The great storehouse next to the Biographia is, of course, the Lectures on Shakespeare with their satellite fragments, unsatisfactory as are the conditions under which we have all these things. There is perhaps no more astounding example of the tricks of self-deception than Coleridge’s statement to Allsop that he had “written” three volumes of five hundred pages each, containing a complete critical history of the English drama, and “requiring neither addition, omission, nor correction—nothing but mere arrangement.” What we actually have of his whole critical work, outside the Biographia, consists of perhaps one-third that amount of his own and other people’s notes of Lectures, very rarely consecutive at all, requiring constant omission because of repetition, and defying the art of the most ingenious diaskeuast to get them into anything like order, and of a smaller but still considerable mass of Marginalia, pocket-book entries, and fragments of the most nondescript kinds. And we know from indisputable testimony by persons who actually heard the Lectures which these notes represent, that if we possessed reports in extenso by the most accurate and intelligent of reporters, things would be not so very much better, because of Coleridge’s incurable habit of apology, digression, anticipation, and repetition. That he found a written lecture an intolerable trammel, and even notes irksome, if he stuck close to them, we can readily believe. Many, if not most, lecturers would agree with him. But it is given to few people, and certainly was not given to him, to speak ex-tempore on such subjects in a fashion which will bear printing. And his lectures have, as we have said, only very rarely had even the chance of standing this.
Their chaotic character
Nevertheless, we are perhaps not in reality so very much worse off. Extreme method in criticism is something of a superstition, and, as we have seen, the greatest critical book of the world, that of Longinus, has, as we possess it, very little of this, and does not appear ever to have had very much. The critic does his best work, not in elaborating theories which will constantly break down or lead him wrong when they come into contact with the myriad-sided elusiveness of Art and Humanity, but in examining individual works or groups of work, and in letting his critical steel strike the fire of mediate axioms and aperçus from the flint of these. It does the recipient rather good than harm to have to take the trouble of selecting, co-ordinating, and adjusting such things for himself; at any rate, he escapes entirely the danger of that deadly bondage to a cut-and-dried scheme which was the curse of the Neo-classic system. And there is no critic who provides these examinations and aperçus and axiomata media more lavishly than Coleridge.[[377]]
and preciousness.
I remember still, with amusement after many years, the words of, I suppose, a youthful reviewer who, admitting that an author whom he was reviewing had applied the method of Coleridge as to Shakespeare, &c., with some skill and even some originality, hinted that this method was quite vieux jeu, and that modern criticism was taking and to take an entirely different line. And I have been grateful to that reviewer ever since for giving me a mental smile whenever I think of him. That his new critical Evangel—it was the “scientific” gospel of the late M. Hennequin, if “amid the memories long outworn Of many-volumed eve and morn” I do not mistake—has itself gone to the dustbin meanwhile does not matter, and is not the cause of the smile. The risibility is in the notion that any great criticism can ever be obsolete. We may, we must, we ought sometimes to differ with Aristotle and Longinus, with Quintilian and Scaliger, with Patrizzi and Castelvetro, with Dryden and Johnson, with Sainte-Beuve and Arnold. But what is good in them—and even what, though not so intrinsically good, is injured only by system and point of view, by time and chance and fatality—remains a possession for ever. “The eternal substance of their greatness” is of the same kind (although it be less generally recognised or relished) as the greatness of creation. La Mort n’y mord.
Of such matter Coleridge provides us with abundance everywhere, and perhaps most on Shakespeare. He acknowledges his debts to Lessing, and was perhaps unduly anxious to deny any to the Schlegels; but he has made everything that he may have borrowed his own, and he has wealth untold that is not borrowed at all. He can go wrong like other people. His favourite and constantly repeated denunciation of Johnson’s couplet—
“Let Observation with extensive view
Survey mankind from China to Peru”—