical “heads of Charles I.” In fact, there is no other critical document known to me which attacks the chief and principal things of poetry proper— poetic language and poetic numbers—in so satisfactory a manner, despite the economy which Coleridge displays on the latter head. Some of the ancient and most of the Renaissance discussions shoot too far and too high, and though the arrows may catch fire and give a brilliant and striking illumination, they hit no visible mark. The discussions of Lessing in the _Laocoön_ concern an interesting but after all quite subordinate point of the relation of poetry to other arts; nearly all of those in the _Dramaturgie_ deal with a part of literature only, and with one which is not, in absolute necessity or theory, a part of literature at all. But here we have the very _differentia_ of poetry, handled as in the Περὶ Ὕψους or the _De Vulgari_ itself, but handled in a more full, generally applicable, and philosophically based manner than Dante’s prose admitted of, and in a wider range than is allowed by the special purpose of Longinus.

[Sidenote: _Wordsworth a rebel to Longinus and Dante._]

With both these great lights of criticism Coleridge agrees almost as thoroughly as Wordsworth disagrees with them: and it is proper here to fulfil the promise which was made[365] of a consideration of Wordsworth’s work in reference to Dante specially, but with extension to Longinus as well.

The collision of Wordsworth with Longinus appears in the very title of the famous little treatise. Fight as we may about the exact meaning of ὕψος, it must be evident, to poets and pedlars alike, that it never can apply to the “ordinary language of real life”; struggle as Wordsworthians may, they never can establish a _concordat_ between the doctrine of the _Preface_ and the doctrine of the “beautiful word.” But as Longinus was not specifically writing of Poetry, and as in reference to Poetry he was writing from his own point of view only, on a special function or aspect of Poetry and Rhetoric alike, he does not meet the Apostle of the Ordinary full tilt and weapon to weapon. I have said that I do not know whether, when Wordsworth wrote the _Preface_, he knew the _De Vulgari_ or not. If Coleridge had known it at the time, he probably would have imparted his knowledge in the celebrated Nether Stowey talks: but his own reference, itself not suggestive of a very thorough appreciation, is twenty years later. And as Wordsworth was a perfectly fearless person, and had not a vestige of an idea that any created thing had authority sufficient to overcrow W. W., he would pretty certainly have rebuked this Florentine, and withstood him to his face, if he had known his utterances.

[Sidenote: _The_ Preface _compared more specially with the_ De Vulgari,]

But, on the other hand, Dante himself might almost have been writing with the _Preface_ before him (except that had he done so Wordsworth would probably have been at least in Purgatory), considering the directness, the almost rude lie-circumstantial of the antidote. “Take the ordinary language, especially of rustic men,” says Wordsworth. “Avoid rustic [“silvan”] language altogether,” says Dante, “and even of ‘urban’ words let only the noblest remain in your sieve.” “If you have Invention, Judgment, and half a dozen other things,” every one of which has been possessed in more or less perfection by most of the great writers of the world whether in prose or poetry, “metrical expertness will follow as a matter of course,” says Wordsworth. “You must, after painfully selecting the noblest words and arranging them in the noblest style, further arrange them in the best line that experience and genius combined can give you, and yet further build these lines into the artfullest structure that art has devised,” says Dante. “Poetry is spontaneous utterance,” says he of Cockermouth. “Poetry, and the language proper for it, is a regular ‘panther-quest,’ an elaborate and painful toil,” says the Florentine.

[Sidenote: _and Dante’s practice_]

And their practice is no less opposed than their theory; or rather the relation of the two, to theory and practice taken together, is the most astonishing contrast to be found in Poetry. Dante never falsifies his theory for a moment. You cannot find a line, in _Commedia_ or _Vita Nuova_ or anywhere else, where the “panther-quest” of word, and phrase, and line-formation, and stanza-grouping is not evident; you will be put to it to find one where this quest is not consummately successful. And, in following word and phrase and form, Dante never forgets or starves his meaning. He may be sometimes obscure, but never because there is no meaning to discern through the gloom. He may be sometimes technical; but the technicality is never otherwise than the separable garb of a “strange and high” thought and intention. Matter and form with him admit no divorce: their marriage is not the marriage of two independent entities, but the marriage of soul and body. He has no need of the alternation of emotion and tranquillity, of the paroxysm succeeded by the notebook (or interrupted by it and succeeded by the fair copy), because his emotion and his tranquillity are identical, because the tide of his poetry is the tide “too full for sound or foam,” at least for splash or spoondrift. He is methodical down to the counting of syllables in poetic words: and yet who has more poetic madness than he?

