Page:Shakespeare in the Class-Room, Weld, Shakespeariana, October 1886.djvu/13

Rh local usages, time, place, surrounding, and even with the changing fashions of the hour. True there are such things as intrinsic indecencies, such always and every where throughout Christendom, yet, whatever in speech outrages the common feeling of fitness, modesty and purity, is, by the rightminded eschewed, as then and there an indecency, not necessarily intrinsic, but relatively such. Thus numbers of words and phrases in our language, once universally used in refined society or in sermons on the gravest occasions, are now regarded as indecent, and are used only by persons utterly gross in all their tastes and tendencies. Words expressing such ideas are a necessity, in the language, but when in the advance of society they become clustered with associations specially repulsive, they thus become indecent, and give place to synonyms that are not so, though representing the same ideas. The very gist of all indecency is, as a general rule, the doing of conscious violence to that sense of moral fitness, which usage has made its standard. Some of the best books in our older literature contain expressions, not at all indecorous when they were written, but if used now by the North American Review, the Atlantic, or Harper's Monthly, would sentence them to instant death "without benefit of clergy." In some of the most advanced of our old English classics, are passages and descriptions, which, were I to read to you now as apt illustrations of the topic under discussion, you would justly regard it as an indignity to be resented, and my address as a nuisance to be abated on the spot. Milton's Paradise Lost, is a text book in most of our higher schools. Shall that, the grandest poem since Job, be ruled out of them for alleged indecencies? And yet, when under reading in the school room, what teacher does not quietly arrange to have certain passages passed without being read in the class." Who would dislodge from the household shelf, the old family Bible, because it contains details, which in selections for reading to an audience would be quietly passed over.

On the same principle of discretionary selection and omission, Bowdler's Family Shakespeare was long since compiled. Near twenty years ago, Prof. Hows of Columbia College, New York City, published his Shakespearian Reader as a school text book, and ten years since his Historical Shakespeare. More recently Rev. Henry N. Hudson of Boston has published his School Shakespeare, an admirable text book for advanced classes.

It is surely no small marvel that it should be charged against the dramas of Shakespeare that they allure youth to disparage virtue and to lead immoral lives. They never deck pollution with the robe of purity; nor call evil good; nor smooth the brow, nor the pathway of evil passions; nor strew with flowers the road to crime.

Milton in his immortal Paradise Lost, fills pages with impious