originality as contradistinguished from servile imitation, or more accurately,
[from] a blind copying of effects instead of a true imitation of the essential
principles? Imagine not I am about to oppose genius to rules. No! the com
parative value of these rules is the very cause to be tried. The spirit of poetry,
like all other living powers, must of necessity circumscribe itself by rules, were
it only to unite power with beauty. It must embody in order to reveal itself;
but a living body is of necessity an organized one?and what is organization
but the connection of parts to a whole, so that each part is at once end and
means! This is no discovery of criticism; it is a necessity of the human mind?
4. Coleridge is opposing the view that because ments and 'organic form.' Mechanical form Shakespeare violates the critical 'rules' based on results from imposing a system of preexisting rules
classical drama?the unities, for instance?his on the literary material. Shakespeare's organic
dramatic successes are marred by his irregularities form, on the other hand, evolves like a plant by an
and reflect the work of an uncultivated genius that inner principle and according to the unique laws
operates without artistry or judgment. His argu-of its own growth, until it achieves an organic
ment is based on a distinction between the unity.
'mechanical form' central to earlier critical assess
.
488 / SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
and all nations have felt and obeyed it, in the invention of meter and measured
sounds as the vehicle and involucrum5 of poetry, itself a fellow growth from
the same life, even as the bark is to the tree.
No work of true genius dare want its appropriate form; neither indeed is
there any danger of this. As it must not, so neither can it, be lawless! For it is
even this that constitutes its genius?the power of acting creatively under laws
of its own origination. How then comes it that not only single Zoili,6 but whole
nations have combined in unhesitating condemnation of our great dramatist,
as a sort of African nature, fertile in beautiful monsters, as a wild heath where
islands of fertility look greener from the surrounding waste, where the loveliest
plants now shine out among unsightly weeds and now are choked by their
parasitic growth, so intertwined that we cannot disentangle the weed without
snapping the flower. In this statement I have had no reference to the vulgar
abuse of Voltaire,7 save as far as his charges are coincident with the decisions
of his commentators and (so they tell you) his almost idolatrous admirers. The
true ground of the mistake, as has been well remarked by a continental critic,8
lies in the confounding mechanical regularity with organic form. The form is
mechanic when on any given material we impress a predetermined form, not
necessarily arising out of the properties of the material, as when to a mass of
wet clay we give whatever shape we wish it to retain when hardened. The
organic form, on the other hand, is innate; it shapes as it develops itself from
within, and the fullness of its development is one and the same with the per
fection of its outward form. Such is the life, such the form. Nature, the prime
genial9 artist, inexhaustible in diverse powers, is equally inexhaustible in
forms. Each exterior is the physiognomy of the being within, its true image
reflected and thrown out from the concave mirror. And even such is the appro
priate excellence of her chosen poet, of our own Shakespeare, himself a nature
humanized, a genial understanding directing self-consciously a power and an
implicit wisdom deeper than consciousness.
1812 1930
From The Statesman's Manual
