There is not much help here; it is rhetoric, not criticism. And when we go on to read that 'Good Sense is the Body of poetic Genius, Fancy its Drapery, Motion its Life, and Imagination the Soul that is everywhere, and in each', we seem to be back in the barren word-play of a century earlier, in the desert from which poetry had already been delivered, and from which Coleridge himself had been one of her deliverers.

But as soon as we pass from these large incoherent abstractions to the body of criticism which they introduce, our feet are on firm ground, and Coleridge is a guide who seldom fails to show us a way. This is especially so when he handles Wordsworth. The conjunction and mutual interaction of the two minds in the Annus Mirabilis of 1796-7 had created much more than the volume of Lyrical Ballads. It had created a new world; and in that world Coleridge lived and had his effective being. All that he did afterwards may be traced back in germ to that year and its results. When he returns upon it he always recovers something of its original radiance and strength.

Apart from this, Coleridge the critic is generally at his best when he is, directly or by implication, criticizing criticism: for then he had something to bite on, and he was kept to the point. His critical faculty, like his creative faculty, was subject to fits of torpor; his delight in dialectic was constantly enticing him into bypaths of speculation. His powers were only called into full activity by some

external excitation; and that they might be exercised coherently he required a tonic, not an opiate. Both requirements were met when he addressed himself to a sustained consideration of Wordsworth's poetry and Wordsworth's poetical doctrine. Both the poetry and the poetical doctrine were enough his own to excite in him the keenest sympathy and the most delicate appreciation; both were enough not his own for him to have no illusions about them.

Hence this section of Coleridge's literary criticism should be read in close connexion with the companion volume of Wordsworth's literary criticism. Wordsworth's greatness was in poetry, not in criticism or exposition. He was unskilful as a dialectician, and lacked persuasiveness of rhetoric; as Coleridge very justly points out, the opposition and obloquy which his poetry for long encountered were very largely brought on by his own prefaces. Again, the qualities which make the special greatness of his poetry are alien, or even opposed, to those of the accomplished critic. Wordsworth thought and felt with great intensity; but his experience of letters (as we speak of a man's experience of life) was not great, and his intellect lost in range and flexibility what it gained in concentration. Throughout life he brooded over his own mind, over his own ideas, over his own writings. He found his own life an unfathomable well into which, as his eye grew trained to see in darkness, he could plunge deeper and deeper down among the springs of life. From those depths-and they were inexhaustible-he drew the water of which

we may still drink, and which we shall not find in other vessels. But when he rose from them, it was with eyes that did not readily adjust themselves to the upper air; and that is why he so often reminds one of an owl in the daylight. The circling flight, the poise and swoop of the critic were not his. When he went beyond himself he was unsure, he was almost unobservant. His sister Dorothy observed for him: She gave me eyes,' he says, and it is no mere form of words, but, like all that he says of her, the exact truth. The sensitiveness and receptiveness which, through the wonderful sympathy that existed between them, she was able to project into him from herself, is perhaps a feminine quality, or at least implies in a man a texture of senses and mind too fine to resist the impact of life.

Thus, at all events, it was with Coleridge. The 'damaged archangel' of Lamb's profoundly penetrating phrase passed his life floundering between the empyrean and the gutter. His senses and his intellect were both painfully acute, so much so that they were a misery to him; he was their servant and not their master. In his highest flights he often finds himself, like another damaged archangel before him, adrift for want of controlling power

His sail-broad vans

He spreads for flight, and in the surging smoke As in a cloudy chair, ascending, rides

Audacious; but, that seat soon failing, meets A vast vacuity.

Such is the feeling which Coleridge's criticism is

apt to give when he generalizes, and especially when he attempts to define the functions of poetry or the quality of a poet in the terms of a quasi-philosophical system. But this comes of the excess rather than the defect of his critical faculty. So long as he moves among real things, his insight is instinctive, his touch certain. One of the most striking things about Wordsworth as a critic is the contrast between the truth of his general principles and the bungling way in which he applies them. His applications of his own doctrine, his particular criticisms on the work of other poets, are often loose, sometimes demonstrably wrong. With Coleridge it is the reverse. His general ideas are nebulous; he becomes intoxicated with his own rhetoric and dialectic, and seems now and then like one talking (as, in fact, he often did) in a sort of dream, under the effect of some opiate which invested all things in an iridescent haze. But when he is following and testing Wordsworth's doctrine, his criticism is as accurate as it is luminous. He not only sees where Wordsworth goes wrong, but points out how and why. Take, for instance, his analysis of Wordsworth's theory about the language of poetry. Here, strangely enough, it is Wordsworth who is fantastic, Coleridge who is sensible and sound. "Volition should be discernible in metrical language, because it is an artificial structure'; 'Whatever is combined with metre must, though not in itself poetic, have nevertheless some property in common with poetry'; 'Where the language is not different from that of prose, the metre itself must become

feeble'; nothing could be more true, or more exactly right. So it is with his particular judgements on Wordsworth's poems. They are always good: they are sometimes still the best. His enumeration of Wordsworth's excellences in the Biographia Literaria is even now the closest to truth of any which have been made. This certainty of judgement extends to nearly all his criticisms of the poets. Exceptions must be made in some cases, where he criticizes on insufficient knowledge. Thus some remarks which he makes on Claudian seem to show either that he had never read Claudian or that he confused his poetry with that of Ausonius, as is possible in view of the fact that he criticizes as Claudian's the famous Phoenix of Lactantius. But he was quite incapable of blundering, and blundering obstinately, as Wordsworth does in his detailed criticism of Gray's sonnet on the death of West. It is when he theorizes, even in relation to Wordsworth, that he is apt to lose touch of reality, and consequently to lose touch of poetry. In a well-known passage of the Table Talk he sets forth, with his usual persuasiveness and mastery of language, his theory of the sort of poetry that Wordsworth ought to have written. 'It is in substance,' he adds, 'what I have been all my life doing in my system of philosophy.' Yes! but poetry is not philosophy. When Coleridge, as he so often does, tries to identify the two, tries to express the function of poetry in the terms of his own metaphysical system, he not only ceases to be a poet but ceases to be a critic.