fiers; they that combine all these with reason and order-the true protoplasts-Gods of Love who tame the chaos." But there are all kinds of art, and Coleridge distinguishes carefully between those artists-poets-who attained the ideal, and those who failed.18

Students of Coleridge's aesthetic theory may be impatient over his metaphysical speculations, especially as they seem so often to be plagarisms. They may feel that they are not giving us Coleridge, that they are simply abstract and uncritical borrowings. But in a very real sense they are Coleridge. The very fact of the promiscuous borrowing, and the abstract status in which his theories are often left, reflect his peculiarly receptive and metaphysical temperament. And I think it is fair to say that were it not for the metaphysical opposites, we should lack many of his keenest concrete criticisms; it was essential that this form of thought should be with Coleridge a constitutional habit.

Moreover, whether his abstract theorizings give us Coleridge

17 A. P., p. 96.

18

Although Coleridge usually maintains that ancient and modern art represent two distinct types, each to be judged according to its own laws, and hence declines to rank one above the other, yet there are instances in which he selects the modern form as illustrative of a unity in variety apparently not attained by the ancients. The traditional unities, he explains, "were to a great extent the natural form of that which in its elements was homogeneous, and the representation of which was addressed pre-eminently to the outward senses." (Works, Vol. IV, p. 35.) Hence it appealed to a "sort of more elevated understanding." The modern romantic drama on the other hand, appealed to the imagination and the reason, and both of these, as Coleridge frequently tells us, are the faculties which fuse, in reconciling, the heterogeneous and opposed. (Works, Vol. IV, pp. 35-36.)

Again, of the Athenian and Shakespearian drama he writes: "The very essence of the former consists in the sternest separation of the diverse in kind and the disparate in degree, whilst the latter delights in interlacing, by a rainbow-like transfusion of hues, the one with the other." (Works, Vol. IV, p. 36.)

And, comparing the romance language with the Latin,-"We find it less perfect in simplicity and relation-the privileges of a language formed by the mere attraction of homogeneous parts;-but yet more rich, more expressive and various, as one formed by more obscure affinities out of a chaos of apparently heterogeneous atoms. As more than a metaphor,-as an analogy of this, I have named the true genuine modern poetry the romantic; and the works of Shakspeare are romantic poetry revealing itself in the drama." (Works, Vol. IV, p. 35.)

In the face of the new unity in variety the classical unity has come to seem to Coleridge-at times certainly-mere homogeneity.

or not, we must admit their significance as definitions of art. The concept of evolutionary development that Coleridge frequently employs, may be better adapted to the description of artistic processes-though even this has serious limitations-than the concept of the reconciliation of metaphysical opposites. But the latter, while not of scientific value, served to make prevalent certain larger interpretations of the elements of art and life that, in their turn, are serving as the basis of a sounder scientific procedure. 19

Finally, the concept served, as will be more apparent in the discussion of Coleridge's concrete analyses, as a generally applicable standard of criticism.

"Cf. Miss Wylie's conclusion to her more general study of Coleridge's criticism: "It was inevitable that the criticism arising in such an age, and largely representing its reactionary tendencies, should be a promise and a suggestion; that its suggestion returned to vitalize a sturdier criticism and a more experimental philosophy, is its great glory In his [Coleridge's] suggestions lies the germ of a higher development, the spirit that must inform the great and enduring work of the future. Fragmentary as his writings are, there is yet opened through them an ideal criticism that has never been reached, and for which we can only hope if the clear intellectuality of the eighteenth century shall come to blend with the spirituality that complemented and destroyed it." (Evolution of English Criticism, pp. 203-204.)

CHAPTER IV

COLERIDGE'S APPLICATION OF THE PRINCIPLE TO CERTAIN LITERARY PROBLEMS

To many, Coleridge's pieces of concrete criticism seem much. more significant than his abstract speculations. J. W. Mackail,1 for example, while thoroughly appreciative of Coleridge's ability to show us, through his concrete Shakespeare criticism, things "that we had not seen before, but see with a thrill of recognition when he points them out to us," yet objects to his metaphysical criticism rather seriously. He notes that poetry and philosophy are not the same things, and writes: "When Coleridge, as he so often does, . . . tries to express the function of poetry in the terms of his own metaphysical system, he not only ceases to be a poet but ceases to be a critic." He finds that while the errors and exaggerations of Coleridge's Shakespeare criticism may be explained on the grounds that he had an "inveterate tradition" to break down, yet the new tradition that he helped create was "largely false," and his criticism, tremendously illuminating for his own generation, is illuminating for us "less as a systematic exposition and theory of Shakespeare than as a body of observations and records."

'Coleridge's Literary Criticism, Introduction.

'P. xvii.

