Lectures on Shakspeare. By H. N. Hudson. New York: Baker & Scribner. 2 vols. 12mo.
We suppose that few of our readers are unacquainted with Mr. Hudson, the lecturer on Shakspeare, and the writer of various brilliant and powerful articles in the American Review. The lectures which compose the present volume have been delivered, at various times, in the principal cities of the Union, and have everywhere been welcomed as productions of the highest merit in one of the most difficult departments of critical art. The author has delayed the publication until the present time, in order that they might be subjected to repeated revision, and every opinion they contain cautiously scanned. Many of the lectures have been re-written a dozen times; and probably few books of the size ever published in the country, have been the slow product of so much toil of analysis and research. Almost every sentence gives evidence of being shaped in the "forge and working-house of thought." All questions which rise naturally in the progress of the work are sturdily met and answered, however great may be their demand on the intellect or the time of the author. Every thing considered, subtilty, depth, force, brilliancy, comprehension, we know of no work of criticism ever produced in the United States which equals the present, either in refinement and profundity of thought, or splendor and intensity of expression. Indeed, none of our critics have devoted so much time as Mr. Hudson to one subject, or been content to confine themselves so rigidly to the central sun of our English literary system. We doubt, also, if there be any work on Shakspeare, produced on the other side of the Atlantic, which is so complete as the present in all which relates to Shakspeare's mind and characters. It not only comprehends the highest results of Shaksperian criticism, but it is a step forward.
This may to some appear extravagant praise, but for its justice we confidentially appeal to the record. The plays which have most severely tried the sagacity of Shakspeare's critics, are Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear, and Othello. We do not hesitate to say that Mr. Hudson's analysis and representation of these are the most thorough, accurate, and comprehensive which exist at present either in English or German. Compare him or these tragedies with Goethe, with Schlegel, with Coleridge, with Hazlitt, with Ulrici, and it will be found that he excels them all in completeness. It is needless to add that he is able to excel them only by coming after them; and that it is by diligently digesting all the positive results of Shaksperian criticism that he has been enabled to advance the science. He has grasped the principles which Schlegel and Coleridge established, and applied them to the discovery of new truths. By the most patient and toilsome analysis he has fully brought out many things which they simply hinted, and distinctly set forth conclusions which lay dormant in their premises. And in the analysis of individual character, meaning by that the resolving each Shaksperian personage into its original elements, and indicating the degree of general truth it covers, our countryman has hardly a rival. Few even of Shakspeare's diligent readers are aware of the vast stores of thought and knowledge implied in Shakspeare's characters, because the fact is so commonly stated in general terms. Mr. Hudson proves that the characters are classes intensely individualized, by showing how large is the number of persons each character represents, or of whom it is the ideal. He thus indicates the extent of Shakspeare's range over the whole field of humanity, and the degree of his success in classifying mankind. No one, therefore, can read Mr. Hudson's interpretative criticisms without new wonder at the amazing reach and depth of Shakspeare's genius.
It would be impossible in the space to which we are necessarily confined, to do justice to Mr. Hudson's powers of analysis and representation, as exercised through the wide variety of the Shaksperian drama. The volumes swarm with strong and striking thoughts on so many suggested topics, that it is difficult to fix upon any particular excellence for especial praise. The first quality which will strike the reader will be the author's opulence of expression and profusion of wit. Analogies with him are as cheap as commonplaces are to other men. He has no hesitation in announcing his analysis in a witticism, and condensing a principle into an epigram. His page often blazes and burns with wit. South, Congreve, and Sheridan are hardly richer in the precious article. In Mr. Hudson, also, the quality has an individual character, and is the racier from its genuineness and from its root in his intellectual constitution. This wit is, perhaps, the leading characteristic of his style, though his diction varies sufficiently with the varying demands of his subjects, and often glides from the tingling concussion of antithesis into the softest music, or rises from sarcastic brevity and stinging emphasis into rich and sonorous amplification. The analysis of Iago, and the analysis of the Weird Sisters, indicate, perhaps, the extremes of his manner. Throughout the volumes, whether the subject be comic or tragic, humorous or sublime, there is never any lack of verbal felicities. These seem to grow spontaneously in the soil of his mind; and there is no American writer whose style is more wholly free from worn and wasted images, phrases, and forms of expression. He is neither mediocre in thought nor expression.
