Romantic Critics PDF

3 The Romantic Critics Reviewers and Bookmen: from Jeffrey to Lamb 'The language of poetry naturally falls in with the language of power.' So Hazlitt, in his essay on 'Coriolanus', underlined the political analogy which is implied by much of romantic criticism. The poetic imagination aggrandises a...

3 The Romantic Critics Reviewers and Bookmen: from Jeffrey to Lamb 'The language of poetry naturally falls in with the language of power.' So Hazlitt, in his essay on 'Coriolanus', underlined the political analogy which is implied by much of romantic criticism. The poetic imagination aggrandises and dominates; its possessor commands and holds sway over the emotions of his readers. The analogy is double-edged. Though intended as a ringing affirmation of the poet's authority, it frequently expresses his underlying im- potence. Coleridge, for example, sounds slightly peevish as he manipulates the concept of power in the following remarks: All men in power are jealous of the pre-eminence of men of letters; they feel, as towards them, conscious of inferior power, and a sort of misgiving that they are, indirectly, and against their own will, mere instruments and agents of higher intellects.... So entirely was Mr. Pitt aware of this, that he would never allow of any intercourse with literary men of eminence;... 1 It is not only Pitt's political adherents who might have felt that the boot was on the other foot. Once Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey had renounced their revolutionary beliefs, they succumbed all too easily to the charms of the men in power. Moreover, their retreat to the Lake District did not protect them from an unparal- leled degree of political animosity. There was in fact no position of dignified 'eminence' to which the romantics could escape unscathed. Wordsworth in the Preface to The Excursion might challenge comparison with Milton for his high purpose, but, as Byron savagely reminded his readers, Milton was no renegade from the republican cause: Would he adore a Sultan? He obey The intellectual eunuch Castlereagh? Wordsworth appears in the notes to Don Juan as 'this poetical charlatan and political parasite [ who ] licks up the crumbs with 64 P. Parrinder, Authors and Authority © Macmillan Publishers Limited 1991  The Romantic Critics 65 a hardened alacrity' at the table of Lord Lonsdale (to whom The Excursion was dedicated). 2 Such bitterness ran high in the years of the Peninsular War, of Waterloo and the Peterloo Massacre -the years, too, in which Wordsworth's greatness, or at least his influence, came grudgingly to be admitted. While the better critics tried to hold the balance between their aesthetic and political incli- nations, much that was written was as crude as a cartoon by Row- landson. The atmosphere was not improved- though neither, in all probability, was it made any worse - by the emergence of the great reviews. With the founding of the Edinburgh in 1802, and the Quarterly as its Tory competitor in 1809, literary criticism became more a matter of party lines than at any time since Pope and Swift. The quarterlies were far from indifferent to the major developments in poetry, and Wordsworth at least found that it was far better to be baited than to be ignored. The quarterlies were a product of the Scottish enlightenment, and played a significant part in the nineteenth-century broadening of culture. The Edinburgh Review was founded to promote political and social reform. Hazlitt, writing in 1825, saw it as a great organ of democratisation, spreading the example of informed, rational comment on public and intellectual issues to a wide readership (its rival, by the same token, was dedicated to leading multitudes by the nose). 3 Though articles in the Edinburgh and Quarterly were by far the longest and best paid, these two journals were not alone in their field. John 0. Hayden records that the number of periodicals carrying regular reviews doubled between 1800 and 1810, and reached a peak of at least thirty-one in the early 1820s. 4 This explosion of literary reviewing must be considered as a social phenomenon in its own right. Probably all of the early reviews were run by small cliques. For breadth of outlook and the sense of the columns being open to all-comers we must wait until the mid-Victorian period. Jeffrey's inveterate habit of rewriting his contributor's copy is symptomatic; the Edinburgh and Quarterly in their early days were closed shops. None the less, Hazlitt's enthusiasm was not entirely misplaced, and his claims would have been fully justified had they been made on behalf of the institution of reviewing as a whole, and not just in defence of one particular editor. To have a periodical composed entirely of book reviews presupposes a constant stream of new books demanding attention, and a literary or cultivated class anxious to be informed about them. Their anxiety to be informed stems from a consciousness of social change - to consider oneself enlightened one must keep up with events- so that it is no accident that the first of the great reviews was on the side of the Whigs. 66 Authors and Authority The stream of new books is felt as at once a promise and a threat. There is the promise of intellectual progress and cultural improve- ment; one is bound to widen one's sensibility (in Wordsworth's phrase) by keeping up with the new. But there is also the threat of losing one's bearings, of being carried along in the cultural tor- rent with no sense of fixed standards or priorities which can be taken for granted. Any review, therefore, is bound to combine up-to-dateness with a sense of stability, providing a source of judg- ment on which the reader can rely. That the early Edinburgh and Quarterly have achieved such a bad reputation is partly due to venality and corruption, but more to their overemphasis on this stabilising function. Thus Jeffrey began his review of Southey's Thalaba (the first of his onslaughts on the Lake Poets) in volume one of the Edinburgh with the following stultifying credo: Poetry has this much, at least, in common with religion, that its standards were fixed long ago by certain inspired writers whose authority it is no longer lawful to call in question; and that many profess to be entirely devoted to it who have no good works to produce in support of their pretensions. Jeffrey was completely sincere in suggesting that Wordsworth and Southey were propounding a dangerous, Rousseauistic heresy, but the very existence of a review casts doubt on this notion of incon- testable authority. Behind the early reviews lay the ideal of Hume's Man of Taste, serenely applying the comparative method to each new book and trying it by the standard of everything that already existed. The critic's stance was judicial and informative, his style was pellucid and his points were lavishly illustrated by quotation. Jeffrey came closest to this ideal, though outside his notorious attacks on the Lake School his lawyer-like displays of trenchant platitudes are often rather dull. Jeffrey was no orthodox neoclassic, and though he detested Wordsworth he admired various romantic traits in Scott, Crabbe, Byron and Burns. Where he seems to take up the burden of Addison and Pope is in striving to defend a literary decorum plainly based on class. The standard of politeness and gentility is fixed, but writers seem increasingly unwilling to conform to it; hence the critic's patience is easily tried, and contempt and ridicule come to his aid. The challenge of simplicity and 'vulgarity' in literature was the main thing that had to be met. Besides the attacks on Wordsworth, Jeffrey's essay on Burns was given over to fine discriminations of what was, and was not, acceptable to a gentleman, while he found Scott's ability to please both informed  The Romantic Critics 67 judges and the general public to be the most provocative feature of 'The Lady of the Lake'. But if the democratic impulse in poetry had to be viewed with intense suspicion, neither was patrician hauteur any more acceptable; hence, perhaps, Brougham's savag- ing of Byron's Hours of Idleness in the Edinburgh Review for January 1808: 'The poesy of this young lord belongs to the class which neither gods nor man are said to permit.' The politeness and gentility of the Edinburgh was essentially middle-class. But this, perhaps, is to look at the matter too impersonally. Keats was not alone in being praised by the Edinburgh because he was damned by the Quarterly; the judicial rhetoric of periodical reviewing was often only a fac;ade. It is nice to see Hazlitt gracefully extricating himself at a tricky moment in The Spirit of the Age: 'We had written thus far when news came of the death of Lord Byron, and put an end at once to a strain of somewhat peevish invective, which was intended to meet his eye, not to insult his memory.' All too often reviewing was intended to meet some body's eye. Poets who had smarted under the lash were inclined, like Coleridge, to sneer at the whole business as a despotism of eunuchs, with broad hints of their own superior potency. 5 The quarterlies had succeeded in demonstrating the existence of a new public eager for literary instruction. In the Victorian period the reviews were destined to reach a level of integrity and seriousness which made them the central organs of literary culture; but that time was not yet. How could the public be offered a less partial and opportunistic version of critical reason and truth? One answer lay in the literary survey and lecture. In 1804 the Royal Institution in London began to offer public lectures on non- technical subjects, and four years later Coleridge gave there the first of his lecture-courses, and the first important series of public lectures on literature in England. Coleridge's motives for lecturing were mainly financial, and despite his personal magnetism his suc- cess was very variable. Sometimes we hear of him holding forth to a fashionable London audience of six or seven hundred, and attracting droppers-in like Byron and Rogers. At other times he disconsolately faced a dozen or so in a hotel at Clifton. In all, he gave ten courses of lectures between 1808 and 1819, and the results must have awakened the rivalry of Hazlitt, whose three courses began in 1818. Hazlitt and Coleridge between them covered the development of English literature from Chaucer onwards; a new mode of criticism had arisen to fulfil a new demand. Coleridge's prospectus for his 1818 course exhibits rather nakedly the lecturer's rueful sense of his audience, earnest for literary instruction so long as they could feel it was useful, not too arduous, and productive 68 Authors and Authority of small talk in the presence of ladies. But here he was selling himself short. When the lectures succeeded it was because they were an intellectual event, not a useful social diversion. The young men present were scribbling down their notes for posterity. The intellectual origin of the romantic lecture-courses lay in Ger- many. Hazlitt made his acknowledgments to A.W. Schlegel's Vor- /esungen uber dramatische Kunst und Litteratur (1809-11) in the Preface to The Characters of Shakespeare's Plays. In his erratic 1811-12 course, the first of which we have detailed records, Coler- idge suddenly pulled himself together in the ninth lecture when (perhaps not for the first time) he had managed to procure a copy of Schlegel. 6 In 1813 we find him writing from Bristol to his London hosts, the Morgans, asking them to send his copy of the Vor- lesungen together with two thick memorandum-books inscribed 'Vorlesungen: Schlegel' which he had taken to his earlier lectures at the Surrey Institution. 