“In order,” says Johnson, “to make a true estimate of the abilities and merit of a writer, it is always necessary to examine the genius of his age and the opinions of his cotemporaries. A poet who should now make the whole action of his tragedy depend upon enchantment and produce the chief events by the assistance of supernatural agents, would be censured as transgressing the bounds of probability, be banished from the theatre to the nursery, and condemned to write fairy tales instead of tragedies.”
In other words, had Shakspeare written Macbeth in the time of Dr. Johnson, that play would be considered unworthy to be performed, except before an audience of children, and the critic would advise the mistaken young author to adopt a profession in which he might hope for more success, than in literature. I can fancy some wiseacre in a London weekly, with the smartness and knack at severity which daily practice confers, taking to pieces “the tragedy of Macbeth, by a Mr. William Shakspeare, said to be a subordinate at Astley’s”—and serving the ambitious young gentleman up such a dressing for his witches, ghosts and murders, as would be enough to extinguish a better educated and more promising litterateur; showing how impossible it must be for witches to mingle in human affairs, in this enlightened age of hebdomadals, and banishing to the nursery a blunderer unworthy to cater for such sensible critics.
The denunciation, however, would embrace other literary works besides the puerile attempt of Mr. Shakspeare. Manfred, Cain, the Faust, and other trifles of the same description, in which the poet has made the action of his tragedy depend upon enchantment. Virgil or Homer might be equally censured. It is quite true that the witches may not be considered probable characters, but how can any one overlook their fearful and magnificent meaning allegorically?
Johnson goes on, however, in his defence.
“But a survey of the notions that prevailed at the time when this play was written, will prove that Shakspeare was in no danger of such censures, since he only turned the system that was then universally admitted to his advantage, and was far from overburthening the credulity of his audience.”
The doctor then goes on to a learned and interesting dissertation on the gross darkness of ignorance—on the credulity of the common people—on the diabolical opposition supposed to have been offered to the Christians in the crusades—quotes Olympidorus, St. Chrysostom, and a law of King James I. against conjurors, and shows much sagacious wisdom and learning, which have about as much to do with the real living beauty of Macbeth as they have with the Temple of Jerusalem.
“Upon this general infatuation,” continues the doctor, “Shakspeare might be easily allowed to found a play, especially as he has followed, with great exactness, such histories as were then thought to be true: nor can it be doubted that the scenes of enchantment, however they may now be ridiculed, were both by himself and his audience thought awful and affecting.”
No one can doubt the moral greatness of Dr. Johnson, but it was not of a kind which enabled him to enter fully into the living principle of beauty which inspires the Shakspeare plays.
He speaks of Macbeth with a sort of indifference which betrays his blindness to its highest merits. He praises the propriety of its fiction, and the solemnity, grandeur and variety of its actions. He adds, “but it has no nice discrimination of character. The events are too great to admit the influence of particular dispositions, etc. The danger of ambition is well described; and I know not whether it may not be said in defence of some parts which now seem improbable, that, in Shakspeare’s time, it was necessary to warn credulity against vain and illusive predictions.”
And in our own time, what leads every criminal astray, but some “vain and illusive prediction,” not uttered by three weird sisters, by an armed head, or the “apparition of a child crowned, with a tree in his hand,” but by the temptations of the world and the treacherous passions of the human heart? What was it which told Napoleon—