Coleridge, however, was fully aware of the scope of the new movement.  He represented, theoretically as well as practically, the reaction against eighteenth-century academicism, the Popean tradition[27] in poetry, and the maxims of pseudo-classical criticism.  In his analysis and vindication of the principles of romantic art, he brought to bear a philosophic depth and subtlety such as had never before been applied in England to a merely belletristic subject.  He revolutionised, for one thing, the critical view of Shakspere, devoting several lecture courses to the exposition of the thesis that “Shakspere’s judgment was commensurate with his genius.”  These lectures borrowed a number of passages from A. W. von Schlegel’s “Vorlesungen ueber Dramatische Kunst und Litteratur,” delivered at Vienna in 1808, but engrafted with original matter of the highest value.  Compared with these Shakspere notes, with the chapters on Wordsworth in the “Biographia Literaria,” and with the obiter dicta, sown through Coleridge’s prose, all previous English criticism appears crude and superficial, and the contemporary squabble over Pope like a scolding match in the nursery.

Coleridge’s acute and sympathetic insight into the principles of Shaksperian drama did not save him from producing his abortive “Zapolya” in avowed imitation of the “Winter’s Tale.”  What curse is on the English stage that men who have done work of the highest grade in other departments, as soon as they essay playwriting, become capable of failures like “The Borderers” and “John Woodville” and “Manfred” and “Zapolya”?  As for “Remorse,” with its Moorish sea-coasts, wild mountains, chapel interiors with painted windows, torchlight and moonlight, dripping caverns, dungeons, daggers and poisoned goblets, the best that can be said of it is that it is less bad than “Zapolya.”  And of both it may be said that they are romantic not after the fashion of Shakspere, but of those very German melodramas which Coleridge ridiculed in his “Critique on Bertram.” [28]

[1] For Coleridge’s relations with German romance, see vol. i., pp. 419-21.  For his early interest in Percy, Ossian, and Chatterton, ibid., pp. 299, 328, 368-70.

[2] “There is as much difference between Coleridge’s brief poem ‘Christabel’ and all the narrative poems of Walter Scott . . . as between a precious essence and a coarse imitation of it got up for sale.” (Leigh Hunt’s “Autobiography,” p. 197).

[3] “Samuel Taylor Coleridge und die Englische Romantik,” Alois Brandl, Berlin, 1886.

[4] It is in view of his critical attitude, not of his poetry, that Saintsbury applies this title to Coleridge.  “The attitude was that of a mediaevalism inspired by much later learning, but still more by that intermediate or decadent Greek philosophy which had so much influence on the Middle Ages themselves.  This is, in other words, the Romantic attitude, and Coleridge was the high priest of Romanticism, which, through Scott and Byron, he taught to Europe, repreaching it even to Germany, from which it had partly come.” ("A Short History of English Literature,” by George Saintsbury, London, 1898, p. 656).