The Mount; Speech from Its English Heights

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. WANDERERS. Of the findings of less recognised genius none have at all been within sight of Heraud, for all his fuss, absurdity, and vagueness. His book on the inner life of Shakespeare is one of the best approaches to recognising the poet, though it is far from fixing what the work of Shakespeare is. In the details, the critic fails to see what the poet is doing, but he has noticed some outlines that are true. The trick of ' the oracle' he has learnt from Coleridge, whose disciple he was, and he practises it in that ridiculous too sufficient way that shows talent aping genius, the upper scholar the master, in this case an imperfect master. In A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest he is only at the door, but so far as he can go he has glimpses of right perception. It is refreshing, although clearly another's blind attempts are being followed, to have some acuteness and sense, if of very peculiarly spotted almost absurd kind, in so high a position. Flickering indeed is the character of the light, yet there is some. Being himself a kind of torso poet, with the head more complete than the other parts, he fails in shapely vigour, and not in right search after the facts. What Ulrici has said deserves attention also, for hehas stated general and some particular truth better than most regarding the spirit and meaning of the plays; indeed, in direct exposition of what he considers the poet's method of construction, he has reached farther than any except Heraud, whose thin guesses are true so far as they go. While his aesthetic perception is very pleasant to meet with, where so much is dull and dark, he has lost the best truths, as the purely critical spirit is apt to do, by his delusion that Shakespeare in his chief works was illustrating Christian ethics. This is as...