We cannot resist the temptation to give a few of Mr. Hudson's sentences, illustrative of his manner of stinging the minds of his readers and enforcing their attention. Speaking of Sir Thomas Lucy, on whose manor Shakspeare is said to have poached, Hudson remarks: "This Warwickshire esquire, once so rich and mighty, is now known only as the block over which the Warwickshire peasant stumbled into immortality." Referring to those purists who regard words more than things in their strictures on licentiousness, he calls them persons "whose morality seems to be all in their ears." Speaking of Hume, "an exquisite voluptuary among political and metaphysical abstractions," he puts him in a class of men who "study art as they study nature, only in the process of dissection—a process which, of course, scares away the very life which makes her nature; so that they get, after all, but a sort of post-mortem knowledge of her." Again, he observes—"Pope, for example, was the prince of versifiers, and Hume the prince of logicians: with the one versification strangled itself in a tub of honey; with the other logic broke its neck in trying to fly in a vacuum. It is by no means strange, therefore, that the thousand-eyed philosophy of Shakspeare should have seemed a perfect monster to the one-eyed logic of Hume." Perhaps the finest answer to the charge that Shakspeare was an unregulated genius, full of great absurdities and great beauties, is contained in Hudson's ironical statement of it: "He has sometimes been represented as a sort of inspired and infallible idiot, who practiced a species of poetical magic without knowing what he did or why he did it; who achieved the greatest wonders of art, not by rational insight and design, but by a series of lucky accidents and lapsus naturæ; who, in short, went through life stumbling upon divinities, and blundering into miracles."
By the publication of these lectures Mr. Hudson takes his place among the first thinkers and writers of the country. He has that in his writings which will make him popular, and that which will make him permanent. It is unnecessary to say that a book so strongly marked by individuality as his is calculated to provoke criticism. It contains many things which will be severely assailed by those whose opinions on certain theories of government and society are in exact opposition to those of the author. Some positions, critical and political, which he confidently states as settled, are still open to discussion. But take the work as a whole, as an embodiment of mental power, and there are few men in the country on whom it would not confer honor. It needs but a very small prophetic faculty to predict for a work so fascinating and instructive a circulation commensurate with its merits.
The Military Heroes of the Revolution. With a Narrative of the War of Independence. By Charles J. Peterson. Philadelphia: Wm. H. Leary. 487 pp. octavo.
This is one of the most elegant books which has ever been issued from the American press. The type is large and clear, and the paper is of the finest quality. It is embellished with nearly two hundred engravings, consisting of portraits of all the chief actors of the Revolution, spirited representations of almost every engagement, with numerous views of noted places. This, together with the picturesque style in which the book is written, gives a peculiar charm, and leaves on the mind of the reader impressions more vivid and lasting than any other work which we have seen on the same subject.
The design of the work is to furnish brief analytical portraits of those military heroes who, either from their superior ability or superior good fortune, played the most prominent part in the war of independence. The volume contains thirty-three biographies. Of these Washington's, Putnam's, Arnold's, Moultrie's, Warren's, Marion's, Hamilton's, and Burr's, are, in our opinion, the most spirited. The biography of Washington affords a keen analysis of that great hero's character, and conclusively proves, we think, that he was not only a great patriot, but a great general. This is a somewhat new view of his character, the fashion having been to exalt his undoubted goodness at the expense of his skill, the result of positive ignorance of his character during the war of independence. Those were no weak achievements which Napoleon acknowledged to have been the examples which first fired him with the spirit and plan of his own victories! And our author justly remarks, that "if four generals in succession, beside several entire armies, failed to conquer America, it was not on account of want of talent or means on the part of the enemy, but because the genius of Washington proved too gigantic for any or all of his competitors."