Chapter 12

It is impossible to pass the exhaustless Shakspere without some further word of inadequate comment. Apparently no one in his day guessed that among the jostling throng of soldiers, statesmen, and philosophers this obscure playwright was the intellectual king. But Time has more than redressed the wrong, for now he is not only reverenced as a sovereign but sometimes worshiped as an oracle. The prime secret of his power, compared with the men before him and about him, is his return to reality. It is the actual world, the actual men and women in it, that he portrays, and not the puppets or shadows of a made-up world. It is a change of standpoint such as Bacon made when he recalled philosophy from abstract speculation to the study of concrete facts, and calmly told men that their past achievements were as nothing compared to the truth they were to attain with the new weapons. Shakspere has no thought of mankind's advance, no method or system to offer, but as seer and artist he beholds and portrays the universe about him. We get some idea of what the change means when we compare the humanity which he depicts with the account of mankind given by a logical theologian like Calvin; the simple, sharp division between saints and sinners, against the mixed, particolored, genuinely human people who touch our tears and laughter on the dramatist's page. Or again, contrast his world with Dante's, where the profoundest imagination and sensibility project themselves into a phantasmagoria. In the change to Shakspere we are tempted to say that we have lost heaven and escaped hell, but have taken fresh hold on earthly life and found in it unmeasured richness and significance.

In reading Shakspere we are never confused or weakened as between virtue and vice. In simply showing us this life as it is acted out by all kinds of people, he shows perpetually the beauty of courage, truth, tenderness, purity, and the ugliness of their opposites. Measure him at the most critical point, chastity. His plays have plenty of coarseness; they have touches, though very rarely, of voluptuous description; but they always leave us with the sense that purity is noble and impurity is evil. It is striking to note the tone in this respect of his successive productions. His youthful poem, "Venus and Adonis," is touched with the disease which had blighted the literature and the life of southern Europe,--the infection of the imagination by sensuality, a sort of intellectual putrescence. In the frank daylight of the early dramas this nightmare has disappeared, yet in the generally clean atmosphere there occurs sometimes a touch of depraved Italian manners, as in "All's Well that Ends Well," the deliberate seduction attempted by Bertram, bringing little discredit and no punishment. Later in the great plays the note of chastity is always clear and firm. In his women, purity is nobly depicted; in his men there appears no such attainment, but often a passionate abhorrence of vice. In only one play, "Antony and Cleopatra," it might superficially appear that there is a glorification of lawless love; but in the action of the story their lawlessness ruins Antony's and Cleopatra's fortunes; then, with the imminence of death, their passion, escaping from the thralldom of flesh, soars into a sublimation that redeems Antony's error and half transforms Cleopatra.

In Shakspere's world the supernatural sanctions have almost disappeared, but the moral law is still supreme. Yet in some ways it is a very unsatisfying world. In its deeper aspects woe predominates over joy. All phases of suffering and anguish find their language here; but of rapture there are only transient glimpses, of great and abiding happiness there is almost none, and there is scarcely a suggestion of "the peace that passeth understanding." We sometimes feel the sharpest pressure of the problems to which Christianity had addressed itself, unlightened by any solution. There is the echo of Paul's cry, "O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from this body of death!"--as in the king at prayer, in "Hamlet;" but nowhere is Paul's note of triumphant deliverance. We see men overwhelmed by temptation, as Macbeth and Angelo; we nowhere see men rising over conquered temptation to higher manhood. Man in Shakspere is generally the creature of Fate. Man's confrontal by the mystery of existence is the real theme of "Hamlet." The true unity of that drama is not in the action nor in the characters; it is the underlying and unanswered problem,--man, in his finest sensibilities and noblest aspirations, beset by a world of trouble, of confusion, of unfathomable mystery. The ghost from the other world is a mere piece of stage scenery; to the real sentiment belongs the frank paganism of Hamlet as he holds the skull,--_this_ is the end of Yorick, and that anything of Yorick may still live except these mouldering bones does not even occur to Hamlet as a question. Yet when he is tempted to take refuge in suicide, the possibility of "something after death" is sufficient to deter him. The thought suggests no hope, only a vague restraining fear. But to the guilty king there is a terrible reality in the divine law which he has broken; he struggles to reconcile himself with heaven, but his will seems paralyzed to retrace the path of wrong-doing. The incapable will, the baffled intellect, cast a gloom over the whole drama.

It is not only a clew to man's relation with the unseen and eternal that we miss in Shakspere. He fails to show one trait which belongs to human nature as truly as Hotspur's courage or Falstaff's drollery. He nowhere depicts a life controlled by a moral ideal, deliberately chosen and resolutely pursued. His world is rich in passion, but deficient in clear and high purpose and soldierly resolve. The metal of mastery is lacking. He shows us life as a wonderful spectacle, but he does not directly aid us to live our own life. His amazing treasury of wisdom seldom lends a phrase that flashes comfort into our sorrow, hope into our dejection, or strength to our wavering will.

