of the way in which Biographia Literaria came to be written.  Originally, in 1815, it was conceived as a preface—­to be “done in two, or at farthest three days”—­to a collection of some “scattered and manuscript poems.”  Two months later the plan had changed.  Coleridge was now busy on a preface to an Autobiographia Literaria, sketches of my literary Life and Opinions.  This in turn developed into “a full account (raisonne) of the controversy concerning Wordsworth’s poems and theory,” with a “disquisition on the powers of Association ... and on the generic difference between the Fancy and the Imagination.”  This ran to such a length that he decided not to use it as a preface, but to amplify it into a work in three volumes.  He succeeded in writing the first volume, but he found himself unable to fill the second.  “Then, as the volume obstinately remained too small, he tossed in Satyrane, an epistolary account of his wanderings in Germany, topped up with a critique of a bad play, and gave the whole painfully to the world in July, 1817.”  It is one of the ironies of literary history that Coleridge, the censor of the incongruous in literature, the vindicator of the formal purpose as opposed to the haphazard inspiration of the greatest of writers, a missionary of the “shaping imagination,” should himself have given us in his greatest book of criticism an incongruous, haphazard, and shapeless jumble.  It is but another proof of the fact that, while talent cannot safely ignore what is called technique, genius almost can.  Coleridge, in spite of his formlessness, remains the wisest man who ever spoke in English about literature.  His place is that of an oracle among controversialists.

Even so, Biographia Literaria is a disappointing book.  It is the porch, but it is not the temple.  It may be that, in literary criticism, there can be no temple.  Literary criticism is in its nature largely an incitement to enter, a hint of the treasures that are to be found within.  Persons who seek rest in literary orthodoxy are always hoping to discover written upon the walls of the porch the ten commandments of good writing.  It is extremely easy to invent ten such commandments—­it was done in the age of Racine and in the age of Pope—­but the wise critic knows that in literature the rules are less important than the “inner light.”  Hence, criticism at its highest is not a theorist’s attempt to impose iron laws on writers:  it is an attempt to capture the secret of that “inner light” and of those who possess it and to communicate it to others.  It is also an attempt to define the conditions in which the “inner light” has most happily manifested itself, and to judge new writers of promise according to the measure in which they have been true to the spirit, though not necessarily to the technicalities, of the great tradition.  Criticism, then, is not the Roman father of good writing:  it is the disciple and missionary of good writing.