LECTURE III.

CHARACTERS AND CHARACTERISTICS OF SHAKSPEARE's age-conDITIONS AND RESOURCES OF GENIUS-NATURE AND OBJECT OF ART.

My last lecture was mainly devoted to an exposition of what I conceived to be the faculties, the processes, and the qualities of Shakspeare's mind. The remainder of the course will be occupied with general discussions on art, and with particular analyses of the poet's works. I trust, however, it will not be deemed inappropriate, first to take a brief view of the characters and charac

teristics of his age. This may help to remove some misconceptions and obscurations, and thus open for us a clearer view, not only of Shakspeare, but into the whole region of modern art.

There has been, and perhaps still is, a very general impression in certain high places, that Shakspeare was the creature of a rude age, and therefore the creator of rude though wonderful productions. Indeed the rudeness of his age, and the rudeness of his works, have been alternately used as premise and conclusion; each has in turn been assumed, and then the other inferred from it. "Born in a rude age," says Mr. Hume, "and educated in the lowest manner, he was without any instruction, either from the world or from books ;" and this oracular criticism has been echoed and re-echoed so many times,

in one form or another, that it is now known to be but the reflection of a voice, and is fast echoing itself into silence. Now, with submission to Mr. Hume and the school he represents, there is not a word of truth in this statement whatever; and his subsequent remark, that Shakspeare "cannot, for any length of time, uphold a reasonable propriety of thought," whether it be viewed as bearing the relation of premise or conclusion to the former, has just as much truth, and just as much want of truth, as its fellow.

Hume, though but a half-man, was probably a sincere one; and I know not whether it be more incredible, that he should say what he did not believe, or that he should believe what he said. But he seems to have been born and educated on purpose to write metaphysics and political history. He could doubtless spin theories and narrate facts well enough;-though even here, as Burke says, "he seems to have aimed rather at telling a good story, than at writing a true history ;" and therefore often shows more skill in tormenting facts than narrating them ;—but in any thing relating to art, or nature, or religion, I do not see how he could possibly tell the truth. Himself a perfect logic-mill, both by nature and discipline, it seems to have been an especial part of his mission, to grind the sceptical consequences out of the then prevailing system of metaphysical philosophy. The taper-light of a closet logic appears to have been "the fountain-light of all his day, the master-light of all his seeing," a light which shines well enough in the closet, but which the breath of nature is very apt to blow out. His mind fed almost exclusively on speculative theorems and diagrams; and of these he was a finished epi

cure.

To draw inferences, the premises being given; to prove that nothing could be proved, seems to have been the chief end of his creation; and the civil wars are said to have been about the only thing that ever transported him out of the dreamy world of abstractions, in which he lived, and moved, and had his being, into something like epic force and epic clearness of thought and speech. He could doubtless fetch you the leg of a metaphysical notion from the Central-Africa of Duns Scotus or Thomas Aquinas, in the twinkling of an eye; but he seems never to have gone out of his closet long enough to see what there was in nature, or whether there was any such thing as nature at all. Engrossed, like many others of his time, in the abstractions of science, he had neither the imagination to see, nor the genial impulse to feel, the individualities of art. Such men can study art, as they study nature, only in the process of dissection- -a process, which of course scares away the very life that makes her nature; so that they get, after all, but a sort of post-mortem knowledge of her. On the whole, Mr. Hume is a fine exemplification of the truth, that the more we use the head without the heart-the more we speculate without love, or reverence, or religion, the unwiser do we become; for there is not a single thing of God's or nature's making in the universe, that can be known, or otherwise than misknown, by such a study. The astonishing acuteness, which made Mr. Hume such an exquisite voluptuary among political and metaphysical abstractions, was not unlike those finely-ground telescopes, which disclose spots on the moon. Without the intervention of other faculties, they deceive the mind, even

while assisting the eye; for they lead it to regard as defects what are really blooming islands, waving forests, laughing valleys, and majestic mountains; and thus cause it to find fault with the moon for not being a mere dead, perpetual waste of waters; that is, for not being good for nothing.

Now, to say that Shakspeare's age was a rude age, that it was without true culture, in the best sense of the term, is about as magnificent a piece of historical misrepresentation as can easily be found. It is one of the instances so common in modern times, wherein people have presumed their fathers to have been in the dark, because they have themselves got into the dark respecting their fathers. But, even if it were true, the following assertion, that Shakspeare "was without any instruction either from the world or from books," besides being false in point of fact, betrays a total misconception of the nature of genius, and of the manner and conditions of its development. And the remark, that Shakspeare "cannot, for any length of time, uphold a reasonable propriety of thought," is directly in the teeth of standing facts which all can see and examine for themselves, provided they have eyes. It is truly surprising, that Mr. Hume should have made statements so palpably false; and can be satisfactorily accounted for only by supposing he had never read Shakspeare at all, nor, indeed, any thing about him, unless, perhaps, the contemptuous and contemptible criticisms of Voltaire. Where, one might ask, does Mr. Hume suppose the world was when Shakspeare wrote? Or does he suppose the poet had no eyes to read it with? That were indeed a serious difficulty. How hard it is to read the world with

out eyes, Mr. Hume himself hath abundantly shown us. Shakspeare, however, probably could not have read any thing to suit Mr. Hume, without a pair of Dellacruscan spectacles; an article which, fortunately, had not come to be substituted for natural eyes in Shakspeare's time. It has long been the misfortune of a certain class of critics, that, distrusting the visual organs which nature gave them, they have preferred the glass eyes of the schools. Having got these, they might about as well have wooden heads as any, filled with clock-work instead of brains; and such an establishment, I suspect, would be no very unfit representative of the class of poets who swayed the sceptre of art when Hume wrote: for if ever there was a wooden-headed man, I take it Nahum Tate was one; nevertheless, he had brains enough, as we shall see hereafter, to improve some of Shakspeare's best and greatest works!

But whether Shakspeare had eyes to read nature with, may seem less doubtful to some, than whether Mr. Hume had eyes to read Shakspeare with. Of Shakspeare's book-knowledge I have already remarked, in speaking of his life. That he was a deep and diligent student of books, as far as they were to be had, is evident, in that many of the fables which form the groundwork, or rather, frame-work of his plays, were taken from novels and romances then in circulation; and his historical dramas prove, not indeed that he had read more history, but that he had read it far better than Mr. Hume. If the skilful collection and arrangement of names and dates and events; in a word, if the dry bones of the past, carefully wired up into an anatomy,— a work done by dissecting the past, not by painting it,