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 “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 to 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.