7 There is no question that a good propor- tion of the material in his lecture-courses was plagiarised; scholars argue over whether there is sufficient original material to support his enormous reputation as a Shakespeare critic. Coleridge tended to claim that his thoughts coincided with the Germans, rather than being overwhelmingly influenced by them. Whether or not this can be proved, it can hardly affect our recognition of the greatness and originality of the German romantic critics whose words he liked to borrow. Basically, their achievement was to view literature as an in- ternational cultural heritage to be understood in the light of a philosophy of history. Literary history, that is, if properly in- terpreted, reflects or embodies the essential history of civilisation. The primitive literary historians of eighteenth-century England had put forward a simple version of this essential history: poetry, they argued, flourishes in a rude and barbarous state of society, and recedes as rationality and decorum advance. This argument was so widely disseminated that few romantic critics could refrain from outlining a potted history of culture. Although the primitivist theory regularly had an anti-Enlightenment thrust, since it focused on the shortcomings of 'rational' civilisation, its crudity was typical of Enlightenment historiography. To the German critics influenced by Kant and Herder, history appeared a more complex process and one that demanded more systematic study. Culture was in- terpreted in terms of dialectical oppositions such as Schiller's naive and sentimental, and Schlegel's classical and romantic; the nostal- gia inherent in the primitivist case was acknowledged, even though its licence was extended. Since different kinds of artistic excellence  The Romantic Critics 69 could be achieved at different times, criticism became a subtle blend of normative and relativistic tendencies. It was the elder Schlegel who applied the new approach to a methodical survey of European drama from Aeschylus down to Goethe and Schiller. He was disparaged for his professorial approach both in Germany and England, but the Lectures on Dra- matic Art and Literature, translated into English in 1815, now appear as one of the foundation stones of modern humanistic criti- cism. Schlegel has the epic sweep, if not quite the depth, of an Auerbach or a Lukacs, and his is the first Grand Tour of the Euro- pean literary museum. Much depends on his ability to get the tone right- to bring a sense of rational, urbane and yet personal apprai- sal to every work that he studies. English readers were particularly attracted by his treatment of Shakespeare, a majestic expression of the Shakespearean vogue in Germany which had begun with Lessing and Herder. Schlegel's emphasis on fair-minded apprecia- tion might seem thoroughly neoclassical - the ideal expression of Hume's doctrine of universal taste- were it not for his emancipation from the historical parochialism of the Enlightenment (Shakes- peare is no longer the 'child of nature'), and his confident recogni- tion of the irrational. For Schlegel was able both to endorse the new values of poetic power and creativity, and to contain them within a framework of rationalistic history. His doctrine of organic form, which was immediately borrowed by Coleridge, is a clear example of such containment. Schlegel was able to write with warmth of the romantic 'expression of the secret attraction to a chaos which lies concealed in the very bosom of the ordered universe' 8 precisely because he felt able to explain it. He is a modern humanist, however, because his rationalism seems some- thing less than inevitable; it is only one of the possible ways of responding to the challenge of the human condition that he expounds (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Hazlitt are among those who represent other ways) and this gives it a willed and precarious quality. The criticism of the other romantics is more far-reaching, but its relation to rationality is much more problematic than his. One irrational aspect of literature is its connection with national pride. The English response to the fulsome reception of their national poet in Germany was necessarily ambivalent. Coleridge and Hazlitt rushed to supply an 'English' Shakespeare, purloining the best features of Schlegel while going one better and pointing out the German critic's shortcomings. The detachment of Schlegel's comparatist outlook, however, owed much to his nationality. The European dramatic heritage appeared to him as a sequence of foreign literatures; he could survey these impartially (allowing for 70 Authors and Authority some bias against the French) while proclaiming that the present and future belonged to his own country. But patriotism was an issue that divided English critics. De Quincey became a champion of the international character of great literature; he saw that poets belong not to the nation-state but to the 'vast empire of human society'. Hazlitt, likewise, wrote of those capable of appreciating the writers of Shakespeare's age as 'true cosmopolites'. 9 But the attitude which has often been uppermost in English studies is the reverse of this- the conservative nationalism represented by Coler- idge. Coleridge speaks of 'mock cosmopolitism', 10 and when lec- turing on English literature his heart often swells with patriotic pride. At best, he shows that grasp of the inner nature of national institutions to which John Stuart Mill was to pay tribute; but at his worst - as on King Alfred - he gives us Kiplingesque school- history. None the less, Coleridge has an unprecedented intimacy with the historical tradition of literature, above all in his fascination with the seventeenth century. Lamb's influential Specimens of English Dramatic Poets Who Lived About the Time of Shakespeare (1808) are precisely what their name implies- specimens gathered on aesthetic grounds by a good antiquarian. Hazlitt's Lectures on the Age of Elizabeth are reputed to have been mugged up in six weeks, presumably to satisfy a public demand. Coleridge stands alone in the depth with which he took the imprint of seventeenth- century language and its ways of thought. Although Hazlitt and Coleridge both attempted the genre of the critical survey, neither embraced it wholeheartedly as Schlegel had done. As had happened a century earlier, a mode of rationalistic criticism imported from the continent was trans- muted into a more English form, in which the social attitude con- veyed by the critic seems at least as important as his facts and arguments. The study of English literary history in the nineteenth century became the preserve of those whom we may call the 'book- men' - the cosy, antiquarian bibliophiles whose outlook was defined by Lamb and Hazlitt, the essayists of the 1820s. John Gross has shown that the bookish ethos emerged with the London Maga- zine (1820-9) to which Lamb, Hazlitt, de Quincey and Landor all contributed. This was at once a metropolitan phenomenon ('It was less like a magazine than a club', Gross comments) 11 and an attempt to insulate the critic from all those considerations of standards and party politics which ruled in Edinburgh reviewing. The bookishness of the essayists may be approached by way of the new attitude to drama that was emerging. Johnson's discus- sion of the Unities of Place and Time in the 'Preface to Shakespeare' had dislodged the neoclassical rules, without putting anything very  The Romantic Critics 71 satisfactory in their place. All the romantics felt that his blunt assertion that 'the spectators are always in their senses' was deroga- tory to art, and several accepted the challenge to produce a new theory of dramatic illusion. Schlegel and Coleridge both argued that drama makes its appeal to the imaginative faculty, and our experience of it is a kind of voluntary dreaming. Hence, Coleridge says, there is neither complete delusion nor complete detachment, but 'a sort of temporary half-faith' or, in his most famous phrase, a 'willing suspension of disbelief'. 12 This is a psychological account which afplies to drama and to the 'perusal of a deeply interesting novel'; 1 that is, it will do as well for solitary reading as for the theatre. Schlegel, by contrast, goes on to discuss what he calls the 'theatrical effect' - the communal effect of drama, based on the traditional comparison of drama and oratory. The poet in the theatre, he argues, can 'transport his hearers out of themselves' by evoking the 'power of a visible communion of numbers'. 14 Schle- gel reminds his readers of the dangers of mass emotion, and hence of the necessity for censorship and state regulation of theatres. This is all very orthodox and Platonic. Coleridge, however, disre- gards the effect of the communal audience as completely as Johnson had done. The English romantic critics in general have lost the sense of the essentially public character of drama. Coleridge, Haz- litt and Lamb all express the feeling that Shakespeare's plays are far better when read than on the stage. The case is argued most fully and interestingly in Charles Lamb's essay 'On the Tragedies of Shakespeare, Considered with Reference to their Fitness for Stage Representation' (1811). Lamb does recognise a 'theatrical effect', but he attributes it entirely to the actor rather than the dramatist, and goes so far as to suggest that Hamlet, rewritten without the poetry, the intellectual content and the profundity of characterisation, would retain the same degree of theatrical impact. This essay is something of a jeu d'esprit- an argument that actors since Garrick have been getting too big for their boots. But it is also an important expression of changing taste. Lamb was not alone in his revolt against the crudely spectacular and melodramatic appeal of theatre in his own day, but the conclusions that he drew show a profound distrust of theatrical performance, which he sees as an inevitable vulgarisation of the written text. (He did not, how- ever, abstain from theatregoing.) The nineteenth century in general came to emphasise those aspects of Shakespeare which seemed to deny performance. It turned his dramas into novels. Lamb points out that dramatic speech is, like the novel in letters, a non-realistic convention - and in good drama the purpose of the convention is to give us knowledge of the 'inner structure and 72 Authors and Authority workings of mind in a character'. But the inner structure of a literary character can only be truly savoured by the solitary reader: These profound sorrows, these light-and-noise-abhorring rumi- nations, which the tongue scarce dares utter to deaf walls and chambers, how can they be represented by a gesticulating actor, who comes and mouths them out before an audience, making four hundred people his confidants at once? Hamlet, inevitably enough, is the character referred to, and it seems obvious that Lamb is making him into a private alter ego, rather than a tragic hero and Prince of Denmark. Lamb is explicit in his belief that Shakespearean characters need 'that vantage- ground of abstraction which reading possesses over seeing', and are properly 'the objects of meditation rather than of interest and curiosity as to their actions' 'Meditation': the term is Wordsworthian, but it takes on an un- Wordsworthian literariness here. For Lamb is defining a literary or poetic element in drama which can only be profaned in the theatre. The ideal reader of Shakespearean drama, he implies, is the connoisseur savouring his appreciation in the solitude of a book-lined study. The cultivation of older English literature in the nineteenth century can hardly be separated from this image of the bookish life, with its frequentation of forgotten authors and rare editions and its mellow storehouse of anecdotes and 'char- acters'. Lamb and Hazlitt savour the atmosphere rather than the substance of reading; they delight in melancholy reminiscences, in out-of-the-way quotations, and in confessions of personal likes and dislikes; their world is the world as seen from a comfortable armchair. Yet the leisured bookman of the Essays of Elia and Hazlitt's essays was necessarily only a persona, a fiction created by harassed professional men (Hazlitt was a journalist and lecturer, Lamb a civil servant). The bookman represented a spare-time ideal of which all men might become amateurs. As the century con- tinued, the notion of romantic withdrawal to the world of the study became increasingly trivialised. At best, fin-de-siecle bookmanship might be represented by a figure such as Saintsbury, relaxed, agree- able and (to the modern reader) intolerably mannered, but none the less a formidable professional scholar. Equally representative, however, was the commercial approach of the Bookman magazine (founded in 1891) with its gossip