sense. 66 It was observed by Warburton, in 1747, that the fit criticism for Shakspere was not such as may be raised mechanically on the rules which Dacier, Rapin, and Bossu have collected from antiquity: and of which such kind of writers as Rymer, Gildon, Dennis, and Oldmixon, have only gathered and chewed the husks." But he goes on to infer that "crude and superficial judgments on books and things" had taken the place of the older mechanical criticism; and that there was "a deluge of the worst sort of critical jargon-that which looks most like ." The rules of art, as they were called, having been rejected as inapplicable to Shakspere, a swarm of writers arose who considered that he was to be judged without the application of any general principles at all. They held that he wrote without a system; that the absence of this system produced his excellences and his faults; that his absurdities were as striking as his beauties; that he was the most careless and hasty of writers; and that therefore it was the business of all grave and discreet critics to warn the unenlightened multitude against his blunders, his contradictions, his violations of sense and decency. This was the critical school of individual judgment, which has lasted for more than a century amongst us; and which, to our minds, is a far more corrupting thing than the pedantries of all the Gildons and Dennises who have eat paper and drunk ink. Before the publication of Johnson's preface (which, being of a higher order of composition than what had previously been produced upon Shakspere, seemed to establish fixed rules for opinion), the impertinences which were poured out by the feeblest minds upon Shakspere's merits and demerits surpass all ordinary belief. Mrs. Charlotte Lennox, in whose Shakespear Illustrated' Johnson himself is reputed to have had some hand, is an average specimen of the insolence of that critical jargon "which looks most like sense." Mrs. Lennox was evidently a very small-minded person attempting to form a judgment upon a very high subject. But it was not only the small minds which uttered such babble in the last century. Samuel 6 | Johnson himself, in some of his critical opinions upon individual plays, is not very far above the good lady whom he patronized. What shall we think of the prosaic approbation of 'A Midsummer-Night's Dream ?'"Wild and fantastical as this play is, all the parts in their various modes are well written." What of his praise of 'Romeo and Juliet ?'— "His comic scenes are happily wrought, but his pathetic strains are always polluted with some unexpected depravations." What of the imputed omissions in ‘As You Like It?'— "By hastening to the end of this work Shakspeare suppressed the dialogue between the usurper and the hermit, and lost an opportunity of exhibiting a moral lesson in which he might have found matter worthy of his highest powers." What of the pompous seesawing about 'Macbeth?'-"It has no nice discriminations of character. . . The danger of ambition is well described. The passions are directed to the true end. Lady Macbeth is merely detested; and, though the courage of Macbeth preserves some esteem, yet every reader rejoices at his fall." What, lastly, shall we say to the bow-wow about 'Cymbeline?'-"To remark the folly of the fiction, the absurdity of the conduct, the confusion of the names and manners of different times, and the impossibility of the events in any system of life, were to waste criticism upon unresisting imbecility-upon faults too evident for detection, and too gross for aggravation." All that we can in truth say of these startling things is this—that this learned, sensible, sometimes profound, and really great man, having trampled upon the unities and other tests of poetical merit, the fashion of Dryden's age but not of his own, is perpetually groping about in the mists of his private judgment, now pursuing a glimmering of light, now involved in outer darkness. This system of criticism upon Shakspere was rotten to the foundation. It was based upon an extension and a misapplication of Ben Jonson's dogmatic assertion—" He wanted art." The art of Shakspere was not revealed to the critics of the last century. Let us hear one to whom the principles of this art were revealed :-"It is a painful truth, that .... not only individuals, but even whole nations, | sions," then he is bewildered; and he geneare ofttimes so enslaved to the habits of rally ends in blaming his author. The chatheir education and immediate circumstances, racteristic excellence, he says, of the tragedy as not to judge disinterestedly even on those of 'Hamlet,' is "variety." According to his subjects the very pleasure arising from which notion that in all Shakspere's dramas we consists in its disinterestedness, namely, on find "an interchange of seriousness and subjects of taste and polite literature. In- merriment, by which the mind is softened at stead of deciding concerning their own modes one time and exhilarated at another," he and customs by any rule of reason, nothing holds, that "the pretended madness of Hamappears rational, becoming, or beautiful to let causes much mirth." But, in the conthem but what coincides with the peculiari- duct of the plot, the business of life and ties of their education. In this narrow the course of the passions do not proceed circle individuals may