Much of what may need to be said on this topic will come in more fitly
in speaking of particular plays and characters. A few observations of
a very inclusive scope will be sufficient here.
And I will begin by saying that soundness in this respect is the
corner-stone of all artistic excellence. Virtue, or the loving of
worthy objects, and in a worthy manner, is most assuredly the highest
interest of mankind;--an interest so vital and fundamental, that
nothing which really conflicts with it, or even postpones it to any
other regards, can possibly stand the test of any criticism rooted in
the principles of human nature. To offend in this point is indeed to
be guilty of all: things must be substantially right here, else there
can be nothing right about them. So that, if an author's moral
teaching or moral influence be essentially bad; or even if it be
materially loose and unsound, so as to unstring the mind from thinking
and doing that which is right; nay, even if it be otherwise than
positively wholesome and elevating as a whole; then I more than admit
that no amount of seeming intellectual or poetical merit ought to
shield his workmanship from reprobation, and this too on the score of
art. But then, on the other hand, I must insist that our grounds of
judgment in this matter be very large and liberal; and that to require
or to expect a poet to teach better morals than are taught by Nature
and Providence argues either a disqualifying narrowness of mind in us,
or else a certain moral valetudinarianism which poetry is not bound to
respect. For a poet has a right to the benefit of being tried by the
moral sense and reason of mankind: it is indeed to that seat of
judgment that every great poet virtually appeals; and the verdict of
that tribunal must be an ultimate ruling to us as well as to him.
But one of the first things to be considered here is the natural
relation of Morality to Art. Now I believe Art cannot be better
defined than as the creation or the expression of the Beautiful. And
truth is the first principle of all Beauty. But when I say this, I of
course imply that truth which the human mind is essentially
constituted to receive as such. And in that truth the moral element
holds, constitutionally, the foremost place. I mean, that the human
mind draws and cannot but draw to that point, in so far as it is true
to itself: for the moral consciousness is the rightful sovereign in
the soul of man, or it is nothing; it cannot accept a lower seat
without forfeiting all its rights, and disorganizing the whole
intellectual house. So that a thing cannot be morally false and
artistically true at the same time. And in so far as any workmanship
sins in the former kind, just so far, whatever other elements of the
Beautiful it may have, it still lacks the very bond of order which is
necessary, to retain them in power; nay, the effect of those other
elements is to cultivate a taste which the whole thing fails to
satisfy; what of true beauty is present tends to awaken a craving for
that part which is wanting.
Nor need we have any fear but that in the long run things will come
right in this matter. In this, however, as in most things, truth is
the daughter of time. The moral sense and reason is so strong a force
in the calm and disinterested judgments of mankind, that it must and
will prevail: its verdict may be some time in coming, but come it
will, sooner or later, and will ultimately have things all its own
way. For the æsthetic conscience is probably the most impartial and
inexorable of the human powers; and this, because it acts most apart
from any regards of self-interest or any apprehension of consequences.
The elections of taste are in a special sort exempt both from hope of
profit and from fear of punishment. And man's sense of the Beautiful
is so much in the keeping of his moral reason,--secret keeping indeed,
and all the surer for being secret,--that it cannot be bribed or
seduced to a _constant_ admiration of any beauty where the moral
element is wanting, or even where it is excluded from its rightful
place. In other words, the law of goodness or of moral rectitude is
so closely interwoven with the nature and truth of things, that the
human mind will not set up its rest with any workmanship in Art where
that law is either set at nought or discrowned. Its natural and just
prerogatives will assert themselves in spite of us; and their triumph
is assured the moment we go to resisting them. That which appeals
merely to our sense of the Beautiful, and which has nothing to
recommend it but as it touches that sense, must first of all have the
moral element of beauty, and this too in the foremost place, else it
stands no chance of a permanent hold upon us.
