Not a little of the Shakespearian criticism of this kind that exists is the mere result of an effort to say something fine about what needs no such gilding, no such prism-play of light to enhance or to bring out its beauties. I will not except from these remarks much of what Coleridge himself has written about Shakespeare. But the German critics whom he emulated are worse than he is. Avoid them. The German pretence that Germans have taught us folk of English blood and speech to understand Shakespeare is the most absurd and arrogant that could be set up. Shakespeare owes them nothing; and we have received from them little more than some maundering mystification and much ponderous platitude. Like the western diver, they go down deeper and stay down longer than other critics, but like him too they come up muddier. Above all of them, avoid Ulrici and Gervinus. The first is a mad mystic, the second a very literary Dogberry, endeavoring to comprehend all vagrom men, and bestowing his tediousness upon the world with a generosity that surpasses that of his prototype. Both of them thrust themselves and their "fanned and winnowed opinions" upon him in such an obtrusive way that if he could come upon the earth again and take his pen in his hand, I would not willingly be in the shoes of either. He would hand them down to posterity the laughing stock of men for ever.
Not Shakespeare only has suffered from this sort of criticism. The great musicians fare ill at their hands. One of them, Schlüter, writing of Mozart, says of his E flat, G minor, C (Jupiter) symphonies:
It is evident that these three magnificent works--produced consecutively and at short intervals--are the embodiment of _one_ train of thought pursued with increasing ardor; so that taken as a whole they form a grand _trilogy_.... These three grandest of Mozart's symphonies (the first lyrical, the second tragic-pathetic, and the third of ethical import) correspond to his three greatest operas, "Figaro," "Don Giovanni," and "Die Zauberflöte."
Now, I venture to say, that there is no such consecutive train of thought, and no such correspondence. Ethical import in the Jupiter and in the "Zauberflöte," and correspondence between them! Mozart did not evolve musical elephants out of his moral consciousness. But a German professor of _esthetik_ is not happy until he has discovered a trilogy and an inner life. Those found, he goes off with ponderous serenity into the _ewigkeit_.