attain to exquisite with the regularity which he desires :—“ Of discrimination, as the French critics have the feigned madness of Hamlet there appears done in their own literature; but a true no adequate cause. . . . . Hamlet is, through critic can no more be such, without placing the whole piece, rather an instrument than himself on some central point, from which an agent. After he has by the stratagem of he may command the whole,—that is, some the play convicted the king, he makes no general rule, which, founded in reason, or attempt to punish him. . . . . The catathe faculties common to all men, must there- strophe is not very happily produced." fore apply to each,-than an astronomer can Where is the mistake in all this? It is in explain the movements of the solar system taking a very limited view of the object and without taking his stand in the sun.' scope of Art. "It is its object and aim to Samuel Johnson proposes to inquire, in bring within the circle of our senses, perhis preface, "by what peculiarities of ex- ceptions, and emotions, everything which cellence Shakspeare has gained and kept has existence in the mind of man. Art the favour of his countrymen." He answers should realize in us the well-known saying, the question at considerable length, by dis- Nihil humani a me alienum puto. Its applaying what he holds to be the great pecu- pointed aim is to awake and give vitality to liarity of his excellence :-"Shakspeare is, all slumbering feelings, affections, and pasabove all writers, at least above all modern sions; to fill and expand the heart; and to writers, the poet of nature; the poet that make man, whether developed or undeholds up to his readers a faithful mirror of veloped, feel in every fibre of his being all manners and of life. This, therefore, that human nature can endure, experience, is the praise of Shakspeare—that his drama and bring forth in her innermost and most is the mirror of life." Such is the leading secret recesses-all that has power to move idea of the critic. He sees nothing higher and arouse the heart of man in its proin Shakspere than an exhibition of the real. foundest depths, manifold capabilities, and "He who has mazed his imagination in fol- various phases; to garner up for our enjoylowing the phantoms which other writers ment whatever, in the exercise of thought raise up before him may here be cured of his and imagination, the mind discovers of high delirious ecstacies, by reading human senti- and intrinsic merit, the grandeur of the ments in human language; by scenes from lofty, the eternal, and the true, and present which a hermit may estimate the transac- it to our feeling and contemplation. In like tions of the world, and a confessor predict manner, to make pain and sorrow, and even the progress of the passions." When John- vice and wrong, become clear to us; to bring son is unable to trace this actual picture of the heart into immediate acquaintance with life in Shakspere, when he perceives any the awful and the terrible, as well as with deviations from the regular "transactions of the joyous and pleasurable; and, lastly, to the world," or the due "progress of the pas- lead the fancy to hover gently, dreamily, on *Coleridge's Literary Remains,' vol. ii. p. 63. the wing of imagination, and entice her to .... revel in the seductive witchery of its volup- | more, which penetrates into the abysses of tuous emotion and contemplation. Art should employ this manifold richness of its subject-matter to supply on the one hand the deficiencies of our actual experience of external life, and on the other hand to excite in us those passions which shall cause the actual events of life to move us more deeply and awaken our susceptibility for receiving impressions of all kinds."* This is something higher than Johnson's notion of Shakspere's art-higher as that notion was than the mechanical criticism of the age which preceded him. But the inconsistencies into which the critic is betrayed show the narrowness and weakness of his foundations. The drama of Shakspere is "a mirror of life;" and yet, according to the critic, it is the great sin of Shakspere that he is perpetually violating "poetical justice." Thus Johnson says in the preface, "He makes no just distribution of good or evil, nor is always careful to show in the virtuous a disapprobation of the wicked; he carries his persons indifferently through right and wrong, and at the close dismisses them without further care, and leaves their examples to operate by chance.” Johnson could not have avoided seeing that, if Shakspere had not carried his persons "indifferently though right and wrong," he would not have exhibited "the real state of sublunary nature." But there was something much higher that Shakspere would not then have done. Had he gone upon the principle of teaching an impracticable and therefore an unnatural theory of rewards and punishments in human affairs, if he had not intended that "his precepts and axioms" should drop casually from him," he would have lost his supereminent power of gradually raising the mind into a comprehension of what belongs to the spiritual part of our nature; of exciting a deep sympathy with strong emotion and lofty passion; of producing an expansion of the heart, which embraces all the manifestations of human goodness and human sorrow; and, what is 66 *We