It is indeed true that works of art, or things claiming to be such, in
which this law of natural proportion is not respected or not observed,
may have a transient popularity and success: nay, their success may be
the greater, or at least the louder and more emphatic, for that very
disproportion: the multitude may, and in fact generally do, go after
such in preference to that which is better. And even men not exactly
of the multitude, but still without the preparation either of a
natural or a truly educated taste,--men in whom the sense of beauty is
outvoiced by cravings for what is sensational, and who are ever
mistaking the gratification of their lower passions for the
satisfaction of their æsthetic conscience;--such men may be and often
are won to a passing admiration of works in which the moral law of Art
is plainly disregarded: but they seldom tie up with them; indeed their
judgment never stays long enough in one place to acquire any weight;
and no man of true judgment in such things ever thinks of referring to
their preference but as a thing to be avoided. With this spirit of
ignorant or lawless admiration the novelty of yesterday is eclipsed by
the novelty of to-day; other things being equal, the later instance of
disproportion always outbids the earlier. For so this spirit is ever
taking to things which are impotent to reward the attention they
catch. And thus men of such taste, or rather such want of taste,
naturally fall in with the genius of sensationalism; which, whatever
form it takes on, soon wears that form out, and has no way to sustain
itself in life but by continual transmigration. Wherever it fixes, it
has to keep straining higher and higher: under its rule, what was
exciting yesterday is dull and insipid to-day; while the excess of
to-day necessitates a further excess to-morrow; and the inordinate
craving which it fosters must still be met with stronger and stronger
emphasis, till at last exhaustion brings on disgust, or the poor thing
dies from blowing so hard as to split its cheeks.
It is for these reasons, no doubt, that no artist or poet who aims at
present popularity, or whose mind is possessed with the spirit of such
popularity, ever achieves lasting success. For the great majority of
men at any one time have always preferred, and probably always will
prefer, that which is disproportioned, and especially that which
violates the law of moral proportion. This, however, is not because
the multitude have no true sense of the Beautiful, but because that
sense is too slow in their minds to prevent their being caught and
carried away by that which touches them at lower points. Yet that
sense is generally strong enough to keep them from standing to the
objects of their present election; so that it is ever drawing them
back one by one to the old truth from which the new falsehood withdrew
them. Thus, however the popular current of the day may set, the
judgment of the wise and good will ultimately give the law in this
matter; and in that judgment the æsthetic and the moral conscience
will ever be found to coincide. So that he who truly works upon the
principle, "Fit audience let me find, though few," will in the long
run have the multitude too: he will not indeed be their first choice,
but he will be their last: their first will be ever shifting its
objects, but their last will stand firm. For here we may justly apply
the aphoristic saying of Burke: "Man is a most unwise and most wise
being: the individual is foolish; the multitude is foolish for the
moment, when they act without deliberation; but the species is wise."
I have said that in the legislation of Art the moral sense and reason
must not only have a voice, but a prerogative voice: I have also said
that a poet must not be required to teach better morals than those of
Nature and Providence. Now the law of moral proportion in Art may be
defeated as well by overworking the moral element as by leaving it out
or by making too little of it. In other words, redundancy of
conscience is quite as bad here as deficiency; in some respects it is
even worse, because its natural effect is to set us on our guard
against the subtle invasions of pious fraud: besides, the deficiency
we can make up for ourselves, but the evil of such suspicions is not
so easily cured. For of all the things that enter into human thought,
I suppose morality is the one wherein we are naturally least tolerant
of special-pleading; and any thing savouring of this is apt to awaken
our jealousy at once; probably from a sort of instinct, that, the
better the cause, the less need there is, and the more danger there is
too, of acting as its attorney or advocate. And the temptation to "lie
for God" is one to which professed moral teachers are so exposed, that
their lessons seldom have much effect: I even suspect that, in many
cases, if not in most, their moralizing is of so obtrusive a kind,
that it rather repels than wins the confidence of the pupils.
Then too moral demonstrativeness is never the habit either of the best
poets or of the best men. True virtue indeed is a very modest and
retiring quality; and we naturally feel that they who have most of it
have "none to speak of." Or, to take the same thing on another side,
virtue is a law of action, and not a distinct object of pursuit: those
about us may know what object we are pursuing, but the mind with which
we pursue it is a secret to them; they are not obliged to know it; and
when we undertake to force that knowledge upon them, then it is that
they just will not receive it. They will sometimes learn it from our
life, never from our lips. Thus a man's moral rectitude has its proper
seat inside of him, and is then most conspicuous when it stays out of
sight, and when, whatever he does and wherever he goes, he carries it
with him as a thing of course, and without saying or even thinking any
thing about it. It may be that our moral instincts are made to work in
this way, because any ambition of conscience, any pride or ostentation
of virtue, any air of moral vanity or conceit, any wearing of
rectitude on the outside, as if put on for effect, or "to be seen of
men," if it be not essentially fictitious and false, is certainly in
the most direct course of becoming so. And how much need there still
is of those eloquently silent lessons in virtue which are fitted to
inspire the thing without any boasting of the name,--all this may well
be judged when we consider how apt men are to build their hopes on
that which, as Burke says, "takes the man from his house, and sets him
on a stage,--which makes him up an artificial creature, with painted,
theatric sentiments, fit to be seen by the glare of candlelight."
