Page 147 - DENG502_PROSE

Unit 15: Hazlitt—On Genius and Common Sense...

may mean anything or nothing; but in the circumstances in which Macduff is placed, it is neither Notes
insignificant nor equivocal. What! man, ne’er pull your hat upon your brows, etc.
It admits but of one interpretation or inference, that which follows it:—
Give sorrow words: the grief that does not speak, Whispers the o’er-fraught heart, and
bids it break.
The passage in the same play, in which Duncan and his attendants are introduced, commenting
on the beauty and situation of Macbeth’s castle, though familiar in itself, has been often praised
for the striking contrast it presents to the scenes which follow.—The same look in different
circumstances may convey a totally different expression. Thus the eye turned round to look at you
without turning the head indicates generally slyness or suspicion; but if this is combined with
large expanded eyelids or fixed eyebrows, as we see it in Titian’s pictures, it will denote calm
contemplation or piercing sagacity, without anything of meanness or fear of being observed. In
other cases it may imply merely indolent, enticing voluptuousness, as in Lely’s portraits of women.
The languor and weakness of the eyelids give the amorous turn to the expression. How should
there be a rule for all this beforehand, seeing it depends on circumstances ever varying, and scarce
discernible but by their effect on the mind? Rules are applicable to abstractions, but expression is
concrete and individual. We know the meaning of certain looks, and we feel how they modify one
another in conjunction. But we cannot have a separate rule to judge of all their combinations in
different degrees and circumstances, without foreseeing all those combinations, which is impossible;
or if we did foresee them, we should only be where we are, that is, we could only make the rule
as we now judge without it, from imagination and the feeling of the moment. The absurdity of
reducing expression to a preconcerted system was perhaps never more evidently shown than in a
picture of the Judgment of Solomon by so great a man as N. Poussin, which I once heard admired
for the skill and discrimination of the artist in making all the women, who are ranged on one side,
in the greatest alarm at the sentence of the judge, while all the men on the opposite side see
through the design of it. Nature does not go to work or cast things in a regular mould in this sort
of way. I once heard a person remark of another, ‘He has an eye like a vicious horse.’ This was a
fair analogy. We all, I believe, have noticed the look of a horse’s eye just before he is going to bite
or kick. But will any one, therefore, describe to me exactly what that look is? It was the same acute
observer that said of a self-sufficient., prating music-master, ‘He talks on all subjects at sight’—
which expressed the man at once by an allusion to his profession. the coincidence was indeed
perfect. Nothing else could compare with the easy assurance with which this gentleman would
volunteer an explanation of things of which he was most ignorant, but the nonchalance with
which a musician sits down to a harpsichord to play a piece he has never seen before. My
physiognomical friend would not have hit on this mode of illustration without knowing the
profession of the subject of his criticism; but having this hint given him, it instantly suggested
itself to his ‘sure trailing.’ The manner of the speaker was evident; and the association of the
music-master sitting down to play at sight, lurking in his mind, was immediately called out by the
strength of his impression of the character. The feeling of character and the felicity of invention in
explaining it were nearly allied to each other. The first was so wrought up and running over that
the transition to the last was very easy and unavoidable. When Mr. Kean was so much praised for
the action of Richard in his last struggle with his triumphant antagonist, where he stands, after his
sword is wrested from him, with his hands stretched out, ‘as if his will could not be disarmed, and
the very phantoms of his despair had a withering power,’ he said that he borrowed it from seeing
the last efforts of Painter in his fight with Oliver. This assuredly did not lessen the merit of it. Thus
it ever is with the man of real genius. He has the feeling of truth already shrined in his own breast,
and his eye is still bent on Nature to see how she expresses herself. When we thoroughly understand
the subject it is easy to translate from one language into another. Raphael, in muffling up the
figure of Elymas the Sorcerer in his garments, appears to have extended the idea of blindness even

LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY 141