Twain, Mark, 1835-1910 / 2008-11-25 00:00:00
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Unlike most creative critics, or most critics who were creative artists in
another medium, Coleridge, when he was writing criticism, wrote it wholly
for its own sake, almost as if it were a science. His prose is rarely of
the finest quality as prose writing. Here and there he can strike out a
phrase at red-heat, as when he christens Shakespeare "the one Proteus of
the fire and flood"; or he can elaborate subtly, as when he notes the
judgment of Shakespeare, observable in every scene of the "Tempest," "still
preparing, still inviting, and still gratifying, like a finished piece of
music"; or he can strike us with the wit of the pure intellect, as when he
condemns certain work for being "as trivial in thought and yet enigmatic in
expression, as if Echo and the Sphinx had laid their heads together to
construct it." But for the most part it is a kind of thinking aloud, and
the form is wholly lost in the pursuit of ideas. With his love for the
absolute, why is it that he does not seek after an absolute in words
considered as style, as well as in words considered as the expression of
thought? In his finest verse Coleridge has the finest style perhaps in
English; but his prose is never quite reduced to order from its tumultuous
amplitude or its snake-like involution.
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