any other circumstance: for it works unconsciously, like nature, and receives its impressions from a kind of inspiration.”[72] It is this power that he has in mind when he says “Poetry is infusing the same spirit in a number of things, or bathing them all as it were, in the same overflowing sense of delight.”[73] It shows Hazlitt to have fully apprehended the guiding principle of the new ideal of criticism which, looking upon the work of art as an act of original creation and not of mechanical composition, based its judgment on a direct sympathy with the artist’s mind instead of resorting to a general rule. In the light of this principle he is enabled to avoid the pitfalls of a moralistic interpretation of literature and to decide the question as to the relative importance of substance and treatment with a certainty which seems to preclude the possibility of any other answer.
It is not the dignity of the theme which constitutes the great work of art, for in that case a prose summary of the “Divine Comedy” would be as exalted as the original, and it would be necessary merely to know the subject of a poem in order to pass judgment upon it. A low or a trivial subject may be raised by the imagination of the artist who recognizes in it the elements of beauty or power. No definition of poetry can be worth anything which would exclude “The Rape of the Lock”; and Murillo’s painting of “The Two Beggar Boys” is as much worth having “as almost any picture in the world.”[74] “Yet it is not true that execution is everything, and the class or subject nothing. The highest subjects, equally well-executed (which, however, rarely happens), are the best.”[75] Though each is perfect in its kind, there can be no difficulty in deciding the question of greatness between “King Lear” and “The Comedy of Errors.” “The greatest strength of genius is shewn in describing the strongest passions: for the power of imagination, in works of invention, must be in proportion to the force of the natural impressions, which are the subject of them.”[76] One also finds a test of relative values in the measure of fulness with which the work of art reflects the complex elements of life. If we estimate a tragedy of Shakespeare above one of Lillo or Moore, it is because “impassioned poetry is an emanation of the moral and intellectual part of our nature, as well as of the sensitive—of the desire to know, the will to act, and the power to feel; and ought to appeal to these different parts of the constitution, in order to be perfect.”[77]
In treating of the specific distinction of poetry Hazlitt does not escape the usual difficulties. Taking his point of departure from Milton’s “thoughts that voluntary move harmonious numbers,” he defines poetry in a passage that satisfactorily anticipates the familiar one of Carlyle, as “the music of language answering to the music of the mind. … Wherever any object takes such a hold of the mind as to make us dwell upon it, and brood over it, melting the heart in tenderness, or kindling it to a sentiment of enthusiasm;—wherever a movement of imagination or passion is impressed on the mind, by which it seeks to prolong or repeat the emotion, to bring all other objects into accord with it, and to give the same movement of harmony, sustained and continuous, or gradually varied according to the occasion, to the sounds that express it—this is poetry. The musical in sound is the sustained and continuous; the musical in thought is the sustained and continuous also. There is a near connection between music and deep-rooted passion.”[78] In this mystical direction a definition could go no further, but like nearly all writers and speakers Hazlitt is inclined to use the word poetry in a variety of more or less connected meanings,[79] ordinarily legitimate enough, but somewhat embarrassing when it is a question of definition. “That which lifts the spirit above the earth, which draws the soul out of itself with indescribable longings, is,” he says, “poetry in kind, and generally fit to become so in name, by ‘being married to immortal verse.’ ”[80] If it is true that Pilgrim’s Progress and Robinson Crusoe possess the “essence and the power of poetry” and require only the addition of verse to become absolutely so,[81] then the musical expression is only a factitious ornament, to be added or removed at the caprice of the writer. But Hazlitt is careful to declare that verse does not make the whole difference between poetry and prose, leaving the whole question as vaguely suspended as ever.[82]
