No man was ever yet a great poet without being at the same time a profound philosopher. For poetry is the blossom and the fragrancy of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language.
How excellently, again, he describes Wordsworth’s early aim as being—
to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural by awakening the mind’s attention from the lethargy of custom and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us.
He explains Wordsworth’s gift more fully in another passage:
It was the union of deep feeling with profound thought, the fine balance of truth in observing, with the imaginative faculty in modifying the objects observed, and, above all, the original gift of spreading the tone, the atmosphere, and with it the depth and height of the ideal world, around forms, incidents, and situations, of which, for the common view, custom had bedimmed all the lustre, had dried up the sparkle and the dew-drops.
Coleridge’s censures on Wordsworth, on the other hand, such as that on The Daffodil, may not all be endorsed by us to-day. But in the mass they have the insight of genius, as when he condemns “the approximation to what might be called mental bombast, as distinguished from verbal.” His quotations of great passages, again, are the very flower of good criticism.
Mr. George Sampson’s editorial selection from Biographia Literaria and his pleasant as well as instructive notes give one a new pleasure in re-reading this classic of critical literature. The “quale-quare-quidditive” chapters have been removed, and Wordsworth’s revolutionary prefaces and essays given in their place. In its new form, Biographia Literaria may not be the best book that could be written, but there is good reason for believing that it is the best book that has been written on poetry in the English tongue.
[(2) Coleridge as a Talker]
Coleridge’s talk resembles the movements of one of the heavenly bodies. It moves luminously on its way without impediment, without conflict. When Dr. Johnson talks, half our pleasure is due to our sense of conflict. His sentences are knobby sticks. We love him as a good man playing the bully even more than as a wise man talking common sense. He is one of the comic characters in literature. He belongs, in his eloquence, to the same company as Falstaff and Micawber. He was, to some extent, the invention of a Scottish humourist named Boswell. “Burke,” we read in Coleridge’s Table Talk, “said and wrote more than once that he thought Johnson greater in talking than writing, and greater in Boswell than in real life.” Coleridge’s conversation is not to the same extent a coloured expression of personality. He speaks out of the solitude of an oracle rather than struts upon the stage of good company, a master of repartees. At his best, he becomes the mouthpiece of universal wisdom, as when he says: “To most men experience is like the stern lights of a ship, which illuminate only the track it has passed.” He can give us in a sentence the central truth of politics, reconciling what is good in Individualism with what is good in Socialism in a score or so of words: