POEMS AND SONNETS

Our idolatry of Shakespeare (not to say our admiration) ceases with his plays.  In his other productions he was a mere author, though not a common author.  It was only by representing others, that he became himself.  He could go out of himself, and express the soul of Cleopatra; but in his own person, he appeared to be always waiting for the prompter’s cue.  In expressing the thoughts of others, he seemed inspired; in expressing his own, he was a mechanic.  The licence of an assumed character was necessary to restore his genius to the privileges of nature, and to give him courage to break through the tyranny of fashion, the trammels of custom.  In his plays, he was ‘as broad and casing as the general air’; in his poems, on the contrary, he appears to be ‘cooped, and cabined in’ by all the technicalities of art, by all the petty intricacies of thought and language, which poetry had learned from the controversial jargon of the schools, where words had been made a substitute for things.  There was, if we mistake not, something of modesty, and a painful sense of personal propriety at the bottom of this.  Shakespeare’s imagination, by identifying itself with the strongest characters in the most trying circumstances, grappled at once with nature, and trampled the littleness of art under his feet:  the rapid changes of situation, the wide range of the universe, gave him life and spirit, and afforded full scope to his genius; but returned into his closet again, and having assumed the badge of his profession, he could only labour in his vocation, and conform himself to existing models.  The thoughts, the passions, the words which the poet’s pen, ’glancing from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven’, lent to others, shook off the fetters of pedantry and affectation; while his own thoughts and feelings, standing by themselves, were seized upon as lawful prey, and tortured to death according to the established rules and practice of the day.  In a word, we do not like Shakespeare’s poems, because we like his plays:  the one, in all their excellences, are just the reverse of the other.  It has been the fashion of late to cry up our author’s poems, as equal to his plays:  this is the desperate cant of modern criticism.  We would ask, was there the slightest comparison between Shakespeare, and either Chaucer or Spenser, as mere poets?  Not any.- -The two poems of Venus and Adonis and of Tarquin and LUCRECE appear to us like a couple of ice-houses.  They are about as hard, as glittering, and as cold.  The author seems all the time to be thinking of his verses, and not of his subject,—­not of what his characters would feel, but of what he shall say; and as it must happen in all such cases, he always puts into their mouths those things which they would be the last to think of, and which it shows the greatest ingenuity in him to find out.  The whole is laboured, up-hill