[Sidenote: _with Wordsworth’s._]

The difference in Wordsworth is almost startling; it looks as if it had been “done on purpose.” He does obey his theory, does accept the language of ordinary life.[366] But when he does so, as (almost) everybody admits, he is too often not poetical at all—never in touch with the highest poetry.[367] And (which is extremely remarkable and has not, I think, been remarked by Coleridge or by many other critics) even in these poems he has not the full courage of his opinions. In no single instance does he venture on the experiment of discarding the merely “superadded charm” of metre, of which he has such a low opinion. He never in one single instance relies on the sheer power of “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” on the impetus of “emotion recollected in tranquillity,” _without_ metre. In the form of poetry, which he affects to despise, he is even as these publicans.

These are two sufficiently striking points; but they are not so striking as the third. Wordsworth _is_ a great poet; he _has_ moments of all but the sublimest—for this argument we need certainly not grudge to say of the sublimest—poetry. He can bathe us in the light of setting suns, and introduce us even to that which never was on sea and land;[368] he can give us the full contact, the full ecstasy, the very “kiss of the spouse.” But in no single instance, again, does he achieve these moments, except—as Coleridge has pointed out to some extent, and as can be pointed out without shirking or blenching at one “place” of poetry—at the price of utterly forgetting his theory, of flinging it to the tides and the winds, of plunging and exulting in poetic diction and poetic arrangement.

[Sidenote: _The comparison fatal to Wordsworth as a critic._]

So we can only save Wordsworth the poet—in which salvage there is fortunately not the slightest difficulty—at the expense of Wordsworth the critic. Even in these curious documents of critical suicide there are excellent critical utterances _obiter_, and some even of the propositions in the very argument itself are separately, if not in their context, justifiable. He might, if he could have controlled himself, have made a very valuable exposure, not merely of false poetic diction, but of that extremely and monotonously _mannerised_ poetic diction which, though not always bad in its inception and to a certain extent, becomes so by misusage and overusage. He might have developed his polemic against the personification of Gray and others with real advantage. He might have arranged a conspectus of the sins of eighteenth-century poetic diction, which would have been a most valuable pendant to Johnson’s array of the extravagances of the Metaphysicals. He might—if he had carried out and corrected that theory of his of the necessity of antecedent “powerful feelings” in the poet—have produced a “Paradox of the Poet” which would have been as true as Diderot’s on the Actor, and have had far greater value. But he did none of these things; and what he did do is itself not even a paradox—it is a paralogism.

[Sidenote: _Other critical places in Coleridge._]

How much better Coleridge comes out of this affair has already been partly said. But these concluding chapters[369] of the _Biographia_, though certainly his capital critical achievement, are very far from being his only one. Indeed, next to his poetical, his critical work is Coleridge’s greatest: and with all his everlasting faults of incompleteness, digression, cumbrousness of style,[370] and what not, it gives him a position inferior to no critic, ancient or modern, English or foreign. But it is scattered all over his books, and it would not be ill done if some one would extract it from the mass and set it together. In surveying such examples of it as are here most important, we shall take the convenient Bohn edition of Coleridge’s Prose, following the contents of its volumes, but supplementing them to no small extent with the very interesting and only recently printed notes which Mr Ernest Coleridge published as _Anima Poetæ_, and with a glance at the _Letters_.

[Sidenote: _The rest of the_ Biographia.]

