An over-strained
enthusiasm is more pardonable with respect to Shakespeare than the
want of it; for our admiration cannot easily surpass his genius. We
have a high respect for Dr. Johnson's character and understanding,
mixed with something like personal attachment: but he was neither a
poet nor a judge of poetry. He might in one sense be a judge of
poetry as it falls within the limits and rules of prose, but not as
it is poetry. Least of all was he qualified to be a judge of
Shakespeare, who 'alone is high fantastical'. Let those who have a
prejudice against Johnson read Boswell's Life of him: as those whom
he has prejudiced against Shakespeare should read his Irene. We do
not say that a man to be a critic must necessarily be a poet: but to
be a good critic, he ought not to be a bad poet. Such poetry as a
man deliberately writes, such, and such only will he like. Dr.
Johnson's Preface to his edition of Shakespeare looks like a
laborious attempt to bury the characteristic merits of his author
under a load of cumbrous phraseology, and to weigh his excellences
and defects in equal scales, stuffed full of 'swelling figures and
sonorous epithets'. Nor could it well be otherwise; Dr. Johnson's
general powers of reasoning overlaid his critical susceptibility.
All his ideas were cast in a given mould, in a set form: they were
made out by rule and system, by climax, inference, and antithesis:--
Shakespeare's were the reverse.
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