Volume 3 / Book 8 — CHAPTER I. 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—METHOD200 OF 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.

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 201the 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.

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 202observations, 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.

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.

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 203Fletcher, 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.

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 204you 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.

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?’”

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 205“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.”

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, 206though 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.

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 207chose, 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.

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.

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 208the sudden charm which accidents of light and shade, of moonlightmoonlight or sunset, communicate to familiar objects.

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.

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 209compositions 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 210comparison of which not the least notable point is a reference to the De Vulgari Eloquio.^[359] 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.

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 “disrealised” (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 211equivocal adjective. Nor will you do any good by adding “in a state of excitement.”

“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.”

212

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.”

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]

The study of his poetry.

After an odd, a distinctly amusing, but despite its title a, for 213our 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.

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, 214and 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.

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 215Wordsworth 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.

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.

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, 216and 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?

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 217recollected 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.

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. 218But he did none of these things; and what he did do is itself not even a paradox—it is a paralogism.

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.

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 219“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.

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 220to promise matter of our kind, and there is some good Shakespeare comment at p. 299: but that is about all.

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.

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 221who 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.

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]

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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 223not 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.

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.

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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.

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.

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 225of 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.

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 226it 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.

The Lecture On Style.

But the most interesting piece that the book contains is the Lecture on Style, with its satellite note (a small but sparkling star) on the “Wonderfulness of Prose.”^[403] The author’s definition of his most elusive subject is indeed not only not satisfying, but (unless you remember his own dictum about being “right incompletely”) demonstrably and almost astoundingly unsatisfactory. “Style is of course nothing but the art of conveying the meaning appropriately and with perspicuity.” One feels inclined in one’s haste to 227say, “That is just what it is not”; one must cool down a little before one can modify this to “Style begins exactly where” the art, &c., “leaves off,” and one can perhaps never come nearer to an accommodation than “The necessary preliminary to Style, and one essential ingredient of it,” is “the art,” and so forth.^[404] It was no doubt this side of the matter that Coleridge was looking at, and at this he stopped, as far as his general way of looking at the thing went. But the main interest of the piece does not lie here. He bases his definition on, and tries to adjust it to, a survey of English style, which is probably one of the first of the kind ever attempted, after the notion of the Queen Anne men being the crown and flower of English had been given up. And though his history, as was natural, is sometimes shaky, and his conclusions are often to be disputed and even overthrown, the whole is of the highest value, not merely as a point de repère historically, but as an introduction to the consideration of Style itself.

The Anima Poetæ.

But the book of Coleridge which, next to the Biographia, is of most importance to the student of his criticism, is perhaps the long-posthumous Anima Poetæ. Mr Ernest Coleridge, in his preface to the Anima itself, says that the Biographia is now little read. I hope he is wrong: but if he is right it would explain many things.

This volume—a collection of extracts from Coleridge’s pocket-books—appeared^[405] more than sixty years after the poet’s death, and the notice taken of it was comparatively small. That it contains passages of ornate prose superior to anything in the previously published writings is interesting, but for our purpose almost irrelevant: it is not so that it gives the fullest and clearest side-lights on Coleridge’s criticism that we have. The earliest years (and pages) are not very fertile, though I subjoin some references^[406] which will assist the reader in looking them up. But from p. 119 for some fifty pages onward (it is significant that the time of writing, 1805-8, corresponds 228with Coleridge’s absence in Malta, &c., from which we have little or no published work) the entries are “diamondiferous.” On French poetry (mistaken but so informingly!);^[407] on Cowper;^[408] on the absurdity of calling etymology (how much more philology!) a “science”;^[409] on the attitude to poetry and to books;^[410] on Leibnitz’s “profound sentence” that “men’s intellectual errors consist chiefly in denying”;^[411] on the “instinctive passion in the mind for one word to express one act of feeling” (Flaubert fifty years before date); on pseudo-originality,—Coleridge is at his very acme. The yeast of criticism—the reagent which, itself created by the contact of the critical with the creative, re-creates itself in all fit media—has never been more remarkably represented than here.

And great as are these passages, there are many others (though not so many in close context) to match them. See the entry (which I venture to think has been wrongly side-headed as “A plea for poetic license” at the foot of p. 165) as to the desire of carrying things to a greater height of pleasure and admiration than they are susceptible of—the old “wish to write better than you can,” the “loss of sight between this and the other style.”^[412] See the astonishing anticipation of the best side of Ruskinism in the note on architecture and climate;^[413] and that on poetry and prose and on the “esenoplastic” power;^[414] and that on somebody (Byron?) who was “splendid” everywhere, but nowhere poetical;^[415] and that on scholastic terms;^[416] and that on the slow comprehension of certain (in this case Dantean) poetry.^[417] They are all apices criticismi—not easy reading, not for the running man, but for him who reads them fitly, certain to bear fruit if he reads them early, to coincide with his own painful and struggling attainments if he reads them late.

