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46
MISS COLERIDGE
whole a valid castle in the air. Miss Coleridge
could not build ; ideas broke in her
mind in showers of whims, and lay where they
fell at haphazard ; she has bequeathed no
castles, but a garden strewn with quaint
figures, where every thought is tagged with
gay conceits. Her short poems are often
successful because she could pick at choice a
thought or fancy and twist it into a stanza ;
but when she attempted a tale or an essay
she gathered a handful of incongruous oddments
and made of them a patchwork.
This first defect was, we conjecture,
a consequence
of that other and more fundamental
flaw to which we have already drawn atten-
tion. If Miss Coleridge's artificers played
truant, it was because she lacked strength
to keep them at their task. For an indolent
and lawless imagination force of character is
the only whip, force of intellect the only guide.
Miss Coleridge was deficient in both respects,
and so her fancy sat playing with chips and
when it should have
pebbles, making mud-pies
been making palaces.
Miss Coleridge never created a real work of
art because she could not grasp emotions, or,
if she grasped, failed to hold them. Perhaps
she was too much of a Victorian lady to do
more than express the culture of an imperfect
age imperfectly. At any rate,
it is clear that