contemporary writers makes them now seem peculiar.’ Let this be compared with what Coleridge, nearly eighty years later, has to say on the same question: ‘Shakespeare is of no age. It is idle to endeavour to support his phrases by quotations from Ben Jonson, Beaumont, and Fletcher, &c. His language is entirely his own, and the younger dramatists imitated him…. I believe Shakespeare was not a whit more intelligible in his own day than he is now to an educated man, except for a few local allusions of no consequence.’ In so far as Coleridge seems to allude to Shakespeare’s very characteristic style, his remarks are true. In so far as he is speaking of the wider problem of language, the verdict of modern Shakespearian scholars is wholly on Johnson’s side.
These extracts from two great critics are here compared because they show that Johnson’s work on Shakespeare has not been superseded. He has been neglected and depreciated ever since the nineteenth century brought in the new aesthetic and philosophical criticism. The twentieth century, it seems likely, will treat him more respectfully. The romantic attitude begins to be fatiguing. The great romantic critics, when they are writing at their best, do succeed in communicating to the reader those thrills of wonder and exaltation which they have felt in contact with Shakespeare’s imaginative work. This is not a little thing to do; but it cannot be done continuously, and it has furnished the workaday critic with a vicious model. There is a taint of insincerity about romantic criticism, from which not even the great romantics are free. They are never in danger from the pitfalls that waylay the plodding critic;
