Assuredly it is not with any intention of diminishing Coleridge's title as a Shakespearean critic that we bring forward this instance. He is the greatest critic of Shakespeare; and the quality of his excellence is displayed in one of the other few notes he left on this particular play. In Act III, scene ii., Warburton's emendation of 'airy' to 'fiery' had in Coleridge's day been received into the text of the Bastard's lines:--
'Now by my life, this day grows wondrous hot; Some airy devil hovers in the sky.'
'I prefer the old text: the word 'devil' implies 'fiery.' You need only to read the line, laying a full and strong emphasis on 'devil,' to perceive the uselessness and tastelessness of Warburton's alteration.'
The test is absolutely convincing--a poet's criticism of poetry. But that Coleridge went astray not once but many times, under the influence of his idolatry of Shakespeare, corroborates the general conclusion that is forced upon any one who will take the trouble to read a whole volume of the modern _Variorum_. There has been much editing, much comment, but singularly little criticism of Shakespeare; a half-pennyworth of bread to an intolerable deal of sack. The pendulum has swung violently from niggling and insensitive textual quibble to that equally distressing exercise of human ingenuity, idealistic encomium, of which there is a typical example in the opening sentence of Mr Masefield's remarks upon the play: 'Like the best Shakespearean tragedies, _King John_ is an intellectual form in which a number of people with obsessions illustrate the idea of treachery.' We remember that Mr Masefield has much better than this to say of Shakespeare in his little book; but we fasten upon this sentence because it is set before us in the _Variorum_, and because it too 'is an intellectual form in which a literary man with obsessions illustrates his idea of criticism.' Genetically, it is a continuation of the shoddy element in Coleridge's Shakespeare criticism, a continual bias towards transcendental interpretation of the obvious. To take the origin a phase further back, it is the portentous offspring of the feeble constituent of German philosophy (a refusal to see the object) after it had been submitted to an idle process of ferment in the softer part of Coleridge's brain.