Note 22 — Chapter VII

Yet they tax Shakspeare with grossness and barbarity. There is nothing like this scene in all his plays, except Titus Andronicus, which is full of the same tragic exaggeration and tautology. I was walking out (this 1st of October—a clear grey autumnal morning) in the gardens of the Tuileries, and seeing the long, tall avenue of trees before me that leads up to the barrier of Neuilly, it put me in mind of former times, of prints and pictures of the scenery and roads in foreign countries which I had been used to from a child, with the old-fashioned look of every thing around Paris, as if it were the year 1724, instead of 1824, till the view before me seemed to become part of a dream, or to transport me into past time, or to raise itself up in my imagination, like a picture in the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress.’ I wondered whether Buonaparte sometimes thought of this view when he was at St. Helena. I checked myself in this strain of speculation as overcharged and disproportioned to the occasion, according to the correct and elegant taste of the people where I was, when on a post opposite, I saw stuck up in large letters, ‘Pension de l’Univers,’ meaning a tenpenny ordinary. These are the people that are continually crying out against the extravagance and bombast of their neighbours. Their imagination runs to the ends of the universe, when it has nothing but words to carry—no people so magnificent, so prodigal of professions, so hyperbolical as they—add but meaning or a weight of feeling to them, and they complain bitterly of the load, and throw it off as barbarous, intolerable, Gothic, and uncouth. It is not the extravagance of the style, then, with which they quarrel, but the palpableness of the imagery which gives a blow to their slender intellectual stamina, or the accumulation of feeling about it with which they have not firmness or comprehension to grapple. ‘Dip it in the ocean, and it will stand’—says Sterne’s barber of the buckle of his wig. They magnify trifles, con amore; it is only when a poor struggling attempt is to be made to gain relief from the ‘perilous stuff that weighs upon the heart,’ or to embody the swelling conceptions of the soul in remote and lofty images, that they shrink back with the timidity of women and the formality of pedants.