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.