Coleridge himself, at the very beginning of the _Biographia_, has indicated the discussion of the question of Poetic Diction as the main point which he had in view; but, with all its gaps and all its lapses, the whole book is among the few which constitute the very Bible of Criticism. The opening, with its famous description of the author’s education in the art under the merciless and yet so merciful ferule of Boyer or Bowyer; the reference to Bowles—so little important in himself and on Arnoldian principles, so infinitely important to “_them_,” and so to history and to us, the “us” of every subsequent time; the personal digressions on himself and on Wordsworth and on Southey—are among “the topmost towers of Ilion,” the best illustrations of that “English fashion of criticism” of which, as has been said, Dryden laid the foundations nearly a century and a half earlier by uniting theory with elaborate, and plentiful, and apparently indiscriminate, examples from practice.

[Sidenote: The Friend.]

One seldom feels inclined to be more angry[371] with Coleridge’s habit of “Prommy pas Payy”[372] than in reference to that introduction to the _Ancient Mariner_—dealing with the supernatural, and with the difference between Imagination and Fancy—to which he coolly refers the reader as if it existed,[373] just before the actual examination of Wordsworth’s theories in the _Biographia_, and after the long digressions, Hartleian, biographical proper, and what not, which fill the second division of the book. But that one does well to be angry is not quite so certain. The discussion would probably have been the reverse of methodical, and it is very far from unlikely that everything good in it is actually cast up here, or there, on the “Rich Strand” of his actual work. To return to that work,[374] there is little criticism in the extraordinary mingle-mangle of religion, politics, and philosophy, of “Bell and Ball: Ball and Bell,” Maria Schoening and Dr Price, called _The Friend_, whichever of its two forms[375] be taken. At the beginning there are one or two remarks which seem to promise matter of our kind, and there is some good Shakespeare comment at p. 299: but that is about all.

[Sidenote: Aids to Reflection, _&c._]

Neither should we expect (save on the principle that in Coleridge the unexpected very generally happens) anything in the _Aids to Reflection_ or the _Confessions of an Enquiring Spirit_, though in the first there are some of the usual girds at anonymous reviewing, and the second is important enough for that equivocal if not bastard variety of our kind which has “Biblical” or “Higher” tacked before it. But the three remaining volumes[376] are almost compact of our matter, while there is not a little of it, and of the very best quality, in the _Anima Poetæ_.

[Sidenote: _The_ Lectures on Shakespeare, _&c._]

The great storehouse next to the _Biographia_ is, of course, the _Lectures on Shakespeare_ with their satellite fragments, unsatisfactory as are the conditions under which we have all these things. There is perhaps no more astounding example of the tricks of self-deception than Coleridge’s statement to Allsop that he had “_written_” three volumes of five hundred pages each, containing a complete critical history of the English drama, and “requiring neither addition, omission, nor correction—nothing but mere arrangement.” What we actually have of his whole critical work, outside the _Biographia_, consists of perhaps one-third that amount of his own and other people’s notes of Lectures, very rarely consecutive at all, requiring constant omission because of repetition, and defying the art of the most ingenious _diaskeuast_ to get them into anything like order, and of a smaller but still considerable mass of _Marginalia_, pocket-book entries, and fragments of the most nondescript kinds. And we know from indisputable testimony by persons who actually heard the _Lectures_ which these notes represent, that if we possessed reports _in extenso_ by the most accurate and intelligent of reporters, things would be not so very much better, because of Coleridge’s incurable habit of apology, digression, anticipation, and repetition. That he found a written lecture an intolerable trammel, and even notes irksome, if he stuck close to them, we can readily believe. Many, if not most, lecturers would agree with him. But it is given to few people, and certainly was not given to him, to speak _ex-tempore_ on such subjects in a fashion which will bear printing. And his lectures have, as we have said, only very rarely had even the chance of standing this.

[Sidenote: _Their chaotic character_]

Nevertheless, we are perhaps not in reality so very much worse off. Extreme method in criticism is something of a superstition, and, as we have seen, the greatest critical book of the world, that of Longinus, has, as we possess it, very little of this, and does not appear ever to have had very much. The critic does his best work, not in elaborating theories which will constantly break down or lead him wrong when they come into contact with the myriad-sided elusiveness of Art and Humanity, but in examining individual works or groups of work, and in letting his critical steel strike the fire of mediate axioms and _aperçus_ from the flint of these. It does the recipient rather good than harm to have to take the trouble of selecting, co-ordinating, and adjusting such things for himself; at any rate, he escapes entirely the danger of that deadly bondage to a cut-and-dried scheme which was the curse of the Neo-classic system. And there is no critic who provides these examinations and _aperçus_ and _axiomata media_ more lavishly than Coleridge.[377]

