Characters of Shakespeares Plays | Page 5

is written less to tell the reader what Mr. H. KNOWS about Shakespeare or his writings than what he FEELS about them--and WHY he feels so--and thinks that all who profess to love poetry should feel so likewise.... He seems pretty generally, indeed, in a state of happy intoxication--and has borrowed from his great original, not indeed the force or brilliancy of his fancy, but something of its playfulness, and a large share of his apparent joyousness and self-indulgence in its exercise. It is evidently a great pleasure to him to be fully possessed with the beauties of his author, and to follow the impulse of his unrestrained eagerness to impress them upon his readers.
Upon this, Hazlitt, no doubt, would have commented, 'Well, and why not? I choose to understand drama through my FEELINGS.' To surrender to great art was, for him, and defnitely, a part of the critic's function--' A genuine criticism should, as I take it, repeat the colours, the light and shade, the soul and body of a work.' This contention, for which Hazlitt fought all his life and fought brilliantly, is familiar to us by this time as the gage flung to didactic criticism by the 'impressionist', and in our day, in the generation just closed or closing, with a Walter Pater or a Jules Lemaitre for challenger, the betting has run on the impressionist. But in 1817 Hazlitt had all the odds against him when he stood up and accused the great Dr. Johnson of having made criticism 'a kind of Procrustes' bed of genius, where he might cut down imagination to matter-of-fact, regulate the passions according to reason, and translate the whole into logical diagrams and rhetorical declamation'.
Thus he says of Shakespeare's characters, in contradiction to what Pope had observed, and to what every one else feels, that each character is a species, instead of being an individual. He in fact found the general species or DIDACTIC form in Shakespeare's characters, which was all he sought or cared for; he did not find the individual traits, or the DRAMATIC distinctions which Shakespeare has engrafted on this general nature, because he felt no interest in them.
Nothing is easier to prove than that in this world nobody ever invented anything. So it may be proved that, Johnson having written 'Great thoughts are always general', Blake had countered him by affirming (long before Hazlitt) that 'To generalize is to be an idiot. To particularize is the great distinction of merit': even as it may be demonstrable that Charles Lamb, in his charming personal chat about the Elizabethan dramatists and his predilections among them, was already putting into practice what he did not trouble to theorize. But when it comes to setting out the theory, grasping the worth of the principle, stating it and fighting for it, I think Hazlitt may fairly claim first share in the credit.
He did not, when he wrote the following pages, know very much, even about his subject. As his biographer says:
My grandfather came to town with very little book-knowledge ... He had a fair stock of ideas ... But of the volumes which form the furniture of a gentleman's library he was egregiously ignorant ... Mr. Hazlitt's resources were emphatically internal; from his own mind he drew sufficient for himself.
Now while it may be argued with plausibility, and even with truth, that the first qualification of a critic--at any rate of a critic of poetry--is, as Jeffrey puts the antithesis, to FEEL rather than to KNOW; while to be delicately sensitive and sympathetic counts more than to be well-informed; nevertheless learning remains respectable. He who can assimilate it without pedantry (which is another word for intellectual indigestion) actually improves and refines his feelings while enlarging their scope and at the same time enlarging his resources of comparison and illustration. Hazlitt, who had something like a genius for felicitous, apposite quotation, and steadily bettered it as he grew older, would certainly have said 'Yes' to this. At all events learning impresses; it carries weight: and therefore it has always seemed to me that he showed small tact, if some modesty, by heaping whole pages of Schlegel into his own preface.
For Schlegel [Footnote: Whose work, by the way, cries aloud for a new and better English translation.] was not only a learned critic but a great one: and this mass of him--cast with seeming carelessness, just here, into the scales--does give the reader, as with a jerk, the sensation that Hazlitt has, of his rashness, invited that which suddenly throws him up in the air to kick the beam: that he has provoked a comparison which exhibits his own performance as clever but flimsy.
Nor is this impression removed by his admirer the late Mr. Ireland, who claims for the Characters that, 'although it professes