his wife's fretfulness has become a felt burden to him. No doubt she had been fretting-perhaps she had been naggingfor some while: but the date at which it unhinged his mind, and (hypothetically) to the wreck of his poetry, is the only one pertinent to our enquiry. As for opium, we have seen that he had inured himself to a large dose as far back as November 1796; that The Ancient Mariner and Christabel, Part I, were very likely composed with help of the drug, as Kubla Khan admittedly was born of its immediate rapture. Let us be fair, and at this point allow it a part of the insidiousness of opiumalmost a property-that it stimulates only to betray, alluring its victim with promises and leaving him of a sudden wrecked and stranded, helpless. But when this has been granted it remains certain that during his sojourn in Germany Coleridge worked indefatigably without (so far as we can discover) having recourse to opium; as that he returned with all his other faculties improved and at their height. Only the creative, the poetic faculty was lost-or almost lost, on the point of vanishing for ever.

I confess I find it hard to accuse opium of this singular impairment in Coleridge, of afflicting him with a paralysis which it thus localised while concurrently strengthening his industry and endurance in the severest of metaphysical studies. Between analysis and synthesis a bridge undoubtedly does lie: and a man industrious, even superhumanly industrious, in the one may find it beyond his powers to cross that bridge to the other -nay, by the build of his nature many a man does, in fact, find it impossible. I do not, for example, believe it possible that Bacon should write Hamlet. I am morally certain that Thomas Hobbes could not have written Paradise Lost, even if, in Wordsworth's phrase "he'd had the mind." ("That's just it," commented Lamb. "It only wants the mind.") But Coleridge had, if with an effort of will, yet securely-and, the resolution taken, easily-crossed that bridge more than once. It is a good old

rule not to multiply miracles praeter necessitatem, and it covers choosing an everyday explanation in preference to a far-fetched one or to an incalculable one such as opium. So let us take, as at any rate handier, that vulgar experience which has translated itself into the proverb "one nail drives out another."

One's feelings lose poetic flow

Soon after twenty-seven or 80—

writes William (Johnson) Cory, translating another common human experience, that the poet in most men dies young. The cares of this world "choke the word, and it becometh unfruitful." Or, shall we say that there was a nail, and another driven in has driven it out?

At the close of his German visit Coleridge writes to his friend Josiah Wedgwood, "I shall have bought thirty pounds worth of books, chiefly metaphysics, and with a view to the one work to which I hope to dedicate in silence (sic) the prime of my life." The books were dispatched to England. Now it is true (as Mr Shawcross points out in his excellent edition of the full Biographia) that Coleridge was a metaphysician long before he studied the German philosophers. In the Nether Stowey days, before ever he saw Germany, when he discussed metaphysics with Wordsworth, it was as a professional with an amateur. It appears true also that the perusal of these particular volumes was for a long time delayed, and that even with the philosophy of Kant he had yet to make acquaintance. But already at Göttingen his German friends had "lamented the too abstruse natu.. of his ordinary speculations." And all the letters, all the journals, all the records down to Biographia, bear overwhelming evidence of this--that the man came back to England intensely and furiously preoccupied with metaphysics. This, I suggest, and neither opium nor Mrs Coleridge's fretfulness, was the main reason why he could not recall his mind to poetry nor get Christabel finished in time for the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, though poor Dorothy would help to

copy it out for him. Nay, I will go farther. This, I hold, too, for the real reason why, for the time, he let Wordsworth's Preface pass. He could not argue with his friend about its imperfections: could not bring himself to it. He had gone too far for that, and knew too much. He had overleapt such questions as roetic Diction, to speculate upon the transcendentals of Poetry and through what divine operation the human mind attained to it.

VI

Here I must make an observation which, whether the reader agree with it or not, he will find not impertinent to a study of Biographia. The dispute between Philosophy and Poetry is at once inveterate and-if it take two to make a quarrelno quarrel at all; since Poetry pretty steadily declines to take part in it. If it were a quarrel, it would be (I believe, perforce) internecine. As it is, the philosophers do all the talking, and cut themselves: the poets go on writing Poetry. Aristotle, though a philosopher, was wise enough to let the nature and origin of Poetry alone, or rather to dismiss them in a few words and leave his successors to fight over their meaning. Actually, for him, Poetry was the stuff which, up to his time, the poets had written. Upon this (it seems likely, early in life) he worked a number of sound inductions and left a work which, though imperfectly reported for us by a disciple, has proved durable and may even last as long as Poetry itself.