[Sidenote: _and preciousness._]

I remember still, with amusement after many years, the words of, I suppose, a youthful reviewer who, admitting that an author whom he was reviewing had applied the method of Coleridge as to Shakespeare, &c., with some skill and even some originality, hinted that this method was quite _vieux jeu_, and that modern criticism was taking and to take an entirely different line. And I have been grateful to that reviewer ever since for giving me a mental smile whenever I think of him. That his new critical Evangel—it was the “scientific” gospel of the late M. Hennequin, if “amid the memories long outworn Of many-_volumed eve and_ morn” I do not mistake—has itself gone to the dustbin meanwhile does not matter, and is not the cause of the smile. The risibility is in the notion that any great criticism can ever be obsolete. We may, we must, we ought sometimes to differ with Aristotle and Longinus, with Quintilian and Scaliger, with Patrizzi and Castelvetro, with Dryden and Johnson, with Sainte-Beuve and Arnold. But what is good in them—and even what, though not so intrinsically good, is injured only by system and point of view, by time and chance and fatality—remains a possession for ever. “The eternal substance of their greatness” is of the same kind (although it be less generally recognised or relished) as the greatness of creation. _La Mort n’y mord_.

Of such matter Coleridge provides us with abundance everywhere, and perhaps most on Shakespeare. He acknowledges his debts to Lessing, and was perhaps unduly anxious to deny any to the Schlegels; but he has made everything that he may have borrowed his own, and he has wealth untold that is not borrowed at all. He can go wrong like other people. His favourite and constantly repeated denunciation of Johnson’s couplet—

“Let Observation with extensive view
Survey mankind from China to Peru”—

as “bombast and tautology,” as equivalent to “let observation with extensive observation survey mankind extensively,” is not only unjust but actually unintelligent,[378] and probably due only to the horror of eighteenth-century personification, intensified in Coleridge by the fact that in his own early poems he had freely indulged therein.

[Sidenote: _Some noteworthy things in them: general,_]

But on the very opposite page[379]—in the very corresponding lines which shut up on this carping when the book is closed—we read, “To the young I would remark that it is always unwise to judge of anything by its defects: the first attempt ought to be to discover its excellences.” I have found nothing better for the motto of this Book; I cannot imagine anything better as a corrective of the faults of Neo-classic critics—as a “Take away that bauble!” the stop-watch. Again, observe the admirable separation of poet and dramatist in Lecture vii. of the 1811 course;[380] the remarks (suggested perhaps by Lessing, but in no respect an echo of him) on poetry and painting in the Ninth;[381] and the altogether miraculous “character” of Ariel which follows.[382] The defences of Shakespeare’s puns are always consummate[383]—in fact, “Love me, love my pun,” should be one of the chief articles of a Shakespearian Proverb-book. In the notes referring (or supposed to refer) to the course of 1818, variations of the _Biographia_ (published the year before) were sure to occur and do; one of the most noteworthy being the expansion and application of the idea of “suspension of disbelief.”[384] Note, too, the acuteness in the censure[385] (with half-apologies) of the absurd stage-directions which characterised German, and characterise Scandinavian, drama.

[Sidenote: _and particular._]

Of the separate notes on Shakespeare’s Plays it is impossible to say much here: and indeed it is not necessary. They are to be read—if possible in conjunction with the plays themselves—by everybody: to digest them into a formal treatise would be perhaps impossible, and, as hinted above, would not be a testimonial to their value if it were possible. But their great merit, next to their individual felicity, is the constant cropping up of those _aperçus_ of a more general, though not too general, cast which have been noticed.