quote this from a very able article in the 'British and Foreign Review,' on Hegel's Esthetics.' The passage is Hegel's. guilt and degradation, and shows that there is no true peace, and no real resting-place, for what separates us from our fellow men and from our God. This is not to be effected by didactic precepts not dropped casually; by false representations of the course of worldly affairs and the workings of man's secret heart. The mind comprehends the whole truth, when it is elevated by the art of the poet into a fit state for its comprehension. The whole moral purpose is then evolved, through a series of deductions in the mind of him who is thus moved. This is the highest logic, because it is based upon the broadest premises. Rymer sneers at Shakspere when he says that the moral of 'Othello' is, that maidens of quality should not run away with blackamoors. The sarcasm only tells upon those who demand any literal moral in a high work of art. Because Johnson only saw in Shakspere's dramas " a mirror of life," he prefers his comedy to his tragedy. "His tragedy seems to be skill, his comedy to be instinct." When the poet is working with grander materials than belong to the familiar scenes of life, however natural and universal, the critic does not see that the region of literal things is necessarily abandoned-that skill must be more manifest in its effects. We are then in a world of higher reality than every-day reality. "In tragedy he often writes with great appearance of toil and study what is written at last with little felicity." This now strikes the most superficial student of Shakspere as monstrous. We open ‘Irene,' and we understand it. "He omits opportunities of instructing or delighting which the train of his story seems to force upon him, and apparently rejects those exhibitions which would be more affecting for the sake of those which are more easy." It is a great privilege of the art of Shakspere, that in his most tragical scenes he never takes us out of the region of pleasurable emotions. It was his higher art, as compared with the lower art of Otway. He does reject "those exhibitions which would be more affecting," but not "for the sake of those which are more easy." Let any one try which is the more easy, "to touch a soul to the quick, to lay upon fear as much as it can bear, to wean and weary a life till it is ready to drop," as Charles Lamb describes the tragic art of Webster; or to make a Desdemona, amidst the indignities which are heaped upon her, and the fears which subdue her soul, move tranquilly in an atmosphere of poetical beauty, thinking of the maid that "had a song of-willow; An old thing 'twas, but it express'd her fortune, And she died singing it." ... the poetical art. He has here narrowed the question to an absurdity. We may observe, from what Johnson says of "the minute and slender criticism of VOLTAIRE," that the English critics fancied that, doing Shakspere ample justice themselves, they were called upon to defend him from the mistaken criticisms of a foreign school. Every Englishman, from the period of Johnson, who has fancied himself absolved from the guilt of not admiring and understanding Shakspere has taken up a stone to cast at Voltaire. Those who speak of Voltaire as an ignorant and tasteless calumniator of It is a rude conception which Johnson has of Shakspere forget that his hostility was based Shakspere's art, when he says of the play of upon a system of art which he conceived, "Hamlet," "The scenes are interchangeably di- and rightly so, was opposed to the system versified with merriment and solemnity. of Shakspere. He had been bred up in the The pretended madness of Hamlet causes school of Corneille and Racine, the glories of much mirth; the mournful distraction of his countrymen; and it is really a remarkOphelia fills the heart with tenderness; and able proof of the vigour of his mind that he every personage produces the effect intended." | tolerated so much as he did in Shakspere, True. But it was no intended effect of the and admired so much; in this respect going madness of Hamlet to cause "much mirth." farther perhaps than many of our Own Every word that Hamlet utters has some- countrymen of no mean reputation, such thing in it which sounds the depths of our as Shaftesbury and Bolingbroke in 1730. intellectual being, because every word is In his 'Discourse on Tragedy,' prefixed to consistent with his own character, which, 'Brutus,' and addressed to Bolingbroke in of all poetical creations, sends us most to that year, he says, "Not being able, my lord, search into the mysteries of our own in- to risk upon the French stage verses without dividual natures. This, if we understand rhyme, such as are the usage of Italy and of it aright, is poetry. But Johnson says, England, I have at least desired to transport "Voltaire expresses his wonder that our to our scene certain beauties of yours. It is author's extravagances are endured by a na- true, and I avow it, that the English theatre tion which has seen the tragedy of 'Cato.' is very faulty. I have heard from your mouth Let him be answered, that Addison speaks the that you have not a good tragedy. But in comlanguage of poets, and Shakspeare of men. pensation you have some admirable scenes in We find in 'Cato' innumerable beauties which these very monstrous pieces. Until the preenamour