en upon our thread bare world, and the routine of things about
us is broken by a novel and happier synthesis. These are moments into
which other minds may be made to enter, but which they cannot
originate. This susceptibility is the element of genius in an artistic
gift. Secondly, there is what may be called the talent of projection,
of throwing these happy moments into an external concrete form--a
statue, or play, or picture. That projection is of all degrees of
completeness; its facility and transparence are modified by the
circumstances of the individual, his culture, and his age. When it is
perfectly transparent, the work is classical. Compare the power of
projection in Mr. Browning's _Sordello_, with that power in the
_Sorrows of Werther_. These two elements determine the two chief aims
of criticism. First, it has to classify those initiative moments
according to the amount of interest excited in them, to estimate their
comparative acceptability, their comparative power of giving joy to
those who undergo them. Secondly, it has to test, by a study of the
artistic product itself, in connexion with the intellectual and
spiritual condition of its age, the completeness of the projection.
These two aims form the positive, or concrete, side of criticism;
their direction is not towards a metaphysical definition of the
universal element in an artistic effort, but towards a subtle
gradation of the shades of difference between one artistic gift and
another. This side of criticism is infinitely varied; and it is what
French culture more often achieves than the German.

Coleridge has not achieved this side in an equal degree with the
other; and this want is not supplied by the _Literary Remains_, which
contain his studies on Shakespeare. There we have a repetition, not
an application, of the absolute formula. Coleridge is like one who
sees in a picture only the rules of perspective, and is always trying
to simplify even those. Thus: 'Where there is no humour, but only wit,
or the like, there is no growth from within.' 'What is beauty'? he
asks. 'It is the unity of the manifold, the coalescence of the
diverse.' So of Dante: 'There is a total impression of infinity; the
wholeness is not in vision or conception, but in an inner feeling of
totality and absolute being.' Again, of the _Paradise Lost_: 'It has
the totality of the poem as distinguished from the _ab ovo_ birth and
parentage or straight line of history.'

That exaggera