These positions indicate, I believe, pretty clearly the right course
for poetry to pursue in order to keep the just law of moral proportion
in Art. Ethical didacticism is quite out of place in workmanship of
this kind. To go about moralizing as of set purpose, or to be
specially dealing in formal precepts of duty, is not the poet's
business. I repeat, that moral demonstrativeness and poetry do not go
well together. A poet's conscience of virtue is better kept to
himself, save as the sense and spirit thereof silently insinuate
themselves into the shapings of his hand, and so live as an
undercurrent in the natural course of truth and beauty. If he has the
genius and the heart to see and to represent things just as they
really are, his moral teaching cannot but be good; and the less it
stands out as a special aim, the more effective it will be: but if,
for any purpose, however moral, he goes to representing things
otherwise than as they are, then just so far his moral teaching will
miss its mark: and if he takes, as divers well-meaning persons have
done, to flourishing his ethical robes in our faces, then he must be
content to pass with us for something less or something more than a
poet: we may still read him indeed from a mistaken sense of duty; but
we shall never be drawn to him by an unsophisticated love of the
Beautiful and the True.
* * * * *
So much for what I hold to be the natural relation of Morality to Art.
And I have put the matter thus, on the well-known principle, that the
moral sensibilities are the most delicate part of our constitution;
that as such they require to be touched with the utmost care, or
rather not to be touched directly at all; and that the thrusting of
instruction upon them tends to dull and deaden, not to quicken and
strengthen them. For the true virtue-making power is an inspiration,
not a catechism; and the truly cunning moral teacher is he who, in the
honest and free enthusiasm of moral beauty, steals that inspiration
into us without our knowing it, or before we know it. The author of
_Ecce Homo_ tells us, and truly too, that "no heart is pure that is
not passionate; no virtue is safe that is not enthusiastic." And there
is probably no vainer labour than the going about to make men good by
dint of moral arguments and reasoned convictions of the understanding.
One noble impulse will do more towards ennobling men than a volume of
ethical precepts; and there is no sure way to put down a bad passion
but by planting a good one. Set the soul on fire with moral beauty,
that's the way to burn the devils out of it. So that, for making men
virtuous, there is, as Gervinus says, "no more fruitless branch of
literature than ethical science; except, perhaps, those dramatic
moralities into whose frigid impotence poetry will always sink when it
aims at direct moral teaching."
Now, I do not at all scruple to affirm that Shakespeare's poetry will
stand the test of these principles better than any other writing we
have outside the Bible, His rank in the School of Morals is indeed no
less high than in the School of Art. He is every way as worthy to be
our teacher and guide in what is morally just and noble and right as
in what is artistically beautiful and true. In his workmanship the law
of moral proportion is observed with a fidelity that can never be too
much admired; in other words, the moral element of the beautiful not
only has a place, but is in the right place,--the right place, I mean,
to act the most surely and the most effectively on the springs of
life, or as an inspiration of good thoughts and desires. And in the
further explication or amplification of the matter I shall take for
granted that the old sophism of holding Shakespeare responsible for
all that is said and done by his characters is thoroughly exploded;
though it is not many years since a grave writer set him down as a
denier of immortality; because, forsooth, in _The Winter's Tale_ he
makes the rogue Autolycus say, "For the life to come, I sleep out the
thought of it." This mode of judging is indeed so perverse or so
ignorant, that to spend any words in refuting or reproving it would be
a mere waste of breath; or, if there be any so innocent as to need
help on that point, it is not to them that I write.
As to the exact features of Shakespeare's own moral character as a
man; whether or how far he was himself a model of virtuous living; in
what measure the moral beauty of his poetical conceptions lived in the
substance of his practical conversations; the little that is known
touching the facts of his life does not enable us to judge. The most
we can say on this score is, that we have a few authentic notes of
strong commendation, and nothing authentic whatever to set against
them. Thus Chettle, in his apology, tells us that "divers of worship
have reported his uprightness of dealing, which argues his honesty";
and his editors, Heminge and Condell, in their dedication claim to
have no other purpose than "to keep the memory of so worthy a friend
and fellow alive as was our Shakespeare." Ben Jonson, too, a pure and
estimable man, who knew him well, and who was not apt to be
over-indulgent in his judgments of men, speaks of him as "my beloved
Shakespeare" and "my gentle Shakespeare"; and describes him as
follows:
"Look, how the father's face
Lives in his issue, even so the race
Of Shakespeare's mind _and manners_ brightly shines
In his well-turnèd and true-filèd lines."