[Sidenote: _Coleridge on other dramatists._]

Coleridge never admires Shakespeare too much; but the Devil’s Advocate may perhaps make something of a count against him that he is often apt to depress others by a comparison, which is not in the least necessary. On Ben Jonson he is rather inadequate than unjust; but he is certainly unjust to Beaumont and Fletcher, and I almost fear that his injustice, like his more than justice to Massinger, may be set down to extra-literary causes. It is extraordinary that such a critic should have used the language that he uses of Florimel in _The Maid of the Mill_.[386] Her devices to preserve her honour are extravagant: this extravagance, as compared with the perfect _naturalness_ of Shakespeare, is the constant note of “the twins”; and if Coleridge had confined himself to bringing it out, there would have been no more to be said. But his remarks are here not merely unjust, they are silly. And yet here, too, we could find the priceless _obiter dicta_, that on words that have made their way despite precisian objection,[387] those on metre[388] almost always, and others.

[Sidenote: _The_ Table Talk.]

The motes fly thick for us in the _Table Talk_; and as they are clearly headed and indexed in the edition referred to, there is the less need of additional specification, while there is, here as everywhere, a good deal of repetition.[389] But one must point in passing to the striking contrast of Schiller’s “material sublime”[390] (and Coleridge was not inclined to undervalue Schiller[391]) with Shakespeare’s economy of means; the pertinent, though by no means final, question, “If you take from Virgil his diction and metre, what do you leave him?”[392] the remarks on Spenser’s “swan-like movement”;[393] a remarkable cluster of literary dicta in the entry for Midsummer-Day 1827 (when H. N. says that his uncle talked “a volume”), to be supplemented by another sheaf on July 12; the contrast of Milton and Shakespeare;[394] the remarks on Rabelais;[395] the wonderfully pregnant one as to the “three silent revolutions in England”;[396] those on Latin Literature;[397] on the evolutionary quality of genius;[398] another great _obiter dictum_,[399] that “Great minds are never in the wrong, but in consequence _of being in the right imperfectly_,” which is truest of all in criticism itself; yet another,[400] “To please me, a poem must be either music or sense: if it is neither, I confess I cannot interest myself in it”; and, above all, that on Tennyson[401]—one of the _loci classici_ of warning to the greatest critics to distrust themselves when they are judging the poetry of the “younger generations.” And if we cannot help reproachfully ejaculating “Æschylus!” when he denies[402] sublimity to the Greeks, let us again remember that Æschylus was strangely _occulted_ to the whole Neo-classic age, and that it is very much Coleridge’s own doing that we of the last two or three generations have re-discovered him.

[Sidenote: _The_ Miscellanies.]

The few contributions, shortly supplemented from MS., to Southey’s _Omniana_ give little, but the volume now entitled _Miscellanies, Æsthetic and Literary_, is very nearly all ours. Much of it, however, is repetition in apparent title, and a good deal of the rest does not quite answer expectations. The general _Essays on the Fine Arts_ with which it opens (and of which the author, who had lost them, entertained that perhaps rather exaggerated idea which we usually entertain of lost loves, books, fishes, &c.) possess in abundance Coleridge’s uniquely stimulating quality, but, perhaps in not much less abundance, his extreme desultoriness and want of definition, save of the most indefinite character. The essay on the _Prometheus_ which follows excites (though hardly in the wary mind, Estesianly “alphabeted,” as he would himself say) great expectations. But it is scarcely too much to say that on this—the most purely poetical of all extant Greek dramas, a miracle of sublimity and humanity mingled, and the twin pillar, with the _Agamemnon_, of its author’s claim to be one of the greatest poets of the world—Coleridge has not a word to say that even touches the poetry. He is philosophico-mythological from the egg to the apple; and one is bound to add that he here shows one of his gravest drawbacks as a critic. The new fragments, however, of the 1818 lectures are full of good matter, on Cervantes especially, perhaps a little less specially on Dante, on Robinson Crusoe very particularly indeed, on Rabelais and Sterne and Donne: while these are taken up and multiplied in interest by the “Marginalia,” with which the literary part of the book concludes, and which contain, on Daniel and Chapman and Selden, Browne and Fuller, Fielding and Junius, some of the best known and nearly of the best of their author’s critical work. Here also, and here only, do we find much on Milton, Coleridge’s rather numerous lectures on him having left surprisingly little trace. He is, though a fervent admirer, not quite at his happiest.

[Sidenote: _The Lecture_ On Style.]