about publishers' autumn lists and its portraits of best-selling lady novelists. Lamb's essay on Shakespeare argued that the essentially poetic element in drama lay in characterisation. This may suggest that  The Romantic Critics 73 there are broad connections between the rise of bookmanship and the rise of the Victorian novel - both of them reflecting the trend toward the cultivation of private experience. Lamb's essays them- selves are indebted to Fielding and Sterne, and look forward to Thackeray and Dickens; the ruminative voice of Elia is not so far from that of the more clubbable Victorian novelists. Both novelists and bookmen may be seen as offering ideals of gentility and spiritual culture to the new middle- and lower-middle-class reading public. Yet the bookish ideal was certainly a meagre one, which insulated its adherent from the pressures of social reality while eliciting none of the ethical and imaginative zeal tapped by the more robust gospels of Dickens, Ruskin or Carlyle. The Victorian novelist of lower-class origins first had to learn to adopt the social tone of gentility; one can see this in Dickens, and later in the young H.G. Wells. Similarly, the bookman had to pretend to a leisure he did not possess. A title such as Leslie Stephen's Hours in a Library suggests, surely, the fruits of idle browsing, not the industry of a prolific historian, intellectual and D.N. B. editor. And for all the candour of the self-portrayal of the Regency essayists, what is missing from their work is any sense of themselves as writers. The essayists did not tell the full truth about their reading experiences, since reading for them was part of the work of earning a living. The bookman with time on his hands is made to seem the antithesis of the reviewer and contributor to the London Magazine. (A clear illustration of the gulf between 'bookman' and reviewer is provided by the state of Jeffrey's library when it was auctioned off after his death: 'a very poor collection, made up largely of law books and review copies'. 15 Jeffrey was much more interested in his wine cellar, one of the finest in Scot- land.) While the reviewer is a metropolitan creature, the bookman often flourishes best in a country home or cottage. Early examples are Southey, who protested that letting Wordsworth into his library at Keswick was 'like letting a bear into a tulip garden' ; and de Quincey, who never forgave the same poet for cutting open the pages of a new volume of Burke with the Dove Cottage butter- knife. 16 Hazlitt was proud of his country retreat, Winterslow Hut in Wiltshire, and in 1839 his son published the first selection of his so-called Winters/ow Essays. Though a coaching inn, Winters- low Hut directly anticipates the writer's cottage of later in the cen- tury - peaceful , rustic, but not too far from the railway station. But Winterslow was also the place where Hazlitt mugged up the Lectures on the Age of Elizabeth from borrowed volumes in six weeks- a glimpse of the reality underlying the ideal. If Hazlitt stops short of total can dour, the strain of living up 74 Authors and Authority to the bookish ideal manifests itself in his outbursts of self-pity. There is his notorious confession that 'Books have in a great measure lost their power over me', and his dejected response to Keats's Endymion: I know how I should have felt at one time in reading such passages; and that is all. The sharp luscious flavour, the fine aroma is fled, and nothing but the stalk, the bran, the husk of literature is left. ('On Reading Old Books', 1821) One might read 'literature' here as the subject of Hazlitt's pro- fessional attentions as writer and journalist, while what he aims at and cannot manage is the pure appreciation due to 'poetry'. This is the 'fine aroma' which he, like so many of his successors, saw it as the critic's duty to try to convey. The desultory and im- pressionistic nature of his and Lamb's criticism is an attempt to realise such a poetic essence of the literature with which they deal. Lamb's preface to his Extracts from the Garrick Plays (1827) , for example, after dwelling fondly on the 'luxury' of reading through the collection of old plays at Montagu House, outlines his editorial method in these terms: You must be content with sometimes a scene, sometimes a song; a speech, or passage, or a poetical image, as they happen to strike me. I read without order of time; I am a poor hand at dates; and for any biography of the Dramatists, I must refer to writers who are more skilful in such matters. My business is with their poetry only. The critic as bookman soaks himself in an atmosphere of passive literariness, and finally draws out of it a single elixir, poetry alone. This is the decadence of the romantic sense of poetic power - its containment within a cosy and ruminative sphere of the private consciousness which augurs no harm to anyone and can be held up as a spiritual ideal to the new middle classes. But in the best criticism of Hazlitt, as well as of Coleridge, Keats and Shelley, the sense of power which inspired and frustrated the romantics has far more heroic manifestations than this. Samuel Taylor Coleridge Biographia Literaria 'The Poet is dead in me', Coleridge told Godwin in 1801. His criticism embodies an attitude to the past very different from the  The Romantic Critics 75 random plundering of old books and fabrication of archaic forms that had been responsible for 'The Ancient Mariner', 'Christa bel' and ' Kubla Khan'. In a letter to Sir George and Lady Beaumont in 1804, Coleridge announced that he was now turning to a far more disciplined and methodical form of literary study: Each scene of each play I read as if it were the whole of Shakes- peare's works - the sole thing extant. I ask myself what are the characteristics, the diction, the cadences, and metre, the character, the passion, the moral or metaphysical inherencies and fitness for theatric effect, and in what sort of theatres. All these I write down with great care and precision of thought and language (and when I have gone through the whole, I then shall collect my papers, and observe how often such and such expres- sions recur), and thus shall not only know what the characteristics of Shakespeare's plays are, but likewise what proportion they bear to each other. The voice of the virtuous literary scientist would often be heard in the years leading up to Biographia Literaria. The origins of Coler- idge's leaning to systematic literary analysis around 1804 might be found in his visit to Germany ( 1798) and his acquaintance with the trend of German criticism; more immediate considerations, however, were his need to earn money by writing and lecturing, and to distract himself from his personal miseries. Two other main strands led to his emergence as a critic. The first was his discovery that he could use literary theory as a form of disguised self- expression. In October 1800 he had written to Humphry Davy of his plan for an 'Essay on the Elements of Poetry' which would be 'in reality a disguised system of morals and politics'. His political interests at this time were intense; he was discovering a new basis for his beliefs after his repudiation of the republican cause, and was contributing leaders and even parliamentary reports to the Morning Post. 1 As he had rejected democracy and the doctrine of abstract rights, it is tempting to suggest that the 'disguised system of morals and politics' was to have been a Burkeian riposte to the arguments from natural reason in the contemporaneous Preface to Lyrical Ballads. But we do not know, and Coleridge did not openly dissociate himself from Wordsworth's doctrines until1802. Three years later, personal confession had become a more urgent necessity than working out a political creed. A new scheme went down in his notebook: Seem to have made up my mind to write my metaphysical works 76 Authors and Authority as my Life, and in my Life- intermixed with all the other events or history of the mind and fortunes of S.T. Coleridge. 2 This was possibly the crucial moment in the evolution of the form of the Biographia. In adopting the autobiographical form, Coler- idge seems to have been making things easier for himself, much as Wordsworth did in writing a Prelude to his 'great philosophical poem'. Coleridge continued to dream of a metaphysical Treatise on the 'Logos', though not of an objectively structured treatise on poetry. But the majority of his published prose consists of systems of morals and politics: witness The Friend, The Statesman's Manual, Aids to Reflection and the Constitution of Church and State. Criticism was to prove a vital but not a lasting interest of his. The other strand leading to the Biographia is that of disagree- ment with Wordsworth. This was brought into the open by the revised Preface of 1802. Coleridge responded both by claiming his share in the original conception of 1800 ('Wordsworth's Preface is half a child of my own brain') 3 and by taking a very cool look at the revised version, complaining of its obscurity and over- elaborate diction. Two letters of July 1802 suggest that the Preface had been the occasion of a mild quarrel with Wordsworth, in which he was enlisting his friends' support: 'we have had lately some little controversy on the subject, and we begin to suspect that there is somewhere or other a radical difference in our opinions.' The difference of opinion was over the key question of the nature of poetic diction. Disagreement with Wordsworth was both now and later the most important factor which goaded Coleridge into order- ing his thoughts about poetry and getting them down on paper. The main critical chapters of Biographia Literaria were eventually written in the summer of 1815, when he had received a further prod from Wordsworth's Preface and 'Essay Supplementary', which had come out in March. 4 Coleridge had sketched out his distinction between fancy and imagination long before, but it was only after Wordsworth's discussion of 1815 that it took its final shape. Yet the disagreement was not a matter of friendly correction of Wordsworth's statements, despite the show of courtesy in the Biographia. In writing his critique, Coleridge was announcing his disaffiliation from the poetic revolution that Wordsworth had advo- cated and led. Already in 1802, while 'The Ancient Mariner' was still included in the new edition of Lyrical Ballads, he had told Southey of his intentions of 'acting the arbitrator between the old school and the new school'. Southey must have found this air of detachment surprising, to say the least.  