Moreover, the most marked characteristic of the present age is a continual disintegration of the consciousness; more or less deliberately in every province of man’s spiritual life the reins are being thrown on to the horse’s neck.  The power which controls and disciplines sensational experience is, in modern literature, daily denied; the counterpart of this power which envisages the ideal in the conduct of one’s own or the nation’s affairs and unfalteringly pursues it is held up to ridicule.  Opportunism in politics has its complement in opportunism in poetry.  Mr Lloyd George’s moods are reflected in Mr ——­’s.  And, beneath these heights, we have the queer spectacle of a whole race of very young poets who somehow expect to attain poetic intensity by the physical intensity with which they look at any disagreeable object that happens to come under their eye.  Perhaps they will find some satisfaction in being reckoned among the curiosities of literature a hundred years hence; it is certainly the only satisfaction they will have.  They, at any rate, have a great deal to gain from the acid of philosophical criticism.  If a reaction to life has in itself the seeds of an intuitive comprehension it will stand explication.  If a young poet’s nausea at the sight of a toothbrush is significant of anything at all except bad upbringing, then it is capable of being refined into a vision of life and of being expressed by means of the appropriate mechanism or myth.  But to register the mere facts of consciousness, undigested by the being, without assessment or reinforcement by the mind is, for all the connection it has with poetry, no better than to copy down the numbers of one’s bus-tickets.

We do not wish to suggest that Sir Henry Newbolt would regard this lengthy gloss upon his book as legitimate deduction.  He, we think, is a good deal more tolerant than we are; and he would probably hesitate to work out the consequences of the principles which he enunciates and apply them vigorously to the present time.  But as a vindication of the supreme place of poetry as poetry in human life, as a stimulus to critical thought and a guide to exquisite appreciation of which his essay on Chaucer is an honourable example—­A New Study of English Poetry deserves all the praise that lies in our power to give.

[MARCH, 1920.

Coleridge’s Criticism

It is probably true that Biographia Literaria is the best book of criticism in the English language; nevertheless, it is rash to assume that it is a book of criticism of the highest excellence, even when it has passed through the salutary process of drastic editing, such as that to which, in the present case,[15] the competent hands of Mr George Sampson have submitted it.  Its garrulity, its digressions, its verbiage, the marks which even the finest portions show of submersion in the tepid transcendentalism that wrought such havoc upon Coleridge’s mind—­these are its familiar disfigurements.  They are not easily removed; for they enter fairly deeply even in the texture of those portions of the book in which Coleridge devotes himself, as severely as he can, to the proper business of literary criticism.