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.

6

Nigh foundered, on he fares, Treading the crude consistence, half on foot, Half flying.

Much of this crude consistence will be found in the following pages. To discern its boundaries, to discriminate the false from the true in it, is a task which itself demands a trained faculty and a sound judgement. And this demand, which is made on us when we study Coleridge's literary criticism, is just one of the main reasons why the study of it is not only illuminating, but stimulating and formative, in so high a degree.

This is true of his criticism on Wordsworth. It is true, with a difference, of his criticism on Shakespeare, which comes next to the other both in amount and in value. But here we are at an incidental disadvantage; we do not possess it in any continuous and considered shape. His lectures on Shakespeare were for the most part brilliant but erratic improvisations. In this,' Crabb Robinson drily notes in his diary of one of them, 'he surpassed himself in the art of talking in a very interesting way, without speaking at all on the subject.' Of another in the same series, a month later, he records that it was incomparably the best' of the seven : 'he was spirited, methodical, and for the greater part, intelligible.' Even for what he said we have to depend on imperfect notes taken among the audience. Beyond these there is nothing but a number of detached remarks, or records of spoken monologues. In this heterogeneous mass of fragments gold is

mixed with dross. But we shall find here also that the chief permanent value of what is preserved lies in particular criticisms, and that his generalizations are often incoherent and sometimes nearly meaningless. He had, indeed, in the fullest measure one great qualification: his admiration for Shakespeare was boundless. But it was not always true. In his critical as in his creative work he was a romantic; and to both the saying of Sainte-Beuve applies, 'L'écueil particulier du genre romantique, c'est le faux.' In dealing with his predecessors in Shakespearian criticism he is always, or nearly always, admirable; he sees where they went wrong, and how: but he falls into errors of his own which it is now easy to see and perhaps, therefore, a little ungracious to emphasize. It was natural, one may even say it was inevitable, to exaggerate where the task was that of breaking down an inveterate tradition. But that very exaggeration helped to create a new tradition which was largely false, and which, so far as it was false, has been necessarily mischievous, all the more so that he clothed it in the colours of a persuasive and seductive eloquence. Not only individuals,' he says in his attack on the eighteenthcentury tradition, but even whole nations are ofttimes so enslaved to the habits of their education and immediate circumstances as not to judge disinterestedly.' It sounds strangely in our ears now to hear Coleridge accuse any one of being enslaved to habits. For the self-wrought enslavement of his senses communicated itself-slowly, perhaps, but in