Characters of Shakespeares Plays | Page 9

the heavens, and
threatens to tear the world from off its hinges; who, more terrible than
AEschylus, makes our hair stand on end, and congeals our blood with
horror, possessed, at the same time, the insinuating loveliness of the
sweetest poetry. He plays with love like a child; and his songs are
breathed out like melting sighs. He unites in his genius the utmost
elevation and the utmost depth; and the most foreign, and even
apparently irreconcilable properties subsist in him peaceably together.
The world of spirits and nature have laid all their treasures at his feet.
In strength a demi-god, in profundity of view a prophet, in all-seeing
wisdom a protecting spirit of a higher order, he lowers himself to
mortals, as if unconscious of his superiority: and is as open and
unassuming as a child.
'Shakespeare's comic talent is equally wonderful with that which he has
shown in the pathetic and tragic: it stands on an equal elevation, and

possesses equal extent and profundity. All that I before wished was, not
to admit that the former preponderated. He is highly inventive in comic
situations and motives. It will be hardly possible to show whence he
has taken any of them; whereas, in the serious part of his drama, he has
generally laid hold of something already known. His comic characters
are equally true, various, and profound, with his serious. So little is he
disposed to caricature, that we may rather say many of his traits are
almost too nice and delicate for the stage, that they can only be
properly seized by a great actor, and fully understood by a very acute
audience. Not only has he delineated many kinds of folly; he has also
contrived to exhibit mere stupidity in a most diverting and entertaining
manner.' Vol. ii, p. 145.
We have the rather availed ourselves of this testimony of a foreign
critic in behalf of Shakespeare, because our own countryman, Dr.
Johnson, has not been so favourable to him. It may be said of
Shakespeare, that 'those who are not for him are against him': for
indifference is here the height of injustice. We may sometimes, in order
'to do a great right, do a little wrong'. An over-strained enthusiasm is
more pardonable with respect to Shakespeare than the want of it; for
our admiration cannot easily surpass his genius. We have a high respect
for Dr. Johnson's character and understanding, mixed with something
like personal attachment: but he was neither a poet nor a judge of
poetry. He might in one sense be a judge of poetry as it falls within the
limits and rules of prose, but not as it is poetry. Least of all was he
qualified to be a judge of Shakespeare, who 'alone is high fantastical'.
Let those who have a prejudice against Johnson read Boswell's Life of
him: as those whom he has prejudiced against Shakespeare should read
his Irene. We do not say that a man to be a critic must necessarily be a
poet: but to be a good critic, he ought not to be a bad poet. Such poetry
as a man deliberately writes, such, and such only will he like. Dr.
Johnson's Preface to his edition of Shakespeare looks like a laborious
attempt to bury the characteristic merits of his author under a load of
cumbrous phraseology, and to weigh his excellences and defects in
equal scales, stuffed full of 'swelling figures and sonorous epithets'. Nor
could it well be otherwise; Dr. Johnson's general powers of reasoning
overlaid his critical susceptibility. All his ideas were cast in a given
mould, in a set form: they were made out by rule and system, by climax,

inference, and antithesis:-- Shakespeare's were the reverse. Johnson's
understanding dealt only in round numbers: the fractions were lost
upon him. He reduced everything to the common standard of
conventional propriety; and the most exquisite refinement or sublimity
produced an effect on his mind, only as they could be translated into
the language of measured prose. To him an excess of beauty was a fault;
for it appeared to him like an excrescence; and his imagination was
dazzled by the blaze of light. His writings neither shone with the beams
of native genius, nor reflected them. The shifting shapes of fancy, the
rainbow hues of things, made no impression on him: he seized only on
the permanent and tangible. He had no idea of natural objects but 'such
as he could measure with a two-fool rule, or tell upon ten fingers': he
judged of human nature in the same way, by mood and figure: he saw
only the definite, the positive, and the practical, the average forms of
things, not their striking differences--their classes, not their degrees. He
was a man of strong common sense