Page:Appreciations of Horace Howard Furness.djvu/15

 Rh seeing that the worst joke of all, life itself, could not daunt this resolution or dull this humor.

There is a look we all know on the face of the judge—a detached habit of thought. It comes on the bench, and it comes, too, let me assure you, if a man has had before his bar for forty years all the culprits who for two centuries have been writing about Shakspere. His beam will stand sure and he will 'poise the cause in justice' equal scales.' There are scholars whose lives are given to the great in letters who become surfeited with honey and 'in the taste confound the appetite.' Nothing saves from this but the incommunicable capacity for the perception of the best. This capacity grows by what it feeds upon. Through these volumes there has grown certainty of touch and serenity of judgment, but from the first issue there was apparent, as in the man, the norm which is not to be corrupted even by the Elizabethan extravagance of the greatest of Elizabethans.

Dr. Furness came to his life task through the Kemble tradition. The Kembles, who succeeded Garrick, first gave dignity to Shakspere. Three critics of the contemporary stage, dramatic critics all, Coleridge, Lamb, and Hazlitt, two of them working journalists, began the present attitude. It has since been impossible for any scholar to say, as Samuel Johnson did, that a passage in a third-rate play, Congreve's 'Mourning Bride,' was better than anything in Shakspere.