1888.] on S. T. Coleridge. 247 



acute wi-iters such as Jeflfrey or Hazlitt, who were his contemporaries, 

 that we are in a freer and hirger atmosphere, and are in contact with 

 deeper principles. It raises another question, for it leads to Cole- 

 ridge's most conscious aim. Nothing is easier than to put the proper 

 label on a poet — to call him " romantic," or " classical," and so forth ; 

 and then, if he has a predecessor of like principles, to explain him by 

 the likeness, and if he represents a change of principles, to make the 

 change explain itself by calling it a reaction. The method is delight- 

 fully simple, and I can use the words as easily as my neighbours. 

 The only thing I find difficult is to look wise when I use them, or to 

 fancy that I give an explanation because I have adopted a classification. 

 Coleridge, both in poetry and philosophy, conceived himself to be one 

 of the leaders of such a reaction. He proposed to abolish the wicked, 

 mechanical, infidel, prosaic eighteenth century and go back to the 

 seventeenth. I do not believe in the possibility or the desirability of 

 any such reaction. I prefer my own grandfathers to tlieir grand- 

 fathers, and myself — including you and me — to my grandfathers. I 

 am quite sure that, if I did not, I could not make time run backwards. 

 We are far enough off to be just to the maligned eighteenth century, 

 and to keep all our uncharitablcness for our contemporaries — it may 

 do them some good. I would never abuse the century which loved 

 common sense and freedom of speech, and hated humbug and mystery ; 

 the century in which first sprang to life most of the social and 

 intellectual movements which are still the best hope of our own ; in 

 which science and history and invention first took their modern shape ; 

 the century of David Hume, and Adam Smith, and Gibbon, and 

 Burke, and Johnson, and Fielding, and many old friends to whom I 

 aver incalculable gratitude ; but I admit that, like other centuries, it 

 had its faults. It was, no doubt, unpoetical at its close — almost as 

 unpoetical as the latter half of the nineteenth ; and somehow it had 

 fallen into that queer blunder of judging poetry by the canons of 

 science. The old symbolism of an earlier generation had faded, and 

 for Pagan or Chiistian imagery we had frigid personifications, such 

 even as Coleriflge quotes from some prize poem : " Inoculation, 

 heavenly maid ! " a deity who ould be only adored in a rhymed 

 medical treatise. And Coleridcfe's charge against the philosophy of 

 the time was really identical with his charge against the poetry. 



Poetry, without the mystic or spiritual element, meant Darwin's 

 "Botanic Garden"— an ice-palace, as he called it, a heap of fine 

 phrases and sham personifications. Take the same element from 

 theology, and you have Paley's ' Evidences ' ; from morals, and the 

 residuum is Bentham's utilitarianism. Coleridge's nomenclature 

 expressed this in a fashion. He was fond of saying that all men 

 were born Aristotelians or Platonists : Platonists, if, in his favourite 

 distinction, the reason and the imagination dominated in them, and 

 Aristotelians if they had only the understanding, the almost vulpine 

 cunning, which was shared even by the lower animals, which meant 

 prudence in morality, reliance upon mere external evidence in 



