Text: C. F. Briggs (?), Literary, Broadway Journal (New York), February 22, 1845, vol. 1, no. 8, p. ??

[page 123, column 2, continued:]

THE LECTURE ROOM.

MR. HUDSON’S LECTURE ON HAMLET.

THE new lecturer on Shakspeare had been gazetted from Boston as something of a lion, in which respect we cannot help considering that he had been very ill classified. His eye, manner, eagerness, and especially the avidity with which he pounces upon a truth as if he would tear out the very heart of the mystery, characterize him as belonging to the ornithological part of creation — a hawk or vulture, rather than a lion. He has none of the paces of the lion, nothing of the roar loud and continuous, or low and dulcet — for your lion, your literary lion, as wisely remarked by Bottom, is very apt to degenerate into the sucking dove.

Mr. Hudson was expected to make a sensation. He had made a sensation in Boston — would the canes and gloves of New York respond? This is, as a question, by no means necessarily to be answered in the affirmative. Civilization and intelligence, we are told, are always proportioned to the density of the population, and New York being huge and metropolitan, it must be considered that what is a thirty-two pounder in the provinces is a mere pop-gun here, by the sheer force of mathematical accumulation. Hence it follows that New York can bear a celebrity from any other part of the country, with great equanimity, while the reverse movement has frequently called to mind the frog in the fable. Whatever Mr. Hudson may be elsewhere,. in New York he is simply a man, a cultivated man, originally of strong mind and vigorous perception, with these rare natural faculties strengthened by judicious reading. Here let him appear what he is, and he will be welcome. Anything extrinsic is “leather and prunella.” There are one or two points of manner about Mr. Hudson that, we might as well state it at once, however telling they may be elsewhere, can be dispensed with to advantage here. Such are some of the unutterable chokings, the ineffable grins, and the foolish apology which preceded the lecture. His own laugh at one point betrayed him — at a peculiarly abdominal utterance of the word practical, during which he tied up his own muscles to relax those of the company. If the thing is to be done in this way, let it be so advertised. Shakspeare through a horse collar might draw upon the Park audiences, but the divines, the lawyers, the literateurs, who graced the Society Library on Monday evening, can dispense with the wrigglings and grins with which Mr. Hudson, like the early Methodists, delivers his conceptions. We are not at all disparaging Mr. Hudson, which we should be, on the contrary, if we took these painful and ludicrous twistings for any thing natural or harmonious with the mind within.

In our view of a lecture on Shakspeare, we are about to pay Mr. Hudson a high and deserved compliment, by saying that his lecture, in tone and thought, might have been written by [page 124:] the poet Dana. There was the same inward depth and command of the outer world, the same profound constructiveness and freedom from mere dogmatism. The separate thoughts may not have been original — that is, uttered for the first time, a very shabby definition of originality, by the way) but there was the innate strength of mind to grasp and mould them into one consistent whole. The thinking was of the right manly sort, stopping at no hall-way house of decencies, but going forth right to the end of the journey, fall who might by the way. Many a bleeding victim was left by Mr. Hudson prostrate on the path. Poor Dr. Paley with his plausible morals, an army of pretenders, who seem rather than are, and a score of politicians. The latter received their death wound from a gun resting on the shoulder of Polonius. We shall not readily forget the miserable demagogue whose secret is to find out the tendencies of the mass, and put himself in the van — “a trick requiring only long legs, a short head, and no heart at all.” This was one of Mr. Hudson's points which told well, and by the way, seeing how much he himself gains from this harmless stage effect, he might have spared the poor actors the gird he put in, in the Ophelia scene — other sayings were as good, but the rapid succession. of short, close, sinewy sentences, have driven them from our memory. We remember one happy illustration, referring to the noisy pretenders, and the silence of true greatness. “We hear the crackling of burning straw, but not the rays of the sun in heaven.” These are words that savor not at all of the mountebank. The pointed antithetical character of the politician, would have done honor to Butler and the best of the old Character Writers. The analysis of the character of Hamlet was ingenious, and if not convincing, it was at least well defended by a numerous light infantry of brilliant truths. The ground taken was that Hamlet feigned insanity, and so closely that he was subject to all the laws of the real melancholy. The most that can be done with Hamlet is to take some theory as a nucleus, like the thread of the sugar manufacturer, for the crystallization of a whole world of truth and philosophy. The sarcasm with which that “code of Chesterfieldianism,” the instructions to Laertes, was toppled over, was righteously expended, and the depth of feeling for Ophelia, was an earnest to us of what we may expect in the lecturer's development of the great Shakspearian female life.