LECTURE V.

SHAKSPEARE'S ALLEGED WANT OF TASTE-HIS FEMALE

CHARACTERS.

IN my last lecture I endeavoured to vindicate Shakspeare from the criticisms of the dissecting school, touching the principle and method of his productions. That Shakspeare developed his subjects organically and according to their innate laws, not according to any system of external rules, was spoken of as the crowning excellence of his works. If, therefore, in this respect, he had not offended the critics in question, his works had been comparatively worthless.

But perhaps the greatest perplexity with these critics was, how to account for the brotherhood between the wonderful excellencies which they acknowledged, and the wonderful faults which they censured. How a mind capable of such exalted beauties should have been betrayed into such shocking deformities, was indeed a problem of no very easy solution. Unable to disentangle the knot which themselves had made, they were obliged to devise some theoretic knife wherewith to cut it asunder. The readiest, perhaps the rationalest way that occurred to them was, to attribute the acknowledged beauties to an astonishing power of genius; the alleged defects, to an equally astonishing want of taste. They thus resorted to an imaginary opposition between genius

and taste, as if these powers might, perhaps must be, in inverse proportion. Akin to this idea, or rather, another phase of the same thing, was the notion, that the excellencies were due to occasional gusts of inspiration; the faults to a prevailing lack of judgment. They accordingly spoke of Shakspeare as a wayward, thoughtless being, who wanted as much of judgment as he had of genius; who, in the words of Hume," frequently hits as if by inspiration, a striking peculiarity of sentiment adapted to a single character, but whose want of judgment gives way only by intervals to irradiations of genius." Here, again, is assumed a sort of antithesis *between genius and intellect, as though genius, instead of being in a greater or less degree the harmony of all the faculties, were a distinct faculty of the mind, which might, and in Shakspeare did, exist in so great a degree as to exclude the others.

With such freedom have critics made reprisals on Shakspeare's intellect, as if to indemnify themselves for his superiority of genius. Thus has the greatest of poets been turned into a sort of Balaam's-ass, who sometimes indeed gave forth true revelations, but who, as soon as the fit of inspiration was over, again became as asinine as ever. This theory constantly vitiates their criticisms, and perplexes their readers; a theory unsupported by facts or philosophy; and which, instead of explaining a single supposed inconsistency, is itself inconsistent with all experience. Fixed to this point, these critics sometimes vibrate, like an electrical pendulum, from positive to negative pole,-sometimes hang, like Mahomet's coffin, between opposite attractions. Swinging to and fro between the extremes of censure and praise,

each movement contradicts the preceding one; and the result of their different conclusions comes out simple zero. In following their criticisms the course of the reader's thoughts is not unlike Satan's journey through Chaos to the shores of the new creation.

"Now his sail-broad vans

He spreads for flight, and, in the surging smoke
Uplifted, spurns the ground; thence many a league,
As in a cloudy chair, ascending, rides

Audacious; then, unwares, plumb down he drops
Ten thousand fathoms deep; and to this hour
Down had been falling, had not, by ill chance,
The strong rebuff of some tumultuous cloud,
Instinct with fire and nitre, hurried him
As many miles aloft."

Often does the reader seem about to enter the gate of Shakspeare's paradise,

A violent cross wind from either coast

Blows him transverse, ten thousand leagues awry
Into the devious air;"

and after being tossed awhile from one extreme to another by antithetic winds, he comes to the conclusion that nothing can be concluded on the subject. For a long time was Shakspeare whirled round and round in the same place by this eddy of criticism, until Lessing, Goëthe, and Schlegel, in Germany, and at the same time Coleridge, Hazlitt, and Lamb, in England, stepped to his relief; and among literary men this style of criticism has now become nearly as unfashionable as it is absurd.

It is not easy, perhaps not worth the while, to determine what these critics mean by taste. If by taste be meant a quick, keen perception, and a deep, steadfast love of truth, and fitness, and order, it is inseparable, nay, it is scarcely distinguishable from genius; or rather, both are one and the same power, now seen in creative transport, now, in elective energy. In the words of Schlegel, "genius is the almost unconscious choice of the highest degree of excellence, and, consequently, it is taste in its greatest perfection." In this sense, taste views a work of art in its unity and integrity, and estimates the details by the principle that combines and organizes them. Viewed, therefore, in reference to the artist, taste necessarily implies truth, and clearness, and justness of conception, selecting and adapting means for its fullest and faithfulest manifestation. But if, by taste, be meant mere facility and accuracy in adjusting the details of a work of art to a preconcerted system of rules, it may be only another name for gentle dulness and elegant absurdity. In this sense the greatest dunces, as might be expected, have sometimes shown the most taste; for, incapable of originating a conception of a vital whole, or of moulding and assimilating the parts into an organic unity of effect, such minds can render the logical, or rather, mechanical adjustment of the parts the more perfect. The outward looks thus come off the more finished, because there is nothing but looks; the thing seems better, for that it has nothing to do but seem; just as the wax figure of a person may be more regular and correct than any real living person; or as a man may seem more pious outwardly when, nay, cause he has no inward piety at all.

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Shakspeare, for example, sometimes falls into a confusion of metaphors, but never into a confusion of thought; in nine cases out of ten the thought is but the more clear and distinct for that very confusion. Pope, on the other hand, never falls into a confusion of metaphors, but sometimes into an inextricable confusion of thought. Yet Pope, in the sense last stated, had the better taste; but then the question occurs, if such be the nature of taste, what is it good for? It is simply a convenient hack-log, whereon connoisseurs may chop critical logic, and perhaps cut off some part of the crown due only to genius, to cover their own baldness. In this sense, too, the dignified, make-believe crystallizations of character in Mrs. More's tragedies show more taste than the baby-heroic, yet genuine, life-breathing characters in Shakspeare's Troilus and Cressida. The misfortune, however, is, that the former, in their stiff, lifeless regularity, are no characters at all, but mere names set before pieces of starched and painted rhetoric; while the latter are real, though not very dignified, living men, struck off with that mixture of irony and caricature, with which a mind like Shakspeare's would naturally regard such chivalrous blusterers about their own honour. On the whole, we may safely assert, that if taste mean but a paltry popinjay connoisseurship of form, which puts the soul of a work of art into its clothes, or rather, which fritters away the soul in mere nicety of dress, then no man never had less taste than Shakspeare: but if taste mean simply an eye to see, a heart to feel, and a tongue to utter the truth, the beauty, and the life of nature and of man, then Shakspeare's taste indefinitely surpasses that of any other man who has ever written.