The Aurora, 1880 The Aurora 6-1880 The Aurora 8.4 Iowa State Agricultural College Follow this and additional works at: https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/aurora_1880 Recommended Citation Iowa State Agricultural College, "The Aurora 8.4" (1880). The Aurora, 1880. 6. https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/aurora_1880/6 This Book is brought to you for free and open access by the The Aurora at Iowa State University Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in The Aurora, 1880 by an authorized administrator of Iowa State University Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. '"SCIENCE "W"IT::S:: PRACTICE." Vol. VIII.] Iowa Agricultural College, June, 1880. [No. 4. SHAKESPEARE FOR CULTURE. not see recurring under some new phase, in PROF, W. II. WYNN. some unexpected subtlety of out-break,­ I. some uncatalogued display of goodness of vice. Look over this vast mass of human Shakespeare, I may say, is the most acces­ life, surging round our planet like a living sible and the most available means of cul­ sea. Conceive for one moment of the emo­ ture in the English language. The older tional heaving of this mass, the joys, the divines were accustomed to rank these plays sorrows, the loves, the hates, the plans, the next to the Bible, often _advising.the young intrigues, the sighs, the heart-breaks, the candidate for orders to hold them of equal night-watches, the prayers, the oaths, the authority in their respective spheres, and long stretches of human feeling that sweep find in them a value exceeding that of all like whirl-pools through the ages and in­ other books. If you want to know the spir­ volve whole nations in their wake-the itual nature of man, his capacity for wor­ magnitude and intricacy of the theme will ship, his longings, battlings, defeats, and vic­ immediately appear. tories, in the attainment of a higher life, you Literature as distinguished from science will study, profoundly, David, Isaiah, Paul, and religion finds here its legitimate sphere. and John; if you want to know human na­ Poetry, fiction, the fine arts, are supreme ture in its subtlest workings, its passions, here. The novelist has a wide range here, its foibles, its meanness, its heroisms, the aw­ and his industry has been prodigious. ful grandeur of its desperate ambitior1s, and Masterpieces of fiction in countless numbers the tragic solemnity of those moments when in all modern literatures have flooded the it bows before the storm, you must read world, and yet the ·mines wiience these Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, Henry I,.Vth., spiritual treasures are digged betray no King Lear. · Indeed, there is not one of the signs of exhaustion. Love and hate, the thirty-two or more plays of Shakespeare'_s lust of dominion, the genial coalescence composition that does not embody some and· sharp collisions of human wills, soul­ special phase of human nature, besides struggles, hopes, fears, all the• springs of throwing many side-lights upon the fathom­ feeling that are stored np in the words, less abyss. home, country, kindred, lover, friend, foe, The deepest terrestrial problem with are as prolific in resource, and as unfailing which we grapple is the human heart. · You in interest, now, as in the days when Cer­ can fathom the sea, but there is no plumet vantes painted his infatuated hero in insane that will sound the infinite depths of the chivalric adventure, and Fielding traced nature of man. The meanest subject you his Tom Jones throughout an obliquitous may put before me confounds all philosophy. career. Goethe, Victor Hugo, Dickens, There is no one of the emotions that I shall George Eliot have drained none of these SHAKESPEARE FOR CULTURE. channels dry. Their sources are perennial. ant, the elocutionist, the mere actor, who But the one being whose penetration was has not aimed to grapple with the play in deeper than all others, whose intuition was the deeper currents of its meaning, may be quicker, who saw and responded most uner­ lavish in his judgments, talking flippantly ringly to the subtlest workings of the human of its alleged defects, or beyond all bounds heart in every variety of situation, was exiravagantly in its praise,-his opinions Shakespeare; Let us see that this is no mere are worth nothing, because there is no cul­ form of words, no empty shout of literary ture back of them to give them force. cant. Stand in the vestibule of this great And precisely this it is which reveals drama, and the marvelous powers of the Shakesp~are, and this it is, also, which poet will not appear. You will be disposed Shakespeare supplies. • I mean culture. to ask: "Is there not a species of,,.literary Shakespeare, in this regard, takes rank with craze about this hue and cry,.