The Romantic Critics 77 What kind of book is the Biographia? In the struggle to make sense of it, readers have turned to the programmatic statement at the end of Chapter Four, where Coleridge promises to present an intelligible statement of my poetic creed; not as my opinions, which weigh for nothing, but as deductions from estab- lished premises conveyed in such a form as is calculated either to effect a fundamental conviction or to receive a fundamental confutation. The image of Coleridge as the great rationalist among critics sur- vives, although there are few who feel either fundamentally con- vinced by his deductive arguments, or capable of fundamentally confuting them. In order to achieve either result, we have to recon- struct the arguments, to complete what Coleridge himself left frag- mentary and implicit. Theoretical his procedure may have been, but impeccably rational it certainly was not. And in any case, the immediate purpose of the above passage is, characteristically enough, to forestall complaints of obscurity. Moreover, it comes in a book that he was not ashamed to subtitle 'Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions'. Considered as literary criticism, the biographical framework is the source of some of its strengths and of most of its weaknesses. Biographia Literaria might be seen as the albatross of what Fredric Jameson has called 'dialecti- cal criticism', or criticism which is based on a constant strategy of self-awareness and self-commentary. Coleridge's acute self- consciousness gives even his most daring paragraphs an air of calcu- lation or controlled exhibitionism; yet his impulse to show off is as often checked by that impulse to hide behind turgid qualifica- tions, empty elaborations and professions of good faith which gives to his prose its garrulous, cobwebby quality. Far from being a rational treatise, the Biographia is a remarkable product of romantic egotism, in which thought constantly reflecting on itself merges into thought transparently attempting to conceal its own nature. Fortunately, the book falls into two halves, and the Shandean - and Pecksniffian - aspects are mainly apparent in the first half. The first three chapters are a tedious parade of self-defence against real and imagined enemies. Between digressions , Coleridge tells of his early literary education and tastes, ending with a remarkably fulsome tribute to Southey. Then, in Chapter Four, he recounts the climax of his early development- his meeting with Wordsworth - and at last rises to his subject, passing from garrulousness to 78 Authors and Authority one of the finest expressions of the critic's experience in English literature. There is just one intermediate stage in the transition, for the theme which opens Chapter Four is Coleridge's attempt to dispel 'this fiction of a new school of poetry' and the 'clamors against its supposed founders'. He begins to emerge as the kind of revol- utionary who aims to consolidate the change of power by denying that it ever took place. He suggests that the hostility which greeted Lyrical Ballads was largely accidental, since the omission of less than a hundred lines would have precluded nine-tenths of the criti- cism. Moreover, the 1800 Preface was chiefly to blame, as it un- necessarily put people's backs up; the Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge feels, should have come into the world more quietly. Despite the venomous attacks on Jeffrey elsewhere in the Biographia, this line of argument prepares us for the lengths to which Coleridge was prepared to go in conceding his opponents' case in order to discredit the Preface and Wordsworth's own account of his poetic strengths. In the 'Essay Supplementary', Wordsworth had written that the great poet must create the taste by which he is to be enjoyed - thus defending his decision to produce a manifesto. Coleridge was now disputing this. His argument makes the reception of a poet not a public and sociological phenomenon, as it was for Words- worth, but a private and psychological one. Poetry speaks for itself, regardless of the general state of culture, as long as the poet does not needlessly irritate the reader - that is what he seems to be saying. The proof lies in his own experience: During the last year of my residence at Cambridge I became acquainted with Mr. Wordsworth's first publication, entitled 'Descriptive Sketches'; and seldom, if ever, was the emergence of an original poetic genius above the literary horizon more evi- dently announced. Coleridge proceeds to summarise the essential impact that Words- worth's poetry made upon him: 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 situa- tions of which, for the common view, custom had bedimmed all the lustre, had dried up the sparkle and the dew-drops. This famous passage draws on the language of poetic 'power' which  The Romantic Critics 79 we have already seen in Wordsworth and de Quincey: consider the adjectives 'deep', 'profound', 'imaginative', 'original'. The poet's power is that of seeing the world in its ideal wonder and novelty, and of communicating his vision to others. Coleridge is concerned with the psychological and ontological status of this power. He 'no sooner felt' Wordsworth's genius, he tells us, than he 'sought to understand' it. He felt that it involved the inter- relationship of feeling and thought, of observation and the 'imagi- native faculty', and of the ideal world and the world of common experience. These were the antinomies from which he would con- struct his theory of imagination. And a theory of imagination, he believed, was a philosopher's stone which would not only 'furnish a torch of guidance to the philosophical critic', but would make the production of great poetry easier and less sporadic than in the past; for 'in energetic minds truth soon changes by domestica- tion into power'. By the end of Chapter Four, then, we have been made to antici- pate something far more ambitious than just 'Biographical Sketches'. But equally Coleridge can claim that the theoretical programme he is now announcing contains the inner meaning of his literary life. For the skeleton of argument in the book follows the pattern of a 'circuitous journey', which M.H. Abrams has shown to be common to many other romantic confessional works. 5 Quite possibly Coleridge was half-consciously imitating one of these, Wordsworth's Prelude (Wordsworth had read the poem to him in 1807). The 'circuitous journey' of romantic autobiography is inaugurated by a natural or instinctive experience of insight into reality; it proceeds by a process of investigation and interrogation of accumulating experiences until the final point is reached at which the initial experience is maturely comprehended in the light of universal reason. In The Prelude this path is traversed by the poet who comes to a mature religious understanding of the glimpses of man's connection with nature that he experienced as a child in Book One. In the Biographia, the primal experience is that of Coleridge's critical response to the 'union of deep feeling with profound thought'. His task then is to deduce the nature of the imagination in ontological terms, and to apply the result to the psychology of the creative act, to the aesthetic definition of the work of art and finally to the purposes of poetic analysis, culminat- ing in the examination of Wordsworth's achievements in the hope of a full understanding of his imaginative genius. Such, at least, is the foundation on which Coleridge based his reputation as a philosophical critic. Like the vast majority of his literary schemes, 80 Authors and Authority he did not fulfil it, though he made a moderately concerted attempt to do so. The structural parallel between the Biographia and The Prelude should not, of course, be allowed to obscure the vast contrast between the mode of discourse of the Biographia and any work of Wordsworth's. In political terms, Coleridge's discussion of the imagination and of diction in the context of philosophical and liter- ary tradition is a Burkeian reply to the Tom Paine manner of the 1800 Preface. Yet the gossipy and anecdotal parade of learning in the Biographia owes nothing to Burke and is a deliberate rejec- tion of eighteenth-century clarity. Coleridge's thinking proceeds not through rational and deductive statement, but through ratioci- native commentary. His feverish sense of intellectual complexity is conveyed by a chaotic mixture of styles: seventeenth-century prolixity jostles with German cloudiness, romantic precision and evocativeness with proto-Victorian humbug. The contents of the first volume (Chapters One to Thirteen) are equally varied, with chapters of exhortations and anecdotes sandwiched amid the philosophy. Coleridge starts out from Chapter Four with a heavily derivative account of philosophical history. Eventually we reach the transcen- dental system enumerated in the Ten Theses of Chapter Twelve, translated without acknowledgment from Schelling. Among the intermissions are those in which Coleridge speaks of truth as the 'divine ventriloquist', and accuses Hume (on nebulous grounds) of plagiarising Aquinas. Yet this section of the Biographia has considerable historical importance for the part it played in dissemi- nating the Kantian revolution in England. Coleridge tells how he rejected the mechanical account of the operations of mind put forward by the British empiricists. He traces the theory of associa- tion down to the eighteenth century, and attacks the tenets of the prevailing Hartleian philosophy. He objects to Hartley's theory on two grounds: first, that it is implicitly materialist and thus anti- Christian; second, that it denies the active and voluntary nature of consciousness. What the materialistic philosophers have dis- covered, Coleridge argues, are not the determining laws of mind itself but simply some of the conditions of mental activity. The individual is logically prior to such conditions and is able to mould them to his own use rather than merely obeying them passively. The acts of perception and consciousness are not determined but voluntary; it is only on this view of mental activity that we can comprehend the creative quality of art and thought. Coleridge's sense of the mind's creative activity is illustrated by the example of jumping (in which we initially resist the external force of gravity  The Romantic Critics 81 in order to make use of it) and by the beautiful analogy of the water-insect in Chapter Seven: Most of my readers will have observed a small water-insect on the surface of rivulets which throws a cinque-spotted shadow fringed with pris,matic colours on the sunny bottom of the brook; and will have noticed how the little animal wins its way up against the stream, by alternate pulses of active and passive motion, now resisting the current, and now yielding to it in order to gather strength and a momentary fulcrum for a further propul- sion, This is no unapt emblem of the mind's self-experience in the act of thinking, There are evidently two powers at work which relatively to each other are active and passive; and this is not possible without an intermediate faculty, which is at once both active and passive, (In philosophical language we must denominate this intermediate faculty in all its degrees and deter- minations the imagination. But in common language, and especially on the subject of poetry, we appropriate the name to a superior degree of the faculty, joined to a superior voluntary controul over it.) The mind here is both the stream and the insect - the experience of the self and the self that experiences. The 'intermediate faculty' of mental motion which provides the field of operation for both the active and passive powers of mind is what Coleridge names the imagination; while 'a superior degree of the faculty, joined to a superior voluntary controul over it' constitutes the imagination that is operative in art. Thus the passage is a direct anticipation of the distinction of primary and secondary imagination in Chapter Thirteen, and foreshadows its essential ambiguity. For what precise differences does Coleridge envisage between the act of imagination in general, and that act in respect of poetry, and the 'act of thinking' of which he examines the 'mind's self-experience' here? These questions can only be answered, if at all, from within the cloudy terrain of Coleridgian metaphysics. Coleridge, who was willing to speak of a 'revolution in philos- ophy', 6 if not in poetry, found in Kant and the post-Kantians a more adequate correspondence to his own intuitions about the nature of mind as both active and passive. The need was now to adopt a philosophical system which would clarify the distinctions which the water-insect analogy leaves begging. But it was one thing to endorse the Kantian critique of rationalism and empiricism, and quite another to follow the German philosophers in their subse- quent quest for the definition of the Noumenon or Absolute Idea. 82 Authors and Authority The religious objections that Coleridge had brought against Hartley raised themselves again; a philosophy which found its starting-point in the creative powers of mind was as likely as one which started from the laws of nature to lead to atheism or pantheism. Coleridge himself had left behind the heterodoxy of the 1790s, and was now a staunch Christian apologist. In his new position he could do with- out Hartley, but not without the Germans, and he chose to base his aesthetics on the transcendental idealism of F. W. J. von Schelling, even though Schelling's system, expounded in Chapter Twelve of the Biographia, is implicitly pantheistic. 