Page:Shakespeare in the Class-Room, Weld, Shakespeariana, October 1886.djvu/1

 SHAKESPEARE IN THE CLASS-ROOM.

In the empire of Literature, Shakespeare rules alone. No other poet has so quickened the human mind. No classics are worthier than his to be permanent text books in our literary institutions. None ministers such varied development to all the mental powers.

Let us first consider Shakespeare as a school-reading book for advanced classes. Reading is a fine art, but if it do not voice the soul, it is a mere mechanical art. No force of will, no painstaking can raise it above that level. A clear, flexible, musical voice, distinct articulation, pauses nicely adjusted and skilful inflexions may make one a perfect mechanical reader, but is such vocalizing good reading? What is it, but a mill so grinding its grist of words as to crush out the soul in them, leaving their corpses laid out upon the lips of the elocutionary undertaker. There can be no good reading, of that, in which the reader takes no vital interest, and other things being equal, the deeper the interest the better the reading. If the words read are the reader's pulses, if in his tones you feel his heart beat, your's will throb too.

A keen relish of the subject matter read, its pithiness, wit, rythm, beauty and force, is indispensible to all really fine reading. By a month's practice in such reading, one would improve incomparably more than plodding a life time through worlds of words that touch not this life.

Shakespeare as a reading book in schools would, under a competent teacher, excite in the pupil a vivid interest, and hold it unflagging to the end. No other bears so triumphantly the test of the recitation room. Other books grow dull upon re-reading, and frequently intolerable, if often read. Shakespeare never tires, and if the pupil be appreciative, his zest increases at each reading.

Finally, no other book furnishes such ample means for vocal culture, nor such incentives and aids to natural and impressive reading.

II. Advantages of Shakespeare as a study.

First. It is our best model of idiomatic English, the staunchest bulwark of our grand old Saxon, beating back the floods that threaten to whelm it.

Nothing would so withstand the rush into our language of vapid,