Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v4.djvu/70

 482 Scholars than scholarly. It makes many needless textual changes, some of them rather wild conjectural emendations of his own, but most of them adopted from other editors. His notes are very full and often obvious. His Introductions and Commentary in general, like the Lectures (1848) which preceded the edition and which are largely embodied in its Introductions, belong to the Coleridgean type of criticism — the type of criticism which en- deavours to set forth Shakespeare's inwardness, and pays com- paratively little attention to his outwardness. The plays are made from within ; the characters grow like a tree, by successive natural accretions ; the whole effect is like that produced by a work of Nature; nature, in fact, is the essential quality of Shakespeare ; and each play and each character in each play is, like Nature, the superlative embodiment of some essential and archetypal idea. This mode of disquisition, together with the treatment of Shakespeare's "alleged immorality," and "alleged want of taste," naturally sentences itself to swift obsolescence. Richard Grant White's Shakespeare' s Scholar (1854) criti- cized acutely the manuscript "corrections" in J. P. Collier's then famous and afterward notorious "Perkins Folio." White did not at first believe that these had been forged by Collier, and he considered that many of them had intrinsic merit; but he demonstrated that they were not early emendations, and were wholly without authority as such. His edition of Shakespeare (1857-66) and his later Studies in Shakespeare (1885), though they retain certain characteristics of the Romantic School, ex- hibit on the whole a healthy reaction against it such as became the friend of Lowell and of Norton. White is romantically inclined to a personal interpretation of Shakespeare's Sonnets and of many of the speeches in the plays, believing in particular that Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida is Shakespeare's own mouth- piece. On the other hand, he anticipates the later non-idealistic school in regarding Shakespeare as intent simply on writing plays that will pay, and as having ' ' no system of dramatic art. " White's text is based upon a careful examination of the Folios and Quar- tos, accepting the first FoHo as generally authentic. In the matter of emendations he is exceedingly cautious — too cautious to suit Lowell. ' White's notes and commentary in general endeavour ' Lowell's anonymous review {Atlantic Monthly, Jan.-Feb., 1857) deserves to be reprinted.