3

Pp. xiii-xv. It is natural that the defects of Coleridge's philosophy should be more evident to critics of to-day than to the progressive minds of his own period and that immediately following. The most whole-hearted eulogy of his Shakespeare criticism that I have come upon is that of Charles Knight, in his Studies of Shakespeare published in 1849, studies taken largely from the Pictorial and Library editions of Shakespeare published 1838-1844. Knight writes:

"At the beginning of the nineteenth century a new school of criticism began to establish itself amongst us. CHARLES LAMB and WILLIAM HAZLITT led the way in approaching Shakespeare, if not wholly in the spirit of Aesthetics, yet with love, with deep knowledge, with surpassing acuteness, with unschackled minds. But a greater arose. A new era of critical opinion upon Shapespeare, as propounded by Englishmen, may be dated from the delivery of the lectures of SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, at the Surrey Institute, in 1814. What that great man did for Shakespeare during the remainder of his valuable life can scarcely be appreciated by the public. For his opinions were not given to the world in formal treat

Yet it must be recognized, and to some extent it is recognized, that Coleridge's power of concrete analysis and his power of constructive metaphysical philosophizing were interrelated. Lowell put the matter well when he said, "His analysis was elucidative mainly, if you will, but could not have been so except in virtue of the processes of constructive and philosophical criticism that had gone on so long in his mind as to make its subtle apprehension seem an instinct. As he was the first to observe some of the sky's appearances and some of the shyer revelations of outward nature, so he was also first in noting some of the more occult phenomena of thought and emotion. It is a criticism of parts and passages, and was scattered carelessly in obiter dicta, but it was not a bringing of the brick as a specimen of the whole house. It was comparative anatomy, far rather, which from a single bone reconstructs the entire living organism."4

In the following sections of this study I am trying to discover how closely Coleridge's power of critical insight, as revealed in his literary criticism, is correlated with the principle that is probably the basic principle of his metaphysics-that of the Union of Opposites. I have classified the material roughly according to the several problems of Dramatic Character, TragiComedy, Imitation, and Unity.

The larger part of the material is taken from Coleridge's Shakespeare criticism. In his chapter on Coleridge, Symons writes: "Most of his best criticism circles around Shakespeare; and he took Shakespeare almost as frankly in the place of Nature, or of poetry. He affirms, 'Shakespeare knew the human mind, and its most minute and intimate workings, and he never

ises and ponderous volumes. They were fragmentary, they were scattered, as it were, at random; many of them were the oral lessons of that wisdom and knowledge which he poured out to a few admiring disciples. But they have had their effect. For ourselves, personally, we owe a debt of gratitude to that illustrious man that can never be repaid. If in any degree we have been enabled to present Shakespeare to the popular mind under new aspects, looking at him from a central point, which should permit us, however imperfectly, to comprehend something of his wondrous system, we owe the desire so to understand him ourselves to the germs of thought which are scattered through the works of that philosopher; to whom the homage of future times will abundantly compensate for the partial neglect of his contemporaries. We desire to conclude this criticism of the opinions of others upon the works of Shakespeare, in connection with the imperfect expression of our own sense of those opinions, with the name of COLERIDGE." (P. 560.)

Prose Works, Vol. VI, p. 73.

introduced a word, or a thought, in vain or out of place.' This granted (and to Coleridge it is essential that it should be granted, for in less than the infinite he cannot find space in which to use his wings freely) he has only to choose and define, to discover and illuminate. In the 'myriad-minded man,' in his 'oceanic mind,' he finds all the material that he needs for the making of a complete aesthetic." This tells the whole story. In Shakespeare, art and nature were one, and, in his art, the ideal and the actual. Hence Shakespeare furnishes the most admirable illustrations of the principle of the Reconciliation of Opposites, which was a formula, now of life or art in general, and now of the ideal. It is largely in Coleridge's appreciative criticism of Shakespeare that we find his concrete literary applications of the principle.

I. ANALYSIS OF THE DRAMATIC CHARACTER

In anlayzing the characters of the drama and of prose fiction Coleridge finds many instances of the union of opposites, especially of the universal and the individual. There is a universal basis in all character, he maintains, and this is, in the individual, modified by circumstances. He almost puts the matter in terms of heredity and environment in his discussion of Shakespeare's women characters: "In all Shaksperian women there is essentially the same foundation and principle; the distinct individuality and variety are merely the result of the modification of circumstances, whether in Miranda the maiden, in Imogen the wife, or in Katherine the queen.' .” And in another passage, the universal appears as the past experience stored up, as it were, in every individual: "In Shakspeare all the elements of womanhood are holy, and there is the sweet, yet dignified feeling of all that continuates society, as sense of ancestry and of sex, with a purity unassailable by sophistry because it rests not in the analytic processes, but in that sane equipoise of the faculties, during which THE FEELINGS ARE REPRESENTATIVE OF ALL PAST EXPERIENCE, NOT OF THE INDIVIDUAL ONLY, but of all those by whom she has been educated, and their predecessors even up to the first mother that lived."

"The Romantic Movement, p. 135. "Works, Vol. IV, p. 76.

In the quotations in this section I have taken the liberty of putting certain phrases in small capitals to make the concept of opposition more easily traceable. The italics are Coleridge's own.