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Critical Notices.
Wiley and Putnam s Library of Choice Reading. No. XIII. The Age of Elizabeth. By William Hazlitt.
We cannot help regarding the thorough success of Wiley and Putnam's Library of Choice Reading, as the harbinger of a better day for the interest of American Letters. It has at length been fairly shown, that not only our educated classes, but our public at large, will purchase, and have capacity to enjoy, a kind of books immeasurably superior, in all that renders a book valuable, to the species of literature with which we have been latterly deluged.
The experiment of fine paper, well-sized type, and a tasteful form of getting up generally, has been attempted, and not in vain. The day of “cheap literature” is, we thank Heaven, happily over; and for this much-desired result it is difficult to say how much we are indebted, or rather how much we are not indebted, to the liberality and good judgment of Messrs. Wiley & Putnam. To have failed in this enterprise would have been to throw us back for several years into the quagmire of the yellow-backed pamphleteering. Of course a great deal depended upon the tact with which books for the series were selected. There was a juste milieu to be attained — a happy medium between the stilted and jejune — between the ponderous and the ephemeral. Works were required of a piquancy to render them at once popular, (for [page 28:] the immediate and extensive sale of the Library was indispensible) and at the same time, of a gravity which would enable them to make their way as volumes not only sufficiently well gotten up, but of a sufficiently standard character to warrant their preservation in our book-cases. This difficult task fell into the best hands; and the result has been one whose importance to the present interest of literature in America, can scarcely be overrated. Booksellers in this country have a trick of as implicitly following a good lead, as did les moutons de Panurge, and we fancy that we already perceive, in all quarters, a disposition to prosecute the good work of readable books, so auspiciously commenced.
Perhaps the very best, although not the last volume, of the European series, is No. XIII — “Lectures on the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth, by William Hazlitt.”
It is indeed a rich work. We cannot, to be sure, agree with some of its author's admirers, in calling him “The best critic which England has produced in the nineteenth century,” for in almost every point, except the vivida vis of glowing fancy, we look upon him as the inferior of Macaulay — a man who, if he has not written the best criticisms ever penned, has at least shown the capacity to write them; — but we would rank him next to Macaulay, and very far before Leigh Hunt, who was a dexterous but unanalytical, and somewhat confused prosodist — or Charles Lamb, who thought brilliantly, and never troubled himself with thinking if he thought to any purpose — or Wilson who always considered himself most honest when he was the fullest of prejudice, and who had cultivated rhodomontade into a passion. Of Jeffrey and Gifford we say nothing — for between these men and Hazlitt there are no points of approximation and they cannot be compared.
The criticisms of the latter are, we think, his best compositions: — his best book is “The Age of Elizabeth.” Upon the whole he is singularly vivid, forceful, acute, discriminative, and suggestive. His honesty is wonderful in an age of dishonesty. His courage is very well as things go. His judgment is never for one moment to be depended upon in any connected or consecutive series of opinions. He is often profound — but his profundity is invariably detailed or particular.
We quote a few highly characteristic passages from his disquisition on the German Drama:
“I have half trifled with this subject: and I believe I have done so because I despaired of finding language for some old rooted feelings I have about it, which a theory could never give nor can it take away. ‘The Robbers’ was the first play I ever read: and the effect produced upon me was the greatest. It stunned me like a blow, and I have not recovered enough from it to describe how it was. There are impressions which neither time nor circumstances can efface. Were I to live much longer thau I have any chance of doing, the books which I rend when I wus young I can never forget. Twenty years have elapsed since I first read a translation of ‘The Robbers,’ but they have not blotted the impression from my mind: it is here still, an old dweller in the chambers of the brain. The scene in particular in which Moor looks through his tears at the evening sun from the mountain's brow, and says in his despair, “It was my wish like him to live, like him to die: it was au idle thought, a boy's conceit,’ took last hold of my imagination, and that sun has to me never set! The last interview in ‘Don Carlos’ between the two lovers, in which the injured bride struggles to burst the prison-house of her destiny, in which her hopes and youth lie confined, and buried, as it were, alive, under the opposition of unspeakable anguish, I remember gave me a deep sense of suffering and a strong desire after good, which has haunted me ever since. I do not like Schiller's late style so well. His ‘Wallenstein,’ which is admirably and almost literally translated by Mr. Coleridge, is stately, thoughtful, and imaginative: bnt where is the enthusiasm, the throbbing of hope and fear, the mortal struggle between the passions: as if all happiness or misery of a life were crowded into a moment, and the die was to be cast at that instant? Gotzebue's best work I read first in Cumberland's imitation of it in ‘The Wheel of Fortune,’ and I confess that that style of sentiment which seems to make of life itself a long-drawn endless sigh, has something in it that pleases me, in spite of rules and criticism. Goethe's tragedies are (those that I have seen of them, his ‘Count Edmont,’ ‘Stella,’ &c.) constructed upon the second or diverted manner of the German stage, with a deliberate design to avoid all possible effect and interest, and this object is completely accomplished. He is however spoken of with enthusiasm almost amounting to idolatry by his countrymen, and those among ourselves who import heavy German criticism into this country in shallow, flat-bottomed unwieldy intellects. Madame de Stael speaks of one passage in his ‘Iphigenia,’ where he introduces a fragment of an old song, which the Furies are supposed to sing to Tantalus in Hell, reproaching him with the times when he sat with the Gods at their golden tables, and with his after-crimes that hurled him from heaven, at which he turns his eyes from his children and hangs his head in mournful silence. This is the true sublime. Of all his works I I [sic] like his ‘Werter’ best, nor would I part with it at a venture, even for the ‘Memoirs of Anastasius the Greek,’ whoever is the author; nor ever cease to think of the times, “when in the fine summer evenings they saw the frank, noble-minded enthusiast coming up from the valley,” nor of “the high grass that by the light of the departing sun waved in the breeze over his grave.”
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Notes:
This review was attributed as being by Poe by W. D. Hull.
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[S:0 - BJ, 1845] - Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Works - Criticism - Literary (Poe?, 1845)