It is the strength of human
nature itself that makes crime strong. Wickedness could have no power of
itself: it lives by the perverted powers of good. And so great is
Shakspere's sympathy with _Shylock_ even, in the hard and unjust doom
that overtakes him, that he dismisses him with some of the spare
sympathies of the more tender-hearted of his spectators. Nowhere is the
justice of genius more plain than in Shakspere's utter freedom from
party-spirit, even with regard to his own creations. Each character
shall set itself forth from its own point of view, and only in the
choice and scope of the whole shall the judgment of the poet be beheld.
He never allows his opinion to come out to the damaging of the
individual's own self-presentation. He knows well that for the worst
something can be said, and that a feeling of justice and his own right
will be strong in the mind of a man who is yet swayed by perfect
selfishness. Therefore the false man is not discoverable in his speech,
not merely because the villain will talk as like a true man as he may,
but because seldom is the villainy clear to the villain's own mind. It
is impossible for us to determine whether, in their fierce bandying of
the lie, _Bolingbroke_ or _Norfolk_ spoke the truth.
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