view of life.

And in some such activity as that, varied as his wide learning, in a
many-sided dramatic kind of poetry, assigning its place and value to
every mode of the inward life, seems to have been for Coleridge the
original path of artistic success. But in order to follow that path
one must hold ideas loosely in the relative spirit, not seek to
stereotype any one of the many modes of that life; one must
acknowledge that the mind is ever greater than its own products,
devote ideas to the service of art rather than of [Greek: gnosis], not
disquiet oneself about the absolute. Perhaps Coleridge is more
interesting because he did not follow this path. Repressing his
artistic interest and voluntarily discolouring his own work, he turned
to console and strengthen the human mind, vulgarized or dejected, as
he believed, by the acquisition of new knowledge about itself in the
_eclaircissement_ of the eighteenth century.

What the reader of our own generation will least find in Coleridge's
prose writings is the excitement of the literary sense. And yet in
those grey volumes we have the production of one who made way ever by
a charm, the charm of voice, of aspect, of language, above all, by
the intellectual charm of new, moving, luminous ideas. Perhaps the
chief offence in Coleridge is an excess of seriousness, a seriousness
that arises not from any moral principle, but from a misconception of
the perfect manner. There is a certain shade of levity and unconcern,
the perfect manner of the eighteenth century, which marks complete
culture in the handling of abstract questions. The humanist, he who
possesses that complete culture, does not 'weep' over the failure of
'a theory of the quantification of the predicate', nor 'shriek' over
the fall of a philosophical formula. A kind of humour is one of the
conditions of the true mental attitude in the criticism of past stages
of thought. Humanity cannot afford to be too serious about them, any
more than a man of good sense can afford to be too serious in looking
back upon his own childhood. Plato, whom Coleridge claims as the first
of his spiritual ancestors, Plato, as we remember him, a true
humanist, with Petrarch and Goethe and M. Renan, holds his theories
lightly, glances with a blithe and naive inconsequence from one view
to another, not anticipating the burden of meaning 'views' will one
day have for humanity. In reading him one feels how lately it was that
Croesus thought it a