(1) COLERIDGE AS CRITIC
Coleridge was the thirteenth child of a rather queer clergyman. The Rev.
John Coleridge was queer enough in having thirteen children: he was
queerer still in being the author of a Latin grammar in which he renamed
the "ablative" the "quale-quare-quidditive case." Coleridge was thus born
not only with an unlucky number, but trailing clouds of definitions. He
was in some respects the unluckiest of all Englishmen of literary genius.
He leaves on us an impression of failure as no other writer of the same
stature does. The impression may not be justified. There are few writers
who would not prefer the magnificent failure of a Coleridge to their own
little mole-hill of success. Coleridge was a failure in comparison not
with ordinary men, but only with the immense shadow of his own genius. His
imperfection is the imperfection of a demi-god. Charles Lamb summed up the
truth about his genius as well as about his character in that final
phrase, "an archangel a little damaged." This was said at a time when the
archangel was much more than a little damaged by the habit of laudanum;
but even then Lamb wrote: "His face, when he repeats his verses, hath its
ancient glory." Most of Coleridge's great contemporaries were aware of
that glory. Even those who were afterwards to be counted among his
revilers, such as Hazlitt and De Quincey, had known what it was to be
disciples at the feet of this inspired ruin. They spoke not only of his
mind, but even of his physical characteristics--his voice and his hair--as
though these belonged to the one man of his time whose food was ambrosia.
Even as a boy at Christ's Hospital, according to Lamb, he used to make the
"casual passer through the Cloisters stand still, intranced with
admiration (while he weighed the disproportion between the _speech_ and
the _garb_ of the young Mirandola), to hear thee unfold, in thy deep and
sweet intonations, the mysteries of Iamblichus, or Plotinus ... or
reciting Homer in the Greek, or Pindar--while the walls of the old Grey
Friars re-echoed to the accents of the _inspired charity-boy!_"
It is exceedingly important that, as we read Coleridge, we should
constantly remember what an archangel he was in the eyes of his
contemporaries. _Christabel_ and _Kubla Kahn_ we could read, no doubt, in
perfect enjoyment even if we did not know the author's name. For the rest,
there is so much flagging of wing both in his verse and in his prose that,
if we did not remind ourselves what flights he was born to take, we might
persuade ourselves at times that there was little in his work but the dull
flappings and slitherings of a penguin. His genius is intermittent and
comes arbitrarily to an end. He is inspired only in fragments and
aphorisms. He was all but incapable of writing a complete book or a
complete poem at a high level. His irresponsibility as an author is
described in that sentence in which he says: "I have laid too many eggs in
the hot sands of this wilderness, the world, with ostrich carelessness and
ostrich oblivion." His literary plans had a ludicrous way of breaking
down. It was characteristic of him that, in 1817, when he projected a
complete edition of his poems, under the title _Sibylline Leaves_, he
omitted to publish Volume I. and published only Volume II. He would
announce a lecture on Milton, and then give his audience "a very eloquent
and popular discourse on the general character of Shakespeare." His two
finest poems he never finished. He wrote not by an act of the will but
according to the wind, and when the wind dropped he came to earth. It was
as though he could soar but was unable to fly. It is this that
differentiates him from other great poets or critics. None of them has
left such a record of unfulfilled purposes. It is not that he did not get
through an enormous amount of work, but that, like the revellers in Mr.
Chesterton's poem, he "went to Birmingham by way of Beachy Head," and in
the end he did not get to Birmingham. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch gives an
amusing account of the way in which _Biographia Literaria_ came to be
written. Originally, in 1815, it was conceived as a preface--to be "done
in two, or at farthest three days"--to a collection of some "scattered and
manuscript poems." Two months later the plan had changed. Coleridge was
now busy on a preface to an _Autobiographia Literaria, sketches of my
literary Life and Opinions_. This in turn developed into "a full account
(_raisonné_) of the controversy concerning Wordsworth's poems and theory,"
with a "disquisition on the powers of Association ... and on the generic
difference between the Fancy and the Imagination." This ran to such a
length that he decided not to use it as a preface, but to amplify it into
a work in three volumes. He succeeded in writing the first volume, but he
found himself unable to fill the second. "Then, as the volume obstinately
remained too small, he tossed in _Satyrane_, an epistolary account of his
wanderings in Germany, topped up with a critique of a bad play, and gave
the whole painfully to the world in July, 1817." It is one of the ironies
of literary history that Coleridge, the censor of the incongruous in
literature, the vindicator of the formal purpose as opposed to the
haphazard inspiration of the greatest of writers, a missionary of the
"shaping imagination," should himself have given us in his greatest book
of criticism an incongruous, haphazard, and shapeless jumble. It is but
another proof of the fact that, while talent cannot safely ignore what is
called technique, genius almost can. Coleridge, in spite of his
formlessness, remains the wisest man who ever spoke in English about
literature. His place is that of an oracle among controversialists.
