1888.] on S. T, Coleridge. 215 



poetry of Pope, or even of Gray, or Goldsmith, or Cowper — poetry 

 which is the direct utterance of a string of moral, political, or 

 religious reflections — implies a literary revolution. Coleridge, even 

 more distinctly than Wordsworth, represented a deliberate rejection 

 of the canons of the preceding school ; for, if AVordsworth's philo- 

 sophy differed from that of Pope, he still tauglit by direct exposition 

 instead of the presentation of sensuous symbolism. The distinction 

 might be illustrated by the ingenious criticism of Mrs. Barbauld, who 

 told Coleridge that the ' Ancient Mariner ' had two faults — it was 

 improbable, and had no moral. Coleridge owned the improbability, 

 but replied to the other stricture that it had too much moral, that it 

 ought to have had no more than a story in the ' Arabian Nights.' 

 Indeed, the moral, which would apparently be that people who 

 sympathise with a man who shoots an albatross will die in prolonged 

 torture of thirst, is open to obvious objections. 



Coleridge's poetical impulse died early ; perhaps, as De Qnincey 

 said, it was killed by the opium ; or as Coleridge said himself, that 

 his afflictions had suspended what nature gave him at his birth, 



His shaping spirit of imagination. 

 So that his only plan was 



From his own nature all the natural man, 

 By abstruse research to st^l, 



and partly, too, I should guess, for the reason that this strange mystic 

 world in which he was at home, was so remote from all ordinary 

 experience that it failed even to provide an efficient symbolism for his 

 deepest thoughts, and could only be accessible in the singular glow 

 and fervour of youthful inspiration. The domestic anxieties, the pains 

 of ill-health, the depression produced by opium, were a heavy clog 

 upon an imagination which should try to soar into vast aerial regions. 

 But it may be doubtful whether this peculiar vein of imagination, 

 emptied in the ' Ancient Mariner ' and ' Christabel,' could in any 

 case have been worked much further. 



At any rate, Coleridge, as his imaginative impulse flagged, passed 

 into the reflective stage ; and, as was natural, his mind dwelt much 

 upon those principles of art which he had already discussed with 

 Wordsworth in his creative period. In saying that Coleridge was 

 primarily a poet I did not mean to intimate that he was not also 

 a subtle dialectician. There is no real incompatibility between the 

 two faculties. A poetic literature which includes Shakespeare in the 

 past and Mr. Browning in the present is of itself a sufficient proof 

 that the keenest and most active logical faculty may be combined with 

 the truest poetical imagination. Coleridge's peculiar service to 

 English criticism consisted, indeed, in great measure, in a clear 

 appreciation of the true relation between the faculties, a relation, I think, 

 which he never quite managed to express clearly. Poetry, as he says, 



