t
effectively, to get it acknowledged. It was an effort, surely, an
effort of sickly thought, that saddened his [69] mind, and limited the
operation of his unique poetic gift.

So 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 larger part of 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 arising not from any moral principle, but
from a misconception of the perfect manner. There is a certain shade
of unconcern, the perfect manner of the eighteenth century, which may
be thought to mark complete culture in the handling of abstract
questions. The humanist, the possessor of 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, in truth, one of the conditions of the just mental
attitude, in the criticism of by-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, holds his
theories lightly, glances with a somewhat blithe and naive
inconsequence from [70] one view to another, not anticipating the
burden of importance "views" will one day have for men. In reading him
one feels how lately it was that Croesus thought it a paradox to say
that external prosperity was not necessarily happiness. But on
Coleridge lies the whole weight of the sad reflection that has since
come into the world, with which for us the air is full, which the
"children in the market-place" repeat to each other. His very language
is forced and broken lest some saving formula should be
lost--distinctities, enucleation, pentad of operative Christianity; he
has a whole armoury of these terms, and expects to turn the tide of
human thought by fixing the sense of such expressions as "reason,"
"understanding," "idea." Again, he lacks the jealousy of a true artist
in excluding all associations that have no colour, or charm, or
gladness in them; and everywhere allows the impre