us of its author, but we see nothing sent time almost all the tragic authors of that acquaints us with human sentiments or your nation have wanted that purity, that human actions; we place it with the fairest regular conduct, those bienséances of action and noblest progeny which judgment pro- and style, that elegance, and all those repagates by conjunction with learning; but finements of art, which have established the 'Othello' is the vigorous and vivacious off- reputation of the French theatre since the spring of observation, impregnated with ge- great Corneille. But the most irregular of nius." If Addison speaks "the language of your pieces have one grand merit-it is that poets," properly so called, 'Cato' is poetry. of action." In the same letter we have If Shakspere speaks the language of men, as his opinion of Shakspere, which is certainly distinct from the language of poets, 'Othello' not that of a cold critic, but of one who is not poetry. It needs no further argument admired even where he could not approve, to show that the critic has a false theory of and blamed as we had been accustomed to blame:-" With what pleasure have I seen in London your tragedy of 'Julius Cæsar,' which for a hundred and fifty years has been the delight of-your nation! I assuredly do not pretend to approve the barbarous irregularities with which it abounds. It is only astonishing that one finds not more of them in a work composed in an age of ignorance, by a man who even knew not Latin, and who had no master but his own genius. But, in the midst of so many gross faults, with what ravishment have I seen Brutus," &c. as it is, of more value than the vague homage of those who, despising, or affecting to despise, Voltaire's system, have embraced no system of their own, and thus infallibly come to be more dogmatical, more supercilious, in their abuse, and more creeping in their praise, than the most slavish disciple of a school wholly opposed to Shakspere, but consecrated by time, by high example, and by national opinion. The worst things which Voltaire has said of Shakspere are conceived in this spirit, and therefore ought not in truth to All this is perfectly intel-offend Shakspere's warmest admirers. "He had a genius full of power and fruitfulness, of the natural and the sublime”—this is the praise. The dispraise is linked to it:"Without the least spark of good taste, and without the slightest knowledge of rules." We may dissent from this, but it is not fair to quarrel with it. He then goes on:"I will say a hazardous thing, but true, that the merit of this author has ruined the English theatre. There are so many fine scenes, so many grand and terrible passages spread through his monstrous farces which they call tragedies, that his pieces have always been represented with extreme suc cess. ligible, and demands no harsher censure than we have a right to apply to Dryden, who says nearly as strong things, and writes most of his own tragedies in the spirit of a devoted worshipper of the French school. In 1761, some thirty years after his letter to Bolingbroke, Voltaire writes' An Essay on the English Theatre,' in which he expresses the wonder, which Johnson notices, that the nation which has 'Cato' can endure Shakspere. In this essay he has a long analysis of 'Hamlet,' in which, without attempting to penetrate at all into the real idea of that drama, he gives such an account of the plot as may exaggerate what ne regards as its absurdities. He then says, "We cannot have a more forcible example of the difference of taste among nations. Let us, after this, speak of the rules of Aristotle, and the three unities, and the bienséances, and the | art—that he cannot outrage us. For what necessity of never leaving the scene empty, and that no person should go out or come in without a sensible reason. Let us talk, after this, of the artful arrangement of the plot and its natural development; of the expressions being simple and noble; of making princes speak with the decency which they always have, or ought to have; of never violating the rules of language. It is clear that a whole nation may be enchanted without giving oneself such trouble." No one can be more consistent than Voltaire in the expression of his opinions. It is not the individual judgment of the man betraying him into a doubtful and varying tone, but his uniform theory of the poetical art, which directs all his censure of Shakspere; and which therefore makes his admiration, such We smile at the man's power of ridicule when he travesties a plot of Shakspere, as in the dissertation prefixed to 'Semiramis.' But his object is so manifest |—that of the elevation of his own theory of is his conclusion? That Shakspere would have been a perfect poet if he had lived in the time of Addison+. The famous Letter to the Academy,' in 1776, was the crowning effort of Voltaire's hostility to Shakspere. In that year was announced a complete translation of Shakspere; and several of the plays were published as a commencement of the undertaking. France, according to Grimm, was in a ferment. The announcement of this translation appears to have enraged Voltaire. It said that Shakspere was the creator of the sublime art of the theatre, which received from his hands existence and perfection; *Lettres Philosophiques.' Lettre 18. 'Correspondance,' 3me partie, tome 1re. |