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The Letters.

Nor must the Letters^[418] be omitted in any sufficient survey of Coleridge’s criticism. That at one early period^[419] he apparently thought Schiller more sublime than Milton is not in the least to his discredit. He was twenty-two; he was, I think, demonstrably in love with three ladies^[420] at once, and extremely uncertain which of two of them he should marry—a state of mind neither impossible nor unnatural, but likely to lead to considerable practical difficulties, and to upset the judgment very decidedly. His minor critical remarks at this very time on Southey’s poems are excellent. That Bowles should be “divine” and Burke “sad stuff”^[421] does not matter—we can explain both statements well enough. But how many men of three- or four-and-twenty (or for that matter of three- or four-and-seventy) were there, are there, have there ever been, who could ask, “Why pass an Act of Uniformity against poets?”^[422] one of the great critical questions of the world, and never, so far as I remember, formulated so pertinently before. It is odd that he should have forgotten (if he knew) Sidney, in his singular and pedantic complaint that to give the name Stella to a woman is “unsexing” it, and his supposition that “Swift is the authority.”^[423] But another astonishing critical truth is that “Poetry ought not always to have its highest relish”;^[424] and yet another in the contrast^[425] of himself with Southey, “I think too much to be a poet; he too little to be a great poet,” unjust as the application is in the first half; and yet again on metre itself “implying a passion,”^[426] a passage worth comparing with, and in some points better than, the Biographia (with which compare also pp. 386, 387). Nor these alone, but many others later—the criticism on Wordsworth’s 230“Cintra” pamphlet;^[427] that on the inadequacy of one style for all purposes;^[428] the remarks on stage illusion,^[429]—might be cited.

The Coleridgean position and quality.

When the first volume of this history was published, an excellent scholar said to me, “How will you ever finish that book? Why, Coleridge himself would take a volume!” There is something to be said for the hyperbole. In this and that critic, of these many ages which we have essayed to survey, we may find critical graces which are not in him; but in all, save two, we shall find corresponding deficiencies. In all the ancient critics, save these two, the limitation of the point of view, the hamper of the scheme, are disastrously felt, nor is either Aristotle or Longinus quite free from them. In the greatest of the sixteenth-century Italians these limitations recur, and are repeated in most of those of the seventeenth and eighteenth. Dante is of the greatest, but he touches the subject very briefly and from a special side. Dryden is great, but he is not fully informed, and comes too early for his own point of view. Fontenelle is very nearly great, but he has the same drawbacks, and adds to them those of an almost, perhaps a quite, wilful eccentricity and capriciousness. Lessing is great, but he has fixed his main attention on the least literary parts of literature; while Goethe later is great but a great pedant.^[430] Hazlitt is great; but Coleridge was Hazlitt’s master, and beside the master the pupil is insular and parochial in range and reading if not in spirit. In Sainte-Beuve himself we want a little more theory; some more enthusiasm; a higher and more inspiriting choice of subjects. And in Mr. Arnold the defects of Fontenelle reappear without Fontenelle’s excuse of chronology.

So, then, there abide these three, Aristotle, Longinus, and Coleridge. The defects of the modern, as contrasted with the ancient, man of letters are prominent in Coleridge when we compare him with these his fellows: and so we cannot quite say that he is the greatest of the three. But his range is necessarily wider: he takes in, as their date forbade them to take, all literature in a way which must for centuries to come give 231him the prerogative. It is astonishing how often, when you have discovered in others of all dates, or (as you may fondly hope) found out for yourself, some critical truth, you will remember that after all Coleridge in his wanderings has found it before, and set it by the wayside for the benefit of those who come after. For all, I believe, of these later days—certainly for all whose mother-tongue is English—Coleridge is the critical author to be turned over by day and by night. Never take him on trust: it is blasphemy to the Spirit of Criticism to do that with any critic. Disagree with him as often as you like, and as you can stand to the guns of your disagreement. But begin with him, continue with him, come back to him after excursions, with a certainty of suggestion, stimulation, correction, edification. C’est mon métier à moi d'être professeur de littérature, and I am not going to parvify my office. But if anybody disestablished us all (with decent pensions, of course), and applied the proceeds of our Chairs to furnishing the boxes of every one who goes up to the University with a copy of the Biographia Literaria, I should decline to be the person chosen to be heard against this revolution, though I should plead for the addition of the Poetics and of Longinus.

He introduces once for all the criterion of Imagination, realising and disrealising.