Yet when this has been said, it remains true that Shakspere's atmosphere is wholesome and even invigorating. We are helped in our higher life by many influences besides direct moral teaching. One takes a twenty-mile tramp over moor and mountain, and no word of admonition or guidance comes from rock or tree, but he comes back stronger and serener. So from an hour among Shakspere's people one may well emerge with a fuller, happier being. It is the inscrutable power of real life truly seen, even though seen but in part.

The wish is as inevitable as it is hopeless that we might know the personality of Shakspere, the medium through which the light passing was thus colored. We get but rare and slight glimpses; the boyhood in the sweet Avon country; the stumble on the threshold of manhood in his marriage; the plunge into roaring London; the theatrical surroundings; the great encompassing drama of Elizabeth's England; the slow winning of a competence; the quiet years at the end, a burgess of Stratford town. There is a rich, tantalizing disclosure of a phase of the inner life in the Sonnets; what they seem to convey is a passion delicate and profound, striving to sublimate and satisfy itself, but baffled by unworthiness in the object, and perhaps by some unworthiness in the lover. More distinct is the outward closing scene; the retirement to the native country town, the modest prosperity, the business-like making of the will. Prosaic enough it sounds, yet in substance it has this significance, that this great genius and passionate soul bore himself among the materialities, where so many make shipwreck, with a practical sense and steadiness which brought him to the haven at least of a comfortable and honorable age. So much Shakspere certainly had in himself,--this homely yet vital self-command. With this is to be taken that he had also that intellectual mastery of himself of which the highest proof is the creation of great works of art. Self-control, prudential and intellectual, was one element of Shakspere, one secret of his sanity and strength.

One loves to see in "The Tempest" the crowning utterance of his maturity. How wise, how noble it is, and the wisdom and nobility set forth in what exquisite play of fancy and wealth of humor! As in Hamlet we seem to see Shakspere in his mid-life storm and stress, so in Prospero we think we recognize the ideal of his ripeness. There is the wise man torn from books and reverie, and rudely thrust upon treachery and the stormy sea; there is control gained over airy powers and ethereal beauties; struggle with bestial evil; forgiveness of the wrong-doer; happiness in the happiness of his child, and willing surrender of her to her lover; the admonition that love perfect itself by the mastery of passion. So wise, so beneficent, so lofty is Shakspere's latest creation. A shadow flits across, in the thought of mortal transiency:--

"We are such stuff As dreams are made of, and our little life Is rounded by a sleep."

Yet instantly Prospero marks this as the utterance of a disturbed moment: "Bear with my weakness, my old brain is troubled;" the coming encounter with Caliban has shaken him. Most Shaksperean, too, is this: alternating impulses of trust and doubt; now a sense of being led "by Providence divine;" an instinct of a "divinity that shapes our ends;" and again, the mood that sees beyond the present scene only blankness and the end.

Those elements which in Shakspere are absent or dim,--the belief in a divine rule and celestial destiny, and a high and fixed moral purpose,--these appear in full strength in men of Shakspere's time, the men of religion; but in their minds inextricably blent with a scheme of the universe which it is plain was to Shakspere as unreal as the mythology of the Greeks, and which he treats in much the same way, merely borrowing it for a dramatic purpose. The men of religion had no such consummate expression in literature as Shakspere, though they had their Taylor and Herbert and Milton; but to appreciate them we must look at them in action, and we may take the Puritan as their type.

But first let us note that in Catholicism as early as in Protestantism appeared the sharp rift between intellect and belief. Montaigne, a man of the world, is outwardly a conformist, but a real skeptic. A nominal Catholic, he corresponds to Shakspere, a nominal Protestant. Montaigne reveals the world of one personality as, frankly as Shakspere pictures a world of humanity, and in each the purely religious element is almost totally absent.

Shakspere shows the widest reach of the mind apart from a definite religious purpose or a strong religious faith. In contrast with him is the Puritan effort to apprehend and follow a divine rule and achieve a divine destiny. The typical Puritan addressed himself to man's foes,--all griefs and sufferings culminating in Death; all wrong-doing, as Sin; and the retribution and woe hereafter, as Hell. To escape from these was his supreme object, and to win what he as firmly believed in--Holiness, Life, and Heaven.

