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.
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