William Hazlitt (1778 – 1830)
Why the Heroes of Romances are Insipid (1827)
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As to the heroes of the philosophical school of romance, such as Goethe’s Werther, &c., they are evidently out of the pale of this reasoning. Instead of being common-place and insipid, they are one violent and startling paradox from beginning to end. Instead of being cast in stiff unmeaning mould, they “all germins spill at once” that make mere mortal men. They run a-tilt at all established usages and prejudices, and overset all the existing order of society. There is plenty of interest here; and instead of complaining of a calm, we are borne along by a hurricane of passion and eloquence, certainly without any thing of “temperance that may give it smoothness.” Schiller’s Moor, Kotzebue’s heroes, and all the other German prodigies are of this stamp.
Shakespeare’s lovers and Boccaccio’s I like much: they seem to me full of tenderness and manly spirit, and free from insipidity and cant. Otway’s Jaffier is, however, the true woman’s man—full of passion and effeminacy, a mixture of strength and weakness. Perhaps what I have said above may suggest the true reason and apology for Milton’s having unwittingly made Satan the hero of ‘Paradise Lost.’ He suffers infinite losses, and makes the most desperate efforts to recover or avenge them; and it is the struggle with fate and the privation of happiness that sharpens our desires, or enhances our sympathy with good or evil. We have little interest in unalterable felicity, nor can we join with heart and soul in the endless symphonies and exulting hallelujahs of the spirits of the blest. The remorse of a fallen spirit or “tears such as angels shed” [see PL I.620] touch us more nearly.