Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 102.djvu/303

Rh forcible expression—since any such rule would put it into the power of every critic, every reader in fact, to decide what is the most beautiful and forcible.

Mr. White has exercised his right of private judgment with much discriminative taste. In the culture both of head and heart, he shows his competency to deal with a subject so replete with difficulty—now marked by rough gnarled obstacles, that seem to defy all "tooling," and now by delicate nuances, which to conserve and present with the bloom on them requires a subtle spirit, and a tender, akin to Shakspeare's own. But, keeping in mind his stand-point, he does seem at times to be a little over-peremptory in his rejection, as preposterous, of emendations which fellow-critics, in their right of private judgment, accept as highly felicitous. There is a soupçon of the Sir Oracle in his voice and mien, when he insists on this as the true reading because it commends itself to his judgment, and scornfully repudiates that as a base cheat and rank impostor, though it commends itself to the judgment of a Dyce, or a Singer, or a Collier. Against Mr. Collier, indeed, his tone is by no means "nice;" and considering the extent to which, after all, he adopts the Perkins' corrections—small as the proportion adopted may numerically be to that disallowed—he might have treated "Perkins's Entire" more tenderly. It is a thousand pities to see how Shakspearian critics and commentators fall out by the way, and how utterly they ignore the nil disputandum in minute points de gustibus, and substitute for that broken law a habit, become second nature, disputandi in sæcula sæculorum. Placable bystanders must make up their minds to see hard blows interchanged in these conflicts, and a determined essay of the pugilists to spoil each other's beauty,—as in this present dashing attempt (if we may strain an old verse)Mr. White's own house of defence is, perhaps, sufficiently glassy to justify caution in his manner of flinging stones; some of his conjectures and expositions in Shakspearian lore being quite open to attack, or strenuous demur: witness his criticism on Isabella in "Measure for Measure,"—his theory of the Sonnets,—his rejection of the rhyming dialogue in the "Cymbeline" apparition scene, and of the dirge in the same play, &c. Or where, on the Clown's saying, in "Othello," to the musicians, "Why, masters, have your instruments been in Naples, that they speak i' the nose thus?" he asks—a proper query!—whether this knowledge of a minute provincial peculiarity is not an evidence that Shakspeare knew more of Italy than by books or hearsay? Or where, in his dissertation on Othello's complexion, which he is anxious to prove was not at all of the Uncle Tom hue, he explicitly lays it down that Shakspeare "had doubtless never seen either a Moor or a negro, and might very naturally confuse their physiological traits"—although so slight an allusion, ut suprà, to the nasal tones of the Neapolitans is enough to make Shakspeare so far-travelled a gentleman. While he is very prompt, again, to ridicule some of his fellow-commentators (if he will allow of the fellowship) for the superfluity and gratuitous character of their occasional glosses, he