Nor is this impression removed by his admirer the late Mr. Ireland,
who claims for the Characters that, 'although it professes to be
dramatic criticism, it is in reality a discourse on the philosophy
of life and human nature, more suggestive than many approved
treatises expressly devoted to that subject'. Well, for the second
half of this pronouncement--constat. 'You see, my friend,' writes
Goldsmith's Citizen of the World ,'there is nothing so ridiculous
that it has not at some time been said by some philosopher.' But for
the first part, while a priori Mr. Ireland ought to be right--since
Hazlitt, as we have seen, came to literary criticism by the road of
philosophical writing--I confess to finding very little philosophy
in this book.
Over and above the gusto of the writing, which is infectious enough,
and the music of certain passages in which we foretaste the masterly
prose of Hazlitt's later Essays, I find in the book three merits
which, as I study it, more and more efface that first impression of
flimsiness.
(1) To begin with, Hazlitt had hold of the right end of the stick.
He really understood that Shakespeare was a dramatic craftsman,
studied him as such, worshipped him for his incomparable skill in
doing what he tried, all his life and all the time, to do. In these
days much merit must be allowed to a Shakespearian critic who takes
his author steadily as a dramatist and not as a philosopher, or a
propagandist, or a lawyer's clerk, or a disappointed lover, or for
his acquaintance with botany, politics, cyphers, Christian Science,
any of the thousand and one things that with their rival degrees of
intrinsic importance agree in being, for Shakespeare, nihil ad rem.
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