7 Coleridge's theory of imagination offers a metaphysical basis for the fancy-imagination distinction empirically arrived at in Chapter Four. Whereas fancy is an arbitrary rearrangement of con- scious material, poetic or secondary imagination is a willed creative act in which the poet moulds and reshapes his experience of the external world to produce an artistic form sui generis; an act anal- ogous to the primary imaginative act by which we constitute and perceive reality itself. Such is the distinction that Coleridge seems to intend, and while we might argue that it is only one of degree, he insists that it is one of kind. Besides the task of establishing that there is such a generic difference between imagination and fancy, Coleridge faces at least two other problems. The first is whether the act of primary imagination by which the mind reshapes external reality is to be understood as an everyday psychological phenomenon (that is, as present in ordinary perception) or as a mode of perception of ultimate truth (and so as partaking of religious and philosophical insight). J.R. Jackson has argued, in the face of the prevailing opinion, that the latter alternative was what Coleridge meant. 8 This emphasis, of course, lends support to the philosophical dignity of poetry, since the secondary imagina- tion 'echoes' the primary. But if primary imagination is part of ordinary sense-perception, then the chief characteristics of its 'echo' in poetic creation must be naturalness and spontaneity. The reason for this ambiguity may be that in Schelling's System des Transcendental Jdealismus Coleridge had found a way of deriv- ing the imagination from a First Cause secure in the mystified realm of pure logic. The imagination in Schelling was a metaphysical entity serving as the medium of human participation in the creation of the world. 9 Coleridge hoped that such a theory could underpin his own more concrete concerns. But when - having completed his logical argument with the Ten Theses establishing Schelling's 'I AM' principle as basic in Chapter Twelve, and the further argu- ment about the product of the interaction of two forces in Chapter Thirteen- he was faced with the necessity of applying merely logical  The Romantic Critics 83 principles in the realm of psychology, he panicked. The result was the notorious break in the argument, with its spurious letter from a 'friend' advising the postponement of any full discussion until it could take its proper place in the Treatise on the Logos, which Coleridge never completed. After these excuses, he offered no more than a page of hasty and cryptic definitions. The second problem arises from the first one. For regardless of the purely logical tangles in which he found himself, it would seem that Coleridge at the time of the Biographia had not made his mind up about the ultimate nature of poetry. In his later prose works, he invariably draws a distinction between the faculties of (mechanical) 'Understanding', and of the (philosophical) 'Reason'. Reason, in The Statesman's Manual (1816), The Friend (1818) and elsewhere, is presented as the highest of human faculties. If the secondary imagination of the Biographia is to be understood as a mode of perceiving ultimate truth, then it is hard to see how it is distinguishable from the Reason. This would make Coleridge's theory one concerned with the psychology of being a good Chris- tian, rather than having anything necessarily to do with art. But if, as has usually been understood, the secondary imagination is a special case of ordinary perception, then it is a specifically poetic faculty indeed, but the relation of that faculty to the philosophical Reason remains forever obscure. Coleridge tells us that a great poet is a 'profound philosopher', but refuses to be more specific. 10 After 1818, however, he gave up writing literary criticism while remaining a Christian apologist, which may well suggest some doc- trinal embarrassment. The theory of imagination, then, may be read as his failed attempt to translate his intuitions into the nature of mental activity, as represented by the water-insect analogy, into the language of metaphysics. The cryptic definitions at the end of Chapter Thirteen represent a blurred though impressive affirma- tion of the creative nature of the mind; but the metaphysics which he has so ceremoniously summoned to his aid in defining the 'imagi- nation or esemplastic power' give us no clear indications about poetry at all. At this point, the first volume of the Biographia ended. The second volume represents a complete break, taking us back at once to the meeting with Wordsworth, the planning of Lyrical Ballads and the shortcomings of the 1800 Preface. Coleridge is now preparing for the long-promised statement of his 'poetic creed', and he launches the discussion by defining his notions 'first, of a poem; and secondly, of poetry itself, in kind and in essence'. These defini- tions are the main business of Chapter Fourteen. The definition 84 Authors and Authority of 'poetry', Coleridge tells us at the end, has been anticipated by the preceding discussion of fancy and imagination: this claim is the only evidence of a logical link between the metaphysics of the Biographia and the literary criticism. In terms of the rationalis- tic criteria by which Coleridge has consistently asked to be judged, it is very weak evidence. For the question 'What is poetry?' he says, is virtually the same as the question 'What is a Poet?', and there follows a famous description of the poet 'in ideal perfection' as one who 'brings the whole soul of man into activity', fusing together its various faculties by means of 'that synthetic and magical power to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of imagination'. The prophetic and symbolic quality of the prose invites direct comparison with Wordsworth's 'What is a Poet?' passage of 1802. But we may say of it, as Coleridge himself said of the Wordsworth passage, that it is 'very grand, and of a sort of Verulamian power and majesty, but it is, in parts... obscure beyond any necessity'. 11 This is Coleridge's tribute, not only to the power of imagination, but to its magic. Yet , just as the poet in him was half-dead, the mode of revelation had been superseded in the Biographia by that of commentary. As a whole, the book presupposes the efforts of previous writers and thinkers, the accumulation of traditions of usage and all those other matters which Coleridge refers to as the 'obligations of intellect' as a kind of screen between the author and the reality (whether metaphysical or textual) to be investigated. The final paragraphs of Chapter Fourteen make an incongruous conclusion to one of his more con- vincing performances in the role of literary scientist. For the description of the poet succeeds his definition of 'a poem', a defini- tion which is comparatively drab , and equally obscure, but in the long run a good deal more important. Coleridge had worked at his definitions in notes and in lectures for several years, but in Biographia Literaria he was distinguishing between the ideas of 'poetry' and 'a poem' for the first time. He even says that 'a poem of any length neither can be, nor ought to be, all poetry'. 'Poetry,' that is, is original creation, the product of the secondary imagination in man. Coleridge cannot explain it except in prophetic and magical terms. 'A poem' , however, is an artificial construction serving a limited cultural purpose. It is that species of composition which is opposed to works of science by proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not truth; and from all other species (having this object in common with it) it is discriminated by proposing to itself such delight from the  The Romantic Critics 85 whole as is compatible with a distinct gratification from each component part. The definition falls into two parts. The first refers us to the neo- classical formula for the poet's purpose (to instruct by pleasing) and to Wordsworth's opposition of poetry and science. The second tells us what kind of pleasure is peculiar to poems, and combines a doctrine of poetic form with a doctrine of the psychology of aesthetic response, both of which Coleridge proceeds, somewhat cryptically, to elaborate. It will be seen how neatly he has separated off the area of purely aesthetic concerns from that of the 'truth' of poetry which may have been proving an embarrassment to him. Coleridge's formal doctrine is that the criterion of a genuine poem is unity; the parts must cohere to form a whole. This is compatible with, though not the same as, the doctrine of 'organic form' which he expounded in his Shakespeare lectures in words purloined from Schlegel. Organic form, when it goes beyond the level of explicit analogy, becomes an expression of romantic nature- mysticism, in which birds can be described as lyrical composers, and poets affirm that their art is as natural to man as humming to bees, twittering to swallows or mourning to small gnats. Schell-· ing, the most rhapsodic of the German post-Kantian philosophers, seriously expounded a mysticism which corresponds to the licensed assertions of the romantic nature lyric. 12 But the notion of organic form which Coleridge took from Schlegel is simply an attractive way of distinguishing internal and intuitive from rigid and external structuring. Organic form appears later in the Biographia, but the formal doctrine of Chapter Fourteen is couched in the more tradi- tional aesthetic terms of 'harmony' and 'proportion': if the definition sought for be that of a legitimate poem, I answer it must be one the parts of which mutually support and explain each other; all in their proportion harmonizing with, and support- ing the purpose and known influences of metrical arrangement. The principle of harmony, it is clear from this, decisively affects the question of metre. Metre can only be successfully 'superadded', in Wordsworth's phrase, if all other parts or elements of the poem are made consonant with it; and so metre alone is sufficient ground for the distinction between prose and poetry which Wordsworth had rejected. Thus Coleridge's definition of a poem directly antici- pates his commentary on the 1800 Preface. The other aspect of Coleridge's definition is his doctrine of the psychology of aesthetic response. The presence of metre, he argues, 86 Authors and Authority tends to promote the kind of pleasure which is peculiar to poetry. This specifically poetic pleasure is the result of heightened atten- tion. The importance of metre is that it stimulates our attention to every facet of linguistic communication, producing not a gener- alised, blurred sense of meaning or message, but 'a distinct gratifi- cation from each component part'. Coleridge's concept of aesthetic attention effectively solves the hopeless muddle in which Words- worth had found himself when he denied that metre made any generic difference to poetry, while admitting that a piece of verse would be read a hundred times where its prose equivalent was read once. The solution is contained in the following statements: If metre be superadded, all other parts must be made consonant with it. They must be such as to justify the perpetual and distinct attention to each part which an exact correspondent recurrence of accent and sound are calculated to excite.... The reader should be carried forward, not merely or chiefly by the mechani- cal impulse of curiosity, or by a restless desire to arrive at the final solution; but by the pleasurable activity of mind excited by the attractions of the journey itself. Not least among the 'attractions of the journey itself', it may be suggested, were the pleasures of sound. Coleridge and Words- worth were noted for the chanting intonation with which they read verse aloud. The concern with pleasure and the perfection of form in these passages foreshadows the musical qualities of later roman- tic and symbolist poetry; the same qualities were enthusiastically advocated by Hazlitt in his Lectures on the English Poets. When we think of poetry as harmonious and pleasurable we are very likely to see it as a kind of music. But Coleridge's concept of aes- thetic attention leaves something to be accounted for - the sense of poetic power. This is the quality that thrills through his own response to Wordsworth's Prelude (1807): An Orphic song indeed, A song divine of high and passionate thoughts To their own music chaunted! ('To William Wordsworth') Coleridge's definition of a