~_;,"'furo, in all the great masterpieces of antiquity. the wild excitement ot some pagan':-f~tive­ They are approached by culture. They day, one voice, and then a thousand, would' will not expose their treasures to the vul­ • be raised in the acclaim, • Great is Diana of .gar gaze, but they pay back a thousand-fold the Ephesians!' when, obviously, Diana of the labor and the pains expended in their the Ephesians was not great?" How comes search. The task I have in hand is to it that this one man, " the divine William," make this plain: the obscure Willi am, rather, the almost per­ We shall easily agree that at the root of sonally unknown play-wright of the city of all just conceptions of culture, is the human­ London, nearly three hundred years ago, izing element, the notion of soul being when restored learning was just dawning brought in contact with soul, the commun­ on our modern world, ana for aught that ity of sympathy which all refined fellow­ appears, the little that was then in vogue feeling must seek and enjoy. In all efforts was unknown to him-should build himself toward culture the quest is man-ward. It a monument in the world of letters that has is not God-ward, for that would be religion. no rival in any language on the face of the It is not earth-ward for that would be sci­ earth? Is there not some mistake about ence. Culture has its own specific sphere. this; some lurking suspicion, at least, that We see that, when we .have no favorite the­ an epidemic of national vanity has made a ory to maintain, and no fast and loose lines god out of an ordinary man? to adjust between it and religion on the one The only answer we can give to this rna­ hand, and between it and science on the soning, in which the novitiate often indulg­ other. Matthew Arnold will· have it that es, is: you must not measure the poet from culture and religion are one and the same an outside estimate of him, from any hear­ thing; but he stands alone m the absurdity. say of bis merits, from any other data than A more popular movement is that made by what your deepest study and your evolving the speculative scientists of the day, who taste will supply. You must push your way are in a mood to push every species of intel­ into the fane of this man's genius, actually lectual effort from the field that will not con­ finq. access to the adytwm of bis tragic and form rigidly to the formulas of science. Of comic muse, before you can have the faint­ poetry they speak patronizingly; at the an­ est conception vf the grandeur of his work. cient Greek and Roman classics they laugh That done, all misgivings will cease. Here outright, There is nothi:hg in Homer, or is Hamlet. I want no opinion of the mar­ Virgil, or Dante, or Shakespeare, that can vels of that piece of literature from any man be wrought out in the laboratory, nothing who bas not threaded it through and through that can be analyzed into elements that we with the web of bis reflections, seen and can see, or touch, or taste, or smell; there­ studied all its characters in their varied fore the venerable old books must be given interactions, weighed well their language. over to the philologist and antiquarian to be and wrought powerfully at the psychologic­ valued, as Mr. Huxley advises, for the light al enigma which lies at its heart. The ped- they throw on "the paleontology of man." .POE. 57 The student must not brood over them for the attributes and propensities of common any intellectual furniture he will thence de­ mortals. rive. He will get nothing for his pains, un­ Prominent among the names in this . less it be an evanescent pleasure ·which is strange order of beings occurs that of Edgar dissipation if indulged. Allan Poe. He combines in a remarkable degree two elements of mind seldom found Mr. Huxley has undertaken in an ingen~ m1ited-analysis and imagination. These ious and captivating essay to show our constitute the groundwork of his genius; young men that every advantage in the way they are the source of his wonderful power. of mental stimulus and equipment absurd­ No two faculties could be more opposite in ly claimed for the classics, may be found in their effects. Their union in him give to the sciences, with the astounding difference many of his subjects the effect of what can that the advantages are real in the case of only be expressed by the contradictory phras­ the sciences, and only imaginary when they are thought to pertain to literary work.