Of
course his comic characters, like his captains and men of action, are
due originally to his faculty of observation; but while his observation
of the fighting men is always superficial and at times indifferent, his
humorous observation is so intensely interested and sympathetic that its
creations are only inferior in artistic value to his portraits of the
poet-philosopher-lover.
The intellect in him had little or nothing to go upon in the case of the
man of action; he never loved the Captain or watched him at work; it is
his mind and second-hand knowledge that made Henry V. and Richard III.;
and how slight and shallow are these portraits in comparison with the
portrait of a Parolles or a Sir Toby Belch, or the ever-famous Nurse,
where the same intellect has played about the humorous trait and
heightened the effect of loving observation. The critics who have
ignorantly praised his Hotspur and Bastard as if he had been a man of
deeds as well as a man of words have only obscured the truth that
Shakespeare the poet-philosopher, the lover
quand meme, only
reached a sane balance of nature through his overflowing humour.
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