These things were said some seven years after the Poet's death; and
many years later the same stanch and truthful man speaks of him as
"being indeed honest, and of an open and free nature." I do not now
recall any other authentic testimonials to his moral character; and,
considering how little is known of his life, it is rather surprising
that we should have so much in evidence of his virtues as a man. But
it is with what he taught; not what he practised, that we are here
mainly concerned: with the latter indeed we have properly nothing to
do, save as it may have influenced the former: it is enough for our
purpose that he saw and spoke the right, whether he acted it or not.
For, whatever his faults and infirmities and shortcomings as a man, it
is certain that they did not infect his genius or taint his mind, so
as to work it into any deflection from the straight and high path of
moral and intellectual righteousness.
I have said that Shakespeare does not put his personal views,
sentiments, and preferences, in a word, his individuality, into his
characters. These stand, morally, on their own bottom; he is but the
describer of them, and so is not answerable for what they do: he holds
the mirror up to them, or rather to nature in them; they do not hold
it up to him: we see them in what he says, but not him in what they
say. And, of course, as we may not impute to him, morally, their
vices, so neither have we any right to credit him, morally, with their
virtues. All this, speaking generally, is true; and it implies just
the highest praise that can possibly be accorded to any man as a
dramatic poet. But, true as it is generally, there is nevertheless
enough of exception to build a strong argument upon as to his moral
principles, or as to his theory of what is morally good and noble in
human character.
I have already mentioned Henry the Fifth as the one of his characters
into whom the Poet throws something of his own moral soul. He delivers
him both as Prince Hal and as King in such a way, that we cannot but
feel he has a most warm and hearty personal admiration of the man;
nay, he even discovers an intense moral enthusiasm about him: in the
Choruses, where he ungirds his individual loves from the strict law of
dramatic self-aloofness, and lets in a stream from his own full heart,
he calls him "the mirror of all Christian kings," and ascribes to him
such qualities, and in such a way, as show unequivocally his own
cherished ideal of manhood, and in what course the current of his
personal approval ran. Here, then, we have a trustworthy exhibit of
the Poet's moral principles; here we are left in no doubt as to what
moral traits of character he in heart approved, whether his own moral
character exemplified them or not. What sort of a man he represents
this his favorite hero to be; how modest in his greatness, how great
in his modesty; how dutiful and how devout; how brave, how gentle, how
generous, how affable, how humane; how full of religious fervor, yet
how bland and liberal in his piety; with "a tear for pity, and a hand
open as day for melting charity"; how genuine and unaffected withal
these virtues grow in him; in short, how all alive he is with the
highest and purest Christian _ethos_ which the old "ages of faith"
could breathe into a man;--all this must stand over till I come to the
plays wherein he is delineated.
Something further to the same point may be gathered, not so much from
the Poet's treatment of particular good characters, as from the
general style of character which he evidently prefers to draw in that
class, and from the peculiar complexion and grain of goodness which he
ascribes to them. Antonio the Merchant, Orlando, the Sebastian of
_Twelfth Night_, Horatio, Kent, Edgar, Ferdinand, Florizel,
Posthumus, Pisanio, are instances of what I mean. All these indeed
differ very widely from each other as individuals; but they all have
this in common, that their virtues sit easy and natural upon them, as
native outgrowths, not as things put on: there is no ambition, no
pretension, nothing at all boastful or fictitious or pharisaical or
squeamish or _egoish_ in their virtues; we never see the men hanging
over them, or nursing and cosseting them, as if they were specially
thoughtful and tender of them, and fearful lest they might catch cold.
