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 suddenly throws him up in the air to kick the
beam: that he has provoked a comparison which exhibits his own
performance as clever but flimsy.
Pages:
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28