f the fact that, while talent cannot safely ignore what is
called technique, genius almost can. Coleridge, in spite of his
formlessness, remains the wisest man who ever spoke in English about
literature. His place is that of an oracle among controversialists.

Even so, _Biographia Literaria_ is a disappointing book. It is the porch,
but it is not the temple. It may be that, in literary criticism, there can
be no temple. Literary criticism is in its nature largely an incitement to
enter, a hint of the treasures that are to be found within. Persons who
seek rest in literary orthodoxy are always hoping to discover written upon
the walls of the porch the ten commandments of good writing. It is
extremely easy to invent ten such commandments--it was done in the age of
Racine and in the age of Pope--but the wise critic knows that in
literature the rules are less important than the "inner light." Hence,
criticism at its highest is not a theorist's attempt to impose iron laws
on writers: it is an attempt to capture the secret of that "inner light"
and of those who possess it and to communicate it to others. It is also an
attempt to define the conditions in which the "inner light" has most
happily manifested itself, and to judge new writers of promise according
to the measure in which they have been true to the spirit, though not
necessarily to the technicalities, of the great tradition. Criticism,
then, is not the Roman father of good writing: it is the disciple and
missionary of good writing. The end of criticism is less law-giving than
conversion. It teaches not the legalities, but the love, of literature.
_Biographia Literaria_ does this in its most admirable parts by
interesting us in Coleridge's own literary beginnings, by emphasizing the
strong sweetness of great poets in contrast to the petty animosities of
little ones, by pointing out the signs of the miracle of genius in the
young Shakespeare, and by disengaging the true genius of Wordsworth from a
hundred extravagances of theory and practice. Coleridge's remarks on the
irritability of minor poets--"men of undoubted talents, but not of
genius," whose tempers are "rendered yet more irritable by their desire to
_appear_ men of genius"--should be written up on the study walls of
everyone commencing author. His description, too, of his period as "this
age of personality, this age of literary and political gossiping, when the
meanest insects are worshipped with sort of Egyptia