Then too, with all these men, the good they do, in doing it, pays
itself: if they do you a kindness, they are not at all solicitous to
have you know and remember it: if sufferings and hardships overtake
them, if wounds and bruises be their portion, they never grumble or
repine at it, as feeling that Providence has a grudge against them, or
that the world is slighting them: whether they live or die, the mere
conscience of rectitude suffices them, without further recompense. So
that the simple happiness they find in doing what is right is to us a
sufficient pledge of their perseverance in so doing. Now all this is,
in its degree, just the ideal of virtue which Christian morality
teaches and exemplifies. For so the right way of Christian virtue is
when a man's good deeds are so much a matter of course with him, that
he thinks not of himself for having done them. As bees when they have
made their honey; as birds when they have carolled their hymn; as the
vine when it has produced its clusters; so it is with the truly good
man when he has done a good act: it suffices him that he has borne his
proper fruit; and, instead of calling on others or even himself to
note what he has done, he goes right on and does other good acts, just
as if nothing had happened.
But if all this be true of the Poet's men, it is true in a still
higher degree of his women. Here it is that the moral element of the
Beautiful has its fullest and fairest expression. And I am bold to say
that, next to the Christian religion, humanity has no other so
precious inheritance as Shakespeare's divine gallery of Womanhood.
Helena, Portia of Belmont, Rosalind, Viola, Portia of Rome, Isabella,
Ophelia, Cordelia, Miranda, Hermione, Perdita, Desdemona, Imogen,
Catharine of Arragon,--what a wealth and assemblage of moral beauty
have we here! All the other poetry and art of the world put together
cannot show such a varied and surpassing treasure of womanly
excellence. And how perfectly free their goodness is from any thing
like stress! How true it is in respect of their virtues, that "love is
an unerring light, and joy its own security!" They are wise, witty,
playful, humorous, grave, earnest, impassioned, practical,
imaginative; the most profound and beautiful thoughts drop from them
as things too common and familiar to be spoken with the least
emphasis: they are strong, tender, and sweet, yet never without a
sufficient infusion of brisk natural acid and piquancy to keep their
sweetness from palling on the taste: they are full of fresh, healthy
sentiment, but never at all touched with sentimentality: the soul of
romance works mightily within them, yet never betrays them into any
lapses from good sense, or any substitutions of feeling for duty.
Then too how nobly and serenely indifferent the glorious creatures are
to the fashions and opinions and criticisms of the world! How
composedly some of them walk amidst the sharpest perils and
adversities, as "having the spirit to do any thing that is not foul in
the truth of their spirit." Full of bitterness their cup sometimes is
indeed; yet they do not mind it,--not they!--save as the welfare and
happiness of others are involved in what pinches them. Several of them
are represented passing through the most ticklish and trying
situations in which it is possible for female modesty to be
placed,--disguised in male attire and sharing as men in the
conversations of men; yet so unassailable is their modesty, that they
give themselves, apparently, no trouble about it. And, framed as they
are, all this may well be so: for indeed such is their fear of God,
or, which comes to the same thing, their fear of doing wrong, that it
casts out all other fears; and so their "virtue gives herself light
through darkness for to wade." Nor do we wonder that, timid maidens as
they are, they should "put such boldness on"; for we see that with
them
"Mighty are the soul's commandments
To support, restrain, or raise:
Foes may hang upon their path, snakes rustle near,
But nothing from their inward selves have they to fear."
It is very noteworthy, withal, how some of them are so secure in the
spirit and substance of the moral law, that they do not scruple, in
certain circumstances, to overrule its letter and form. Thus Isabella
feigns to practise sin; and she does so as a simple act of
self-sacrifice, and because she sees that in this way a good and pious
deed may be done in aid of others: she shrinks not from the social
imputation of wrong in that case, so her conscience be clear; and she
can better brave the external finger of shame than the inward sense of
leaving a substantial good undone. Helena, also, puts herself through
a course of literal dishonours, and this too, with a perfect
understanding of what she is about; yet she yields to no misgivings;
not indeed on the ground that the end justifies the means, but because
she knows that the soul of a just and honorable purpose, such as hers,
will have power to redeem and even to sanctify the formal dishonours
of its body. Much the same principle holds, again, in the case of
Desdemona's falsehood, when, Emilia rushing into the room, and finding
her dying, and asking, "Who has done this?" she sighs out, "Nobody--I
myself: commend me to my kind lord." I believe no natural heart can
help thinking the better of Desdemona for this brave and tender
untruth, for it is plainly the unaffected utterance of a deeper truth;
and one must be blind indeed not to see that the dying woman's purpose
is to shield her husband, so far as she can, from the retribution
which she apprehends will befall him, and the thought of which wrings
her pure breast more sharply than the pangs of death.
