But Shakspeare has always been a point for dispute between ours and foreign critics. We confess that the present article appears to us a complete Border-land of debatable questions. But what shall we say of the opinion on the sonnets?—"There is more of poetry, imagination and melancholy, than sensibility, passion and depth. Shakspeare loved: but he believed no more in love than he believed in any thing else. A woman was to him a bird, a zephyr, a flower which charms and passes away."
We will not enter on the spirit of the sonnets, because this has already been done in so masterly a manner, in the pages of this very Magazine, that we need only to refer to the articles of last year, on the 'Sonnets of Shakspeare,'—a series of papers eloquent and complete, and bringing out the truth by the light of the imagination. But we protest against the light assertion that "Shakspeare no more believed in love, than he believed in anything else!" Why, the very element of poetry is faith—faith in the beautiful, the divine, and the true. No one was ever great in any pursuit without earnestness,—and who, can be in earnest without belief? It was from his own heart that Shakspeare drew his glorious and his touching creations, of which all nature attest the truth. Doubt never was and never will be the atmosphere of genius. He had the true poet's generous reliance on futurity when he wrote
"Not marble, not the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme."
And again,
"Yet do thy worst, old Time: despite thy wrong,
My love shall in my verse live ever young."
Milton.—To this subject Chateaubriand has brought all his enthusiasm; and his estimate of Milton is infinitely more English—we might say more true, than his estimate of Shakspeare. We should say this arises from having no standard of comparison by which to try the merits of "Paradise Lost." There is nothing like it in French literature, and the critic has no preconceived notions to whose test the foreign work must submit. In speaking of the drama, he is fettered by early associations of admiration, links as slight as those charmed threads Monimia wound the hands of Thalaba, and as impossible to break. But in reading Milton, he is "fancy free," and has to make the rules by which he judges. Moreover, Milton is less national than Shakspeare; he belongs more to that apart world of imagination, solemn and stately, which is to be entered by the ideal faculty alone. Thus has been produced a fine and elaborate criticism, written in the noblest spirit of appreciation.
Scott.—We confess that we are not surprised to find that Chateaubriand does not appreciate Walter Scott. Never were two minds more dissimilar. But the reason that he gives is very strange:—"I speak on this subject with some vexation, because I, who have described, loved, sung, and extolled so much the old Christian temples, am dying of spleen from hearing them so constantly depreciated. There was left me a last illusion—a cathedral: it has been taken from me by storm."
This seems a most extraordinary complaint to make against the