Plato, unlike Aristotle, was a poet: and just there lay his tragedy. Precisely because the poet and the philosopher were born side by side in him, and because of his superstition that philosophy, being the more rational, must therefore be the true heir of his mind, the quarrel in him became internecine; nor, though his affections tore him, could he see any end but to strangle poetry and cast the body out of his system: which he

accordingly did, with the result that (if we except Tolstoi, in these later times) Signor Benedetto Croce can arraign Plato with truth and justice as "the author of the only great negation of art which appears in the history of ideas."

There is nothing tragic in the fate of most of Plato's successors in the attempt to reduce poetry to a system and explain it in terms of philosophy, for the reason that tragedy does not concern itself in the failures of men who try to jump over the moon. We derive no purgation of pity and terror from a walk through the University of Laputa.

But before speaking with necessary frankness (necessary because constrained by belief) of the great and good whose names are uttered by thousands with bated breath, let me quote what one of their most learned admirers says of them, deeming that he praises them for superior beings. I take the following from a recent book The Philosophy of Benedetto Croce, by Dr Wildon Carr, learned President of the Aristotelian Society. It comes from his third chapter, expounding the principles of Croce's Estetica; and Dr Carr is engaged to show, by the example of Ruskin, the difference that Croce detects between so "indirect an analyser" as Ruskin and the true aesthetician -a difference so afflicting that Croce "feels some embarrassment in including in the history of a science one whose whole character is the reverse of scientific."

"Ruskin," says Dr Carr, "may well stand as the type of a class of writers on aesthetic of whom many and famous examples belong to our own country and literature. They are artists who criticise art. They are deeply versed in the philosophy of art and often give us profound insight into it, but their main direction is not towards a philosophy of art indifferent to any particular production; it is towards art itself and its appreciation. We go to them, for example, to enhance our enjoyment of the work of Polycleitus or Michelangelo, of Dante or of Beethoven. We do not go to them as we go to Kant or to Schopenhauer or to Schelling or to Hegel, whose aesthetic appreciation may be по whit above the vulgar, for a theory of art itself."

I ask why we should not go to men who can teach us about Polycleitus and Michelangelo, Dante or Beethoven in preference

to men who "their aesthetic appreciation being no whit above the vulgar"-by hypothesis lack capacity to separate wrong from right, good from less good, less good from utterly bad, in the subject on which they talk? Art is art: science is science: and anything so personal as poetry, painting, sculpture must be, by its nature, an art; cannot, by refusal of its nature, be a science. It is of the essence of art to particularise. "To generalise," says Blake, roundly speaking of art, "is to be an idiot. To particularise is the great distinction of merit." If, after art has particularised Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello and Lear, a man comes along and makes an induction upon them, will he be not the likelier to make a true induction if he know good work from bad? and who so likely to know this as "the artist who criticises art"? Which is likelier to know what poetry is all about-Dante or Hegel? Hegel or Heine?

"Ah, Dante and Heine know how to do it. But Hegel can tell how it is done, or ought to be done."-Is that the answer? Indeed, Dante and Heine can do it; but even they cannot tell how it comes, save somehow by work and fasting. How then shall he tell who knows neither what it is nor what it is about?

May we not before assenting to any of these majestical writers who would bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, cast back on our memories and bethink that next to Spring hats and parlour games, systems of philosophy are perhaps the most fugacious of all human toys? To those who listened once and eagerly, how far and faint already sound the echoes of Mansel, and Hegel plus Lewes plus T. H. Green; counterchiming against Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, plus Comte as interpreted by the Positivists! Nietzsche, Bergson, James have followed; and have passed, or are passing; even Croce they tell me is in process of being supplanted"Where are the snows of yester-year?" "You see, my friend," writes Goldsmith's Citizen of the World, Lien Chi Altangi,