HENRY HALLAM, 1839
(1777-1859)
Of William Shakespeare, whom, through the mouths of those whom he has inspired to body forth the modifications of his immense mind, we seem to know better than any human writer, it may be truly said that we scarcely know anything. We see him, so far as we do see him, not in himself, but in a reflex image from the objectivity in which he was manifested: he is Falstaff, and Mercutio, and Malvolio, and Jaques, and Portia, and Imogen, and Lear, and Othello; but to us he is scarcely a determined person, a substantial reality of past time, the man Shakespeare. The two greatest names in poetry are to us little more than names. If we are not yet come to question his unity, as we do that of “the blind old man of Scios’ rocky isle,” an improvement in critical acuteness doubtless reserved for a distant posterity, we as little feel the power of identifying the young man who came up from Stratford, was afterwards an indifferent player in a London theatre, and retired to his native place in middle life, with the author of Macbeth and Lear, as we can give a distinct historic personality to Homer. All that insatiable curiosity and unwearied diligence have hitherto detected about Shakespeare serves rather to disappoint and perplex us than to furnish the slightest illustration of his character.
Introduction to the Literature of Europe in the Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth Centuries. 1839, ii. 382-3.
—— JOHNSTONE, 1840
Some men can only acquire knowledge by a careful process of painstaking investigation, while the minds of others descend at once, and with a swoop, as it were, upon the truth of which they are in search. Others, again, can not only do this, but having grasped the truth, they soar upward with it to the highest pinnacles of imaginative loftiness, or beyond these even, to the empyrean of thought, where the minds of ordinarily gifted men may not follow them. Of this last class was Shakespeare, the most wonderful of mere men that we know to have ever lived.
The Table Talker, or Brief Essays on Society and Literature. 1840, vol. i. p. 183.
THOMAS CARLYLE, 1840
(1795-1881)
“The Hero as Poet.”