The creed was accepted as the form of this truth, but the earnest men sought to know its truths experimentally,--to take home the full sense of them. This was found in the consciousness of man's supreme need; and, responding to that, a divine command, an invitation, and a threat. The result of this was to set man upon a struggle so intense that it was indeed a warfare,--first, against his own lusts, then against the evils in the world around him. These evils were to him embodied--in the Pope, the head of a false religion, the oppressor of God's people; in the imitation and approach to Popery in the church of England; in all false belief and error, all wrong-doers, and Satan himself.

The Puritan believed that the sublimest possibility was open to man, and purposed at every cost to achieve it. "Man's chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever." There was also the most dreadful possibility to be shunned. All earthly pleasure he held in suspicion, as a bait of the great adversary of souls.

The belief of serious men in the seventeenth century was that theology was the guide to heaven. They believed this as modern men believe that science is the guide to human life. Hence, an infinite diversity of sects, and hence the attempts to enforce each by authority.

The Bible fed the deeper substratum of the Puritan life. It touched and fired the imagination of the common people. The dominant idea on which the English Puritan laid hold was the Old Testament idea of God's chosen people,--separate from the rest of the world, given a code of written laws, led by a divinely appointed priesthood and prophets, disciplined by a constant intervention of rewards and punishments. This conception they transferred to the faithful of their own time; and against them was Antichrist, in the Roman church, to which the English prelates seemed traitorously to incline. They proposed to purify and maintain the church in England, or, failing there, to transplant it to America.

The typical Puritan character, as most fully worked out in Scotland and New England, was a mixture of intense idealism and sternest practicality. The idealism aimed to control every action of life, and to base itself on the ultimate reality. It renounced the aid of art and embodied imagination; it renounced human authority; it had no aid from material beauty, none from knowledge of nature.

This religion had an appalling side. Foremost among its teachings was man's depravity and the terrible wrath of God. The worst cruelty of the Iroquois was mercy compared to God's dealing with sinners. This was an inheritance from an older religion. But the condition of salvation in the Catholic church--and in all high church religion--was practically obedience to the church. But the Puritan required a conscious change of heart, which to many was impossible. The utmost pains were taken that the most laborious right-doing should count for nothing, unless accompanied by this mystic experience.

Catholicism put man under guardianship through the hierarchy, the confessional, the whole church system. Calvinism threw him on his own resources,--set him face to face with God. It, too, set a church to help him, but even the minister of the church exhorted him to make his own peace with God. This responsibility weighted men heavily, and made them sombre. It crushed the feeble, but made strong men stronger.

The first half of the seventeenth century was full of religious enthusiasms, which carried high expectations. Milton looked for a wonderful advance in truth. The Puritan sought to build a church simple in forms, austere in morals and manners, exacting personal holiness of its members, and subjecting the ungodly to a rule of the saints. Charles the First and Archbishop Laud believed in a religious monarchy; that the king should be chief in church and state; that beauty of ritual should go along with the encouragement of festivity and joyousness; and that the ultimate aim was a reunited Christendom.

The wave passed, and these expectations had failed. But the force of the Puritan movement had accomplished certain things. It had turned the tide of the English civil war, it had leavened the more serious portion of the nation, and it had planted the New England colonies.

In England the Puritan zeal gave force to overthrow despotism, but it then plunged the nation into chaos; it could not rule or harmonize the composite forces of national life; constitutional monarchy was established at last under William of Orange, by men of less fervent and lofty temper than the Puritans, but better conversant with the wants and possibilities of the actual world.

Milton was a man of heroic mould. He governed himself by a deliberate and lofty moral purpose. The thirst for "moral perfection" inspired and ruled his life. He was far from the narrowness of the typical Puritan. He was open on all sides to the noblest influences. The heroic antique temper, the beauty and richness of the Greek, the religious seriousness of the Puritan, the English love of freedom, all met in him. He was at heart a poet and scholar, but he threw himself into the active life of his time.

Yet his genius was cramped by his theology. He could not fuse the conflicting elements of thought,--just as the heroes of the Revolution, Pym and Hampden and Cromwell and Falkland, could not blend the elements of English political society. He is like his own lion "struggling to get free." His epic is a story of disaster. His deity is undivine. There is more that touches sympathy and admiration in his Satan than in his Jehovah or Adam.

The best thing he gives us is his own noble personality, imbuing the majestic rhythm with a kind of moral power. Servant and friend of Cromwell, sacrificing all scholarly delight to his country's need, champion of freedom, worshiper of truth, building in neglected solitude his epic,--his works are less than Shakspere's, but _he_ is greater than the imaginary Hamlet, Othello, or Brutus.

Cromwell is in action the counterpart of Milton in thought,--a heroic nature struggling with irreconcilable elements. Each is confronted by a situation as difficult as Hamlet's; but though they cannot fully master it, they deal with it like men.

Here is the true advantage of the men of religion over Shakspere and his creations,--here is the greater world than Shakspere saw,--men grappling with their fate and in the struggle working out heroic lives.