These are plain cases of virtue tried and purified in the straits of
self-humiliation, virtue strained, as it were, through a close-knit
fabric of difficulties and hardships, and triumphing over the wrongs
that threaten its total defacement, and even turning its obstructions
into a substance glorious as its own; that is, they are exceptional
instances of a conscious departure from the letter and form of moral
beauty for the fuller and clearer manifestation of its spirit and
soul.
Nor are the virtues of Shakespeare's men and women the mere result of
a certain felicity and harmony of nature, or the spontaneous movements
of a happy instinct so strong in them that they do what is right
without knowing or meaning it. No; his Henry the Fifth, and Horatio,
and Kent, and Edgar, and Posthumus, his Helena, and Isabella, and
Cordelia, and Hermione, and Imogen, and Catharine, are most truly
"beings breathing thoughtful breath." Virtue is with them a discipline
as well as a joy; a strong upright will is the backbone of it, and a
healthy conscience is its keeper. They all have conscious reasons for
what they do, and can state them with piercing eloquence, if occasion
bids. For so the Poet, much as he delights in that fineness of nature
or that innate grace which goes right of its own accord, evidently
prefers, even in women, the goodness that has passed through struggles
and temptations, and has its chief seat, not in impulse, but in
principle, a virtue tested, and not merely instinctive: rather say, he
delights most in the virtue that proceeds by a happy consent and
marriage of the two. He therefore does not place his highest
characters, whether men or women, in an atmosphere so pure that
average mortals cannot breathe in it: he depicts their moral nature in
conflict, with the powers of good and evil striving in them for the
mastery; and when the former prevail, it is because they have "a
strong siding champion, Conscience," to support them. Thus through
their weakness they come near enough to get hold of us, while at the
same time in their strength they are enough higher than we to lift us
upwards.
But Shakespeare's main peculiarity as a teacher of goodness lies in
this, that he keeps our moral sympathies in the right place without
discovering his own. With the one exception of Henry the Fifth, we
cannot perceive, from the delineation itself, whether he takes part
with the good character or the bad; nevertheless he somehow so puts
the matter that we cannot help taking part with the good. For I run no
risk in saying there is not a single instance in his plays where the
feelings of any natural-hearted reader fail to go along with those who
are, at least relatively, the best. And as he does not make nor even
let us see which side he is on, so of course we are led to take the
right side, not because he does, but simply because it is the right
side. Thus his moral lessons and inspirations affect us as coming, not
from him, but from Nature herself; and so the authority they carry is
not his, good as that may be, but hers, which is infinitely better.
Thus he is ever appealing directly to the tribunal of our own inward
moral forces, and at the same time speaking health and light into that
tribunal. There need be, there can be, no higher proof of the perfect
moral sanity of his genius than this. And for right moral effect it is
just the best thing we can have, and is worth a thousand times more
than all the ethical arguing and voting in the world. If it be a
marvel how the Poet can keep his own hand so utterly unmoved by the
passion he is representing, it is surely not less admirable that he
should thus, without showing any compassion himself, move our
compassion in just the degree, and draw it to just the place, which
the laws of moral beauty and proportion require.
Herein even Milton, great and good as he unquestionably is, falls far
below Shakespeare as a moral poet. Take the delineation of Satan in
_Paradise Lost_. Now Milton does not leave us at all in doubt as to
where his own moral sympathies go in that delineation: they are
altogether on the side of God and the good Angels. And he tells us
again and again, or as good as tells us, that ours ought to be there;
so that there is no possibility of mistake in the matter.
Notwithstanding I suspect he does not quite succeed in keeping the
reader's moral sympathies there. He does indeed with me: my own
feelings have somehow been so steeped in the foolish old doctrine or
faith which holds obedience to be a cardinal virtue, that they have
never sided with Satan in that controversy. But I believe a majority
of readers do find their moral feelings rather drawing to the rebel
side; this too, notwithstanding their moral judgment may speak the
other way: and when the feelings and the judgment are thus put at
odds, the former are pretty sure, in effect, to carry the day.
