ge has he not outseen? What gentleman has he not
instructed in the rudeness of his behavior?
18. Some able and appreciating critics think no criticism on
Shakspeare valuable, that does not rest purely on the dramatic merit;
that he is falsely judged as poet and philosopher. I think as highly
as these critics of his dramatic merit, who still think it secondary.
He was a full man, who liked to talk; a brain exhaling thoughts and
images, which, seeking vent, found the drama next at hand. Had he been
less, we should have had to consider how well he filled his place, how
good a dramatist he was,--and he is the best in the world. But it
turns out, that what he has to say is of that weight, as to withdraw
some attention from the vehicle; and he is like some saint whose
history is to be rendered into all languages, into verse and prose,
into songs and pictures, and cut up into proverbs; so that the
occasion which gave the saint's meaning the form of a conversation, or
of a prayer, or of a code of laws, is immaterial, compared with the
universality of its application. So it fares with the wise Shakspeare
and his book of life. He wrote the airs for all our modern music: he
wrote the text of modern life; the text of manners: he drew the man of
England and Europe; the father of the man in America: he drew the man,
and described the day, and what is done in it: he read the hearts of
men and women, their probity, and their second thought, and wiles; the
wiles of innocence, and the transitions by which virtues and vices
slide into their contraries: he could divide the mother's part from
the father's part in the face of the child, or draw the fine
demarcations of freedom and of fate: he knew the laws of repression
which make the police of nature: and all the sweets and all the
terrors of human lot lay in his mind as truly but as softly as the
landscape lies on the eye. And the importance of this wisdom of life
sinks the form, as of Drama or Epic, out of notice. 'Tis like making a
question concerning the paper on which a king's message is written.
19. Shakspeare is as much out of the category of eminent authors, as
he is out of the crowd. He is inconceivably wise; the others,
conceivably. A good reader can, in a sort, nestle into Plato's brain,
and think from thence; but not into Shakspeare's. We are still out of
doors. For executive faculty, for creation, Shakspeare is unique. No
man can imagine it better. He was the farthest reach
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