witnesses of the moulding of an
unforeseen type by some new principle of association; and to that
phenomenon Coleridge wisely recalls our attention. What makes his view
a one-sided one is, that in it the artist has become almost a
mechanical agent: instead of the most luminous and self-possessed phase
of consciousness, the associative act in art or poetry is made to look
like some blindly organic process of assimilation. The work of art is
likened to a living organism. That expresses [81] truly the sense of a
self-delighting, independent life which the finished work of art gives
us: it hardly figures the process by which such work was produced.
Here there is no blind ferment of lifeless elements towards the
realisation of a type. By exquisite analysis the artist attains
clearness of idea; then, through many stages of refining, clearness of
expression. He moves slowly over his work, calculating the tenderest
tone, and restraining the subtlest curve, never letting hand or fancy
move at large, gradually enforcing flaccid spaces to the higher degree
of expressiveness. The philosophic critic, at least, will value, even
in works of imagination, seemingly the most intuitive, the power of the
understanding in them, their logical process of construction, the
spectacle of a supreme intellectual dexterity which they afford.

Coleridge's prose writings on philosophy, politics, religion, and
criticism, were, in truth, but one element in a whole lifetime of
endeavours to present the then recent metaphysics of Germany to English
readers, as a legitimate expansion of the older, classical and native
masters of what has been variously called the a priori, or absolute, or
spiritual, or Platonic, view of things. His criticism, his challenge
for recognition in the concrete, visible, finite work of art, of the
dim, unseen, comparatively infinite, soul or power of the artist, may
well be [82] remembered as part of the long pleading of German culture
for the things "behind the veil." To introduce that spiritual
philosophy, as represented by the more transcendental parts of Kant,
and by Schelling, into all subjects, as a system of reason in them, one
and ever identical with itself, however various the matter through
which it was diffused, became with him the motive of an unflagging
enthusiasm, which seems to have been the one thread of continuity in a
life otherwise singularly wanting in unity of purpose, and in which he
was certainly