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.

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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