There is one more remarkable object in the Shakespeare of Warburton. He not only preserved that strange device of Pope to distinguish the most beautiful passages by inverted commas, but carried on that ridiculous process on his own separate account, by marking his favourites by double commas. It is evident that these great editors judged Shakespeare by these fragmentary and unconnected passages, which could not indicate the harmonious and gradual rise of the thoughts, nor the fine transitions of emotions, and less the comprehensive genius of the inventor. They were scattering the living members which must be viewed whole with all their movements, and at last must be sought for by the reader in his own mind. The truest mode of discovering the beauties of an author is first to be conversant with the beautiful, otherwise it is possible that the beauties may escape the readers, even should they be marked by a Pope or a Warburton.
The acknowledged failure of the preceding editions invited to a fresh enterprise, and it was the edition of Johnson, in 1765, which conferred on Shakespeare the stability of a classic, by the vigour and discrimination of his criticism, and the solemnity of his judicial decisions.
When Johnson had issued his proposals twenty years before for an edition of Shakespeare, he pointed to a great novelty for the elucidation of the poet. His intuitive sagacity had discerned that a poet so racy and native required a familiarity both with the idiom and the manners of his age. He was sensible that a complete explanation of an author, not systematic and consequential, but desultory and vagrant, abounding in casual allusions and slight hints, is not to be expected from any single scholiast. He enumerates, however, the desiderata for this purpose; among which we find that of reading the books which Shakespeare read, and to compare his works with those of writers who lived at the same time, or immediately preceded, or immediately followed him. This project, happily conceived, inferred comprehensive knowledge in the proposer; but it was only a reverie; a dim Pisgah view which the sagacity of the great critic had taken of that future Canaan, which he himself never entered. With this sort of knowledge, and these forgotten writers, which the future commentators of Shakespeare revelled in, Johnson remained wholly unacquainted.
But what proved more fatal to the editorial ability of Johnson than this imperfect knowledge of the literature and the manners of the age of Shakespeare, was that the commentator rarely sympathised with the poet, for his hard-witted and unpliant faculties, busied with the more palpable forms of human nature, when thrown amid the supernatural and the ideal, seemed suddenly deserted of their powers; the magic knot was tied, which cast our Hercules into helpless impotence; and in the circle of imaginative creation, we discover the baffled sage resisting the spell, by apologising for Shakespeare’s introduction of his mighty preternatural beings! a certain evidence that the critic had never existed for a moment under their influence. “Witches, fairies, and ghosts, would not now be tolerated by an audience;” such was the grave and fallacious assumption of the unimaginative critic, which seems something worse than Voltaire’s raillery; for though that wit ridiculed the ghost in Hamlet, he afterwards had the poetic agility to transfer its solemnity to his own Semiramis,—though, like all rapid inlayers, the appliqué did not fit to his work.[30]
We may even suspect the degree of our great critic’s susceptibility of the infinitely-varied emotions flowing in the inexhaustible vein of the poet of nature. In those judicial summaries at the close of each drama, his cold approbation, his perplexing balancings, his hazarded doubts, or his positive censures, all alike betray the uncertainty and the difficulties of a critical mind, which misapplied its energies to themes adverse to its habits.
Johnson’s preface to his Shakespeare was long held as a masterpiece; and several splendid passages, after more than half a century, remain to remind us of his nervous intellect. If we now read that preface with a different understanding than that of most of his contemporaries, it is because Johnson himself has revealed his poetical confessions in certain “Lives of the Poets.” We now look on that famed preface much more as a labour of pomp than a labour of love. Far from me be any irreverence to our master-genius of the passed century, whose volumes were read by all readers, and imitated by all writers; my first devotion to literature was caught from his pages; and the fire still burns on that altar. But the literary character of Johnson, with his enduring works, is no longer a subject of inquiry, but of history; of truths established, and not of opinions which are mutable.
Can we imagine that Johnson himself experienced a degree of conviction, some perplexing consciousness, that his spirit was not endowed with the sensibility of Longinus? A profound thinker, acutely argumentative and analytical, though clothed in the purple of his cumbrous diction, and the cadences of his concatenated periods, when he touched on themes of pure imagination, and passions not merely declamatory, had nothing left to him but the solitary test of his judgment, to decide on what lies out of the scope of daily life. He interpreted the pathetic and the sublime, till they ceased to be either by the force of his reasoning and the weakness of his conceptions; he cross-examined shadowy fancies, till they vanished under the eye of the judge. He had no wing to ascend into “the heaven of invention.”
In Johnson’s Shakespeare, therefore, we may trace that deficient sympathy which subsequently betrayed itself in his revolting decisions on Collins, on Gray, on Milton, and on others. It was his hard fate to be called on to deliver his solemn decisions on two of our greatest poets; from Spenser he had fortunately escaped, having wholly forgotten the Muse of Mulla, while his piety and his taste had remembered Blackmore, in the collection of English poets. It is curious to detect the mode by which our great critic extricated himself from the difficulties of his judicial function on Shakespeare and on Milton, by his prudential sagacity, and his passive obedience to established authorities. Johnson’s preface to Shakespeare was grafted on Pope’s, as afterwards, when he came to Milton, he followed the track of Addison. But Johnson was too honest to disguise the reality of his own conviction: it was legitimate to adopt theirs, but it was independent to preserve his own; in this dissonance he has left a lesson and a warning for some who are eminent, and who travel in the high-road of criticism.
It is thus that we find in this famous preface to Shakespeare that he is hailed as the poet of nature, and is placed by the side of Homer; and of this Pope had instructed the critic; but in the sudden change the noble qualities of the bard are minutely reversed; the antithesis was too often in the critic’s own taste; and the characteristic excellence ascribed to Shakespeare seems hardly compatible with the number and the grossness of his faults. Every work of note bears the impression of its times; and we learn from the faithful chronicler of Johnson the real occasion which gave rise to this remarkable preface. “A blind and indiscriminate admiration of Shakespeare had exposed the British nation to the ridicule of foreigners; and this preface was considered as a grave, well-considered, and impartial opinion of the judge.” Such was the defence of the logical critic, who so diligently enumerated the defects of his author, that Voltaire, who could never understand the language nor comprehend the genius of Shakespeare, might sometimes have referred to Johnson to confirm his own depreciating notions.