Theodore Dwight Weld

“ There can be no good reading, of that, in which the reader takes no vital interest, and other things being equal, the deeper the interest the better the reading. If the words read are the reader's pulses, if in his tones you feel his heart beat, your's will throb too.
A keen relish of the subject matter read, its pithiness, wit, rythm, beauty and force, is indispensible to all really fine reading. By a month's practice in such reading, one would improve incomparably more than plodding a life time through worlds of words that touch not this life. ”

“ No works not professedly religious, are so rife with moral sentiments as those of Shakespeare. They infect with no moral taint the pure, nor lead the innocent to tolerate the atmosphere of guilt. Gentleness, and human sympathy, love and justice meet, embrace and blend.
The religious literature of Christendom furnishes no statement of the law of love, the golden rule, and the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount, more terse, comprehensive and radiant with beauty than scores of passages in the works of Shakespeare. ”

“ Nature is not a mere store-house of things, events, facts, entities, masses, atoms, and isolations, but an exhaustless fountain of principles, laws, causes and effects, fixed relations, affinities, combined elements, balanced forces, means and ends, processes, necessities and motives, and thus an infinite magazine of susceptibilities and powers, each a stimulus inciting the mind to clothe itself with beauty and strength. ”

“ In the empire of Literature, Shakespeare rules alone. No other poet has so quickened the human mind. No classics are worthier than his to be permanent text books in our literary institutions. None ministers such varied development to all the mental powers.
Let us first consider Shakespeare as a school-reading book for advanced classes. Reading is a fine art, but if it do not voice the soul, it is a mere mechanical art. No force of will, no painstaking can raise it above that level. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There in free disport, all quick with life, she basks at full length in her own sunshine, ever humming her fancies as they come and go, now in frolic, now in battle, musing now, and now in tears, in ecstasy, in prayer, all in her own sweet way, and saying and doing all, only because she cannot help it, if she would, and would not help it if she could. ”

“ And now to sum up in a word, let me say that, regarding Shakespeare, as without a peer not only as a poet, but as a thinker, a philosopher, a moralist, a metaphysician, a logician,—though without the 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. ”

“ In a word, I am in the highest sense to impersonate him, at the bar of my own conscience, just as in any other case of personation, I do in my conception assume the personality of another, and so regarding myself as himself, I am to judge the case accordingly, and thus determine what is his due from me. "Love thy neighbor as thyself." "As ye would that men should do unto you, do ye even so unto them." ”

“ Why teach the pupil to reproduce the author's conception to the ear, and not to the eye? In the former, he has a daily drill for years, in the latter not a lesson. Why not? What we see stirs us more than what we hear. It sinks deeper, stays longer and, and suggests more. While voice reveals thought and feeling in sound alone,—posture, attitude, gesture, manifold action, with expressions of face and feature diversified in countless phases, reveal them in lines, shapes, figures, hues and pictures, in lights and shades vastly more multiform. ”

“ A clear, flexible, musical voice, distinct articulation, pauses nicely adjusted and skilful inflexions may make one a perfect mechanical reader, but is such vocalizing good reading? What is it, but a mill so grinding its grist of words as to crush out the soul in them, leaving their corpses laid out upon the lips of the elocutionary undertaker. ”

“ Such await our birth, ply every grade of our growth, throng in through the senses, throb in every pulse, flash in every ray, ring in all tones, float in every odor, and savor, live in every thought, feeling, volition, and physical action, ever acting without us and upon us at each moment of our lives, and peopling even the vagaries of our dreams. ”

“ Besides, the relation of the imagination to the other faculties is such that their scope, grasp, hardy growth, their symmetry, poise, and point are greatly determined by the force and range of its conceptive power, which becomes thus pre-eminently their educator, beckoning them out and up,—their watchword and talisman, their badge, beacon and banner. No power of the mind performs for it so high a service as this. When wisely developed it is the standard bearer for them all. It alone buoys us from our low actuals, toward a higher possible. ”

“ The girl chirps and sings, a birdie, a dove, she coos—a lamb, she bleats—or a loving mother, she lullabies her sick baby doll as she rocks it to sleep. What mother upon answering tiny raps at her nursery door, has not seen entering there distinguished guests?—the teacher, the doctor, the squire, the minister, or their wives—next come world-wide travelers, and authors known to fame, gravely sifted in with peddlers, beggars, and gypsies, and with pomp and circumstance, Generals, Governors, Presidents, Kings and Queens, the Sultan, the Pope, the Grand Lama and the Great Mogul. ”

