has poured in any part of its produce between its millstones, it grinds it off, one man's sack the same as another, and with whatever wind may happen to be then blowing. All the two-andthirty winds are alike its friends. Of the whole wide atmosphere it does not desire a single finger-breadth more than what is necessary for its sails to turn round in. But this space must be left free and unimpeded. Gnats, beetles, wasps, butterflies, and the whole tribe of ephemerals and insignificants, may flit in and out and between, may hum and buzz and jar, may shrill their tiny pipes and wind their puny horns, unchastised and unnoticed. But idlers and bravadoes of larger size and prouder show must beware how they place themselves within its sweep. Much less may they presume to lay hands on its sails, the strength of which is neither greater nor less than as the wind is which drives them round. Whomsoever the remorseless arm slings aloft, or whirls along with it in the air, he has himself alone to blame; though, when the same arm throws him from it, it will more often double than break the force of his fall. Putting aside the too manifest and frequent interference of national, party, and even personal predilection and aversion, and reserving for deeper feelings those worse and more criminal intrusions into the sacredness of private life, which not seldom merit legal rather than literary chastisement, the two principal objects and occasions which I find for blame and regret in the conduct of the review in question are: first, its unfaithfulness to its own announced and excellent plan, by subjecting to criticism works neither indecent nor immoral, yet of such trifling importance even in point of size, and according to the critic's own verdict so devoid of all merit, as must excite in the most candid mind the suspicion, either that dislike or vindictive feelings were at work, or that there was a cold prudential predetermination to increase the sale of the Review by flattering the malignant passions of human nature. That I may not myself become subject to the charge which I am bringing against others, by an accusation without proof, I refer to the article on Dr. Rendel's sermons in the very first number of the Edinburgh as an illustration of my meaning. If in looking through all the succeeding volumes the reader should find this a solitary instance, I must submit to that painful forfeiture of esteem which awaits a groundless or exaggerated charge. The second point of objection belongs to this review only in common with all other works of periodical criticism; at least it applies in common to the general system of all, whatever exceptions there may be in favor of particular articles. Or if it attaches to the Edinburgh Review and to its only corrival, the Quarterly, with any peculiar force, this results from the superiority of talent, acquirement, and information which both have so undeniably displayed, and which doubtless deepens the regret, though not the blame. I am referring to the substitution of assertion for argument, to the frequency of arbitrary and sometimes petulant verdicts, not seldom unsupported even by a single quotation from the work condemned, which might at least have explained the critic's meaning, if it did not prove the justice of his sentence. Even where this is not the case, the extracts are too often made without reference to any general grounds or rules from which the faultiness or inadmissibility of the qualities attributed may be deduced, and without any attempt to show that the qualities are attributable to the passage extracted. I have met with such extracts from Mr. Wordsworth's poems, annexed to such assertions, as led me to imagine that the reviewer, having written his critique before he had read the work, had then pricked with a pin for passages wherewith to illustrate the various branches of his preconceived opinions. By what principle of rational choice can we suppose a critic to have been directed (at least in a Christian country, and himself, we hope, a Christian), who gave the following lines, portraying the fervor of solitary devotion excited by the magnificent display of the Almighty's works, as a proof and example of an author's tendency to "downright ravings" and absolute unintelligibility? 1 1 O then what soul was his, when on the tops Rise up, and bathe the world in light! He looked – And ocean's liquid mass, beneath him lay In gladness and deep joy. The clouds were touched, That is, Jeffrey, in the Edinburgh Review's account of The Excursion. And in their silent faces did he read And by them did he live: they were his life. (Excursion.) Can it be expected that either the author or his admirers should be induced to pay any serious attention to decisions which prove nothing but the pitiable state of the critic's own taste and sensibility? On opening the Review they see a favorite passage, of the force and truth of which they had an intuitive certainty in their own inward experience, confirmed - if confirmation it could receive-by the sympathy of their most enlightened friends, some of whom, perhaps, even in the world's opinion, hold a higher intellectual rank than the critic himself would presume to claim. And this very passage they find selected as the characteristic effusion of a mind "deserted by reason," as furnishing evidence that the writer was raving, or he could not have thus strung words together without sense or purpose! No diversity of taste