Now Milton's Satan, I think, may be not unfitly described as a highly
magnified realistic freethinker. Iago and Edmund are also realistic
freethinkers, the former slightly magnified, the latter unmagnified,
though both may be somewhat idealized. And both of them speak and act
strictly in that character. Accordingly all religion is in their
account mere superstition; and they take pride in never acknowledging
their Maker but to brave Him. Both exult above all things in their
intellectuality; and what they have the intellect to do, that is with
them the only limit to intellectual action; that is, their own will is
to them the highest law: hence to ruin another by outwitting and
circumventing him is their characteristic pastime; and if they can do
this through his virtues, all the better. Iago's moral creed may be
summed up in two of his aphoristic sayings,--"Virtue! a fig! 'tis in
ourselves that we are thus or thus"; and, "Put money in thy purse";
while Edmund wants no other reason for his exploiting than that his
brother is one
"Whose nature is so far from doing harms,
That he suspects none; on whose foolish honesty
My practices ride easy."
The characters of the two freethinking heroes are delineated
consistently throughout, in keeping with these ideas, no one can say,
no one has ever said, that the Poet discovers any the least prejudice
against them, or any leanings of moral or personal sympathy towards
their victims. Nothing comes from him that can be fairly construed as
a hint to us against warming up to them. Nor has any one a right to
say that he overdoes or overstresses their wickedness a jot: he merely
shows it, or rather lets them show it, just as it is. He lends them
the whole benefit of his genius for the best possible airing of their
intellectual gifts and graces; all this too without swerving a hair
from the line of cold, calm, even-handed justice: yet how do our
feelings, how do our moral sympathies, run in these cases? I need not
say they run wholly and unreservedly with the chivalrous but infirm
Cassio, the honest and honour-loving Othello, the innocent though not
faultless Desdemona; with the pious and unsuspecting Edgar, the erring
indeed but still upright and sound-hearted Gloster. Nay, more; we
would rather be in the place of the victims than of the victors:
virtue wronged, betrayed, crushed, seems to us a more eligible lot
than crime triumphant, prosperous, happy.--Such is the moral spirit of
these great delineations.
I could easily go through all the Poet's instances of virtue and
innocence in conflict or in contrast with villainy and guilt, and show
that he never fails thus to keep our moral sympathies in the right
place without discovering his own; that he is just as far from
overdoing or overstressing the villainy of the bad as the virtue of
the good; both of which fall alike under the censure of moral
demonstrativeness, while, as in the two cases specified, his moral
teachings, even because they thus come from Nature, not from him,
therefore bring in their right hand sanctions which we cannot appeal
from if we would, and would not if we could.
There is one more point on which it may be needful to say a few
words.--Johnson and others have complained that Shakespeare seems to
write without any moral purpose; and that he does not make a just
distribution of good and evil. Both charges are strictly true; at
least, so I hope, and so I believe. As regards his seeming to write
without any moral purpose, on the same principle he seems to write
without any art. But who does not know that the very triumph of art
lies in concealing art; that is, in seeming to write without it? And
so, if the Poet writes without discovering any moral purpose, that
very fact is just the highest triumph of art in the moral direction.
For no one has alleged that he seems to write with an immoral purpose.
Here, then, I have but to say that, with so consummate an artist as
Shakespeare, if the charge is not true, it ought to be. Redundancy of
conscience is indeed fatal to art; but then it is also, if not fatal,
at least highly damaging to morality; "for goodness, growing to a
plurisy, dies in its own too much." Verily, a moral teacher's first
business is to clear his mind of cant. And so much the wise and good
Dr. Johnson himself will tell us.
If, again, Shakespeare fails to make a just distribution of good and
evil, so also does Providence. If, in his representations, virtue is
not always crowned with visible success, nor crime with apparent
defeat; if the good are often cast down, the evil often lifted up, and
sometimes both cast down together; the workings of Providence in the
actual treatment of men are equally at fault in that matter. Or if he
makes the sun of his genius to rise on the evil and on the good, and
sends the rain of his genius on the just and on the unjust, why should
this be thought wrong in him, when Providence manifestly does the
same?
For, explain the fact as we may, it is certain that the consummations
of justice are not always experienced here. The world is full of
beginnings that are to be finished elsewhere, if finished at all.
Virtue often meets with very rough usage in the present order of
things: poverty and want, hardship, suffering, and reproach, are often
the lot of the good; while men of the opposite character have their
portion carved to them out of the best that the world has to bestow.
Nay, it sometimes happens that the truest, the kindest, and most
upright souls are the most exposed to injuries and wrongs; their
virtues being to them a kind of "sanctified and holy traitors," and
the heaven within them serving to disable them from winning the prizes
of earth: whereas the very unscrupulousness of the bad, their hardness
of heart and unbashfulness of front build or open for them the palaces
of wealth and splendour and greatness; their want of principle seems
to strengthen their hands; they rise the higher, that they care not
whose ruins they rise upon, and command the larger success for being
reckless how they succeed.
