No More Learning

His notes to the selections from the
Elizabethan dramatists are the surest criticisms that we have in English;
they go to the roots. Coleridge's critical power was wholly exercised upon
elements and first principles; Lamb showed an infinitely keener sense of
detail, of the parts of the whole. Lamb was unerring on definite points,
and could lay his finger on flaws in Coleridge's work that were invisible
to Coleridge; who, however, was unerring in his broad distinctions, in the
philosophy of his art.

"The ultimate end of criticism," said Coleridge, "is much more to establish
the principles of writing than to furnish rules how to pass judgment on
what has been written by others. " And for this task he had an incomparable
foundation: imagination, insight, logic, learning, almost every critical
quality united in one; and he was a poet who allowed himself to be a
critic. Those pages of the "Biographia Literaria," in which he defines and
distinguishes between imagination and fancy, the researches into the
abstract entities of poetry in the course of an examination of Wordsworth's
theories and of the popular objections to them, all that we have of the
lectures on Shakespeare, into which he put an illuminating idolatry,
together with notes and jottings preserved in the "Table-Talk," "Anima
Poetae," the "Literary Remains," and on the margins of countless books,
contain the most fundamental criticism of literature that has ever been
attempted, fragmentary as the attempt remains. "There is not a man in
England," said Coleridge, with truth, "whose thoughts, images, words, and
erudition have been published in larger quantities than _mine_; though
I must admit, not _by_, nor _for_, myself. " He claimed, and
rightly, as his invention, a "science of reasoning and judging concerning
the productions of literature, the characters and measures of public men,
and the events of nations, by a systematic subsumption of them, under
principles deduced from the nature of man," which, as he says, was unknown
before the year 1795. He is the one philosophical critic who is also a
poet, and thus he is the one critic who instinctively knows his way through
all the intricacies of the creative mind.

Most of his best criticism circles around Shakespeare; and he took
Shakespeare almost frankly in the place of Nature, or of poetry. He
affirms, "Shakespeare knew the human mind, and its most minute and intimate
workings, and he never introduces a word, or a thought, in vain or out of
place. " This granted (and to Coleridge it is essential that it should be
granted, for in less than the infinite he cannot find space in which to use
his wings freely) he has only to choose and define, to discover and to
illuminate. In the "myriad-minded man," in his "oceanic mind," he finds all
the material that he needs for the making of a complete aesthetics. Nothing
with Coleridge ever came to completion; but we have only to turn over the
pages about Shakespeare, to come upon fragments worth more than anyone
else's finished work. I find the whole secret of Shakespeare's way of
writing in these sentences: "Shakespeare's intellectual action is wholly
unlike that of Ben Jonson or Beaumont and Fletcher.
The latter see the
totality of a sentence or passage, and then project it entire. Shakespeare
goes on creating, and evolving B out of A, and C out of B, and so on, just
as a serpent moves, which makes a fulcrum of its own body, and seems
forever twisting and untwisting its own strength. "And here are a few
axioms: 'The grandest efforts of poetry are where the imagination is called
forth, not to produce a distinct form, but a strong working of the mind';
or, in other words, "The power of poetry is, by a single word perhaps, to
instill that energy into the mind which compels the imagination to produce
the picture. " "Poetry is the identity of all other knowledges," "the
blossom and fragrance of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human
passions, emotions, language. " "Verse is in itself a music, and the natural
symbol of that union of passion with thought and pleasure, which
constitutes the essence of all poetry "; "a more than usual state of
emotion, with more than usual order," as he has elsewhere defined it. And,
in one of his spoken counsels, he says: "I wish our clever young poets
would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose--
words in their best order; poetry--the best words in the best order. "

Unlike most creative critics, or most critics who were creative artists in
another medium, Coleridge, when he was writing criticism, wrote it wholly
for its own sake, almost as if it were a science. His prose is rarely of
the finest quality as prose writing. Here and there he can strike out a
phrase at red-heat, as when he christens Shakespeare "the one Proteus of
the fire and flood"; or he can elaborate subtly, as when he notes the
judgment of Shakespeare, observable in every scene of the "Tempest," "still
preparing, still inviting, and still gratifying, like a finished piece of
music"; or he can strike us with the wit of the pure intellect, as when he
condemns certain work for being "as trivial in thought and yet enigmatic in
expression, as if Echo and the Sphinx had laid their heads together to
construct it. " But for the most part it is a kind of thinking aloud, and
the form is wholly lost in the pursuit of ideas. With his love for the
absolute, why is it that he does not seek after an absolute in words
considered as style, as well as in words considered as the expression of
thought? In his finest verse Coleridge has the finest style perhaps in
English; but his prose is never quite reduced to order from its tumultuous
amplitude or its snake-like involution. Is it that he values it only as a
medium, not as an art? His art is verse, and this he dreads, because of its
too mortal closeness to his heart; the prose is a means to an end, not an
end in itself.

The poetry of Coleridge, though it is closely interwoven with the
circumstances of his life, is rarely made directly out of those
circumstances. To some extent this is no doubt explained by a fact to which
he often refers in his letters, and which, in his own opinion, hindered him
not only from writing about himself in verse, but from writing verse at
all.