poem is a formalist definition, and what it does is to give a more dynamic and analytic understanding of the poem as aesthetic object. To see the poem in terms of power, however, is to see it as the product of a creative activity of mind in the poet - of 'high and passionate thoughts' - and as capable  The Romantic Critics 87 of exciting a similar creativity in the mind of the reader. Though it was this discovery, prompted by Wordsworth's poetry, that had inaugurated his 'circuitous journey' in Chapter Four, he was unable to bring it wholly within the province of rationalised aesthetics. That is why he adopted the expedient of distinguishing 'poetry' from 'a poem', and why when it came to defining 'poetry'- where power was involved- he launched into the rhapsody on the 'poet, described in ideal perfection', with which Chapter Fourteen ends. If aesthetics could not cope rationally with the power of poetry, what about practical criticism? It was to this that he turned in the next chapter claiming to elucidate the 'specific symptoms of poetic power' in an analysis of 'Venus and Adonis'. Though he discussed the use of imagery in some particular passages of Shakes- peare's poem, these discussions are rather desultory, and follow what Wordsworth had done in the 1815 Preface. Coleridge's main concern is not with the linguistic energy of the poem, but the moral energy and 'genial and productive nature' of the mind that pro- duced it. Coleridge lists four main symptoms of power in Shakes- peare's poems - sweetness of versification, powers of dramatic creation, handling of imagery and 'depth and energy of thought' -and the chapter culminates with a brilliant but very general appre- ciation of the 'protean' quality of Shakespeare's genius. Shakes- peare, who 'darts himself forth, and passes into all forms of human character and passion', is contrasted with Milton who draws all things to himself, 'into the unity of his own ideal'. Shakespeare and Milton are seated upon 'the two glory-smitten summits of the poetic mountain'; the question from here on is whether there is to be a third summit, occupied by Wordsworth. But first, a good deal of the critical view is still blocked by a jerry-built edifice called the Preface to Lyrical Ballads. Coleridge on Wordsworth Coleridge's reply to Wordsworth is one of the most dramatic docu- ments of English criticism. Here, in the clash of two strongly idio- syncratic minds, is a telling realisation of that conflict between author and critical authority which is implicit throughout literary history. The fact that Coleridge was Wordsworth's friend and admirer should not disguise the magnitude of the conflict. Words- worth's sense of mission and his sternly egotistic genius stand, even today, as awkward obstacles to our sense of English poetry as a continuous tradition. Coleridge's purpose was to show how the best of Wordsworth could and must be assimilated within that cor- porate tradition. The price of such assimilation was high, since 88 Authors and Authority not only Wordsworth's theories but the whole idea of a poetic language - and, by extension, of creative genius - independent of literary education and cultural precedent was at stake. Coleridge won the argument, but his was in part a victory of the intellectual or one-man academy over the unsophisticated, visionary poet. His detached and judicial air is particularly notable when he exposes Wordsworth's weaknesses in expounding his own point of view. The issue is, of course, greatly complicated by the personal relation- ship between the two men. Their close association during the writ- ing of the 1800 Preface makes some of Coleridge's later misunderstandings seem wilful and perverse. At the same time, he is still Wordsworth's warmest advocate, though the 'GENUINE PHILOSOPHIC POEM' that he envisages as the poet's crowning achievement is partly a product of his own over-intellectual expec- tations of genius. If he read between the lines of the Biographia, Wordsworth could hardly have found its argument welcome. Coler- idge claims, it is true, that the excision of the Preface and a few dozen lines of Lyrical Ballads would be enough to satisfy the poet's most stringent critic; but the damage his arguments seem calculated to cause is more far-reaching than this. What they do, in effect, is to cut the poet off from what he believed were his external sources of creativity, undermining that sense of confident oneness with the world of nature which irradiates the Lyrical Ballads and the 1805 Prelude. Where Wordsworth himself felt cut off from the Platonic essence of nature (as we know from the 'Immortality Ode') , Coleridge suggested that his grasp of what was left behind, the human and material world, was imperfect and unrepresenta- tive. Poetic powers like his rested wholly on inner resources and intuitions. In inviting his friend to look still more into himself, and to cultivate his solipsistic bent, Coleridge was condemning some of the best things (as well as the worst things) Wordsworth had written by the standards of poetry that he was still expected to write. The demise of the 'genuine philosophic poem' shows how misguided these expectations were. 'Language', Coleridge wrote, 'is the armoury of the human mind; and at once contains the trophies of its past, and the weapons of its future conquests. ' 13 Wordsworth's criticism was the work of a poet who saw his responsibility as necessarily extending to questions of culture, but Coleridge in the Biographia speaks with the voice of a philologist, not of a poet of nature. Such a voice can command the past and the future but may feel threatened by a poet who writes as if in an eternal present. In fact, Coleridge launched a two-pronged attack on the Preface, aiming to save Wordsworth's poetry as literature while countering its cultural  The Romantic Critics 89 effects. The underlying motive of Wordsworth's theory of diction seems a very simple one: it was to expose the sterility of Augustan verse and to state the case for a revolutionary plainness of style and subject-matter as trenchantly as possible. But the argument had implications which Coleridge recognised and fought against for all he was worth. That is why he attacks the Preface as a philol- ogist, linguist, sociologist, aesthetician and philosopher, but never as a fellow-poet. The author of 'Frost at Midnight' , 'The Ancient Mariner' and 'This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison'- poems as radical and as free of intellectualism as any of Wordsworth's - has given way to a brilliant dialectician exposing the absurdity of the left-wing views he had held in his own youth. He is not interested in Words- worth's immediate objects, only in the conformity of his views with tradition and precedent; thus there is 'no poet whose writings would safelier stand the test of Mr. Wordsworth's theory than Spenser'. 14 He plays down the revolutionary aspects of Words- worth's poetry, and he pronounces the experiments of Lyrical Bal- lads an unmitigated failure. 15 Some of his arguments, as Hazlitt and others noticed, were taken from Wordsworth's bitterest oppo- nents; and the Biographia was seen as an act of apostasy by the Monthly Review, which rated Wordsworth as a 'very moderate writer', but greeted his critic as an 'unintentional defender of good taste and good sense in poetry'. 16 The argument commences with a diversion: Chapter Sixteen , a charming little essay on the Renaissance lyric. The key to it is perhaps found in a footnote referring to Sir Joshua Reynolds and his belief that good taste is acquired from 'submissive study of the best models'. Similar references had appeared in the 1798 'Advertisement' and the 1800 Preface. Coleridge asserts that the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century lyrics and madrigals are among the best models, but the simplicity and purity of diction which he admires in them are the reverse of Wordsworthian simplicity. Their writers used a highly polished diction, and 'placed the essence of poetry in the art' , or, as we should say, in perfection of form. This is a tacit rebuke to Wordsworth, and establishes the context of philosophy and literary history within which the Preface is to be discussed. Coleridge admits that there is a more ambitious kind of poetry than this, and from here on he tends to divide good poetry into two sorts: first, a simple (though preferably polished and musical) mode written not in the 'real language of men' but in a purified and public traditional style which he christens the 'lingua communis' ; and second , a more impassioned and imagina- tive mode in which style becomes more personal and idiosyncratic. The first is found in the madrigalists and in Chaucer and Herbert, 90 Authors and Authority and is opposed to the false simplicity or 'matter-of-factness' of the experimental Lyrical Ballads. The second is Miltonic, and also W ordsworthian. Coleridge looks to a combination of the two modes for the perfection of English poetry; it seems a prophecy less of what Wordsworth would do than of the 'musical' imagination of Keats and Tennyson. In Chapter Seventeen he at last reaches the discussion of the Preface, and outlines an alternative theory of language. Language is not the natural expression of man, but the bearer of culture and civilisation; it is what the human race laboriously creates, and each individual has to learn. Wordsworth had stressed the spon- taneity of the individual's use of language, finding in rustics the virtues that we would now find in children. Coleridge replies that a language is created and sustained by the educated classes of a society; its best parts are the products of philosophers and not of shepherds. The sociological bearing of his defence of the values of education leads to the theory of the clerisy or intellectual class that he was to develop in Church and State (1830). In relation to poetry, it leads to concurrence with Johnson's and Reynolds's view of literary language. The headnote 'Poetry essentially ideal and generic' could have been written by either of them, and his substitution of the literary concept of a lingua communis for Words- worth's 'real language of men' clearly harmonises with Johnson's ideas about poetic diction. But in Coleridge's case, the neoclassical ideas are underwritten by Kantian transcendentalism, in the shape of his commitment to the 'Science of Method'. Coleridge's essays on Method dominate the otherwise haphazard material of The Friend (1818). Like his metaphysics, his interest in method is logically prior to literary criticism, though he turns to criticism for its application and illustration. Essentially these essays are an analysis of the operations of the perfect or 'philos- ophic' mind; they elaborate Coleridge's ideal of intellectuality. The truly educated man, Coleridge writes, is accustomed to contem- plate, not things on their own, but the relations between things. He possesses a 'prospectiveness of mind' or 'surview' which enables him to express his thoughts with the maximum of discipline and organisation. It may well be argued that poets work through quite other faculties than the methodical intellect, and perhaps this was why Coleridge became half-ashamed of 'The Ancient Mariner' and 'Kubla Khan'. None the less, the Biographia is based on the assumption that the principles of Method must be applied in the sphere of poetry. The language of rustics is lacking in Method on two counts. The rustic is poor in linguistic resources; Coleridge does not share  The Romantic Critics 91 Wordsworth's faith in the natural articulateness of men under the stress of passion. Moreover, being uneducated, he has nothing to express save 'insulated facts'; he has not learned to contemplate the relations between things. In arguing this, Coleridge not only seems blind to any non-intellectual mode of human awareness, but rejects the particularism of detail which is the essence of much romantic poetry and poetic theory. He is far more pertinent when he comes to the formal aspect of the choice of diction and metre. When Wordsworth spoke of selecting from the real language of men, what he mainly had in mind was a selection of its vocabulary. But Coleridge points out that the essence of style