And if any one is still dissatisfied with particular critical utterances, and even with the middle axioms interspersed among them, let him remember that Coleridge—not Addison, not the Germans, not any other—is the real introducer into the criticism of poetry of the realising and disrealising Imagination as a criterion. Even now, a hundred years after his earliest day as a critic, the doctrine, though much talked of, is apparently little understood. Even such a critic as the late Mr Traill, while elsewhere^[431] admitting that “on poetic expression” Coleridge “has spoken the absolutely last word,” almost apologised^[432] for his putting on a level “lending the charm of imagination to the real” and “lending the force of reality to the imaginary.” He confessed that, “from the point 232of view of the highest conception of the poet’s office there can be no comparison”—where indeed I might also “say ditto to Mr Burke,” but in a sense opposite to his. And if, on such a mind and such an appreciation as Mr Traill’s, this one-sided interpretation of “the esenoplastic faculty” had hold, how much more on others in increasing measure to the present day? The fallacy is due, first, to the hydra-like vivacity of the false idea of mimesis, the notion that it is not re-presentation, re-creation adding to Nature, but copying her; and, secondly, to the Baconian conception of poetry as a vinum dæmonum, a poison with some virtue as a medicine. What power these errors have all our history has shown,—all Histories of Criticism that ever can be written will show if they are written faithfully. But Coleridge has provided—once for all, if it be not neglected—the safeguard against this in his definitions of the two, the co-equal, the co-eternal functions of the exercise of the poetic Imagination.

The “Companions.”

In the title of the present chapter I have used the word “companions” in a double sense—the first and special application of it being that in which it is technically applied to the Companions of the Prophet—to the early coadjutors of Mahomet in his struggle with the Koreish. Of these the chief are Southey, Lamb, Leigh Hunt, and Hazlitt, with perhaps as an even closer ally—though unknowing and unknown—William Blake. Then follow companions in the wider sense—associates in the work, who varied from nearly complete alliance, as with Scott, to very distant and lukewarm participation, as in Campbell, and (in literary position) from the captaincy of Scott again and of Shelley to the more than respectable full-privateship of the contributors to the Retrospective Review. As for the “Adversaries,” they can be more briefly dealt with, for their work was mostly “wood, hay, stubble”; but Gifford and Jeffrey at least could not be excluded here, and a few more may deserve notice. So let the inquiry proceed in this order.

Southey.

It may seem at first sight curious, and will perhaps always 233remain a little so, that we have no collected examples, nor many uncollected but singly substantive pieces, of strictly critical work, from the most widely read and the most industrious of the whole literary group of 1800-1830 in England—from a man who, for eleven years at least, wrote reviews almost wherever he could place them without hurting his conscience, and who for another five-and-twenty was a pillar of one of the greatest of critical periodicals. But Southey’s earlier reviewing is for the most part not merely whelmed in the dust-bins of old magazines, but, as his son and biographer complains, extremely difficult to trace even there; and his later was, by choice or by chance (more I think by the former than by the latter), mainly devoted to subjects not purely literary. If that great Bibliotheca Britannica^[433] (which so nearly existed, and which is a thing lacking in English to this present day, a hundred years later) had come actually into existence, it would hardly have been necessary to look beyond that: as it is, one has the pleasing but rather laborious and lengthy duty of fishing out and piecing together critical expressions from The Doctor and other books to some extent, and from the two parallel collections of the Life and Correspondence^[434] and the Letters^[435] to a still greater. The process is necessary for a historian of criticism, and the results, if hardly new to him, are interesting enough; but they cannot claim any exhibition at all correspondent to the time taken in arriving at them. Nor will any such historian, if he be wise, complain, for Southey is always delightful, except when he is in his most desperately didactic moods: and the Goddess of Dulness only knows how even the most egregious of her children, unless from pure ignorance, has managed to fix on him the title of “dull.”

General characteristics of his Criticism.

That “a man’s criticism is the man himself” is almost truer 234than the original bestowal of the phrase; and it is nowhere truer than with Southey. That astonishing and almost godlike sanity which distinguished him, in almost all cases save as regards the Anti-Jacobin, Mr Pitt, the Roman Catholic Church, and my Lord Byron (who, by the way, lacked it quite as conspicuously in regard to Southey), is the constant mark of his critical views. Except his over-valuation of Kirke White,^[436] which was undoubtedly due to his amiable and lifelong habit of helping lame dogs, I cannot, at the moment or on reflection, think of any critical estimate of his (for that of himself as a poet is clearly out of the question) which is flagrantly and utterly wrong; and I can think of hundreds which are triumphantly right. In respect of older literature, in particular,^[437] his catholicity is free from the promiscuousness of Leigh Hunt, and his eclecticism from the caprice of Charles Lamb: while, prejudiced as he can be, I do not remember an instance in which prejudice blinds or blunts his critical faculty as it does Hazlitt’s. On all formal points of English poetry he is very nearly impeccable. He may have learnt his belief in substitution and equivalence from Coleridge; but it is remarkable that his defences of it to Wynn^[438] are quite early, quite original, and quite sound, while Coleridge’s own account long after, in the preface to Christabel, is vague and to some extent incorrect. He knew, of course, far more literary history than any one of his contemporaries—an incalculable advantage—and he could, sometimes at least, formulate general critical maxims well worth the registering.

