Through the squinters' slits!

At the heaps on heaps on heaps,
Wriggling here and there like ripe cheese,
But mostly upward glancing,
From water,

Ophelia eyes in the moats,
Poor old frogs' eggs.

COLERIDGE

By H. P. COLLINS

OLERIDGE is customarily hailed as the greatest of English critics; his pre-eminence has been challenged, though not by any considered examination of authority. But nowadays it is often conceded a little patronizingly. It could hardly be otherwise, for the arid intellectualism which has laid hold on several of the finest critical intelligences in England-and, to a lesser extent owing to difference of national temperament, in Franceis in itself proof that the victims do not carry the Biographia Litereria, that masterpiece of intimate poetic criticism, very freshly in their minds. Coleridge has, in fact, a particular relevance to literary thought at the present hour: less in those aspects which have caused him to be qualified as 'the last' of English critics, than in that central aspect by virtue of which he was the first.

Critical rank is not, of course, absolute as in poetic rank: the greatest criticism is not necessarily the most final. A critic is not likely to be superseded wholly, as a scientist is superseded. But there is a sense in which a good critic writing a hundred years later, with the benefit of a century's experience, is a more adequate critic than Coleridge; though for that it is necessary for him to have absorbed most of what is valuable in Coleridge. Criticism is less a creative act, an expression purely of the ego, than a recognition and ratification of something in the hidden nature of things: the history of criticism is cumulative as the history of imaginative art is not. (The premiss that there is, as the supreme condition of artistic values, a 'nature of things' might be challenged by a pseudo

scientific school of current æstheticians; but it is impossible even were one craven enough to desire it-to consider Coleridge except in the light of these fundamental assumptions which inspired his thought; on which his 'intuition rested.) Criticism is more relative, less timeless, more of a discovery and less of a vision than imaginative art because (1) its validity lies in being impersonal, not personal; therefore (2) its perception will depend as much, instead of as little, as possible on previous writers, so far as they are felt to be 'sound'. Further, the critic has everything to gain by a longer-tested and wider field of reading, for his material is books; while the purely creative artist, unfortunately, must find his fruitful experience in ways less easily indicated. The critic, in fine, reveals what is in the last resort impersonal; the pure creator achieves what is in the last resort personal. One attains beauty through truth; the other truth through beauty: this does not affect, but rather implies, the more ultimate identity between truth and beauty.

However, the state of the modern literary consciousness does not suggest that grateful heritors are carrying about with them what is most valuable in Coleridge'. Contemporary writing shows a general disregard of the nature of the creative Imagination, the understanding of which -he called it secondary' Imagination-I am considering as Coleridge's chief achievement. It dis-realises and realises ': the modern brand of realism does not dis-realise, and so cannot realise. The sheer expansiveness and tentative nature of contemporary romanticism tend to dissipate the essential function of aesthetic realisation. (L'étendue même des conceptions nuit à la décision du caractère, said Mme. de Stael.) Where egoism and intellectualism are alike rife, the novice should carry in his knapsack the Biographia, together with the Poetics and the Peri Hypsous. I do not apologise for the pedantry: firstly because the pedantry was Dr. Saintsbury's before (better to err with

Pope .'); secondly, because false gods are in the land-though they are hardly the gods of the Philistines. They are esoteric gods and, if personal, are yet sometimes difficult to track down. (I am not speaking of the Freudian pantheon: a more plausible and insidious religion than that is needed to catch a critic.) Many of them wear the visage of a composite photograph: but one is clearly Signor Croce; another (though his votaries are more furtive) resembles Flaubert in his middle years, a third is Remy de Gourmont-an odd culmination, to say the least, of the century of Sainte-Beuve, Scherer, and Brunetière. Both Croce and de Gourmont are nearly great critics; but both have been betrayed by a purely intellectual intricacy. De Gourmont was not capable of full spiritual experience; or, if capable, denied himself. Perhaps so: his gesture was always aristocratic. Croce is a bigger man, and his practice of criticism is generally masterly. But the root of the matter is not, I think, in him. The question is too complex to be worked out here; but I would refer readers to the final chapter of The Romantic Theory of Poetry, by A. E. Powell; and on the more general point to The Theory of Great Poetry, by Lascelles Abercrombie. If these are not convincing, Coleridge should help.

The handy edition of the Biographia Literaria which I am using has an introduction by Mr. Arthur Symons, which opens with the words 'Criticism is a valuation of forces, and it is indifferent to their direction'. direction de notre esprit est plus importante que son progrès,' said the subtlest of Coleridge's contemporaries.

'La

am under no romantic illusions about the inferiority of our age to previous ages, and I do not collate the two observations as a proof of critical decadence; but one cannot help wondering which was the more readily accepted. It is the very essence of Imagination that its multiform forces' cannot be valued without a sense of direction.

Even if we allow this sense of direction to be a personal predisposition, we abandon the critical issue: that is, we render impossible the attachment of significance to expressions of the human spirit in the only conceivable way, their relation to the spiritual 'heart of things'. Art is at once a creation and an evocation; it cannot create unless it evokes also. Imagination (the primary Imagination' of Coleridge) is felt individually-subjectively if you will -but to become creative, to pass from the static to the dynamic, its light must kindle a light in the souls of others. How? By evoking the common, the universal experience; by finding a comprehensible, an inevitable' direction',

when, from individual states

She doth abstract the universal kinds.

In Coleridge's own words: nothing can permanently please, which does not contain in itself the reason why it is so, and not otherwise'.

·

Before pondering these weighty words, it is best to guard against a misunderstanding of them. The reason' to which Coleridge is referring is used with fundamental purport, the theory-not wholly sound-of 'artistic inevitability' is not meant. It is untrue that a poet uses every word thus and not otherwise; that the creative impulse depends upon one unique, exact equivalence of expression to perception. Marlowe often re-moulded lines and improved them-or at least did not annul their value-and every editor of a posthumous novel knows the 'alternative ending'. The reason is that expression modifies or moulds inspiration in releasing it.

It is the artist's apprehension of reality which is so, and not otherwise '; reality has infinite aspects, but some aspect must be apprehended. 'Otherwise, there is nothing permanently to please. There is a hiatus in the

evocation.

This insistence that art is 'evocation' of a universal