We have heard it objected to ROMEO AND JULIET that it is founded on
an idle passion between a boy and a girl, who have scarcely seen and
can have but little sympathy or rational esteem for one another, who
have had no experience of the good or ills of life, and whose
raptures or despair must be therefore equally groundless and
fantastical. Whoever objects to the youth of the parties in this
play as 'too unripe and crude' to pluck the sweets of love, and
wishes to see a first-love carried on into a good old age, and the
passions taken at the rebound, when their force is spent, may find
all this done in the Stranger and in other German plays, where they
do things by contraries, and transpose nature to inspire sentiment
and create philosophy. Shakespeare proceeded in a more
straightforward and, we think, effectual way. He did not endeavour
to extract beauty from wrinkles, or the wild throb of passion from
the last expiring sigh of indifference. He did not 'gather grapes of
thorns nor figs of thistles'. It was not his way. But he has given a
picture of human life, such as it is in the order of nature. He has
founded the passion of the two lovers not on the pleasures they had
experienced, but on all the pleasures they had NOT experienced. All
that was to come of life was theirs. At that untried source of
promised happiness they slaked their thirst, and the first eager
draught made them drunk with love and joy.
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