Later German Shakespeare-critics.
The performances of the later German Shakespeare-critics are so much better known in England than almost any other part of the literature of the subject that it seems unnecessary to devote much of our rapidly disappearing space to them. Gervinus, Delius, Ulrici, Elze, have all been translated, quoted, and so forth, with the curious deference to foreign opinion in matters of taste, which has so oddly accompanied English stiff-neckedness in general. Gervinus: his German Poetry. I am bound to say that I think not much of any of these pundits;[[1061]] and least of all of their great Panjandrum Gervinus. His critical quality, however, may be for our purpose better gauged by taking his large work on German Poetry.[[1062]] It is an estimable book enough; the author often says what he ought to have said, and does not very often or very outrageously say what he should not. But the faults of his Shakespeare-criticism—platitude, verbiage, attention to the unnecessary, and avoidance of the heart and root of the matter, the quality of Shakespeare as an English poet, mark this also. Take persons most diverse in character, time, what you will—take Walther von der Vogelweide, Hans Sachs, Opitz, Novalis, for instance—and read his verdicts on them. You will find that in the first place he hardly ever quotes or appreciates a phrase—in itself a tell-tale, and damagingly tell-tale, abstinence. But you will also find, in compensation for this reticence, a flood of general remark, (false) comparison, see-saw antithesis, and the like. By no means his worst judgment, but a most characteristic one, is that on Bürger, which I may partly translate, partly summarise, from the original:[[1063]]—
On Bürger.
“Bürger then appears to us as at once a pathological and a critical poet, a poet of Nature and of Art, a poet of the people and of Love. He belongs at once to the school of the North and to that of the South, relies at once on sensations and reflections. His nature-painting is apparently dashed on with a big brush, but it is careful in detail. There is in him a fight of the Universal and the Particular, of Art and Nature, of Endowment and Facility, of Poetry and Platitude.”
I do not know how many readers will sympathise with, or even understand, the kind of rage which, I confess it, such criticism as this excites in my mind. It is not exactly false criticism; on the contrary, it is rather true. But its truth has nothing vital, nothing germinal, nothing specially appropriate to the subject in it: and if there can be said to be anything specially appropriate to the writer, it is only matter for an unfavourable judgment of him. Any man, with a good deal of reading and a little practice, can string tic-tac antitheses of this kind, made up of critical commonplaces and terminology, together for pages. No man, from anything of the kind, could grasp the real differentia of Bürger—the fact that he was one of the first to make, in poetry, an almost convulsive attempt to get out of the conventional by attempting the supernatural.
In all these German Shakespeare-critics, moreover, the fault (which we have noticed even in Goethe) reappears, that they are criticising, not Shakespeare, but the translation of Shakespeare; that while they have plenty to say about the plot, and the “points in Hamlet’s soul,” and even sometimes the text in its lower aspects, the other and over-soul, the essence, the poetry, of Shakespeare not merely escapes, but apparently fails to interest or occupy them at all. On the accidents, the unnecessary things, they are voluble. “The rest is silence”—to expand which text in its present bearing were an insult.
The Shakespeare-heretics: Rümelin.