And is a poet, who professedly aims at nothing better than a just
reflection of human life and character as he finds them, is he to be
blamed for faithfully holding the mirror up to facts as they are in
this respect? That our Shakespeare, the mighty and the lovely,
sometimes permits the good to suffer while their wrongers prosper, I
thence infer, not indeed that he regarded them indifferently, but that
he had a right Christian faith in a further stage of being where the
present disorder of things in this point is to be rectified, and the
moral discriminations of Providence consummated. His judgment clearly
was, that suffering and death are not the worst things that can happen
to a man here. He reverences virtue, he does not patronize it. And the
virtue he has in reverence is not a hanger-on at the counters of
worldly thrift. He knew right well that "the fineness of such metal is
not found in Fortune's love," but rather "in the wind and tempest of
her frown"; and so he paints it as a thing "that Fortune's buffets and
rewards doth take with equal thanks." And, surely, what we need here
is a deeper faith, a firmer trust in the government of a Being "in
whose pure sight all virtue doth succeed"; yea, and perhaps succeeds
most highly in those very cases where the course of things in this
world fails to recognize its claims.
For so in fact it seems pretty clear that the forces of Nature have
little sense or discernment of right and wrong: the sunshine and the
rain are rather blindly given to favouring the good and the evil
indiscriminately; the plague and the thunderbolt are strangely
indifferent to moral distinctions where they strike. What of that?
these things are but the under-agents of Providence in the government
of the world: whereas the inward conscience of truth and right is the
immediate smile of God himself; and that is the Paradise of the truly
good man's soul, the very life of his life; he can live without
happiness, but he cannot live without that. Shakespeare's delineations
reflect, none so well, none so well as his, this great, this most
refreshing article of truth; and I heartily thank him for it; yes,
heartily!
So then, what though the divine Cordelia and the noble Kent die, and
this too in the very sweetness and fragrance of their beauty? Is it
not, do we not feel that it is, better to die with them than to live
with those who have caused their death? Their goodness was not acted
for the sake of life, but purely for its own sake: virtue such as
theirs does not make suit to Fortune's favours, nor build her trust in
them; pays not her vows to time, nor is time's thrall; no! her
thoughts are higher-reared; she were not herself, could she not "look
on tempests, and be never shaken." And such characters as these,
befall them what may, have their "exceeding great reward" in the very
virtue that draws suffering and death upon them: they need nothing
more, and it is their glory and immortality not to ask any thing more.
And shall we pity them, or shall we blame the Poet, that their virtue
is not crowned with Fortune's smiles? Nay, rather let us both pity and
blame ourselves for being of so mean and miserable a spirit.
As for those poets, and those critics of poetry, who insist that in
the Drama, which ought to be a just image of life as it is, there
shall always be an exact fitting of rewards and punishments to moral
desert; or that the innocent and the guilty, the just and the unjust,
shall be perfectly discriminated in what befalls them; as for such
poets and critics, I simply do not believe in them at all: their
workmanship is radically both unchristian and immoral; and its moral
effect, if it have any, can hardly be other than to "pamper the coward
heart with feelings all too delicate for use."
Wherefore, if any students of Shakespeare are still troubled with such
criticisms as the one in question, I recommend them to make a thorough
study of the _Book of Job_, and not to leave it till they shall have
mastered the argument of that wonderful and divine poem. They will
there find that, when the good man was prosperous, the Accuser brought
against him the charge, that his serving God so well was from his
being sure of good pay; and that therefore he would presently give
over or slack his service, if the pay should be withheld: they will
also find that, when he was in affliction, his comforters sought to
comfort him with the cruel reproach of having been all the while
secretly a bad man, and with arguments no less cruel, that his
afflictions were sent upon him as a judgment for his secret sins: and,
further, they will find that, when his wife urged him to "curse God
and die," her counsel proceeded upon the principle, that the evils
which fall upon the upright prove the government of the world to be in
the hands of a being who has no respect for the moral character of his
subjects; or, in other words, the sufferings of good men are taken by
her as evidence that goodness is not the law of the Divine
administration.
Now, it was from such teachers as Nature and Job, and not from such as
Job's Accuser and comforters and wife, that Shakespeare learnt his
morality.