So, then, there abide these three, Aristotle, Longinus, and Coleridge. The defects of the modern, as contrasted with the ancient, man of letters are prominent in Coleridge when we compare him with these his fellows: and so we cannot quite say that he is the greatest of the three. But his range is necessarily wider: he takes in, as their date forbade them to take, all literature in a way which must for centuries to come give him the prerogative. It is astonishing how often, when you have discovered in others of all dates, or (as you may fondly hope) found out for yourself, some critical truth, you will remember that after all Coleridge in his wanderings has found it before, and set it by the wayside for the benefit of those who come after. For all, I believe, of these later days—certainly for all whose mother-tongue is English—Coleridge is the critical author to be turned over by day and by night. Never take him on trust: it is blasphemy to the Spirit of Criticism to do that with any critic. Disagree with him as often as you like, and as you can stand to the guns of your disagreement. But begin with him, continue with him, come back to him after excursions, with a certainty of suggestion, stimulation, correction, edification. C’est mon métier à moi d'être professeur de littérature, and I am not going to parvify my office. But if anybody disestablished us all (with decent pensions, of course), and applied the proceeds of our Chairs to furnishing the boxes of every one who goes up to the University with a copy of the Biographia Literaria, I should decline to be the person chosen to be heard against this revolution, though I should plead for the addition of the Poetics and of Longinus.

He introduces once for all the criterion of Imagination, realising and disrealising.

And if any one is still dissatisfied with particular critical utterances, and even with the middle axioms interspersed among them, let him remember that Coleridge—not Addison, not the Germans, not any other—is the real introducer into the criticism of poetry of the realising and disrealising Imagination as a criterion. Even now, a hundred years after his earliest day as a critic, the doctrine, though much talked of, is apparently little understood. Even such a critic as the late Mr Traill, while elsewhere[[431]] admitting that “on poetic expression” Coleridge “has spoken the absolutely last word,” almost apologised[[432]] for his putting on a level “lending the charm of imagination to the real” and “lending the force of reality to the imaginary.” He confessed that, “from the point of view of the highest conception of the poet’s office there can be no comparison”—where indeed I might also “say ditto to Mr Burke,” but in a sense opposite to his. And if, on such a mind and such an appreciation as Mr Traill’s, this one-sided interpretation of “the esenoplastic faculty” had hold, how much more on others in increasing measure to the present day? The fallacy is due, first, to the hydra-like vivacity of the false idea of mimesis, the notion that it is not re-presentation, re-creation adding to Nature, but copying her; and, secondly, to the Baconian conception of poetry as a vinum dæmonum, a poison with some virtue as a medicine. What power these errors have all our history has shown,—all Histories of Criticism that ever can be written will show if they are written faithfully. But Coleridge has provided—once for all, if it be not neglected—the safeguard against this in his definitions of the two, the co-equal, the co-eternal functions of the exercise of the poetic Imagination.

The “Companions.”

In the title of the present chapter I have used the word “companions” in a double sense—the first and special application of it being that in which it is technically applied to the Companions of the Prophet—to the early coadjutors of Mahomet in his struggle with the Koreish. Of these the chief are Southey, Lamb, Leigh Hunt, and Hazlitt, with perhaps as an even closer ally—though unknowing and unknown—William Blake. Then follow companions in the wider sense—associates in the work, who varied from nearly complete alliance, as with Scott, to very distant and lukewarm participation, as in Campbell, and (in literary position) from the captaincy of Scott again and of Shelley to the more than respectable full-privateship of the contributors to the Retrospective Review. As for the “Adversaries,” they can be more briefly dealt with, for their work was mostly “wood, hay, stubble”; but Gifford and Jeffrey at least could not be excluded here, and a few more may deserve notice. So let the inquiry proceed in this order.

Southey.

It may seem at first sight curious, and will perhaps always remain a little so, that we have no collected examples, nor many uncollected but singly substantive pieces, of strictly critical work, from the most widely read and the most industrious of the whole literary group of 1800-1830 in England—from a man who, for eleven years at least, wrote reviews almost wherever he could place them without hurting his conscience, and who for another five-and-twenty was a pillar of one of the greatest of critical periodicals. But Southey’s earlier reviewing is for the most part not merely whelmed in the dust-bins of old magazines, but, as his son and biographer complains, extremely difficult to trace even there; and his later was, by choice or by chance (more I think by the former than by the latter), mainly devoted to subjects not purely literary. If that great Bibliotheca Britannica[[433]] (which so nearly existed, and which is a thing lacking in English to this present day, a hundred years later) had come actually into existence, it would hardly have been necessary to look beyond that: as it is, one has the pleasing but rather laborious and lengthy duty of fishing out and piecing together critical expressions from The Doctor and other books to some extent, and from the two parallel collections of the Life and Correspondence[[434]] and the Letters[[435]] to a still greater. The process is necessary for a historian of criticism, and the results, if hardly new to him, are interesting enough; but they cannot claim any exhibition at all correspondent to the time taken in arriving at them. Nor will any such historian, if he be wise, complain, for Southey is always delightful, except when he is in his most desperately didactic moods: and the Goddess of Dulness only knows how even the most egregious of her children, unless from pure ignorance, has managed to fix on him the title of “dull.”