The enumeration of Wordsworth’s excellences which follows is masterly; and the exhilaration with which one rises through the crescendo to the famous:  ’Last and pre-eminently, I challenge for this poet the gift of Imagination in the highest and strictest sense of the word ...’ is itself a pleasure to be derived only from the gift of criticism of the highest and strictest kind.

The object of this examination has been to show, not that the Biographia Literaria is undeserving of the high praise which has been bestowed upon it, but that the praise has been to some extent undiscriminating.  It has now become almost a tradition to hold up to our admiration Coleridge’s chapter on poetic diction, and Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, in a preface that is as unconventional in manner as it is stimulating in most of its substance, maintains the tradition.  As a matter of fact, what Coleridge has to say on poetic diction is prolix and perilously near commonplace.  Instead of making to Wordsworth the wholly sufficient answer that much poetry of the highest kind employs a language that by no perversion can be called essentially the same as the language of prose, he allows himself to be led by his German metaphysic into considering poetry as a Ding an sich and deducing therefrom the proposition that poetry must employ a language different from that of prose.  That proposition is false, as Coleridge himself quite adequately shows from his remarks upon what he called the ‘neutral’ language of Chaucer and Herbert.  But instead of following up the clue and beginning to inquire whether or not narrative poetry by nature demands a language approximating to that of prose, and whether Wordsworth, in so far as he aimed at being a narrative poet, was not working on a correct but exaggerated principle, he leaves the bald contradiction and swerves off to the analysis of the defects and excellences of Wordsworth’s actual achievement.  Precisely because we consider it of the greatest importance that the best of Coleridge’s criticism should be studied and studied again, we think it unfortunate that Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch should recommend the apprentice to get the chapters on poetic diction by heart.  He will be condemned to carry about with him a good deal of dubious logic and a false conclusion.  What is worth while learning from Coleridge is something different; it is not his behaviour with ’a principle,’ but his conduct when confronted with poetry in the concrete, his magisterial ordonnance (to use his own word) and explication of his own aesthetic intuitions, and his manner of employing in this, the essential task of poetic criticism, the results of his own deep study of all the great poetry that he knew.

[APRIL, 1920.

Shakespeare Criticism