235

Reviews.

Of his regular critical work, however, which can be traced in the Annual and Quarterly Reviews from the list given by his son at the end of the Life, some notice must be taken, though the very list itself is a tell-tale in the large predominance of Travels, Histories, and the like over pure literature. That he should have made a rule for himself after he became Laureate not to review poetry (save in what may be called an eleemosynary manner) is merely what one would have expected from his unvarying sense of propriety; but there were large ranges of belles lettres to which this did not apply. The articles which will best repay the looking up are, in the Annual, those on Gebir, Godwin’s Chaucer, Ritson’s Romances, Hayley, Froissart, Sir Tristram, Ellis’s Specimens, Todd’s Spenser, and Ossian; in the Quarterly, those on Chalmers’s Poets, Sayers, Hayley again, Camoens, and Lope de Vega, with some earlier ones on Montgomery (James, not Robert).^[439]

The Doctor.

The Doctor also must have its special animadversion, for this strangely neglected and most delightful book is full of critical matter. Its showers of mottoes—star-showers from the central glowing mass of Southey’s enormous and never “dead” reading—amount almost in themselves to a critical education for any mind which is fortunate enough to be exposed to them when young, while the saturation of the whole book with literature can hardly fail to produce the same effect. It is lamentable, astonishing, and (the word is not too strong) rather disgraceful that, except the “Three Bears” story, the appendix on the Cats, and perhaps the beautiful early passages on the Doctor’s birthplace and family, the book should be practically unknown. But it by no means owes its whole critical value to these borrowed and reset 236jewels. The passages of original criticism—direct or slightly “applied”—which it contains are numerous and important. The early accounts of the elder Daniel’s library^[440] and of Textor’s dialogues^[441] are valuable; the passage on “Taste and Pantagruelism”^[442] much more so. On Sermons,^[443] on Drayton,^[444] on the Principles of Criticism,^[445] on the famous verse-tournament of the Poitiers Flea,^[446] on the Reasons for Anonymity,^[447] on Mason^[448] (for whom Southey manages to say a good word), on Bowdlerising and Modernising, and (by an easy transition) Spenser^[449]—the reader will find nuggets, and sometimes whole pockets, of critical gold, the last-mentioned being one of the richest of all. It is to Southey’s immortal honour (an honour not sufficiently paid him by some Blakites) that he recognised and quoted at length^[450] the magnificent “Mad Song,” which is perhaps Blake’s most sustained and unbroken piece of pure poetry. His discussion on Styles^[451] is of great value: while the long account^[452] of the plays of Langeveldt (Macropedius), and of our kindred English Morality Everyman, shows how admirably his more than once projected Literary Histories would have been executed.

Altogether somewhat impar sibi.

Still, I am bound to say that he conveys to my mind the impression of not quite having his soul bound up in the exercise of his critical function. He was a little too fond of extending his love of books to those which, as Lamb would say, are no books—of giving the children’s bread unto dogs. Occasionally, moreover, that want of the highest enthusiasm and sympathy, the highest inspiration, which—after the rather ungracious and ungrateful suggestion of Coleridge—it has been usual to urge against him, and which cannot be wholly disproved, does appear. Some would say that this was due to his enormous reading, and to 237the penal servitude for life to what was mostly hack-work, which fate and his own matchless sense of duty imposed upon him. I do not think so; but of course if it be said that no one with the more translunary fancies, the nobler gusts, could have so enslaved himself, an authority^[453] who takes so high a ground must be allowed his splendid say. Anyhow, and on the whole, we must return to the position that Southey does not hold a very high position among English critics, and that it is easier to give plausible reasons for the fact than entirely to understand it.^[454]

Lamb.

