Page:Shakespeare in the Class-Room, Weld, Shakespeariana, October 1886.djvu/2

438 foreign dilutions, as a baptism into Shakespeare's terse, crisp, sinewy Saxon.

Second. While the study of Shakespeare keeps thought hard pushed, its difficulties attract and stimulate rather than dishearten.

Though often taxing the powers of the pupil, yet such is the interest excited that each knotty point proves a magnet to draw out his best thinking, and a premium to pay him for it.

Third. Of all writers, Shakespeare affords the largest scope for the analysis of language as an instrument of thought.

If language were a mere vehicle of ideas, then in using it, the chief mental exercise would be in selecting words to express them, but it is hardly less necessary to thinking than to utterance. If we do not think in words, we do not think with them.

What mental process can be carried on without them? How vast then the force of language, as an educator of mental power. Words are intellectual developers. They generate ideas, make them fast,—fixtures in the mind, and hold it still to contemplate and thus multiply them. Our conceptions, our logical processes, even our abstractions, give birth to ideas, only when shaped in the mould of words. Since words then, are both the symbols and inspirers of thought, inciting as well as transmitting it, the more vividly they express it, the more powerfully do they stimulate it. Such words so used are thought generators, their function is creative.

Shakespeare being pre-eminent, not only as a master of thought, but as a word master, a system of education that ignores the study of his language as a mental discipline fails in a vital point.

Fourth. The study of Shakespeare not only quickens the pupil's thinking powers, but trains him to the use of apt and telling words.

In action upon matter, two things combine in every proper instrument; substance and form, or a fit material and a fit shape. Dough in the shape of an axe, and steel without shape are but dough and steel, the axe is wanting. So in mind as wrought out in language, the same things combine, substance and form, thought and speech. Thought without expression is life unborn, expression without thought is a birth still-born. Thought ill expressed is a born monster. Fit words not less than fitly spoken are apples of gold. What hands, assigned to dress and keep throughout the ages the gardens of literature, have caused to grow in them, such and so many golden apples, as those of Shakespeare. Who that has regaled his sight and taste with fruits and flowers such as his, can turn from them to those tepid dilutions, thinnest platitudes, tawdry fineries, daubed with prismatic streaks and strung with tinsel to tinkle and dazzle—those grandiloquent mouthings, misty ambiguities and mawkish sentimentalities, which, tricked out in a motley patch work ablaze with pyrotechnics, flaunt their gewgaws in our sensational literature.

Such is the marvellous mosaic of his words that each word, attracted to