lies in 'ordon- nance', or the syntax and arrangement of thought. Thus in order to adopt the 'language of a class', we must imitate not merely its vocabulary, but its word-order as well. This argument leaves Wordsworth in a cleft stick. The Lyrical Ballads use the word-order appropriate to verse rather than prose; hence they are not in the real language of men. Since the presence of metre forces the poet to use a different word-order, poetic diction, defined as the form of linguistic ordonnance appropriate to metre, is something that he cannot avoid. A choice of different styles or 'languages' is inevi- table in any culture which can distinguish between verse. prose and conversational forms. Presumably there is no logical necessity for these alternative styles to form a hierarchy, but Coleridge evidently believes that this is and ought to be the case. Verse, he argues, ought to command a heightened style; this follows both from the principles of harmony and aesthetic attention introduced in Chapter Fourteen, and from the authority of the poetic tradition. The final objection he deals with is Wordsworth's argument that once the 'arbitrariness' of poetic diction was allowed. no limits could be set to it. On the con- trary, Coleridge replies, the limits are set by 'the principles of gram- mar, logic, psychology!' These would not have sufficed as revol- utionary slogans in 1800, but then neither could Wordsworth have written, as Coleridge does, of Gray's sonnet 'That the "Phoebus" is hackneyed, and a schoolboy image, is an accidental fault, depen- dent on the age in which the author wrote and not deduced from the nature of the thing.' The abuses of Augustan style which bulked so large in 1800 are now shrugged off as trifling matters which do nothing to disturb Coleridge's sense of literary precedent broa- dening down from age to age. And though he is famous for his emphasis that the principles of logic and grammar must be organi- cally and intuitively applied by the poet, this is balanced by his insistence on their objective, canonical status. Thus Wordsworth's theory of diction is incapable of 92 Authors and Authority furnishing either rule, guidance or precaution that might not, more easily and more safely, as well as more naturally, have been deduced in the author's own mind from considerations of grammar, logic and the truth and nature of things, confirmed by the authority of words whose fame is not of one country nor of one age. In these closing words of Chapter Eighteen, the 'author' is firmly put down by the consensus of literary authority. The time is now ripe for Coleridge to examine Wordsworth's claims as a poet to enter the pantheon of literature. The formal balance-sheet is presented in Chapter Twenty-Two, but Coleridge has long before this made some damaging points about the Lyrical Ballads. Most importantly, he uncovers a failure of realism, a failure on Wordsworth's part to disclose the world as it really is. We may go back to Chapter Fifteen, where he praised Shakespeare's prodigious dramatic powers and unerring treatment of 'subjects very remote from the private interests and circum- stances of the writer himself'. It is precisely this power that, in Coleridge's view, Wordsworth lacks. We might, indeed, wonder whether a poet whose gift was so fundamentally solipsistic would be well equipped to become the 'profound philosopher' of whom Coleridge speaks. Yet Coleridge was no empiricist, and saw no contradiction in boosting Wordsworth's philosophic powers at the very same time as he denigrated his grip on reality. The principal example here is 'The Thorn'. Coleridge ridicules the device of the sea-captain as narrator, pointing out that the poem veers uncer- tainly between the dullness and garrulity attributed to the captain, and a degree of imaginative intensity which appears to belong to the poet's own character, and cannot be taken from the 'language of ordinary men'. This might seem a trivial failure, but Coleridge brings the same objection against The Excursion, a far graver mat- ter. 'Is there one word, for instance, attributed to the pedlar in the Excursion characteristic of a pedlar?' 17 This is a very harsh exposure of the solipsistic tendency of Wordsworth's imagination. Wrapped in his own life, Coleridge seems to be saying, Wordsworth understands neither society, nor rustics, nor the 'language of men' that he professes to write. He struggles to cover this up with 'matter- of-factness', 'a laborious minuteness and fidelity' in the represen- tation of objects, together with the 'insertion of accidental circum- stances' such as those.of the Wanderer and the sea-captain. 18 Coleridge's strictures on 'The Thorn' thus turn out to be aimed at much more than a single, mawkish ballad. They are but pallidly counteracted by a page or so of praise for Wordsworth's 'truth  The Romantic Critics 93 of nature', mainly in his nature-lyrics. The social realism of Words- worth's poetry is something to which Coleridge does no justice at all. In Chapters Nineteen and Twenty he distinguishes between the legitimate mode of poetic simplicity - here the ' neutral style' of Chaucer and Herbert, based on a literary lingua communis or puri- fied diction - and the style ordained for the higher and more philo- sophical powers of Wordsworth. The advocate of the real language of men is revealed as 'a poet whose diction, next to that of Shakes- peare and Milton, appears to me of all others the most individu- alized and characteristic'. Coleridge relies largely on quotations to convey his sense of this idiosyncrasy; so much so that, in the final chapters of the Biographia, the deductive, rationalistic ideal of criticism he had aspired to earlier seems to give way to a new and more empirical procedure like that which was later to be cham- pioned by Matthew Arnold. Arnold quotes in order to avoid abstract definitions which he feels inappropriate to poetry, but Col- eridge's use of extensive quotation to redress the balance of his critique and reveal the 'positive' side of Wordsworth suggests that he has run out of steam. None the less, these last chapters are a decisive rejection of the 'simple Wordsworth' in favour of the lofty and Miltonic poet-prophet, whose strengths, Coleridge argues, come from his internal powers of meditation and imagina- tion rather than from a direct grasp of the real world. The Preface to Lyrical Ballads had expressed Wordsworth's strong conviction that his poetry was the spontaneous vehicle of natural emotions and of natural responses to external objects. In the 1815 Preface, despite his stress on the modifying role of imagination, he had not altogether abandoned this conviction. Coleridge, however, argues that his diction depends for its success on 'striking passages' that come from within - passages which belong quintessentially to poetry rather than to prose and which reflect the full idiosyncrasy of his genius. The faults which he assiduously notes down in Chapter Twenty-Two are of two main kinds: the matter-of-factness and abuse of the dramatic form which result from Wordsworth's mistaken attempts to write on subjects remote from his private interests, and, as the converse of this, a self-indulgent idiosyncrasy of style which fails to 'satisfy a cultivated taste'. All of which empha- sises the solipsism of Wordsworth's imagination. When he moves from the poet's defects to the beauties, Coleridge in effect lists those qualities of mind which make such solipsism heroic: Words- worth's precision of language, the weightiness of his thoughts, his 'meditative pathos', and finally , the 'gift of imagination in the highest and strictest sense of the word'. These qualities which dis- 94 Authors and Authority tinguish Wordsworth and qualify him for that 'FIRST GENUINE PHILOSOPHIC POEM' which Coleridge believes m·ay be the sum- mit of his work. The implication is that it is precisely by following the ideal of the self-reflecting philosopher which Coleridge had inherited from the post-Kantians that Wordsworth would achieve this. But Coleridge's ideal of sceptical self-consciousness was at variance both with the prophetic confidence and the humble fidelity with which Wordsworth alternately approaches the world of nature. Though their background is Kantian, Coleridge's list of Words- worth's virtues seems on the face of it rather academic. The issues raised by the Biographia strike deep, but the depth does not extend to establishing the 'strictest sense of the word' imagination. His final tribute to Wordsworth's imaginative power is paid by means of quotations, and, characteristically, Coleridge reserves the full articulation of his meaning for a further work: I shall select a few examples as most obviously manifesting this faculty; but if I should ever be fortunate enough to render my analysis of imagination, its origin and characters, thoroughly intelligible to the reader, he will scarcely open on a page of this poet's works without recognizing, more or less, the presence and the influence of this faculty. It is with a declaration of faith rather than a quod erat demonstran- dum that the long critique ends. The Biographia is a product of the revolution it condemns; so much must be obvious. It is a work of intellectual commentary, creating a field of brilliantly ingenious discussion and hard-hitting debate, out-flanking the positive , abstract rationalism of the Pre- face and all but overwhelming it. Coleridge's critical performance is almost impossible to sum up, magnificently far-sighted as he is in some directions, and unable to see what is in front of his nose in others. If we subtract that part of the book which grew out of Wordsworth's poetic impact and the outspoken radicalism of his prefaces, we are left with little but a Shandean fa9ade, some desultory reminiscences, and some borrowed metaphysics. For if the apotheosis of the poetic imagination seems to be prompted by Wordsworth, so is Coleridge's theory of language and his doc- trine of aesthetic attention. The second half of the Biographia is dominated by his obsession with contradicting Wordsworth, cor- recting his views and stating the terms on which he may be accepted as a great writer. What kind of personal and creative symbiosis had gone on between Wordsworth and Coleridge, we can only guess. Whatever view we take of the outcome, there could be no  The Romantic Critics 95 more graphic demonstration of the clash of interests in criticism and the power-struggle that ensues when poet and critic meet, to use Coleridge's phrase, 'in a war embrace'. Shakespearean Criticism Apart from the Biographia, Coleridge's criticism consists almost entirely of scattered lecture-notes and marginalia, and of reports of his lectures and conversation. Very high claims have been made for this material. T. M. Raysor introduced his edition of the Shakes- peare criticism in 1930 with the statement that 'In the history of English literary criticism there is no work which surpasses in interest Coleridge's lectures upon Shakespeare.' Yet the lectures do not really live up to their reputation, especially when one is familiar with the works of Schlegel and Schiller from which many of their most famous ideas are drawn. Coleridge, in general, inherits the comparative and historicist outlook of German thought, adding to it a more detailed interest in poetic texture and an explicitly patriotic concern with the English literary heritage. To his Shakes- peare lectures Coleridge brought a genuine sense of mission, feeling that he was the first English critic capable of appreciating the Bard's true powers. The eighteenth-century critics, he complained, were in the habit of treating him like an errant schoolboy; he devoted two lectures (now lost) in the 1811-12 course to a savage analysis of Johnson's Preface. Coleridge was the first major English critic to idolise Shakespeare, and he saw in him not only a great genius, but a genius of diametrically opposite type to Wordsworth. It seems almost commonplace to describe Shakespeare's as a protean imagi- nation, darting forth and passing into all the forms of human char- acter and passion, and it was in any case what Schlegel had said. But Coleridge's characterisation of Shakespeare's genius both con- trasts with and complements his description of Wordsworth. Both the great extrovert genius and the great solipsist owe their pre- eminence, he suggests, to their intellectual and meditative powers. Shakespeare was not a child of nature but a philosophical poet whose greatness was the result of reflection and of 'knowledge become habitual and intuitive'. 