the understanding,--knowing well that the
understanding in such things is at fault, and the sage as ignorant as
the child.

Only the highest order of genius can represent nature thus. An inferior
artist produces either something entirely immoral, where good and evil
are names, and nobility of disposition is supposed to show itself in the
absolute disregard of them--or else, if he is a better kind of man, he
will force on nature a didactic purpose; he composes what are called
moral tales, which may edify the conscience, but only mislead the
intellect.

The finest work of this kind produced in modern times is Lessing's play
of 'Nathan the Wise.' The object of it is to teach religious toleration.
The doctrine is admirable--the mode in which it is enforced is
interesting; but it has the fatal fault, that it is not true. Nature
does not teach religious toleration by any such direct method; and the
result is--no one knew it better than Lessing himself--that the play is
not poetry, but only splendid manufacture. Shakespeare is eternal;
Lessing's 'Nathan' will pass away with the mode of thought which gave it
birth. One is based on fact; the other, on human theory about fact. The
theory seems at first sight to contain the most immediate instruction;
but it is not really so.

Cibber and others, as you know, wanted to alter Shakespeare. The French
king, in 'Lear,' was to be got rid of; Cordelia was to marry Edgar, and
Lear himself was to be rewarded for his sufferings by a golden old age.
They could not bear that Hamlet should suffer for the sins of Claudius.
The wicked king was to die, and the wicked mother; and Hamlet and
Ophelia were to make a match of it, and live happily ever after. A
common novelist would have arranged it thus; and you would have had your
comfortable moral that wickedness was fitly punished, and virtue had its
due reward, and all would have been well. But Shakespeare would not have
it so. Shakespeare knew that crime was not so simple in its
consequences, or Providence so paternal. He was contented to take the
truth from life; and the effect upon the mind of the most correct theory
of what life ought to be, compared to the effect of the life itself, is
infinitesimal in comparison.

Again, let us compare the popular historical treatment of remarkable
incidents with Shakespeare's treatment of them. Look at 'Macbeth.' You
may derive abundant instruction from it--instruction of many kinds.
There is a moral l