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 our purpose, somewhat irrelevant, excursus on “the present mode of conducting critical journals,”[[363]] Coleridge concludes with a pretty long[[364]] and a very interesting examination of Wordsworth’s poetry. He brings out his defects, his extraordinary declension from the felicitous to the undistinguished, his matter-of-factness of various kinds (this part includes a merciless though most polite censure of The Excursion), his undue preference for dramatic [perhaps we should say dialogic] form, his prolixity, and his introduction of thoughts and images too great as well as too low for the subject. The excellences are high purity and appropriateness of language; weight and sanity of thoughts and sentiments; strength; originality and curiosa felicitas in single lines and paragraphs; truth of nature in imagery; meditative pathos; and, lastly, imagination in the highest and strictest sense of the word.
High merits of the examination.
In fact this chapter, which forms in itself an essay of the major scale, is one of the patterns, in English, of a critical study of poetry. None, I think, had previously exhibited the new criticism so thoroughly, and very few, if any, have surpassed or equalled it since, although it may be a little injured on the one hand by its limitation to a particular text, and by the restrictions which the personal relations of the critic with his author imposed on Coleridge; on the other, by his own tendencies to digression, verbosity, and intrusion of philosophical “heads of Charles I.” In fact, there is no other critical document known to me which attacks the chief and principal things of poetry proper—poetic language and poetic numbers—in so satisfactory a manner, despite the economy which Coleridge displays on the latter head. Some of the ancient and most of the Renaissance discussions shoot too far and too high, and though the arrows may catch fire and give a brilliant and striking illumination, they hit no visible mark. The discussions of Lessing in the Laocoön concern an interesting but after all quite subordinate point of the relation of poetry to other arts; nearly all of those in the Dramaturgie deal with a part of literature only, and with one which is not, in absolute necessity or theory, a part of literature at all. But here we have the very differentia of poetry, handled as in the Περὶ Ὕψους or the De Vulgari itself, but handled in a more full, generally applicable, and philosophically based manner than Dante’s prose admitted of, and in a wider range than is allowed by the special purpose of Longinus.