MACBETH AND IAGO.

By WILLIAM SAMUEL WESCOTT, Lawrence University, Appleton, Wis.

BIOGRAPHICAL.

Mr. William Samuel Wescott was born in Washington county, Wisconsin, in 1873. His time at school until he was fifteen years of age consisted of three summer and four winter months. When he reached his fifteenth year he left home and went to Lake Mills, where the opportunity was given him to work for his board and room. To obtain money for books and clothing he did whatever work was available that would give him a little cash. In June of 1893 he was graduated from the high school of Lake Mills, as valedictorian of his class. The following summer he spent on a farm, and in the fall of 1893 began a course in the Lawrence University, at Appleton, Wisconsin, with only $35 in his pocket. With this and with what he was enabled to earn outside of the college, he finished the first year successfully. The second year he received a small salary as a singer in the Methodist Church, and in the summer of 1896 he accepted the position of assistant pastor of the Congregational Church at Appleton, Wis., under Dr. John Faville. After serving in that capacity for three years he resigned his position in order to finish his work in the University, graduating in 1900. In October, 1900, Mr. Wescott entered the Chicago Theological Seminary, and in connection with his work as a student in that institution accepted the position of assistant pastor of the First Congregational Church of Chicago. After a year's service in this church as pastor's assistant, Mr. Wescott resigned his position and accepted the position of pastor of the Crawford Congregational Church for two years. He graduated from the Chicago Theological Seminary in 1904, and immediately accepted a call to the First Congregational Church at Western Springs, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, where he is now located.

THE ORATION.

Delivered at the Inter-State Oratorical Contest at Denver, Colorado, May 3, 1900, taking first prize. Judges: Judge ROBERT Kerr, ( 211 )

Rev. GEO. B. VOSBURG, W. H. H. BEADLE, Prof. W. H. CHEEVER, and others.

Conduct is only an outward expression of an inner condition. The philosophy of evil must be based upon the desires and purposes of the heart and mind.

The villain is necessary to the highest literary art. Shakespeare's philosophy of evil is found in his dramas. Macbeth and Iago are ethical types.

Macbeth is controlled by feeling. Iago is controlled by intellect. Macbeth represents heart without mind. Iago represents mind without heart.

Conclusion.

These two characters exhibit Shakespeare's philosophy of evil. Humanity has much in common with Macbeth.

Iago is the consummate fiend; he champions the cause of heaven, but ruins the soul.

Life's greatest mystery is life. The conduct which appears in the external world is only the outward expression of the thoughts and the feelings which are resident within. Whoever, therefore, would understand the philosophy of evil, must pass beyond the action to the actor, must go back of deeds to desires and purposes, and make a survey of the motives and emotions that dominate the inner life. Whether we go to Greece and think of Sophocles, or come to later times and think of Shakespeare, Richter, or Matthew Arnold, we find no one who has left this thought out of his work. Hugo has said: "There is something grander than the ocean, and that is conscience; something sublimer than the sky, and that is the interior of the soul." Conscience is the mainspring of the moral life, and fully to tell its story would be to

give in climacteric form all that is deepest, darkest and most mysterious in the lives of men.

Rembrandt used dark shadows to give meaning and power to his paintings. Music is never so impressive as when the minor chords are struck. Nature seems majestic, not in the calm of summer sunshine, but in the roar and tumult of the tempest. So literature seems grandest, not when it revels in the glowing pictures of exultant fancy, but when it turns to tragedy and marshals on the stage those great copartners, who "with Cain go wandering through the shades of night." The villain is therefore necessary to the highest literary

art.

the

Shakespeare, whose genius measured. strength of every human passion and weighed the tenderest emotion of the soul, has given to the world, in the great dramas of Othello and Macbeth, his philosophy of evil, and a picture of its awful work. Macbeth and Iago are not fictitious creations of the poet's genius, but ethical types, the dreadful realities possible to every human soul; not monstrous products of perverted law, but perverted products of natural law;—the personified metamorphosis of ambition and revenge; Macbeth fiendishly human, Iago humanly fiendish; Macbeth a villain, Iago a devil.

While both of these characters are controlled by an evil mind, it is an evil that exists by reason of an abnormal mental condition, which defeats the moral purpose and deforms the moral nature.

Macbeth, emotional, imaginative, superstitious and ambitious, weak in intellect and will, is controlled by feeling, not by reason. His bold imagination clothes even his wildest hopes with possibility, and makes the crown of Duncan seem an easy acquisition; and even though the ascending steps be smeared with blood, yet he trusts that "the assassination may trammel up the consequence, and catch with its surcease success. If this be insured, then come what may. Let the threatening retributions of another world be o'erleaped; let the pale and kindly stars hide their light; let the “sure and firm-set earth" muffle the skulking footstep; let not the slumbering ear of Duncan hear "the knell that summons him to heaven or to hell."

The introduction of Macbeth into the drama is in strange keeping with his bold daring and superstitious fears. The blasted heath, the warring of the elements, the "foul and fair" seen in nature's livery, are but typical of the condition of Macbeth's mind. Fresh from the field of action where his "brandished steel smoked with bloody execution," he appears the brave knight, the honest thane of Glamis, worthy of the name of soldier; but when the weird sisters hail him "thane of Cawdor" and "king hereafter," like a searchlight turned within his soul it reveals the dark broodings of an evil mind. It is not the supernatural visitation of these weird images that makes Macbeth "start and seem to fear things

that sound so fair," but that in their strange solicitings he discovers his own premeditated thought "whose horrid image makes his seated heart knock at his ribs against the use of nature." Macbeth

is shocked and terrified by his evil imaginings, as he hears in the voice of the weird sisters the awful echo of his own dark soul. It is, however, the prophetic salutation of these ghastly visitors that first gives purpose to Macbeth's hope, and it is superstitious fears prompted by an outraged conscience that fill his mind with dark presentiments and gloomy forebodings.

With Iago, there is no need of supernatural visitations to "prick the side of his intent," or give shape to his diabolical schemes. Mastered by a pride of intellect, directed by an inflexible will, he marshals men and events with cunning genius and heartless cruelty. The mainspring of his action is in his cold, sleepless intellect, and the source of his power is his fiendish skill in giving direction to another's thoughts. Unlike Macbeth, Iago is controlled by reason, not by feeling. For him to think, means for him to act, and for him to act, means the employment of the arts of hell in damning men. His imagination pictures no "dagger of the mind" whose bloody point marshals him the way that he should go, but with calm deliberation he speculates on Desdemona's ruin, and, like a Mephistopheles, breathes poison in Othello's ear.

Iago is both unimaginative and unemotional. His only pleasure is in psychological analysis and