already plain that his place will be among the highest. From various
indications, too, it looks as if the time for judging him had come:
"Hamlet" is perhaps his most characteristic creation, and Hamlet, in his
intellectual unrest, morbid brooding, cynical self-analysis and dislike
of bloodshed, is much more typical of the nineteenth or twentieth
century than of the sixteenth. Evidently the time for classifying the
creator of Hamlet is at hand.
And this work of description and classification should be done as a
scientist would do it: for criticism itself has at length bent to the
Time-spirit and become scientific. And just as in science, analysis for
the moment has yielded pride of place to synthesis, so the critical
movement in literature has in our time become creative. The chemist, who
resolves any substance into its elements, is not satisfied till by
synthesis he can re-create the substance out of its elements: this is
the final proof that his knowledge is complete. And so we care little or
nothing to-day for critical analyses or appreciations which are not
creative presentments of the person. "Paint him for us," we say, "in his
habit as he lived, and we will take it that you know something about
him."
One of the chief attempts at creative criticism in English literature,
or, perhaps it would be fairer to say, the only memorable attempt, is
Carlyle's Cromwell. He has managed to build up the man for us quite
credibly out of Cromwell's letters and speeches, showing us the
underlying sincerity and passionate resolution of the great Puritan once
for all. But unfortunately Carlyle was too romantic an artist, too
persuaded in his hero-worship to discover for us Cromwell's faults and
failings. In his book we find nothing of the fanatic who ordered the
Irish massacres, nothing of the neuropath who lived in hourly dread of
assassination. Carlyle has painted his subject all in lights, so to
speak; the shadows are not even indicated, and yet he ought to have
known that in proportion to the brilliancy of the light the shadows must
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