Bare theorizing, according to his own confession, was no favorite pursuit with Hazlitt. He enjoyed himself much more in the analysis of an individual author or his work. His aversion to literary cant, his love of “saying things that are his own in a way of his own,” were here most in evidence. What he says of Milton might appropriately be applied to himself, that he formed the most intense conception of things and then embodied them by a single stroke of his pen. In a phrase or in a sentence he stamped the character of an author indelibly, and, enemy to commonplace though he was, became a cause of commonplace in others. No matter how much might already have been written on a subject (and Hazlitt did not make a practice of celebrating neglected obscurity) his own view stood out fresh and clear, and yet his judgments were never eccentric. He wrestled with a writer’s thoughts, absorbed his most passionate feelings, and mirrored back his most exquisite perceptions with “all the color, the light and the shade.” His fertility is more amazing than his intensity, for no critic of nearly equal rank has enriched English literature with so many valuable and enduring judgments on so great a variety of subjects. Dr. Johnson is by common consent the spokesman of the eighteenth century, or of its dominant class; Coleridge and Lamb are entitled to the glory of revealing the literature between Spenser and Milton to English readers, and the former rendered the additional service of acting as the interpreter of Wordsworth. But to give an idea of Hazlitt’s scope would require a summary of opinions embracing poetry from Chaucer and Spenser to Wordsworth and Byron, prose sacred and profane from Bacon and Jeremy Taylor to Burke and Edward Irving, the drama in its two flourishing periods, the familiar essay from Steele and Addison to Lamb and Leigh Hunt, the novel from Defoe to Sir Walter Scott. This does not begin to suggest Hazlitt’s versatility. His own modest though somewhat over-alliterative words are that he has “at least glanced over a number of subjects—painting, poetry, prose, plays, politics, parliamentary speakers, metaphysical lore, books, men, and things.”[83]
The importance of Hazlitt’s Shakespearian criticism is no longer open to question. Though Coleridge alluded to them slightingly as out-and-out imitations of Lamb,[84] Hazlitt’s dicta on the greatest English genius are equal in depth to Lamb’s and far more numerous; and while in profoundness and subtlety they fall short of the remarks of Coleridge himself, they surpass them in intensity and carrying power. To both of these men Hazlitt owed a great deal in his appreciation of Shakespeare, and perhaps even more to August Wilhelm Schlegel, whose Lectures on Dramatic Literature he reviewed in 1815.[85] His allusions to Schlegel border on enthusiasm and he makes it a proud claim that he has done “more than any one except Schlegel to vindicate the Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays from the stigma of French criticism.”[86] But however great his obligation, there was some point in the compliment of the German critic when he declared that Hazlitt had gone beyond him (l’avoit dépassé) in his Shakespearian opinions.[87] A few years later Heine maintained that the only significant commentator of Shakespeare produced by England was William Hazlitt.[88] Coleridge’s notes, it is to be remembered, were not at that time generally accessible.
Hazlitt’s attitude toward Shakespeare was wholesomely on this side of idolatry. He did not make it an article of faith to admire everything that Shakespeare had written, and refused his praise to the poems and most of the sonnets. Even Schlegel and Coleridge could not persuade him to see beauties in what appeared to be blemishes, but in a general estimate of Shakespeare’s all-embracing genius he conceived his faults to be “of just as much consequence as his bad spelling.”[89] He saw in him a genius who comprehended all humanity, who represented it poetically in all its shades and varieties. He examined all the fine distinctions of character, he studied Shakespeare’s manner of combining and contrasting them so as to produce a unity of tone above even the art of the classic unities. From the irresponsible comedy of Falstaff to the deepest tragic notes of Lear, the whole gamut of human emotions encounters responsive chords in the critic’s mind—the young love of Romeo and Juliet or the voluptuous abandonment of Antony and Cleopatra, the intellect of Iago irresistibly impelled to malignant activity or Hamlet entangled in the coils of a fatal introspection. To the sheer poetry of Shakespeare he is also acutely sensitive, to the soft moonlit atmosphere of the “Midsummernight’s Dream,” to the tender gloom of “Cymbeline,” to the “philosophic poetry” of “As You Like It.” Some of his interpretations of isolated passages are hardly to be surpassed. He comments minutely