seems capable of explaining such a contrast in judgment. That I had overrated the merit of a passage or poem, that I had erred concerning the degree of its excellence, I might be easily induced to believe or apprehend. But that lines, the sense of which I had analyzed and found consonant with all the best convictions of my understanding, and the imagery and diction of which had collected round these convictions my noblest as well as my most delightful feelings,—that I should admit such lines to be mere nonsense or lunacy, is too much for the most ingenious arguments to effect. But that such a revolution of taste should be brought about by a few broad assertions, seems little less than impossible. On the contrary, it would require an effort of charity not to dismiss the criticism with the aphorism of the wise man: in animam malevolam sapientia haud intrare potest.1 What, then, if this very critic should have cited a large 1 Into a malicious soul wisdom is unable to enter. number of single lines, and even of large paragraphs, which he himself acknowledges to possess eminent and original beauty? What if he himself had owned that beauties as great are scattered in abundance throughout the whole book? And yet, though under this impression, should have commenced his critique in vulgar exultation with a prophecy meant to secure its own fulfilment? With a "This won't do!" What if, after such acknowledgments extorted from his own judgment, he should proceed from charge to charge of tameness and raving, flights and flatness, and at length, consigning the author to the house of incurables, should conclude with a strain of rudest contempt evidently grounded in the distempered state of his own moral associations? Suppose, too, all this done without a single leading principle established or even announced, and without any one attempt at argumentative deduction, though the poet had presented a more than usual opportunity for it, by having previously made public his own principles of judgment in poetry and supported them by a connected train of reasoning... SHAKESPEARE LECTURES [Coleridge gave courses of lectures on Shakespeare and other poets in various years, especially 1811-12 and 1818, and for these accumulated many manuscript notes, which were published in his Literary Remains, 1836-39. Those here represented are especially associated with the lectures of 1818. Coleridge's statement (p. 36) that he was the first to set forth the view of Shakespeare as a regular artist, working according to principles as susceptible of analysis as those of the classical dramatists, is partly due to the suspicion that he had imbibed this view from the German critic Schlegel, a suspicion not yet altogether disproved.] SHAKESPEARE'S JUDGMENT EQUAL TO HIS GENIUS SHAKESPEARE appears, from his Venus and Adonis and Rape of Lucrece alone, apart from all his great works, to have possessed all the conditions of the true poet. Let me now proceed to destroy, as far as may be in my power, the popular notion that he was a great dramatist by mere instinct, that he grew 1 See page 309. immortal in his own despite, and sank below men of secondor third-rate power when he attempted aught beside the drama even as bees construct their cells and manufacture their honey to admirable perfection, but would in vain attempt to build a nest. Now this mode of reconciling a compelled sense of inferiority with a feeling of pride began in a few pedants, who, having read that Sophocles was the great model of tragedy, and Aristotle the infallible dictator of its rules, and finding that the Lear, Hamlet, Othello, and other masterpieces were neither in imitation of Sophocles nor in obedience to Aristotle, and not having (with one or two exceptions) the courage to affirm that the delight which their country received from generation to generation, in defiance of the alterations of circumstances and habits, was wholly groundless, took upon them, as a happy medium and refuge, to talk of Shakespeare as a sort of beautiful lusus naturæ,1 a delightful monster, — wild, indeed, and without taste or judgment, but, like the inspired idiots so much venerated in the East, uttering, amid the strangest follies, the sublimest truths. In nine places out of ten in which I find his awful name mentioned, it is with some epithet of "wild," "irregular," "pure child of nature," etc. If all this be true, we must submit to it; though to a thinking mind it cannot but be painful to find any excellence, merely human, thrown out of all human analogy, and thereby leaving us neither rules for imitation, nor motives to imitate; but if false, it is a dangerous falsehood, for it affords a refuge to secret self-conceit, — enables a vain man at once to escape his reader's indignation by general swollen panegyrics, and merely by his ipse dixit to treat as contemptible what he has not intellect enough to comprehend, or soul to feel, without assigning any reason, or referring his opinion to any demonstrative principle; thus leaving Shakespeare as a sort of Grand Llama, adored indeed, and his very excrements prized as relics, but with no authority or real influence. I grieve that every late voluminous edition of his works would enable me to substantiate the present charge with a variety of facts, one tenth of which would of themselves exhaust the time allotted to me. Every critic who has or has not made a collection of black-letter books in itself a useful and 1 Freak of nature. |