19 And it was not in knowledge of the world so much as in knowledge of himself- but of his 'rep- resentative' self- that he excelled. It is in this way that Coleridge adapts his post-Kantian view of genius to fit the case of the great dramatic poet, and we need not be surprised that as a practical critic he stresses the novelistic, at the expense of the theatrical, side of his achievement. Coleridge's favourite role as a Shakespeare critic is precisely that which John- 96 Authors and Authority son, in his 'Preface' and notes on the plays, refused to fill. It is the role of omniscient narrator, explaining and commenting on the action in such a way that nothing is lost and verisimilitude is enhanced to the utmost degree. The narrator of a nineteenth- century novel has privileged access to the secret motives of his characters; so it is with Coleridge and Shakespeare's heroes. His imagination responds most strongly to the enigmas of character in the plays, and to the creation of realism and 'atmosphere' in Shakespeare's opening scenes. His analysis of the beginning of Hamlet is unforgettably evocative, but it is the fruit of lavish concen- tration on speeches and actions which the theatrical audience must take in very quickly. Opening scenes in novels tend to be far more amply presented than in Shakespeare, even where the material is 'dramatic' - consider Middlemarch - and though Coleridge's discussion will enrich the experience of anyone who has studied the text of Hamlet, we are often disconcerted by the relentless pace at which productions of plays we have studied (and still more, dramatisations of novels) seem to get under way. A good example of Coleridge's procedure in discussing Shakes- peare is his commentary on the opening of The Tempest, in the ninth lecture of 1811-12. This is the first lecture in which Schlegel's influence is acknowledged and beyond dispute, and Coleridge approaches The Tempest by way of Schlegel's distinction between mechanical and organic form. He then illustrates this by analysing the altercation between Gonzalo and the Boatswain in the brief scene of the storm. As he tries frantically to organise the crew, the Boatswain forgets the deference due to rank and rudely chal- lenges Gonzalo either to silence the elements with his authority, since he is a Counsellor, or to get out of the way. Gonzalo fails to answer the taunt directly, however: An ordinary dramatist would, after this speech, have represented Gonzalo as moralizing, or saying something connected with the Boatswain's language; for ordinary dramatists are not men of genius: they combine their ideas by association, or by logical affinity; but the vital writer, who makes men on the stage what they are in nature, in a moment transports himself into the very being of each personage, and, instead of cutting out artificial puppets, he brings before us the men themselves. Therefore, Gonzalo soliloquises, - 'I have great comfort from this fellow: methinks, he hath no drowning mark upon him; his complexion is perfect gallows'. 20 The fact is that this is not a soliloquy. The whole royal party are  The Romantic Critics 97 on stage when it is spoken, and it is obviously meant to cheer them up. Coleridge's 'ordinary dramatist' is a short-sighted theatri- cal technician for whom each speech must be a response to the one before. Gonzalo's speech is certainly different in that it emerges from a whole imaginative conception, but its function, surely, is to reassure the audience by a momentary nonchalance hinting that the bangs and rumbles in the wings are not to be taken seriously. It does not give us insight into the unique individuality of Gonzalo, which is the last thing we want in the middle of a storm. Coleridge's concern, however, is to show the rounded conception of Shakes- peare's characters and the philosophical powers revealed in his mastery of an inexhaustible range of mental types. The theme of Coleridge's Shakespeare criticism is that of 'Shakespeare's Judgment Equal to his Genius'. His analyses are punctuated by exclamations ('But observe the matchless judgment of Shakespeare!'), and the tone is almost invariably hagiographic. One of his marginalia records his bafflement over a passage in Coriolanus (IV.vii.28-): 'I cherish the hope that I am mistaken and, becoming wiser, shall discover some profound excellence in what I now appear to myself to detect an imperfection. S.T.C. ' 21 Coleridge affirmed that criticism of Shakespeare should be 'rever- ential', and we might say that in his hands it becomes a kind of spilt natural theology. Paley sought for evidences of design in the natural universe, arguing back from the watch to the watch-maker. The belief that the hand of God was discoverable in every aspect of Nature sanctioned the minutest study of natural history in the eighteenth century; this was the heyday of the botanising and bird- watching parson. Criticism of Shakespeare, too, could produce proofs of design and Authorship where careless eyes had seen nothing but accident : such was the justification to be advanced by de Quincey for his essay 'On the Knocking at the Gate in Mac- beth' (1823), and it is implicit in Coleridge's attempts to make the smallest details of the texts yield evidence of Shakespeare's conscious control, and hence of his creative omnipotence. Like a parson examining the geological vestiges of the Flood, he feels vaguely threatened when something in the text proves recalcitrant. Coleridge on Shakespeare, then, is a commentator who tends to translate drama into fiction at the behest of a quasi-theological piety. It is not surprising that his reverence should sometimes seem personal or ideological rather than purely aesthetic. If he confessed to having a smack of Hamlet himself, he also compared Macbeth to Napoleon and Caliban to the Jacobins, and praised Shakespeare for his patriotism, his conservatism and his habit of 'never introduc- ing a professional character, as such, otherwise than as respect- 98 Authors and Authority able'. 22 Shakespeare's political and patriotic merits, however, were subordinate to his highest excellence as a manifestation of 'divine' genius. We have traced Coleridge's concern with judgment and genius as a theme of his criticism, but it led him in the end to abandon criticism for Christian apologetics. As early as The States- man's Manual (1816) he described the reason, the organ of the immediate spiritual consciousness of God, as a higher faculty than the imagination. 23 When criticism comes to be recognised as a mediated form of theology, its scope must be very limited. Coler- idge finally came to such a recognition; so much is suggested by his marginal note on a volume of Milton (c. 1823?): Of criticism we may perhaps say, that those divine poets, Homer, Eschylus, and the two compeers, Dante, Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, who deserve to have Critics, KpLra{, are placed above criticism in the vulgar sense, and move in the sphere of religion, while those who are not such scarcely deserve criticism in any sense. 24 Before reaching this slough of critical Despond, he had a last fling at aesthetic theory in the lecture 'On Poesy or Art' (1818). Though a fine source for rapt Coleridgian utterances, this lecture is little more than a translation of Schelling, and in any case it offers a theory of the visual arts rather than of literature. His later years produced only some desultory critical table-talk, and some hints about the place of literature in society. In The Friend (1818), he somewhat economically divided human social activity into the 'two main directions' of Trade and Literature - forces which both sustain the national identity of a society, and seek to transcend it. 25 But what is the social function of the imaginative element in Literature? We would naturally look for an answer to this in On the Constitution of the Church and State (1830), where Coleridge outlines his theory of the national culture. Here he argues for the recognition of the 'clerisy' - the class of intellectuals and educators - as one of the permanent estates of the realm. The task of the clerisy is to exercise the faculty of Vision (that is, imagination), as well as those of Reason and Understanding. Yet apart from a dutiful quotation or two from Wordsworth, the figure of the poet plays no part in Coleridge's description of the clerisy, whose culture consists of the traditional hierarchy of lite rae humaniores, crowned by theology. There is no Coleridgian equivalent to Words- worth's 'rock of defence for human nature', or to Shelley's 'un- acknowledged legislator'. Church and State really confirms the academic and intellectualising tendencies that were present  The Romantic Critics 99 throughout his earlier career in literary criticism. It leaves us, how- ever, with the baffling paradox of Coleridge, a brilliantly intelligent literary critic by any standards, and for many the undisputed master of the discipline in England, yet who fails so many of the tests we put to critics, including in the end the test of commitment to the creative spirit itself. Coleridge, it seems, can admit of poetic genius only as a means to more intellectual and spiritual ends. Whatever the personal struggles that marked his thought, there is a logical link between his criticism of Shakespeare and Words- worth, and the later years in which the evidence of his disillusion- ment with criticism and even with literature is so strong. Shelley, Hazlitt and Keats In his famous dictum about 'negative capability', Keats chooses Coleridge as his example of the non-poet irritably reaching after fact and reason. Coleridge had managed to convince himself that the poetic spirit, while deeply hostile to British empirical philo- sophy, could be subsumed under the higher reason of Kantian trans- cendentalism. Others did not agree. None the less, the theme of opposition to utilitarian doctrine is very widespread in the period, from Coleridge's Church and State to de Quincey, Hazlitt, and Shelley's 'Defence of Poetry'. The ancient quarrel between philo- sophy and poetry took on an urgency quite unknown in Johnson's time, for the ideological upheavals of the 'age of revolutions' had shaken customary beliefs about the nature and demarcations of culture. The metaphysics of Coleridge and the literary witch-hunt- ing of the quarterlies suggest the variety of possible conservative responses to this situation. The revolution in literary values insti- gated by Wordsworth was, however, carried on by Keats, Shelley and their circle. Like many of their predecessors, they show signs of a deep frustration and insecurity about the position of the poet, but for them the frustration is a source of energy and a guarantee that they can only benefit from living in a revolutionary age. They respond with militant assertions of the ideals of literary culture, and with poetry fervently embodying those ideals. Shelley, in parti- cular, is a prophet of humanism denouncing the tyranny of aris- tocratic government and bourgeois materialism. We have to distinguish here between the broad humanism of the romantics and the effect of their beliefs within the narrower sphere of poetry and criticism. After his death Shelley came to personify the char- isma and magic of poethood for generations of Victorians who had no time for his political views. Though he failed in his revol- 100 Authors and Authority utionary aims, the attitude of poetic absolutism which he asserted against Peacock's rational and 'enlightened' view of history found a much wider echo. It was symptomatic of the romantic revolt that the language of criticism became unpredictable, and its relation to rational thought problematic. One of the ways in which romantic militancy and the breakdown of the eighteenth-century cultural consensus are reflected in language is in the redefinition of the word 'poetry'. 'Literature', as we have seen, was redefine