246 Mr. Leslie Steiyhen [March 9, 



is properly opposed not to prose but to science. Its aim, he infers, is 

 not to establish truth but to communicate pleasure. The poet 

 presents us with the concrete symbol ; the man of science endeavours 

 to analyse and abstract the laws embodied. Shakespeare was certainly 

 not a psychologist in the sense in which Professor Bain is a j)sycholo- 

 gist. He does not state what are our ultimate faculties, or how they 

 act and react, and determine our conduct ; but, so far as he creates 

 typical characters, he gives concrete psychology, or presents the 

 problems upon which psychology has to operate. Therefore, if poetry, 

 as Coleridge says after Milton, should be simple, sensuous, passionate, 

 instead of systematic, abstract, and emotionless, like speculative 

 reasoning, it is not to be inferred that the poet should be positively 

 unphilosophical, nor is he the better, as some recent critics appear to 

 have discovered, for merely appealing to the senses as being without 

 thoughts, or, in simpler words, a mere animal. The loftiest poet and 

 the loftiest philosopher deal with the same subject-matter, the great 

 problems of the world and of human life, though one presents the 

 symbolism and the other unravels the logical connection of the 

 abstract conccj^tions. 



Coleridge, having practised, proceeded to preach. That a poet 

 should also be a good critic is no more surprising than that any man 

 should speak well on the art of which he is master. Our best critics 

 of poetry, at least, from Dryden to Mr. Matthew Arnold, have been 

 (to invert a famous maxim) poets who have succeeded. Coleridge's 

 specific merit was not, as I think, that he laid down any scientific 

 theory. I don't believe that any such theory has as yet any existence 

 except in embryo. He was something almost unique in this as in his 

 poetry, first because his criticism (so far as it was really excellent) 

 was the criticism of love, the criticism of a man who combined the 

 first simple impulse of admiration with the power of explaining why 

 he admired ; and secondly, and as a result, because he placed himself 

 at the right point of view ; because, to put it briefly, he was the first 

 great writer who criticised poetry as poetry, and not as science. The 

 preceding generation had asked, as Mrs. Barbauld asked: What is 

 the moral? Has Othello a moral catastrophe ? What does ' Paradise 

 Lost ' prove ? Are the principles of Pope's ' Essay on Man ' philo- 

 soi^hical, or is Goldsmith's 'Deserted Village' a sound piece of 

 political economy ? The reply embodied in Coleridge's admirable 

 criticisms, especially of Shakespeare, was that this implied a total 

 misconception of the relations of poetry to philosoj^hy. The " moral " 

 of a poem is not this or that proposition tagged to it or deducible from 

 it, moral or otherwise; but the total effect of the stimulus to the 

 imagination and affections, or what Coleridge would call its dynamic 

 effect. That will, no doubt, depend partly upon the philosophy 

 assumed in it; but has no common ground with the merits of a 

 demonstration in Euclid or Spinoza. It is this adoption of a really 

 new method, which makes us feel when we compare Coleridge, not 

 only with the critics of a past generation, but even with very able and 



