Precisely because we consider it of the greatest importance
that the best of Coleridge's criticism should be studied and studied
again, we think it unfortunate that Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch should
recommend the apprentice to get the chapters on poetic diction by heart.
He will be condemned to carry about with him a good deal of dubious
logic and a false conclusion. What is worth while learning from
Coleridge is something different; it is not his behaviour with 'a
principle,' but his conduct when confronted with poetry in the concrete,
his magisterial ordonnance (to use his own word) and explication of his
own aesthetic intuitions, and his manner of employing in this, the
essential task of poetic criticism, the results of his own deep study of
all the great poetry that he knew.
[APRIL, 1920.
_Shakespeare Criticism_
It is an exciting, though exhausting, experience to read a volume of the
great modern Variorum Shakespeare from cover to cover. One derives from
the exercise a sense of the evolution of Shakespeare criticism which
cannot be otherwise obtained; one begins to understand that Pope had his
merits as an editor, as indeed a man of genius could hardly fail to
have, to appreciate the prosy and pedestrian pains of Theobald, to
admire the amazing erudition of Steevens.
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