In criticising the criticism of Charles Lamb^[455] one has to walk warily; for is he not one of the most justly beloved of English writers, and are not lovers apt to love more well than wisely? I shall only say that if any be an “Agnist,” I more. Ever since I can remember reading anything (the circumstance would not have seemed trivial to himself), I have read and revelled in, and for nearly forty years I have possessed in fee, a copy of the original Elia of 1823, in the black morocco coat which it put on, at least seven years before Lamb’s death, in 1827. I have also read its contents, and all other attainable Agnalia, in every edition in which I have come across them, with introductions by “Thaunson and Jaunson,” in and on all sorts of shapes and types and papers and bindings. I have never wearied of reading 238them; I am sure I never shall weary as long as eye and brain last. That Lamb is one of the most exquisite and delightful of critics, as of writers, is a proposition for which I will go to the stake; but I am not prepared to confess him as one of the very greatest in his critical capacity.

His “occultism”

The reasons for this limitation are to be found in two passages of his friend Hazlitt—a ruthless friend enough, but one who seldom goes wrong in speaking of friend or foe, unless under the plain influence of a prejudice which here had not the slightest reason for existing. The passages (referred to again elsewhere) are that on “the Occult School” in the “Criticism”^[456] and one in the “Farewell.”^[457] The first speaks of those “who discern no beauties but what are concealed from superficial eyes, and overlook all that are obvious to the vulgar part of mankind.” “If an author is utterly unreadable they can read him for ever.” “They will no more share a book than a mistress with a friend.” “Nothing goes down with them but what is caviare to the multitude,” &c. The other, in which Lamb is actually named, contrasts his “surfeit of admiration,” the antiquation of his favourites after some ten years, with the “continuity of impression” on which Hazlitt prided himself.

and alleged inconstancy.

I am inclined to think that both these charges—made with what is (for the author) perfect good-humour, and only in the first case slightly exaggerated, as was almost permissible when he was dealing ostensibly with a type not a person—are quite true. One would not indeed have them false; it would be most “miserably wise” economy to exchange Lamb, as he is, for a wilderness of consistent, equitable, catholic mediocrities. As Hazlitt himself admits, this “Occult Criticism” does not or need not come from any affectation or love of singularity: indeed, some occult critics “smack of genius and are worth any money.” The Lothario part of the indictment, the desertion after enjoyment, is perhaps less easy to authenticate as well as to defend; but I think it existed, and was indeed a necessary consequence of the other tendency. If you love merely or mainly as a 239collector, and for rarity,—if not only thus but because others do not,—the multiplication of the object or of the taste must necessarily have a disgusting effect. “The bloom is off the rye.” And I should say that, beyond all reasonable question, there is a distinct character of eccentricity in the strict sense, of whim, of will-worship, about many, if not most, of Lamb’s preferences. There is no affectation about him; but there is what might be affectation in another man, and has been affectation in many and many another. Take the most famous instances of his criticism—the defence of Congreve and Wycherley, the exaltation of Ford, the saying (productive of endless tribulation to the matter-of-fact) that Heywood is “a prose Shakespeare,” the enthusiasm shown towards that rather dull-fantastic play A Fair Quarrel, while the magnificence of the same author’s Changeling was left to Leigh Hunt to find out—these and other things distinctly show the capriccio. Lamb, not Hunt, is really the “Ariel of Criticism,” and he sometimes pushes tricksiness to a point which would, we fear, have made his testy Highness of Milan rather angry. It was probably in conversation rather than in writing that his fickleness showed itself: we can never conceive Lamb writing down anything that he had ever written up. But something of disillusionment must, as has been said, almost necessarily have resulted from the peculiarly whimsical character of his inamoration. Canon Ainger has noted, as the distinguishing features of Lamb’s critical power, “width and versatility.” One differs with the Master^[458] of the Temple unwillingly and suo periculo: but neither term seems to me quite appropriate. “Width” implies continuity, and there is little of this in Lamb: “versatility” implies a power of turning to what you will, and Lamb, I think, loved, not as he would but as he could not help it at the time.

The early Letters.

But he wants nothing save method and certainty (in response—not even this in touch), and he has critical graces of his own which make him all but as great as Coleridge or Hazlitt, and perhaps more delightful than either. In his very earliest critical utterances, in the Letters to Coleridge and Southey especially, much of this delightfulness 240displays itself as well as its two parents—Lamb’s unconquerable originality of thought and feeling, and his unsurpassable quaintness and piquancy of phrase. The critic is, as is inevitable from his youth, and from the as yet very imperfect reading which he frankly confesses, a little uncertain and inadequate. His comparative estimates of Coleridge and Southey, Southey and Milton, Southey and Cowper, and of all or most of these poets and others in themselves, exhibit an obviously unregulated compass—a tendency to correct impression rather overmuch, because the first striking off of it has been hasty. But this soon disappears: and though the eccentricity above noted rather increases than lessens with years, the critic’s real virtues—those just indicated—appear ever and ever more distinctly and more delightfully.

The Specimens.

