Characters of Shakespeares Plays | Page 5

own admiration is, on the whole, more
discriminating and judicious, there are not many points on which,
especially after reading his eloquent exposition of them, we should be
much inclined to disagree with him.
The book, as we have already intimated, 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