The finest type of the New England colonists is seen in the Winthrops, father and son. When the migration is determined on, the son writes: "For myself, I have seen so much of the variety of the world that I esteem no more of the diversities of countries than as so many inns, whereof the traveler that hath lodged in the best or the worst findeth no difference when he cometh to his journey's end; and I shall call that my country where I may most glorify God and enjoy the presence of my dearest friends. Therefore herein I submit myself to God's will and yours, and, with your leave, do dedicate myself (laying by all desire of other employments whatsoever) to the service of God and the company herein, with the whole endeavors both of body and mind."

The elder Winthrop is shown to us in the Journal or chronicle of the Massachusetts colony, a sombre record of seemingly petty events; in his religious diary of an earlier period; and in his domestic letters, which are full of manly strength and sweetness. He combined some of the chief elements of greatness,--loftiness of aim; a character disinterested, patient, modest, brave; deep religious experience; and personal tenderness.

To a man like Winthrop, the heart of his creed was that man's true aim is moral perfection and a living relation with a Divine Lover. The sense of a Divine Presence--inspiring, ruling, gladdening--is what his religion means to him. In this quiet country gentleman, portrayed in his private diary, is an intense play of feeling and imagination, concentrated on the attainment of a personal and social ideal.

All this introspective fervor merged into a public enterprise,--the transplanting of a church and colony to Massachusetts Bay. The last half of his life was spent in the most assiduous, minute, exacting labors. The self-watchful diary gives place to a public chronicle, prosaic as a ship's log-book--and, like the log-book, the shorthand record of adventures, heroisms, and sublimities.

In the Puritan of Winthrop's type the flame of spiritual emotion was harnessed and made to serve. The drudgery of founding New England was done by men whose hearts were touched with fire,--men such as Lowell sings of:--

"Who, dowered with every gift of passion, In that fierce flame can forge and fashion Of self and sin the anchor strong; Can thence compel the driving force Of daily life's mechanic course."

Winthrop set out with a great ideal--shown with statesmanlike breadth in the "Considerations," and with apostolic fervor in the "Model of Christian Charity." His conception was cramped into conformity with the far narrower views of the ministers who were the leaders in the colony. Yet it was his ideal and his personality which gave most to success.

The letters between Winthrop and his wife are an example of human love perfected by a higher love. He writes to her: "Neither can the sea drown thy husband, nor enemies destroy, nor any adversity deprive thee of thy husband." Shakspere has no note like that. Margaret writes from her country home to her husband in London: "My good husband, cheer up thy heart in the expectation of God's goodness to us, and let nothing dismay or discourage thee; if the Lord be with us, who can be against us? My grief is the fear of staying behind thee, but I must leave all to the good providence of God." She was obliged to stay behind in England, awaiting the birth of a child. On the eve of sailing he writes her: "I purpose, if God will, to be with thee upon Thursday come sen'night, and then I must take my leave of thee for a summer's day and a winter's day. The Lord our good God will (I hope) send us a happy meeting again in his good time. Amen! Being now ready to send away my letters, I received thine; the reading of it has dissolved my head into tears. Can write no more. If I live, I will see thee ere I go. I shall part from thee with sorrow enough; be comfortable, my most sweet wife, our God will be with thee. Farewell."

A few months later, across the pages of the Journal, full of the cares and anxieties of the struggling colony, shines a ray of pure joy. Margaret has come! And the whole community rejoices and makes cheer, with homely and hearty feasting, for the happiness of their good governor.

The actual conditions nourished homely virtues,--industry, thrift, self-reliance, family affection, civic responsibility. The greatness of early New England is partly measured by the fact that there were comparatively no dregs, no mass of ignorance and vice. It was not the individuals who rise into sight at this distance who were superior to the prominent men of England or France,--it was the lower stratum which was above that elsewhere. Two prime causes worked to this elevation,--the spiritual estimate of man and the economic conditions which offered independence to every one on the condition "work and save." The social and political conditions were largely shaped by these underlying facts.

The wrestle for a livelihood under stern material conditions was a prime factor in the making of New England. Whatever the creed might say, in practice Work was the equal partner of Faith in building manhood and the state. The soil was to their bodies what Calvinism was to their souls,--yielding nourishment, but only through a hard struggle. Its sterility drove them to the sea for a livelihood; they became fishermen; then, carrying their fish and lumber abroad, they grew into commerce. They traded along the coast, to the West Indies, to Europe, and so into their little province came the winds of the larger world. They learned the sailor's virtues,--his courage, his mingled awe and mastery of elemental forces, his sense of lands beyond the horizon. Well might Winthrop name the first ship he launched "The Blessing of the Bay."