Critics have too often entertained themselves with speculations as to the Poet’s specific moral purpose in this play or that.  Wherein their great mistake is the not duly bearing in mind, that the special proposing of this or that moral lesson is quite from or beside the purpose of Art.  Nevertheless, a work of art, to be really deserving the name, must needs be moral, because it must be proportionable and true to Nature; thus attuning our inward forces to the voice of external order and law:  otherwise it is at strife with the compact of things; a piece of dissonance; a jarring, unbalanced, crazy thing, that will die of its own internal disorder.  If, then, a work be morally bad, this proves the author more a bungler than anything else.  And if any one admire it or take pleasure in it, he does so, not from reason, but from something within him which his reason, in so far as he has any, necessarily disapproves:  so that he is rather to be laughed at as a dunce than preached to as a sinner; though perhaps this latter should be done also.

As to the moral temper of The Merchant of Venice, critics have differed widely, some regarding the play as teaching the most comprehensive humanity, others as caressing the narrowest bigotries of the age.  This difference may be fairly taken as an argument of the Poet’s candour and evenhandedness.  A special-pleader is not apt to leave the hearers in doubt on which side of the question he stands.  In this play, as in others, the Poet, I think, ordered things mainly with a view to dramatic effect; though to such effect in the largest and noblest sense.  And the highest praise compatible with the nature of the work is justly his, inasmuch as he did not allow himself to be swayed either way from the right measures and proportions of art.  For Art is, from its very nature, obliged to be “without respect of persons.”  Impartiality is its essential law, the constituent of its being.  And of Shakespeare it could least of all be said,

                      “he narrow’d his mind,
    And to party gave up what was meant for mankind.”

He represented men as he had seen them.  And he could neither repeal nor ignore the old law of human nature, in virtue of which the wisest and kindest men are more or less warped by social customs and prejudices, so that they come to do, and even to make a merit of doing, some things that are very unwise and unkind; while the wrongs and insults which they are thus led to practise have the effect of goading the sufferers into savage malignity and revenge.  Had he so clothed the latter with gentle and amiable qualities as to enlist the feelings all in their behalf, he would have given a false view of human nature, and his work would have lost much of its instructiveness on the score of practical morality.  For good morals can never be reached by departures from truth.  A rule that may be profitably remembered by all who are moved to act as advocates and special-pleaders in what they think a good cause.