The Complete Works of William Shakespeare - Israel Gollancz William Shakespeare [3226]
It is for these reasons, no doubt, that no artist or poet who aims at present popularity, or whose mind is possessed with the spirit of such popularity, ever achieves lasting success. For the great majority of men at any one time have always preferred, and probably always will prefer, that which is disproportioned, and especially that which violates the law of moral proportion. This, however, is not because the multitude have no true sense of the Beautiful, but because that sense is too slow in their minds to prevent their being caught and carried away by that which touches them at lower points. Yet that sense is generally strong enough to keep them from standing to the objects of their present election; so that it is ever drawing them back one by one to the old truth from which the new falsehood withdrew them. Thus, however the popular current of the day may set, the judgment of the wise and good will ultimately give the law in this matter; and in that judgment the æsthetic and the moral conscience will ever be found to coincide. So that he who truly works upon the principle, "Fit audience let me find, though few," will in the long run have the multitude too: he will not indeed be their first choice, but he will be their last: their first will be ever shifting its objects, but their last will stand firm. For here we may justly apply the aphoristic saying of Burke: "Man is a most unwise and most wise being: the individual is foolish; the multitude is foolish for the moment, when they act without deliberation; but the species is wise."
I have said that in the legislation of Art the moral sense and reason must not only have a voice, but a prerogative voice: I have also said that a poet must not be required to teach better morals than those of Nature and Providence. Now the law of moral proportion in Art may be defeated as well by overworking the moral element as by leaving it out or by making too little of it. In other words, redundancy of conscience is quite as bad here as deficiency; in some respects it is even worse, because its natural effect is to set us on our guard against the subtle invasions of pious fraud: besides, the deficiency we can make up for ourselves, but the evil of such suspicions is not so easily cured. For of all the things that enter into human thought, I suppose morality is the one wherein we are naturally least tolerant of special-pleading; and any thing savouring of this is apt to awaken our jealousy at once; probably from a sort of instinct, that, the better the cause, the less need there is, and the more danger there is too, of acting as its attorney or advocate. And the temptation to "lie for God" is one to which professed moral teachers are so exposed, that their lessons seldom have much effect: I even suspect that, in many cases, if not in most, their moralizing is of so obtrusive a kind, that it rather repels than wins the confidence of the pupils.
Then too moral demonstrativeness is never the habit either of the best poets or of the best men. True virtue indeed is a very modest and retiring quality; and we naturally feel that they who have most of it have "none to speak of." Or, to take the same thing on another side, virtue is a law of action, and not a distinct object of pursuit: those about us may know what object we are pursuing, but the mind with which we pursue it is a secret to them; they are not obliged to know it; and when we undertake to force that knowledge upon them, then it is that they just will not receive it. They will