Even so, _Biographia Literaria_ is a disappointing book. It is the porch,
but it is not the temple. It may be that, in literary criticism, there can
be no temple. Literary criticism is in its nature largely an incitement to
enter, a hint of the treasures that are to be found within. Persons who
seek rest in literary orthodoxy are always hoping to discover written upon
the walls of the porch the ten commandments of good writing. It is
extremely easy to invent ten such commandments--it was done in the age of
Racine and in the age of Pope--but the wise critic knows that in
literature the rules are less important than the "inner light." Hence,
criticism at its highest is not a theorist's attempt to impose iron laws
on writers: it is an attempt to capture the secret of that "inner light"
and of those who possess it and to communicate it to others. It is also an
attempt to define the conditions in which the "inner light" has most
happily manifested itself, and to judge new writers of promise according
to the measure in which they have been true to the spirit, though not
necessarily to the technicalities, of the great tradition. Criticism,
then, is not the Roman father of good writing: it is the disciple and
missionary of good writing. The end of criticism is less law-giving than
conversion. It teaches not the legalities, but the love, of literature.
_Biographia Literaria_ does this in its most admirable parts by
interesting us in Coleridge's own literary beginnings, by emphasizing the
strong sweetness of great poets in contrast to the petty animosities of
little ones, by pointing out the signs of the miracle of genius in the
young Shakespeare, and by disengaging the true genius of Wordsworth from a
hundred extravagances of theory and practice. Coleridge's remarks on the
irritability of minor poets--"men of undoubted talents, but not of
genius," whose tempers are "rendered yet more irritable by their desire to
_appear_ men of genius"--should be written up on the study walls of
everyone commencing author. His description, too, of his period as "this
age of personality, this age of literary and political gossiping, when the
meanest insects are worshipped with sort of Egyptian superstition if only
the brainless head be atoned for by the sting of personal malignity in the
tail," conveys a warning to writers that is not of an age but for all
time. Coleridge may have exaggerated the "manly hilarity" and "evenness
and sweetness of temper" of men of genius. But there is no denying that,
the smaller the genius, the greater is the spite of wounded self-love.
"Experience informs us," as Coleridge says, "that the first defence of
weak minds is to recriminate." As for Coleridge's great service to
Wordsworth's fame, it was that of a gold-washer. He cleansed it from all
that was false in Wordsworth's reaction both in theory and in practice
against "poetic diction." Coleridge pointed out that Wordsworth had
misunderstood the ultimate objections to eighteenth-century verse. The
valid objection to a great deal of eighteenth-century verse was not, he
showed, that it was written in language different from that of prose, but
that it consisted of "translations of prose thoughts into poetic
language." Coleridge put it still more strongly, indeed, when he said that
"the language from Pope's translation of Homer to Darwin's _Temple of
Nature_ may, notwithstanding some illustrious exceptions, be too
faithfully characterized as claiming to be poetical for no better reason
than that it would be intolerable in conversation or in prose."
Wordsworth, unfortunately, in protesting against the meretricious garb of
mean thoughts, wished to deny verse its more splendid clothing altogether.
If we accepted his theories we should have to condemn his _Ode_, the
greatest of his sonnets, and, as Coleridge put it, "two-thirds at least of
the marked beauties of his poetry." The truth is, Wordsworth created an
engine that was in danger of destroying not only Pope but himself.
Coleridge destroyed the engine and so helped to save Wordsworth. Coleridge
may, in his turn, have gone too far in dividing language into three
groups--language peculiar to poetry, language peculiar to prose, and
language common to both, though there is much to be said for the division;
but his jealousy for the great tradition in language was the jealousy of a
sound critic. "Language," he declared, "is the armoury of the human mind;
and at once contains the trophies of its past, and the weapons of its
future conquests."
He, himself, wrote idly enough at times: he did not shrink from the
phrase, "literary man," abominated by Mr. Birrell. But he rises in
sentence after sentence into the great manner, as when he declares:
No man was ever yet a great poet without being at the same time a
profound philosopher. For poetry is the blossom and the fragrancy
of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions,
language.