In a certain sense they never appear to greater advantage than in the brief notes included in the Specimens of Dramatic Poets (1808). Everything necessary to excite Lamb’s critical excellence united here,—actual merit, private interest (for, though the study of the minor as well as of the major Elizabethans had been progressing steadily, and “Dodsley” had gone through several editions, yet the authors were caviare to the general still); presence of the highest excellence; and, as we see from the Letters, years of familiarity and fondness on the part of the critic.

The Notes themselves pretend to no method, and fulfil their pretence very strictly. Lamb is distinctly inferior to both his great friends and rivals in grasp. His appreciation is tangential—though in a different sense from that in which Hazlitt applies the word to Coleridge. Lamb is not so much desultory or divagatory as apt to touch his subject only at one (sometimes one very small) point. The impact results in a spark of the most ardent heat and glowing light, but neither heat nor light spreads much. Sometimes, as is inevitable in this style of criticism, he can be only disappointing: one is inclined to be pettish with him for seeing nothing to notice in the vast and shadowy sweep of Tamburlaine save an interesting evidence that Pistol was not merely jesting. Nor is perhaps Barabbas “a mere monster brought in with a large painted 241nose to please the rabble.” But you must get out of this mood if you are to enjoy Lamb. How he makes it all up, and more than up, on Faustus, and (when he comes to Dekker) on Old Fortunatus! “Beware! beware!” is the cry here also, lest we steal too much of his honeydew. Fortunately it has been so widely used, even for the vulgar purpose of sweetening school-editions, that it has become generally accessible. The famous passage on the Witches, which Hazlitt loved to quote, is perhaps as characteristic as any: the Webster and Chapman notices are perhaps critically the best.

Next in order of time come the articles contributed to the Reflector, especially the magnificent paper on “The Tragedies of Shakespeare” and their actableness. I may be prejudiced in favour of this, by caring myself infinitely to read the drama, and not caring at all to see it acted; but this objection could not be made to Lamb, who was notoriously a playgoer, and an eager though unfortunate aspirant to the honours of the boards. The piece, of course, shows some traces of the capriccio,—especially in the confession of being utterly unable to appreciate “To be or not to be,” because of its being “spouted.” Shakespeare himself might have taught Lamb better, in a certain passage about age and custom. To learn, to hear, nay, direst curse of all! to teach “To be or not to be” leaves it perfect Cleopatra. But Lamb must be Lamb and keep his Lambish mind: and he keeps it here to great purpose. The Lear passage, the best known and the most generally admitted as forcible, is not more so than those on the Tempest and on Macbeth. They all come to that position of the true critic (as I believe it to be), which has been indicated elsewhere, that drama may be literature but is not bound to be—that they are different things, and that the points which drama need not have, and perhaps to which it cannot do full justice, are in literature of the greatest importance.

The Garrick Play Notes.

It is natural, though they were written so long afterwards, to take the “Notes on the Garrick Plays” with these other forerunners and suggesters; nor do I think that so much of the “first sprightly running” is lost as has sometimes been thought. How Lamb-like and how pleasant is 242the phrase on Day’s quaint Parliament of Bees—“the very air seems replete with humming and buzzing melodies.” (Most obvious, of course: only that nobody had met it before!) And the imploration to Novello to set the song from Peele’s Arraignment; and the fine and forcible plea for the minor Elizabethans in the note to The Two Angry Women of Abingdon (a play, by the way, every fresh reading of which makes one more thoroughly agree with Lamb). The fewness and slightness of these notes should not be allowed to obscure their quality.

Miscellaneous Essays.

It was seldom that the bee-like nature of Lamb’s own genius could settle long on a single flower; and his regular “studies” are few, and not always of his very best. The actual state of the paper on The Excursion, after its mangling by Gifford, illustrates the wisdom of that editorial counsel, “Always keep a copy,” which the contributor (alas! we are all guilty) doth so unwisely neglect; and the two best that we have among the miscellaneous essays are those on Wither and on Defoe’s secondary novels. It is difficult to say which is the better: but the singular unlikeness of the two subjects (except that both Wither and Defoe are eminently homely) shows what I presume Canon Ainger meant by the “versatility” of the critic’s genius. Both are admirable, but most characteristically “promiscuous.” The Defoe piece avowedly gives stray notes; but the “Wither,” though it has a beginning, has very little middle, and no end at all.

Elia.

