Characters of Shakespeares Plays | Page 4

Reynell, of 21,
Piccadilly, the head of a printing establishment of old and high standing;
and it was agreed that 100 pounds should be paid to the author for the
entire copyright ... The volume was published by Mr. Hunter of St.
Paul's Churchyard; and the author was gratified by the prompt insertion
of a complimentary notice in the Edinburgh Review. The whole edition
went off in six weeks; and yet it was a half- guinea book.' [Footnote:
Memoirs of William Hazlitt, by W. Carew Hazlitt, 1887. Vol. i, p.

228.]
The reader, who comes to it through this Introduction, will note two
points to qualify his appreciation of the book as a specimen of Hazlitt's
critical writing, and a third that helps to account for its fortune in 1817.
It was the work of a man in his thirty-eighth year, and to that extent has
maturity. But it was also his first serious essay, after many false starts,
in an art and in a style which, later on, he brilliantly mastered. The
subject is most pleasantly handled, and with an infectious enthusiasm:
the reader feels all the while that his sympathy with Shakespeare is
being stimulated and his understanding promoted: but it scarcely yields
either the light or the music which Hazlitt communicates in his later
and more famous essays.
For the third point, Hazlitt had made enemies nor had ever been
cautious of making them: and these enemies were now the 'upper dog'.
Indeed, they always had been: but the fall of Napoleon, which almost
broke his heart, had set them in full cry, and they were not clement in
their triumph. It is not easy, even on the evidence before us, to realize
that a number of the finest spirits in this country, nursed in the hopes of
the French Revolution, kept their admiration of Napoleon, the hammer
of old bad monarchies, down to the end and beyond it: that Napier, for
example, historian of the war in the Peninsula and as gallant a soldier
as ever fought under Wellington, when--late in life, as he lay on his
sofa tortured by an old wound-- news was brought him of Napoleon's
death, burst into a storm of weeping that would not be controlled. On
Hazlitt, bound up heart and soul in what he regarded as the cause of
French and European liberty and enlightenment, Waterloo, the fall of
the Emperor, the restoration of the Bourbons, fell as blows almost
stupefying, and his indignant temper charged Heaven with them as
wrongs not only public but personal to himself.
In the writing of the Characters he had found a partial drug for despair.
But his enemies, as soon as might be, took hold of the anodyne. Like
the Bourbons, they had learnt nothing and forgotten nothing.
The Quarterly Review moved--for a quarterly--with something like
agility. A second edition of the book had been prepared, and was
selling briskly, when this Review launched one of its diatribes against
the work and its author.
Taylor and Hessey [the booksellers] told him subsequently that they

had sold nearly two editions in about three months, but after the
Quarterly review of them came out they never sold another copy. 'My
book,' he said, 'sold well--the first edition had gone off in six
weeks--till that review came out. I had just prepared a second
edition--such was called for--but then the Quarterly told the public that
I was a fool and a dunce, and more, that I was an evil disposed person:
and the public, supposing Gifford to know best, confessed that it had
been a great ass to be pleased where it ought not to be, and the sale
completely stopped.
The review, when examined, is seen to be a smart essay in detraction
with its arguments ad invidiam very deftly inserted. But as a piece of
criticism it misses even such points as might fairly have been made
against the book; as, for example, that it harps too monotonously upon
the tense string of enthusiasm. Hazlitt could not have applied to this
work the motto--'For I am nothing if not critical'--which he chose for
his View of the English Stage in 1818; the Characters being anything
but 'critical' in the sense there connoted. Jeffrey noted this in the
forefront of a sympathetic article in the Edinburgh.
It is, in truth, rather an encomium on Shakespeare than a commentary
or a critique on him--and it is written more to show extraordinary love
than extraordinary knowledge of his productions ... The author is not
merely an admirer of our great dramatist, but an Idolater of him; and
openly professes his idolatry. We have ourselves too great a leaning to
the same superstition to blame him very much for his error: and though
we think, of course, that our