“ While doing all that we are doing in physics, (and much more may we do,) yet, let us never ignore the fact, that outside of these sciences of nature, lives vast nature herself, all aglow, above, beneath, around and within us,—its great heart beat stirring our pulses too, thrilling us with its vitalities till we grow plastic in their warmth, absorb their forces, and thus dilate into a larger development, and rise into higher life. ”

“ 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. ”

“ His page is ever astir and aglow—thought quivers and flashes—pulses throb, and life leaps along the lines. Thoroughly plied with such forces, and inspirited by a skillful teacher, the pupils mind must be a marvel of matter, if not inspired to mental activity.
Eighth. Further, I advocate the study of Shakespeare in our higher schools because nothing in our literature so tends to beget in youth an earnest love of nature. In the good time coming to education, that vast developing force, the love of nature, will at last receive its due as an educator of mind. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The last consideration that I urge, is that Shakespeare's works are in themselves an epitome and a summary of universal literature wrought out in endless forms of philosophic structure, and æsthetic texture, in felicities of thought and style, regrouping and refining the shapeliest features of other writers. What characteristic of universal literature is not sublimated in Shakespeare? ”

“ But besides this, the development of the dramatic faculty is invaluable, as an intellectual discipline. The process is itself an educator. It trains to high force the power of conception, inasmuch as the personation of a character, necessitates its vivid conception. It also shapes and kindles distinct ideals, gives acuteness and zest to the literary appreciation, brings attention to a focus till it burns there, thus giving special vigor to that without which, mind has no power worthily to achieve. ”

“ Shakespeare as a reading book in schools would, under a competent teacher, excite in the pupil a vivid interest, and hold it unflagging to the end. No other bears so triumphantly the test of the recitation room. Other books grow dull upon re-reading, and frequently intolerable, if often read. Shakespeare never tires, and if the pupil be appreciative, his zest increases at each reading. ”

“ In measuring themselves they judge from false data. Their intense sensitiveness stifles manifestation. Thus they can neither show nor know their own strength. Their light is within ground glass, and they judge of it by the few rays that struggle through. The manifestations of mind made by their schoolmates, they compare with their own, not considering that they cannot show what they have, their powers having to force a passage through non-conductors, which stop half of them, and so hard beset the rest, that they come out warped and battered ”

“ May I not add to this that Shakespeare was also the wisest of sages. Does he not give us more lessons of practical wisdom and fraught with deeper meaning in the conduct of life, than ever fell from any lips save his of whom astonished crowds declared "Never man spake like this man." Shunning the formalities of scholastic logic, its elaborate methods and techincs, he yet inwrought its very gist through his works,—not logic as an art with its routine and formulæ, but those principles which an analysis of the art reveals. ”

“ Children almost as soon as they can totter, begin to go out of themselves. The boy turns into a dog and bow-wows—a cock, he flaps his wings and crows—a cow, he fetches a long drawn moo—a horse broke loose, he curvets, prances and kicks fearfully among his nursery blocks—a big bull, he waxes dangerous as he bellows and paws the carpet—a locomotive, he blows his steam whistle and dashes round the nursery with puffs and yells spasmodic, or taming down, sticks a feather in his cap and struts a soldier. ”

“ Its development gives self-poise, quickens perception, memory, imaginative, taste, and intuition, gives keener appreciation of beauty, strength and grace, and to volition a firmer grasp and wider sway.
To exercise this power seems a kind of instinctive mental necessity. No intellectual element has more persistently asserted itself through all time; and of all way-marks with which civilization has spaced off its progress, none have been projected into higher relief than the dramatic. ”

“ When the pupils in our advanced classes are, under a wise supervision, put to the study and critical analysis of Shakespeare, there will then be taught in our schools, not only an English literature, but all that is fundamental in Universal Literature, not its mere outline, but its essential self, with whatever is vital in æsthetic philosophic detail. ”

“ Again, the study of Shakespeare stimulates general mental activity, luring almost constraining the pupil into habits of vigorous thought. The tendency of the pupil to slug and drone, is to the earnest teacher his "gorgon dire," seeming sometimes a very demoniacal possession, defying exorcism. If the demon be not deaf, dumb, blind, and besotted, as well as dead asleep, Shakespeare taught as he should be could hardly fail to cast the monster out. ”