As for Elia itself, it is fortunately too well known to need any analysis or much detailed survey. In the first and more famous collection the literary element is rather a saturation than a separable contingent. Except the “Artificial Comedy” paper, there is none with a definitely literary title or ostensible subject: while this itself starts in the closest connection with the preceding paper on Actors, and is dramatic rather than literary. But the “saturation” is unmistakable. As one turns the beloved and hundred-times-read pages, the constant undercurrent of allusion to books and reading strikes one none the less—perhaps indeed the more—for familiarity, whether it is at some depth, as in places, or whether it bubbles up to and over the surface, as in 243“Oxford in the Vacation,” and the book-borrowing close of “The Two Races of Men,” and that other close of that “New Year’s Eve” which so unnecessarily fluttered Southey’s orthodoxy, and not a little of “All Fool’s Day”; and in quotations everywhere. But in the Last Essays Lamb exhibits the master-passion much more openly. The “Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading” of course lays all concealment aside,—it is a regular affiche, as are also “The Genteel Style in Writing” and (most of all) “On Some Sonnets of Sir Philip Sidney”Sidney”—the valiant and triumphant sally against Hazlitt—with not a little of “Old China” itself. Everywhere there is evident the abiding, unfailing love of “the book.”

The later Letters.

And if we recur to the Letters we shall find the most abundant proof of this quality. How admirable are those criticisms^[459] of the second edition of Lyrical Ballads which, because they are not “neat” praise, roused the poetic irritability, not merely of Wordsworth, whose views respecting the reception of his own verse were always Athanasian, but of Coleridge, who had, at any rate, intervals of self-perception! How sound the judgment of Mrs Barbauld and of Chapman (a pleasing pair) to Coleridge himself on Oct. 23, 1802!^[460] How sure the touch of the finger on that absurdity in Godwin’s Chaucer which has been so frequently copied since, “the fondness for filling out the picture by supposing what Chaucer did and how he felt”!^[461] The choicest of his observations are naturally those to Coleridge, almost passim: but the vein is so irrepressible that he indulges it even in writing to Wordsworth, though he knew perfectly well that the most favourable reception could only be a mild wonder that people could think or talk of any literature, and especially any poetry, other than “W. W.’s” own. Even his experiences in 1800 could not prevent him from handling^[462] the Poems of 1815 with the same “irreverent parrhesia” which he uses immediately after^[463] also to Southey on Roderick as compared with Kehama 244and Madoc. His famous appreciation of Blake^[464] (of whom 'tis pity that he knew no more) is one of the capital examples of pre-established harmony between subject and critic. That he could not, on the other hand, like Shelley, is not unsusceptible of explanations by no means wholly identical, though partly, with those which account for Hazlitt’s error. Lamb did not like the word “unearthly” (he somewhere objects to its use) and he did not like the thing unearthliness. The regions where, as Mr Arnold has it, “thin, thin, the pleasant human noises sound,” were not his haunt. Now Blake always has a homely domestic everyday side close to his wildest prophetisings,^[465] and Shelley has not. On the other hand, how completely does he grasp even Cervantes in the few obiter dicta to Southey on Aug. 19, 1825,^[466] and how instantly he seizes the “charm one cannot explain” in Rose Aylmer.^[467] And his very last letter concerns a book, and a book on poetry, Phillips’s Theatrum Poetarum.

Uniqueness of Lamb’s critical style

His love was, as we said, “of the book,” perhaps, rather than, as in Hazlitt’s case, “of literature.” The Advocatus Diaboli may once more suggest that to Lamb the book was a very little too much on a level with the tea-pot and the engraving—that he had a shade in excess of the collector’s feeling about him. But the Court will not call upon the learned gentleman to say anything more on that head. It is time to acknowledge, without reservations or provisos, the unique quality of “Elia’s” critical appreciation. Very much of this quality—if a quality be separable into parts—arises from his extraordinary command of phrase,—the phrase elaborate without affectation, borrowed yet absolutely individual and idiosyncratic, mannered to the nth, but never mannerised, in which, though he might not have attained to it without his great seventeenth-century masters, he stands original and alone. In no critic perhaps—not even in Mr Pater—does style count for so much as in Lamb; in none certainly is it more distinctive, and, while never monotonous, more homogeneous, uniform, instantly recognisable and self-bewrayed. 245The simulative power—almost as of the leaf-insect and suchlike creatures—with which he could imitate styles, is of course most obvious in the tour de force of the Burton counterfeits. But in his best and most characteristic work it is not this which we see, but something much nobler, though closely allied to it. It is not Browne, or Fuller, or Burton, or Glanvill, but something like them, yet different. And though it has more outré presentation in some of his miscellaneous writing than in his criticism, yet it is never absent in the most striking pieces of this, and gives them much of their hold on us.

and thought.

