indeed, a king's son; but the great interest lies in the character, apart from all mythical interest, all superhuman or unearthly attributes.
The critical character predominates not only in the form, but in the matter, of this, and in part of all Shakspeare's plays, and all his works. The surpassing interest of Hamlet over the other plays lies in the mind of the hero, to whom the whole world, all his relations in life, and his own soul, do but furnish food for a criticism, morbid in its excess; so that, as he himself says, the current of all enterprise is turned awry, and loses the name of action.
The inventive spirit of the Greeks was nowhere more exhibited than in the distinct forms they gave to every department of literature and art. A. great modern critic has shown, that the arts become debased, when they are suffered to run into each other: as, for instance, when poetry usurps the province of painting, or the latter of sculpture, &c.[1] In the Greeks, the observance of this law appears almost as a natural instinct, not only in respect to the different arts, but even in the different provinces of the same art. It seems as if the same principle which caused every noun or verb to be so rich in forms of expression, prevailed, in making their literature full of varied forms of artistic utterance. Every writing among them had a form, by which it plainly belonged to some one understood class. Among the moderns, on the contrary, every writing tends to the formless. We may trace the tendency to form, growing gradually weaker and more artificial through the Roman literature, and becoming antiquated in the imitative portion of the French. The effort towards a new establishment of literary form on a critical basis, in Germany, is one of the most remarkable literary phenomena of our age.
The literary forms had their origin in the religious and festive observances of a people of primitive manners and high intellectual tendencies, among whom, owing to the absence of books, and the mechanical and other obstacles in the way of communication by writing, the publication or utterance of
- ↑ Lessing.
