Is it not
true, that there is in the very substance of the English mind, that
which naturally predisposes us to sympathy with the Drama, and this
though we are perhaps the most untheatrical of all people? The love
of action, the impatience of abstraction, the equity which leads us
to desire that every one may have a fair hearing, the reserve which
had rather detect personal experience than have it announced--
tendencies all easily perverted to evil, often leading to results
the most contradictory, yet capable of the noblest cultivation--seem
to explain the fact, that writers of this kind should have
flourished so greatly among us, and that scarcely any others should
permanently interest us.
These remarks do not concern poetical literature alone, or chiefly.
Those habits of mind, of which I have spoken, ought to make us the
best _historians_. If Germany has a right to claim the whole realm
of the abstract, if Frenchmen understand the framework of society
better than we do, there is in the national dramas of Shakespeare an
historical secret, which neither the philosophy of the one nor the
acute observation of the other can discover.
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