The Anima Poetæ.
But the book of Coleridge which, next to the Biographia, is of most importance to the student of his criticism, is perhaps the long-posthumous Anima Poetæ. Mr Ernest Coleridge, in his preface to the Anima itself, says that the Biographia is now little read. I hope he is wrong: but if he is right it would explain many things.
This volume—a collection of extracts from Coleridge’s pocket-books—appeared[[405]] more than sixty years after the poet’s death, and the notice taken of it was comparatively small. That it contains passages of ornate prose superior to anything in the previously published writings is interesting, but for our purpose almost irrelevant: it is not so that it gives the fullest and clearest side-lights on Coleridge’s criticism that we have. The earliest years (and pages) are not very fertile, though I subjoin some references[[406]] which will assist the reader in looking them up. But from p. 119 for some fifty pages onward (it is significant that the time of writing, 1805-8, corresponds with Coleridge’s absence in Malta, &c., from which we have little or no published work) the entries are “diamondiferous.” On French poetry (mistaken but so informingly!);[[407]] on Cowper;[[408]] on the absurdity of calling etymology (how much more philology!) a “science”;[[409]] on the attitude to poetry and to books;[[410]] on Leibnitz’s “profound sentence” that “men’s intellectual errors consist chiefly in denying”;[[411]] on the “instinctive passion in the mind for one word to express one act of feeling” (Flaubert fifty years before date); on pseudo-originality,—Coleridge is at his very acme. The yeast of criticism—the reagent which, itself created by the contact of the critical with the creative, re-creates itself in all fit media—has never been more remarkably represented than here.
And great as are these passages, there are many others (though not so many in close context) to match them. See the entry (which I venture to think has been wrongly side-headed as “A plea for poetic license” at the foot of p. 165) as to the desire of carrying things to a greater height of pleasure and admiration than they are susceptible of—the old “wish to write better than you can,” the “loss of sight between this and the other style.”[[412]] See the astonishing anticipation of the best side of Ruskinism in the note on architecture and climate;[[413]] and that on poetry and prose and on the “esenoplastic” power;[[414]] and that on somebody (Byron?) who was “splendid” everywhere, but nowhere poetical;[[415]] and that on scholastic terms;[[416]] and that on the slow comprehension of certain (in this case Dantean) poetry.[[417]] They are all apices criticismi—not easy reading, not for the running man, but for him who reads them fitly, certain to bear fruit if he reads them early, to coincide with his own painful and struggling attainments if he reads them late.
The Letters.
Nor must the Letters[[418]] be omitted in any sufficient survey of Coleridge’s criticism. That at one early period[[419]] he apparently thought Schiller more sublime than Milton is not in the least to his discredit. He was twenty-two; he was, I think, demonstrably in love with three ladies[[420]] at once, and extremely uncertain which of two of them he should marry—a state of mind neither impossible nor unnatural, but likely to lead to considerable practical difficulties, and to upset the judgment very decidedly. His minor critical remarks at this very time on Southey’s poems are excellent. That Bowles should be “divine” and Burke “sad stuff”[[421]] does not matter—we can explain both statements well enough. But how many men of three- or four-and-twenty (or for that matter of three- or four-and-seventy) were there, are there, have there ever been, who could ask, “Why pass an Act of Uniformity against poets?”[[422]] one of the great critical questions of the world, and never, so far as I remember, formulated so pertinently before. It is odd that he should have forgotten (if he knew) Sidney, in his singular and pedantic complaint that to give the name Stella to a woman is “unsexing” it, and his supposition that “Swift is the authority.”[[423]] But another astonishing critical truth is that “Poetry ought not always to have its highest relish”;[[424]] and yet another in the contrast[[425]] of himself with Southey, “I think too much to be a poet; he too little to be a great poet,” unjust as the application is in the first half; and yet again on metre itself “implying a passion,”[[426]] a passage worth comparing with, and in some points better than, the Biographia (with which compare also pp. 386, 387). Nor these alone, but many others later—the criticism on Wordsworth’s “Cintra” pamphlet;[[427]] that on the inadequacy of one style for all purposes;[[428]] the remarks on stage illusion,[[429]]—might be cited.
The Coleridgean position and quality.
When the first volume of this history was published, an excellent scholar said to me, “How will you ever finish that book? Why, Coleridge himself would take a volume!” There is something to be said for the hyperbole. In this and that critic, of these many ages which we have essayed to survey, we may find critical graces which are not in him; but in all, save two, we shall find corresponding deficiencies. In all the ancient critics, save these two, the limitation of the point of view, the hamper of the scheme, are disastrously felt, nor is either Aristotle or Longinus quite free from them. In the greatest of the sixteenth-century Italians these limitations recur, and are repeated in most of those of the seventeenth and eighteenth. Dante is of the greatest, but he touches the subject very briefly and from a special side. Dryden is great, but he is not fully informed, and comes too early for his own point of view. Fontenelle is very nearly great, but he has the same drawbacks, and adds to them those of an almost, perhaps a quite, wilful eccentricity and capriciousness. Lessing is great, but he has fixed his main attention on the least literary parts of literature; while Goethe later is great but a great pedant.[[430]] Hazlitt is great; but Coleridge was Hazlitt’s master, and beside the master the pupil is insular and parochial in range and reading if not in spirit. In Sainte-Beuve himself we want a little more theory; some more enthusiasm; a higher and more inspiriting choice of subjects. And in Mr. Arnold the defects of Fontenelle reappear without Fontenelle’s excuse of chronology.