The Table Talk.

The motes fly thick for us in the Table Talk; and as they are clearly headed and indexed in the edition referred to, there is the less need of additional specification, while there is, here as everywhere, a good deal of repetition.[[389]] But one must point in passing to the striking contrast of Schiller’s “material sublime”[[390]] (and Coleridge was not inclined to undervalue Schiller[[391]]) with Shakespeare’s economy of means; the pertinent, though by no means final, question, “If you take from Virgil his diction and metre, what do you leave him?”[[392]] the remarks on Spenser’s “swan-like movement”;[[393]] a remarkable cluster of literary dicta in the entry for Midsummer-Day 1827 (when H. N. says that his uncle talked “a volume”), to be supplemented by another sheaf on July 12; the contrast of Milton and Shakespeare;[[394]] the remarks on Rabelais;[[395]] the wonderfully pregnant one as to the “three silent revolutions in England”;[[396]] those on Latin Literature;[[397]] on the evolutionary quality of genius;[[398]] another great obiter dictum,[[399]] that “Great minds are never in the wrong, but in consequence of being in the right imperfectly,” which is truest of all in criticism itself; yet another,[[400]] “To please me, a poem must be either music or sense: if it is neither, I confess I cannot interest myself in it”; and, above all, that on Tennyson[[401]]—one of the loci classici of warning to the greatest critics to distrust themselves when they are judging the poetry of the “younger generations.” And if we cannot help reproachfully ejaculating “Æschylus!” when he denies[[402]] sublimity to the Greeks, let us again remember that Æschylus was strangely occulted to the whole Neo-classic age, and that it is very much Coleridge’s own doing that we of the last two or three generations have re-discovered him.

The Miscellanies.

The few contributions, shortly supplemented from MS., to Southey’s Omniana give little, but the volume now entitled Miscellanies, Æsthetic and Literary, is very nearly all ours. Much of it, however, is repetition in apparent title, and a good deal of the rest does not quite answer expectations. The general Essays on the Fine Arts with which it opens (and of which the author, who had lost them, entertained that perhaps rather exaggerated idea which we usually entertain of lost loves, books, fishes, &c.) possess in abundance Coleridge’s uniquely stimulating quality, but, perhaps in not much less abundance, his extreme desultoriness and want of definition, save of the most indefinite character. The essay on the Prometheus which follows excites (though hardly in the wary mind, Estesianly “alphabeted,” as he would himself say) great expectations. But it is scarcely too much to say that on this—the most purely poetical of all extant Greek dramas, a miracle of sublimity and humanity mingled, and the twin pillar, with the Agamemnon, of its author’s claim to be one of the greatest poets of the world—Coleridge has not a word to say that even touches the poetry. He is philosophico-mythological from the egg to the apple; and one is bound to add that he here shows one of his gravest drawbacks as a critic. The new fragments, however, of the 1818 lectures are full of good matter, on Cervantes especially, perhaps a little less specially on Dante, on Robinson Crusoe very particularly indeed, on Rabelais and Sterne and Donne: while these are taken up and multiplied in interest by the “Marginalia,” with which the literary part of the book concludes, and which contain, on Daniel and Chapman and Selden, Browne and Fuller, Fielding and Junius, some of the best known and nearly of the best of their author’s critical work. Here also, and here only, do we find much on Milton, Coleridge’s rather numerous lectures on him having left surprisingly little trace. He is, though a fervent admirer, not quite at his happiest.

The Lecture On Style.

But the most interesting piece that the book contains is the Lecture on Style, with its satellite note (a small but sparkling star) on the “Wonderfulness of Prose.”[[403]] The author’s definition of his most elusive subject is indeed not only not satisfying, but (unless you remember his own dictum about being “right incompletely”) demonstrably and almost astoundingly unsatisfactory. “Style is of course nothing but the art of conveying the meaning appropriately and with perspicuity.” One feels inclined in one’s haste to say, “That is just what it is not”; one must cool down a little before one can modify this to “Style begins exactly where” the art, &c., “leaves off,” and one can perhaps never come nearer to an accommodation than “The necessary preliminary to Style, and one essential ingredient of it,” is “the art,” and so forth.[[404]] It was no doubt this side of the matter that Coleridge was looking at, and at this he stopped, as far as his general way of looking at the thing went. But the main interest of the piece does not lie here. He bases his definition on, and tries to adjust it to, a survey of English style, which is probably one of the first of the kind ever attempted, after the notion of the Queen Anne men being the crown and flower of English had been given up. And though his history, as was natural, is sometimes shaky, and his conclusions are often to be disputed and even overthrown, the whole is of the highest value, not merely as a point de repère historically, but as an introduction to the consideration of Style itself.