Still, those who, however unnecessarily (for no one surely is going to deny it save in a mood of paradox or of monomania), insist that style must be the body of thought—nay, that this body itself must think (in Donne’s phrase), and not merely live, will find no difficulty in claiming Lamb as theirs. Nothing of the kind is more curious than the fact that, strongly marked as are his peculiarities and much as he may himself have imitated, he is not imitable; nobody has ever, except in the minutest shreds—rather actually torn off from his motley than reproducing it—written in Lamb’s style save Lamb. And accordingly no one (though not a few have tried) has ever criticised like Lamb. It is very easy to be capricious, fantastic, fastidious—as easy as to wear yellow stockings and go cross-gartered, and as effective. To Lamb’s critical attitude there go in the first place that love for the book which has been spoken of; then that faculty of sound, almost common-sense, “taste” which is shown in the early letters to Coleridge and Southey; then the reading of years and decades; and, lastly, the je ne sais quoi that “fondoos” the other things, as the old Oxford story has it—a story to be constantly borne in mind by the critic and the historian of criticism.^[468] Even the 246other ingredients are not too common, especially in conjunction: the je ne sais quoi itself is here, and nowhere else.

Leigh Hunt: his somewhat inferior position.

Leigh Hunt^[469] claims less space from us than either of his friends Hazlitt and Lamb. This is not because he is an inconsiderable critic, for he is by no means this. As has been said, he has the immense and surprising credit of having first discovered the greatness of the tragic part of Middleton’s Changeling, as an individual exploit, and in more general ways he has that, which Macaulay duly recognised in a well-known passage,^[470] of being perhaps more catholic in his tastes as regards English Literature than any critic up to his time. He has left a very large range of critical performance, which is very rarely without taste, acuteness, and felicity of expression; and he has, as against both the greater critics just named, the very great advantage of possessing a competent knowledge of at least one modern literature^[471] besides his own, and some glimmerings of others. He has the further deserts of being almost always readable, of diffusing a pleasant sunny atmosphere, and of doing very much to keep up the literary side of that periodical production which, for good or for evil, was, with the novel, the great literary feature of the nineteenth century. These are not small merits: and while they might seem greater if they were not thrown somewhat into the shade by the superior eminence of Coleridge and Hazlitt, and the superior attractiveness of Lamb, they retain, even in the vicinity of these, claims to full acknowledgment.

Reasons for it.

A severely critical estimate, however, will discover in Leigh Hunt—perhaps in very close juxtaposition and in a sort of causal relation to these merits themselves—something which is not quite so good. Even his catholicity may be set down in part, by the Enemy, to a certain loose facility of liking, an absence of fastidiousness and selection. If Lamb goes too far towards the ends of the English 247literary earth for the objects of his affection, Hunt is rather too content to find them in triviis et angiportis. He does not exactly “like grossly,” but he likes a little promiscuously. The fault is no very bad one; and it becomes exceedingly venial—nay, a positive virtue in time and circumstance—when we compare it with the unreasonable exclusiveness of the Neo-classic period. But it is a kind of criticism which inclines rather too much to the uncritical.

His attitude to Dante.

A further objection may be taken by applying that most dangerous of all tests, the question “What does he dislike?” For the twentieth time (probably) let us repeat that in criticism likes and dislikes are free; and that the man who, however unfortunately, still honestly dislikes what the consensus of good criticism approves, is entitled to say so, and had much better say so. But he gives his reasons, descends upon particulars, at his peril. Leigh Hunt, to do him justice, is not like Mr Rymer—it is not his habit “no wise to allow.” But it is certainly a pity that one of his exceptions should be Dante, and it is certainly a much greater pity that among the reasons given for unfavourable criticism^[472] should be because Dante “puts fabulous people with real among the damned,” because Purgatory is such a very disagreeable idea, and because the whole poem contains “absurdities too obvious nowadays to need remark.”

This, however, was merely an exceptional outburst of that “Liberal” Philistinism and blundering which, it is only fair to say, had been provoked by plentiful exhibition of the same qualities on the other side, and which was more particularly excusable in Leigh Hunt (humanly, if not critically, speaking), because nobody, not even Hazlitt, had received worse treatment from that side than himself. But it does something affect his critical position; for even Hazlitt managed, in some queer fashion, to distinguish between the prostitute baronet, Sir Walter Scott, and “the Author of Waverley,” between that 248wicked Mr Burke and the author of the great speeches and treatises. But the main reasons why Hunt must go with shorter measure than others, is the combination of abundance in quantity with a certain want of distinction in quality, which mars his writings. Not even the largest space here possible would enable us to go through them all, and we should be able to select but a few that are of unquestionably distinctive and characteristic race. It is, indeed, rather in his favour that you may dip almost anywhere into him with the certainty of a wholesome, pleasant, and refreshing critical bath or draught. He is very rarely untrustworthy; and when he is, as in the Dante case, he tells the fact and its secret more frankly even than Hazlitt himself. But it would be unjust to refer to no samples of him, and a few of the most characteristic shall therefore be given.