Page:Shakespeare in the Class-Room, Weld, Shakespeariana, October 1886.djvu/12

448 mechanism of logic,—as the most acute and profound mental analyst, that ever threaded the mazes of human nature, I look upon the critical study and analysis of his works as indispensable to the completeness of a liberal culture. I regard it not mainly as a discipline, unfolding the æsthetic elements, but quickening and giving momentum to the whole mind, a general educational force, a normal stimulant to all the faculties, rousing the inert, developing the latent and giving symmetry and equipoise to the whole.

This is not theoretic abstraction, but historic detail, embodying the results of many years in classes of both sexes, under a supervision inspired by these convictions. In conclusion, I notice a grave objection to the study of Shakespeare, which is, that his dramas abound in such representations of vice as tend to corrupt the mind.

Shakespeare's dramas present multiform phases of human nature. They teem with good and very good, bad and very bad, men and women. The good speak their own vernacular, the bad theirs. Truth and falsehood, fidelity and treachery, love and hatred, revenge and forgiveness, blessing and cursing, innocence and guilt, are all there in high relief. On the one hand, Christian meekness, humility, and repentance, compassion and the rendering of good for evil; on the other, bloated pride and self-will, envyings, jealousies and hypocricies, malignity and diabolic rage. We have already noticed a marked resemblance between Shakespeare and the Bible in their peculiar modes of presenting thought. We have here another in the impartial presentation of the differences in moral character. In that respect the method of Shakespeare is exactly the method of the Bible, with this exception, that only the good of Shakespeare's best characters appears. In the Bible the falsehoods, impurities, injustice and other sins and shames into which the good sometimes fall, are, with stern impartiality told in detail.

There is another striking similarity between the methods of Shakespeare and those of the Bible. The latter records crimes, sometimes describes them in detail, yet it not only never gilds them, but it unmasks their ugliness, and so encases them in a dark setting of circumstances and consequences that their grim features disgust and repel. This Bible method is also the method of Shakespeare. He draws in minute detail Iago, Goneril, Regan, Edmund, Claudius, Shylock, Queen Margaret, Macbeth, and Richard III, monsters all, but who is attracted to their diabolisms by his description? Nay, who does not the rather recoil from them all the more, for the graphic hideousness with which he stamps them.

A word with regard to the alleged indecencies of Shakespeare's dramas. The words decency and indecency, are not for the most part, absolute in their meaning, but comparative, not intrinsic but relative, not invariable, but incessantly shifting with phases of civilization, grades of development and the progress of refinement, with